MJ calls what happened to her in Zion national park “small ‘T’ trauma”. She knows women have experienced worse from their partners. But she still feels the anger of being left behind on a hike by her now ex. “It brings up stuff in my body that maybe I have not cleared out yet,” she said.
Five years ago, MJ and a new partner – he was not exactly her boyfriend, and the pair were not exclusive – traveled from Los Angeles to Utah for an adventure getaway. MJ, who is 38 and works in PR, was looking forward to exploring Zion’s striking scenery; its vast sandstone canyon and pristine wading trails were on the list. But on the morning of their big hike, MJ was not feeling well. She could not shake the feeling that something was “off”; indeed, MJ would learn on this trip that her partner was seeing other women.
As they made their way up Angel’s Landing, MJ’s partner started walking faster than her. “I could tell it was getting on his nerves that I was slow,” she said. “I was like, ‘Fuck it, just go ahead of me.’” He did without hesitation.
When she caught up at the top of the mountain, they took a picture together. Then her partner hiked down the mountain with a woman he had met on the way up, leaving MJ to finish by herself. They broke up shortly after that trip. (MJ asked to be referred to by her initials for the sake of speaking openly about a past relationship.)
Last month, MJ opened TikTok and heard the phrase “alpine divorce”, a label she now attaches to her experience in Zion.
Firstly, cite what you quote from elsewhere in the future, if you want to be taken seriously. I found it myself, so no need in this case, anymore.
Secondly, that cited study of hiking accidents has literally nothing to do with ‘alpine divorce’—it makes no differentiation between hiking injuries following from someone being abandoned by someone else (much less specifically a man abandoning a woman) after going hiking together, and accidents that happen under any other circumstances. It’s a study about hiking accidents overall, and it’s extremely disingenuous to even attempt to reach any conclusions about ‘alpine divorce’ based on its data.
This is the study that was cited. Here are the variables about the accidents it had access to:
Can’t help but notice not a single data point related, at all, to even going hiking with someone else, much less anything about being separated from them during the hike.
It’s a massive, desperate straw grasp by the author to cite this study in support of any assertion about the frequency of ‘alpine divorce’, and no less of one by you to try and bolster your assertion with it.
“Facts don’t care about your feelings.” Once again, your own words come back to bite you; it’s obvious your feelings/biases led you to willfully discarding the part of your brain that would easily have seen how nonsensical that article’s claims are. I can find literally no data about how common this ‘phenomenon’ even is, much less anything about it becoming more or less frequent over time, and from what you’ve written so far, I have a feeling that I’ve ironically looked harder for it than you have, being the one of the two of us who isn’t driven by bias.