Bye Bye, Love

By Tiffany Sharples

When Angie Schmidt's seven-year marriage ended, there wasn't much to laugh about. But what she craved was a little levity. "There was nothing out there that really made people laugh at themselves and laugh at breakups," she says. "I thought, Wouldn't it be great to create a business that does this?" Last September she started an online store dedicated to lightening the mood -- smashingkatie.com named after "the other woman." By the holidays, the site was flooded with orders.

The annual number of divorces has dropped nearly a third since the early 1980s, to 16.4 for every 1,000 married women age 15 and over, but 40% to 50% of first marriages still break up. In the spirit of American ingenuity that can find a way to make a buck out of even the worst situations, a cottage industry has sprung up to help people cope with and often celebrate this passage from one part of their lives to the next. "Once divorce gets so common, the human approach is to treat it like another aspect of life," says sociologist David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers.

Business for products aimed at the newly divorced, from greeting cards and postbreakup getaway packages to custom-made cakes and joke gifts like wedding-ring coffins, is booming. New Orleans resident Renee Savant bought a hearse, thinking she would rent it out for over-the-hill-birthday celebrations. But since she began her service last October, the hottest demand has come from clients who want to ride around as they and friends celebrate the death of their marriages. "I would never in a million years have thought the fad would be divorce parties," says Savant.

No party is really complete without a cake, and increasingly, bakers are being asked to come up with fanciful designs that give new meaning to the pun "just desserts." Joan Spitler, co-owner of Cake Divas in Los Angeles, says she was used to baking cakes for "people's second, third and even fourth weddings" but has recently been getting orders for confections to mark the end of marriages as well. The designs feature scenarios like a bride kicking her former groom down the tiers of the cake. At Sprinkles Custom Cakes in Winter Park, Fla., Larry Bach has been getting requests for his upside-down wedding cake with the bride or groom's legs sticking out at the bottom as if the cake had crashed down on the figure `a la the Wicked Witch of the East.

Like Schmidt, many of the divorce entrepreneurs are people who have gone through the experience themselves. After Scott Schmeizer, an executive with a housewares firm based on Long Island, N.Y., got divorced in 2004, he worked with a designer to manufacture a knife rack that looks like a human figure. He called it the Ex. "It was cathartic," he says. Others apparently think so too; it now comes in six different colors, retails for $120 and is one of the firm's top sellers. Schmidt's online breakup boutique sells mugs that say things like BOO FRICKIN' HOO and books like How to Tell If Your Boyfriend Is the Antichrist. "Why take life so seriously?" she asks.

Most separation-inspired items--the Ex, ex-wife toilet paper, ex-boyfriend voodoo dolls--may be intentionally designed to evoke laughter from the otherwise painful situation of a breakup. "They're filling a need," says Princeton anthropologist John Borneman. But he and other experts worry that the surge of products is symptomatic of an increasingly fickle investment in marriage. "A classic case where market intervention is sapping the moral fiber of a society," Popenoe says.

Marriage experts say it's too soon to know how these new rites will affect future relationships. "We'll have to wait and see whether such things help you find a new mate sooner, and once you do, if you're going to stay with that person as you didn't in the first round," Popenoe says.

Throwing a divorce party turned out to be just the right thing for Lesley Rogers, whose five-year marriage ended in 2006. Rogers, a communications director in Seattle, met her current boyfriend that night when another friend brought him to the celebration.