When it comes to celebrity divorce, the ambulance-chasers aren’t just lawyers keen on getting a cut of a fat settlement, it’s also the experts who promise to help the general public deal with their own romantic breakdown or how to avoid a similar fate. Kim Kardashian was too flimsy a poster child for marital strife, what with the rumors that the whole thing was staged for reality TV, but Moore is just the unwilling spokesperson that relationship experts, divorce coaches and even financial advisors need to ply their trade, and ply they did. The P.R. push in the hours following her announcement was tasteless enough to catch the eye of several tweeters — a group not exactly known for their rejection of shameless self-promotion — who called out the indelicate tactic. Because, really, you’re going to use someone’s failed marriage to promote your tips for marital success, recovering from infidelity or coping with divorce?

But of course they are! It’s unseemly and utterly predictable, all at once. Match.com relationship expert Kate Taylor weighs in on “what went wrong,” pointing to the ongoing involvement of ex Bruce Willis in her and her kids’ lives. Divorced parents who can maturely coexist around their kids? A father who lives up to his parental commitment? Tsk, tsk. She also fingers the age gap and the disparity in income and fame, invoking the hoary maxim, “Who wears the trousers?” If only Demi had been a little less successful! (Take note, ladies.)

So-called experts on “cougar dating” are getting in on the action too by offering “some ‘musts to avoid’ that can help both you and Demi when dealing with a younger man.” WhatsYourPrice.com, a site that lets people literally buy and sell dates, issued a press release reminding everybody that it totally predicted the couple’s split, based on a survey it conducted of cougar-cub dates among its users. The headline: “Scientific Reason for the Ashton and Demi Breakup.”

If you’ve already failed to follow the advice of such sage experts, there is always post-divorce support. The press release about “celebriries” that I mentioned earlier advertised a message board support group and online courses meant to help you through divorce. Another email from a site making similar promises began, “First it was Kim Kardashian and now it’s Ashton and Demi. Unfortunate as it is, divorce is once AGAIN rearing its ugly head.” Surely, though, this can’t be a surprise to “the leading authorities on marriage and divorce in the country” — they must be aware of the high divorce rate, right? (And that’s probably why they offer an array of divorce boot camps and getaways.)

It might actually be reassuring that there are so many people out there with answers, if they weren’t all offering different advice. You need only look at the sprawling relationship advice section of your local bookstore to confirm that no one has discovered the one-size-fits-all guide to lasting relationships. But these experts are catering to a real desire for comfort and reassurance. High-profile divorces and cheating scandals tap into common insecurities: If a woman like Demi can’t keep her man from straying, can I? If two people with such pretty, perfect lives can’t make it work, can we?

Since everyone seems to be dispensing relationship advice, you might as well consider the recommendation of this never-married 27-year-old: Don’t trust anyone who says he or she has the secret to marriage.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!” I texted my husband.

“Yeah, it’s really sad,” he wrote back, without nearly enough emotion for someone who always wore this ecstatic expression during the infinite groove on “Expressway to Yr Skull.”

“If it can happen to Kim and Thurston, it can happen to anyone,” a friend said morosely. Another asked, “Do you know why they’re splitting up?”

“No,” I snapped, feeling oddly protective of their privacy, “and I don’t want to know. That’s their business.”

I don’t know them. I’m not now, nor have I ever been, friends with Kim and Thurston. We lived on the same Lower East Side block for a while, and for the last 25 years I’ve seen them around town and at shows, either their own or in the audience for everyone from Sebadoh to Shonen Knife. Most recently, our teenage daughters’ bands shared a bill with their daughter, Coco, and we had the shared experience of proud parents appreciating the joy of their kids expressing themselves onstage.

I feel like I can call them Kim and Thurston because they never felt like celebrities to me; they were just the down-to-earth, keeping-it-real, DIY rock stars that lived next door. More than that, for the majority of my adult life, they’ve inspired me through their music and art, and yes, through their marriage and parenting.

The first time I saw Sonic Youth was in 1987 at CBGBs, at a benefit for a record store that had flooded. I was with my then-boyfriend, later husband, Rob Spillman. I remember hearing “Hot Wire My Heart” and thinking that should be our song. The evening ended with a cacophonous cover of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” The last time I saw them was in 2009 at McCarren Pool in Brooklyn with my then 14-year-old daughter, jumping up and down as we sang along to “Schizophrenia.”

