What a Best-Selling Divorce Memoir Does Not Say About Marriage

Belle Burden’s Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage is one of 2026’s most talked-about books. It tells the story of a woman whose husband abruptly left their 20-year marriage, refused to explain why, and exposed how emotionally and financially vulnerable she had become after years of entrusting herself to her husband.

Her memoir can be read in at least three ways. Some readers treat Strangers as proof that women are safer avoiding marriage altogether. Others read it as a case for prenups, financial independence, and minimizing vulnerability within marriage. Both these readings seek to mitigate the risk of divorce by strengthening independence before and within marriage. 

A third view takes the opposite approach: avoiding divorce by strengthening marriage and de-emphasizing independence. The antidote to a widespread divorce culture is a marriage culture that prioritizes commitment, unity, and family life over individual satisfaction.  

Marriage Isn’t the Villain

Burden was married for nearly 21 years when her husband asked for a divorce. In her account, a “switch had flipped” in his personality. He left shortly after she discovered he was having an affair. Adding insult to injury, he wanted nothing to do with the life they had built together, not even custody of their children. Though an educated lawyer, Burden chose to step back from her career to care for their children while her husband worked. That choice, combined with her financial disengagement and a risky prenup signed against legal advice, turned the divorce into a devastating emotional and financial crisis for her.

The first and most sweeping interpretation is that Strangers is an indictment of marriage itself. On social media, the book has been treated as proof that financial dependency within marriage is harmful for women. One video bemoaned that women are “unbelievably naïve when it comes to marriage,” and that Strangers “really shows you what men are.” The caption hovering throughout the video betrayed its conclusion: don’t get married.  

Of course, one anecdote doesn’t override the findings of population-level data. Research shows that marriage is strongly associated with higher happiness and greater financial stability for most women. Married women live longer, earn more, and report more meaning in their lives in comparison with single women. The happiness premium for married moms compared to single, childless women is large and growing among prime aged (25–55-year-old) women. Married moms aren’t just happier than single women; they are increasingly happier than single women.

But the story is more complicated than it seems. “Unmarried” is not the same as “never married.” To the extent that divorced women are included in the unmarried category, some of the gap may capture the effects of divorce and not simply the absence of marriage. The data may reflect both the benefits of marriage and the harms of divorce. Strangers is a story about that harm—and it is rational for women to want to avoid it.

Anxiety About Marriage

A Harper’s Bazaar article recently described how Strangers is planting widespread paranoia and “making people hate their husbands.” One woman started monitoring her husband’s phone. Another obsessively began evaluating her husband’s behavior for any sign of a supposed “red flag.” One woman read the book during the thick of wedding planning, causing “24 to 48 hours of sheer panic.” She wrote: 

Obviously, I am very in love and very happy and don’t foresee a split from my partner at all. But in those moments, you’re like, ‘Well, neither did she.' 

The anxiety captured in the Harper’s Bazaar article is a rational response to the risky climate surrounding marriage. There is a lack of legal protection for marital vows in a world of no-fault, at-will divorce. The rise of expressive divorce culture has reframed divorce as a form of self-expression and undermined old wisdom around marriage: the expectation of commitment and the delineation between bad and good reasons for divorce. The divorce rate more than doubled since the expressive divorce revolution began in the 1960s. 

A "Union" View of Marriage

Seeking financial independence is one way to protect oneself in this unstable environment. But it comes at the cost of old wisdom that sees marriage as a union of two individuals into a shared identity and oriented toward a project above and beyond their individual satisfaction. 

Couples who share finances generally enjoy longer and more satisfying marriages. In fact, a recent study finds a link between joint bank accounts and better marriages. 

The same effect is seen in couples who share a last name. IFS examined U.S. divorce rates to compare couples who shared a surname with those who did not. The results showed that spouses who did not share a surname divorced about 50% more often than those who did, and divorces among non-sharers occurred roughly 30% earlier in the marriage.

The antidote to a widespread divorce culture is a marriage culture that prioritizes commitment, unity, and family life.

Sharing finances and a last name expresses a “union” view of marriage, linking the couple together in a shared identity, project, and future. This view stands in contrast to what Brad Wilcox calls the “soulmate myth,” which “assumes marriage’s primary function is to build and sustain an intense romantic or emotional connection that should last only as long as it remains happy, fulfilling, and lifegiving to the self.” According to his research, the soulmate myth is associated with higher rates of divorce and conflict. 

Social science vindicates old wisdom: marriages are stronger when both the husband and wife see themselves as part of a union that endures “for better or for worse.” Sharing finances is one expression of this view. 

Love and Risk

In her conclusion, Burden writes: “I hope because I was open about what happened to me, my children will insist on intimacy, on knowing their partner deeply, on being known deeply.” She continues, “I hope they will fall in love with abandon as I did with their father.” 

Even though she doesn’t want her children to fear relationships, her story has sparked fear in some women who want love but not heartbreak—and reasonably so. Rather than embrace financial and emotional protectionism, our culture and laws should make it safer for men and women to fall in love with abandon again. A culture of strong marriage should address the financial and social incentives in support of divorce. Cultural messaging and policy solutions can be leveraged to achieve this.

Culturally, the “union” view of marriage should be upheld in wedding customs, pre-marital counselling, and online messaging. For example, couples should be encouraged to use the traditional vows over modern self-written ones, as author Cheryl Mendelson has argued on these pages. Traditional vows express unconditional and lifelong fidelity, while sentimental self-written “vows” often use poetic language to communicate anything but a binding promise. Online messaging should discuss the benefits of investing your identity in your spouse, rather than focusing exclusively on its risks.

At the state level, policymakers can consider offering the more difficult to exit “covenant marriages” as an option available for couples to choose. Other states have addressed financial incentives to divorce by making 50-50 shared custody the default when couples divorce or separate.

While policies can reduce the risks promoted by our no-fault, at-will regime, they cannot eradicate it. Strangers has tapped into an anxiety pervading modern relationships, one that might scare many away from ever embracing commitment. Many young adults are, as C.S Lewis put it, safely locking up their hearts to prevent heartbreak. That approach comes at a steep cost: a lonely heart that is “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.” Instead of retreating into a world of self-sufficiency, we should turn to others, embrace dependency, and accept the risk of love. 

Liana Graham is a research assistant in domestic and economic policy at The Heritage Foundation. 

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Institute for Family Studies.

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