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.
I bet if you looked at the numbers, it happens to ciswomen from cismen a statistically large amount of the time. Like at least three times higher than the others per capita. I mean, that wouldn’t be particularly surprising to me because queer couples tend to have different issues, but I am gonna take a wild shot in the dark and say that you have maybe one queer friend and thus know very little about the relationship dynamics.
I think if your problem is that women are complaining about men is sexist, then you are preemptively trying to shield shitty partner behavior when it’s done by men. To me, that reeks of someone that thinks it’s okay to be abusive to women, which is sort of a shitty person indicator, which, as you indicated, is because you are shitty to others.
No one said this. The complaint is that women are painted as helpless in order to manufacture abuse. The man that continues the hike alone is in no danger because he’s man. Woman alone is in danger.
Before you say anything, yes, there can be many different situation where it’s not just about being alone. There can be difference in experience or someone can be left without supplies. None of the examples in the article alleges anything like that. All the described cases are simply women that are left behind by someone walking faster. One example is a women left behind by her male and female friends. The implication is that women left without a man is in danger which I find sexist.
Well, in spite of the fact that the person I replied to is definitely a misogynist (and thus sexist), I would argue that there is one hundred percent an intended bias in their message to try to defend men’s (specifically) behavior when it is abusive by downplaying it.
But, thank you for standing up for women! I was unaware that women being infantilized was, in fact, more sexist than saying it is okay for anyone to abandon their partners when they explicitly did not want to be abandoned! Was that your message? Because it’s weird that these women were saying they didn’t want to be abandoned and yet they were and that that fact must be about them being defenseless and not about abusive behaviors on the part of those men. How strange. Can you explain that?