When my husband proposed to me at 22, the idea of getting married seemed a bit absurd, but also the most rebellious thing I could think of — I mean, only squares got married. Look, we’d say to each other, Kim and Thurston are married, as though that gave us permission. They made monogamy, the whole til-death-do-us-part seem rad. Being married didn’t mean losing some part of yourself, it meant making each other stronger.

Onstage and off, neither seemed dominant; they were equal. They didn’t cling to each other in public, they gave each other space — still, in a crowd, you’d pick them out as a couple. They fit, in a way some couples, even after years of marriage, simply don’t seem to.

There they were up on stage, attacking their guitars with screwdrivers, shredding, nursing howling feedback, singing solo and together, their voices perfectly tuned to each other’s. Look at them, I thought: They were in love and married and making art. They were cool and hardcore, with a profound seriousness about their art, and they hadn’t sold out or gotten soft. In an age of irony, where I’d feign indifference and cover up my insecurity with mockery, they weren’t too cool to care.

Years later, freaking out over the fact that we were even thinking of having a child, Kim and Thurston showed us the way. Seeing Kim and Thurston with Coco, walking past the Dean & Deluca downtown, made being a parent seem not only possible, but infinitely hip. By the time I got pregnant, they’d made two more records. Indeed, half of Sonic Youth’s music (and scores of side projects) were produced after their daughter was born, proving you could be “alternative” as well as “traditional” and successful.

Kim was a mom — she loved her daughter, loved being a mother, and she was still writing and performing. She was also completely ripped. It made me think that motherhood had made her even more of a badass. So, why not me?

Sure, some of the sadness I feel over Kim and Thurston splitting is tied to nostalgia, a remembrance of a long gone past. I’ve become one of those tedious boors lamenting the death of downtown New York. Kim’s Video, King Tut’s Wa Wa Hut, holding my breath as I pass CBGBs, a sacred place defiled. I miss the days of the Tompkins Square riots and squatters and boomboxes. I’d rather hear the sibilant lowing of “Smoke? Smoke?” than a toddler wailing on the playground, and yes, I’m crying over spilt organic milk.

I tell myself, for Christ’s sake, they left the Lower East Side ages ago, left New York City, decamping to Northampton, Mass. — and made the denizens of that groovy town feel even more smug about their own decisions to flee New York City. (They just claimed Frank Black.) In all honesty, their move did — briefly — set me wondering if we were crazy not to at least consider ditching our cramped Brooklyn digs for hipper pastures.

And if there’s some nostalgia, there’s lots of projecting. No one can really know what goes on inside another couple’s marriage. Sure, from the outside — the great musical successes, arty side projects, the house featured in shelter magazines, the “It girl” daughter — they looked like the epitome of domestic bliss.

But who knows? At some point, I’ll want to know what happened. Just not now. I don’t want to hear about infidelity, some clichéd open marriage bullshit (that always goes badly) or the old-as-dirt tale of trading in the old wife for the new model. I don’t want to hear about addiction, or cruelty, or gambling debts. Instead, I’m left to project my own shit and fears. Who knows, though, what it was like sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning when they were out of coffee. What it was like to balance careers that each required traveling, negotiating time-zone differences, weeks spent apart.  Who knows what compromises were made, and what sacrifices. Who knows what personal disappointments and resentments they endured. Coco will soon be of college age. It’s not uncommon for parents today to consider renegotiating their marriage contract once the children are out of the house. Maybe they just fell out of love, maybe by inches, the way uneven proportions of sand and water can become concrete.

Why should they be different than the rest of us?

And therein lies my problem letting them go. What’s scarier than a couple deciding — after 30 years of being in a band they created, 27 years of marriage, 17 years spent raising a child – that now they’re done with it? As they succeeded, we succeeded. Now the world just got a little less cool.

Last night, I went through some of our old records (how the hell will Kim and Thurston divide their albums?). I played “Evol,” “Daydream Nation” — a desert island record — and “Confusion is Sex/Kill Your Idols.” Kill Your Idols. It was time to trust that I can go on. Well, that or put on a Yo La Tengo album…

We’ve been separated for nearly two years, and I’ve been going to counseling all along. He hasn’t. I’ve changed, he hasn’t. I still love him. I don’t know if he ever really loved me. I’ve come to accept it, thanks to antidepressants and the love of my many good friends and family — cousins, who live in a nearby country and whom I see a couple of times a year. I love my husband’s big family like my own, and I’ve done everything to remain close to them. I know they love me and I will continue to see many of them and my nieces and nephews. I would simply die if I thought I couldn’t have them in my life anymore. I love them so much. So, it sounds like I’m doing fine all things considered, doesn’t it?

