Love & Learn
Katie Holmes May Have Divorced Tom Cruise Because He’s Impossible to Love
We've all heard a lot about how Scientology is probably to blame for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' divorce, but there may be one larger factor that most of us are overlooking: Tom's upbringing. According to an interview he gave a couple years back, Tom's father was a "bully and a coward"; someone who physically abused Tom before he and his mother moved out. Cruise's publicist from back in the '80s acknowledges that the actor's upbringing was very difficult and that he didn't know how to open up to people because he was "too hurt by his father to do that."
Accusing Tom's (really, really out there) religion of forcing the split is an easy, if not mostly true, out, but it sounds like there's something deeply ingrained in Tom that's made each of his three marriages end in divorce. If you can't open up, how are you supposed to love?
Everyone brings baggage to the relationship, but not everyone is really willing to sift through those massive duffels of dirty laundry to try and clean it out for a fresh start. If Tom hasn't worked through a lot of the pain and anxiety he felt as a child, it must be pretty difficult for him to give his relationship the love and attention it needs when the only example he had of family growing up involved hostility and hatred.
No one's upbringing is perfect -- we all bring subconscious or preconceived notions of what family means to our own marriages and project them onto our own children -- that's a given. But most successful relationships are built on a foundation of similar values, aka similar upbringings, or a mutual agreement on what is to be expected out the partnership.
The only foundation or mutual agreement that I think Tom and Katie had was that alleged five-year marital contract in which she was to beget him a child and not wear heels. But I digress.
Let's say that all this Scientology crap isn't true. Let's say Tom and Katie really thought they were in love. After the initial lust wears away and you're four years into a marriage with a man who doesn't know how to love because he wasn't taught properly, you probably give it your all to rectify that, and when that doesn't work, you file for divorce.
How do you make it work with someone who's had a different upbringing than you?
Photo via Splash News
Piping Hot Posts
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
gnicole
This sounds like my first marriage, and I feel empathetic for Katy if there is any truth to this article. I was married 5 yrs to a guy who was abused by his father (and mother occasionally) as a child, then joined the army at age 18 to get away from them. I met him a couple years later and fell madly in love with everything else about him, ignoring the fact that he hadn't seen his parents for years. We were blissfully happy for the first 3 - 4 yrs, but just couldn't make it work for longer than 5 yrs. Because of his "special ops" job and training with the military, he was good at suppressing emotion so I never really felt like I had "all of him" in the marriage and he never dealt with the hurt inside from his upbringing. I filed for divorce from him in 1999 and am happily married to someone else now but to this day, I still feel the pain of leaving my first husband even though deep inside I know I made the right decision.