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Divorce, American Style

We barely began the new year before celebrity divorces began making headlines. Last week the 1970s pop duo Captain & Tennille ("Love Will Keep Us Together") announced the end of their 39-year marriage. That came a week after former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, filed for divorce. No surprise there.

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Gawking at celebrity divorces is nothing new, though there sure are more of them - especially for the headliners who have been around for awhile. After all, according to an often-quoted study, while divorce rates are falling for younger people, those for people age 50-plus have doubled in the last 20 years.

What has changed is the industry that the media have built around divorce. It's now a life phase that ranks up there with birth, marriage and death.

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Headlines in newspapers and celebrity magazines are just the beginning. Last summer the New York Times began a regular feature as part of their "Booming" series, titled " Unhitched," sort of like the popular accounts of how people met and courted and proposed and planned their wedding. Only the stories look at marriage from the other end, like a Milwaukee couple whose emptying nest spurred unresolved questions that had sprouted much earlier in their marriage.

Since 2010, the Huffington Post has welcomed readers to Huffpost Divorce, a section of their popular website that tracks the progress of breakups from infidelity to online dating, with plenty of stops in between. Its motto: Marriages Come and Go, but Divorce is Forever.

Coming soon to NBC: a new sitcom with a 59-year-old lead character advertised as both divorced and blind. "Funny what will keep a family together" is the show's unpromising tag line.

And just last week, the Sun Sentinel, of Broward and South Palm Beach counties in Florida added a divorce columnist, Debbie Martinez, who will pen " Debbie Does Divorce" monthly. She already writes about the subject for other outlets in South Florida.

"I learned about divorce because I went through it, but there were things I had no clue about," says Martinez, 54, a life coach and family mediator. "You do better when you feel you're not alone."

What fascinates about these unhappy stories? Reading about celebrity divorces, we "feel a sense of moral superiority by judging them and their life choices," says Karen Sternheimer, a University of Southern California sociology professor and author of Celebrity Culture and the American Dream.

And avidly following the implosion of high-profile marriages, she adds, provides "common gossip fodder that can help people feel more connected to one another."

Divorce, in other words, may keep us together.

Photo: malerapaso/iStockphoto

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