Here’s the complication: I met a man, about a year after I was separated. We became friends, then we became lovers. He is fiercely in love with me. I don’t love him. He knows that I don’t feel the same way about him. But he is dear to me. He is always there for me. I know I will never love him like he loves me. I worry that I might be using him, due to my somewhat fragile condition.

I have set boundaries. He respects them. I feel free to date other men, though I really don’t — not seriously.  When I call, he is there and it is a dear comfort to have him. I think about what I want for my future: I am 54, financially stable, and dream of retiring early and traveling, seeing more of my cousins whom I love dearly, and maybe getting more involved in my artistic pursuits that I have somewhat put aside. I sometimes dare to dream that I will fall in love again, be happy again, contribute to another’s happiness again.

This man is unemployed, unstable and, if I am honest, I don’t completely respect his life choices. Our emotional EQ feels unbalanced. And yet, we have fun together, have great sex, and he lets me have my space without question. I have the power in the relationship — an issue that I know was at the forefront of my divorce. And here I am again. Am I using him? Should I break it off? I feel guilty, fragile, alone and needy deep inside. On the outside, I am strong, very attractive, happy, carefree. Yet I am losing my family — my husband’s family — and it kills me.

I have no children. His family were my life, my future, people I could give myself to, care for, and who were there for me. Now I’m alone.  How much longer do I let myself be so close with my male friend, whom I don’t want to hurt? I truly care about him.

Life seems so short. I want to be a good person. I don’t want to hurt or be hurt, as much as I can avoid it. Am I being selfish? Honest? I want to embrace my future and dance like there’s no one watching. But there is someone watching. It’s me.

Sincerely,

Dancer in the Dark

Dear Dancer in the Dark,

If you are being honest with this man, then he knows where he stands. Though the circumstance is sad, you are each giving the other something needed, something welcome. You are being honest with him. That is all you can do. Why break up with him? To save him from his own feelings? Why deprive yourself of his presence? He is not ready to play more than a provisional role in your life. The way things are now, he is getting a great gift from you. He is benefiting from your presence, your kindness and your strength, your beauty, your passion. You need not kid each other. It makes sense now. It may not make sense later. That’s OK.

You are not just taking from him. You are also giving. He, like you, may be bereft in ways that are less apparent. He may have sorrows under the skin that you are soothing even as you are soothed.

In a general way, without being too autobiographical, I can say that when I was single and in my drinking years there were provisional relationships of the kind you describe. Strong, smart women were interested but kept their distance.

I am actually grateful now for those certain strong, smart women who knew to keep their distance. I remember poignant goodbyes that were also warnings, clues to my eventual collapse had I been able to decode them. I remember these things with gratitude.

Such sad, truncated encounters did not harm me. I quickly resumed my loneliness. Loneliness I knew how to do. What was dangerous was meeting another woman fully as unstable and grandiose as I was, and diving into a mad fusion of egos without boundaries. That was dangerous! And then the noxious, painful, sudden peeling away that left me raw. That took a while to get over.

So just be clear with this man. Just maintain your boundaries. You may tire of maintaining the boundaries. You may think, Why should I be doing all the work? It may be tempting, once you are divorced, to try to make this relationship into something it’s not. Be careful in this regard.

May I say, too, that your letter kind of breaks my heart? In some way that I can’t fully articulate?

And also there is this: You are in counseling but you are not in counseling with your husband. Can you fix a marriage by fixing yourself? I wonder about that. It may be that you have to fix the marriage. That would mean your partner has to be involved. So maybe it is worth one final effort. Is there any last chance that your husband would join you for counseling? Is there any chance at all? Did you work as hard as humanly possible to get him to join you in counseling, and then did you redouble your efforts?

Is it possible that some hard kernel of denial, once dislodged, could open up a new possibility? Is it possible that what stands between you and reconciliation is some secret, which compared to the breakup of a marriage and the loss of a family is not so earth-shattering that it could not be shared and dealt with? Could there be something between you that is preventing you from taking the truly forceful step of getting him into counseling?

Maybe there is one last effort to be made. And then, after that, acceptance.

I am currently in a new relationship with a person who I have a great deal in common with. He is definitely not Asperger’s. He seems insightful, caring, giving, intelligent, funny and thoughtful. However, it seems we have a lot of disagreements.

So, to give you some history about me, my family of origin was pretty violent and angry and abusive.

I try to avoid disagreements and arguments at all cost.

