You Don't Even Want To Know What An 'Alpine Divorce' Is |
You Don't Even Want To Know What An 'Alpine Divorce' Is
The unusual term has been trending on social media – and we really wish we didn’t have to talk about it.
Lifestyle Reporter, HuffPost
We really wish we didn’t have to talk about “alpine divorces”.
Over the past week, the unusual term has been trending on social media, particularly on Threads. The conversation stems from a TikTok video posted last month by a woman who said she was left alone on a hike after a man who invited her along abandoned her.
We reached out to the woman to verify the claims in the video, which has over 21.8 million views, but did not receive a response before publication. But in a new follow-up video, she said it all went down during a recent hike with a date in the North McCullough Wilderness area of southern Nevada. According to her, her date rushed ahead to beat other hikers to the summit and left her behind to catch up on the trail.
“He said he wanted to run and I remembered thinking, ‘Why are we chasing strangers to the top of the mountain?’” she said in the clip. (Good point!)
In the comments on the original video, women broadened the conversation, saying that having a partner leave you on a hike or any other outdoor outing was a surprisingly common experience. Some claimed that there were whole online support groups filled with women who’ve been abandoned mid-hike by men – an “alpine divorce”, they labelled it.
The eerie-sounding phrase comes from the title of an 1893 short story by Scottish-Canadian writer Robert Barr, about a man who plots to kill his wife while they are traveling in the Swiss Alps.
As women discussed the topic and shared tales of alpine divorce and breakups, they were met with some disbelief in the replies, mostly from men. “Things that never happened for 500,” one guy replied to a Threads post.
Obviously, he’s not a true crime follower. If you pay attention to such stories in the news, you know that things like this – attempted murder through remote abandonment, essentially – sadly happen all the time.
Just last month, an........