I have been known to dissociate when someone is yelling.

We have disagreements about my ex being my best friend. I get that this would make my boyfriend uneasy but I don’t have a history of cheating AT ALL!

We also seem to have a hard time communicating. We get defensive with each other. I think he uses things I’ve told him against me and he says I do the same things. I think I’m more open about constructive criticism and have admitted wrongdoing and apologized. When this happens with him, I don’t think he apologizes and it seems he just defends himself. I often find myself being lost in the arguments — like he is running circles around me and I get confused. “How did we end up HERE?” is a frequent thought of mine. I think he has a pretty strong ego yet he can talk the talk about letting go of ego. He seems to play the role of devil’s advocate a great deal. I also feel like he argues semantics a lot.

In so many ways, he’s terrific. How do I know what things to accept and what things to bail on? I really want him to be “the one.” But wanting it doesn’t make it happen.

I guess I thought that true love would be easy, that it wouldn’t be hard, tedious work every single day. I’m getting tired and don’t want to imagine my life in the future to be filled with arguments and disagreements. Ugh! So, as you guessed, we’re three months into our relationship and I’m starting to wonder if this is my lifelong true love or another three-month relationship. We insist that we want to stay friends if things don’t go well with us romantically but sometimes I find that I don’t really like him (when we’re arguing) and can’t imagine that any breakup with him would go smoothly enough to maintain a friendship after. So, Cary, do you have any advice for me?

Thank you,

Scared of the Three-Month Curse

Dear Scared,

I’ll bet if you can adopt certain ground rules for communication together, that will help.

You’re still getting to know each other. I think you need some rules of engagement before anything else. You have habits of communication that seem to be setting off hot button issues. So take a look at these sites and see if you can find something helpful to share with your new friend.

Here are the kinds of things I’m thinking of, like this article from TwoOfUs.org, and these Fair Fighting Rules for Couples, and also look at this: Couples Communication: The Rules.

Sure, there are a lot of reasons this is happening. But I suggest right now you try to stabilize your communication routine so that you can relax a little bit and not be blowing up all the time.

In the process, you will learn some things about each other. It will happen slowly. You come into this relationship with admirable self-knowledge and an understanding of your own tendencies and habits. Try to learn what his history is and what his habits are.

Changing our habits is hard without an outside observer to give you a sort of freeze-frame of what’s happening and suggest adjustments, like a couples coach or therapist. You need new skills for interacting.

But having a set of ground rules for communication is a nice place to start. In the process of learning to communcate, listen to his history. Find out where he has been and what has shaped him. Look for patterns. Try to understand what he is afraid of and why he reacts the way he does. Don’t psychoanalyze him. Just take note of what seems to set him off.

You’ve been through a lot. You know yourself well. You don’t know this guy nearly as well as you know yourself. You don’t know him well enough to trust him with your fragile self, nor does he know you very well. So take it slow. Don’t expect too much. Show a lot of respect. Be cautious and careful with each other’s feelings.

If he wants to stick it out for the long haul, then maybe there is a future. The big question would be, Is he willing to change? And are you willing to change? I mean, when we’re being defensive and argumentative, it’s often because we’re angry or hurt or frightened and we’re not so eager to admit that. We have to be willing to show some stuff we’re not too comfortable with. We’ll keep arguing until we’re willing to admit why we’re doing it.

So if I were you, if I were trying to decide whether it’s worth it, I would adopt some communcations rules, and ask him what he’s willing to do to keep the relationship going. If he’s willing to do practically anything, then go ahead and try to follow some rules of communication and start looking for some kind of couples therapist who has useful, practical behavioral tools you can begin using right away.

I wouldn’t necessarily start by going deep into past trauma and all that. You need practical communication tools, ways to stop these patterns while they’re happening.

Later, for sure, I’ll bet you could benefit immensely from meditation and a deeper examination of your life patterns. Who couldn’t benefit from that? The path of wisdom is for everyone. But right now, find a way to set some rules about how to interact, and find somebody who can help you in these early days of the relationship.

What? You want more advice?

• Read more Cary Tennis in the Since You Asked directory.
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I never wanted to join their ranks — but life doesn’t always give you what you want.

My wife and I met in 1992, after I won a prize in a literary magazine. My wife’s then-husband was the editor of the journal, Prism International. He and I became fast friends. His wife was gay. Eventually, I offered his wife an ear if she ever needed to talk. She and I met at a reading I gave a few months later, and I had sprung-socket eyes, I swear.

Seven years later, after she’d adopted my biological kids, my wife and I, along with other Canadian couples, sued Canada’s federal government for same-sex marriage rights. After a three-year fight, we were victorious and, in 2003, just after our 10th anniversary, we wed, the coolest group of daughters and dragmaids at our sides.

In 17-plus years, I had never imagined, not even for a sliver of a second, that my wife and I would part through any means besides death — that’s how happy and bonded I believed we were. If anyone had asked me my favorite thing, my answer would have been to spend time with my wife. Doing anything.

Only days before she started making noises about leaving me, my wife and I were renewing our vows during a horse-drawn carriage ride under the Eiffel Tower, and while the horse hooves clopped their way along the cobblestone side streets of Paris, I was swooning. I was delighted at how fresh our love still was. We were not symbiotic or enmeshed, but independent, free and happy. Our relationship glowed with health. When we had issues, we had meetings and solved them, and nothing went along unresolved.

Then came the shock — and the unraveling.

Separation is not big news when it happens to someone else. Where I live, in Canada, about 40 percent of marriages are headed in that direction (America is slightly higher). But when it happens to you, separation is huge and the opposite of commonplace. Marriages — in some cases dazzling, phenomenal, nurturing marriages — die as if struck by cars. Crawling out of the wreckage can take a surprising number of years.

Had I seen something coming? Only over the last few months when my wife became oddly, breakably happy in occupations outside our home. Things between us quickly went from bad to horrible, both of us on a gerbil wheel of act and react and react to the reaction and react to the reaction to the reaction. After six months, I finally came to grips with the fact that she had transferred herself — like a bank balance — into another future entirely. We parted. OK. What next?

I was already seeing a therapist and an energy healer, but I needed more, more. Still, I didn’t want to be among the losers at the divorce group — spilling their deeply personal, private and unnerving truths. But I needed help. I was awash in grief.

So I went every Sunday to the little cafe, and there were always stories that made my story sound a little less compelling. There was always someone who had it worse, whose pain was more fresh. But there was also someone a few months or years further along, who was beginning to thrive. And far from being losers, these were accomplished and bright people, wise and perspicacious.

They gave support. They gave shoulders to cry on. They gave company.

At the divorce group, we talked about the futures we planned but did not achieve: the babies we were trying to conceive, the kayak trip planned for mid-summer, the retirement in the south of France, the housing upgrade. We talked about realizing that we would not grow old with our beloved. We talked about our worries for our children and the embarrassment and pain of becoming broken families. We talked about our longing and our spite. We talked our own blindnesses to matters plain as day in front of our faces. We talked about our human capacity to believe that people are mostly good at heart even though all the evidence — all the evidence — demonstrated this to be magical thinking.

I felt stupid for the things I hadn’t seen and recognized as my relationship was going down the tubes. But the folks in the divorce group insisted I hadn’t been stupid. Not stupid, just deceived. I hadn’t been wrong to be so trusting. Trust was the backbone of any healthy marriage. I hadn’t been wrong to love well and deeply.

We measured success in small changes: whether or not we wept at the grocer’s, the gym, the dry cleaners. Whether or not we’d given into pleading with the beloved to come back, or whether we managed to keep our piteous begging at bay. We measured success by when we did not miss our beloved for a minute, an hour, a half-day, a whole day. We measured success by the curious sound of own unfamiliar laughter, lifting in bubbles around us.

Each of us played “what if.” What if I had been a better wife/lover/cook? We sifted through our 18 or 25 or five years together with magnifying glasses, seeking the one moment where we could have altered this terrible future.

We had lost our wives and husbands. We had lost our best friends. We had lost sex. We had lost our children. We had lost our animals. We had lost our homes. We had lost our furniture. We had lost our gardens. Our incomes had severely plummeted. There were new therapists to pay, and lawyers to pay, and moving costs to pay. Some of us had to replace even the spices in our cupboards and the toilet brushes behind the bowls. We moved without screwdrivers, without our art, without our shampoo.

All of us longed to stop obsessing over our exes. Most of us were reluctant to call them that. We understood, most of us, that our partners, disconnected as they had become, nevertheless also hurt. No one, we believed, could walk away from a long-term marriage without pain and regrets.

We missed many things. We missed, mostly, not hurting, that innocent state in which we had lived our lives.

I understood what the divorce group said when they told me that the only cure for the wreck of my marriage was time. So time I would give it. With their help, I trudged on. And when I felt I couldn’t go any further, in addition to their other burdens, they carried me.