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Women are being abandoned by their partners on hiking trails. What’s behind ‘alpine divorce’?
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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Articles like this are 99% trash
So are some comments.
So two or three "credible" stories over a century qualify for this headline? Seems a bit inflated.
I mean.. it's not a nice thing to do to someone but.. eh..
What is everyone’s problem with women sharing these stories though? We’re not allowed to speak about these instances because you decided it doesn’t happen frequently enough?
That's not what I'm saying. Don't make it about something it's not.
If something happens a handful of times.. it's barely a story.
That’s literally what your comment is saying - that this type of abuse doesn’t happen enough to warrant attention. Why do you have a problem with women sharing stories like this?
Apparently you can't read.
Care to elaborate? Because you are clearly expressing that this doesn't happen enough for people to actively talk about it.
The point is, it doesn't happen enough to merit an article that tries to imply, especially with its headline, that it's a common occurrence.
It's like when discussions about rape in general are primarily focused on incidents of violent 'random' rapes committed by strangers to the victim, when the fact is that that is literally the rarest type of rape that happens.
If the article was just talking about this shitty thing someone did to something else, without trying to pretend it's 'a thing' that happens with any statistically-significant frequency, it wouldn't get/merit the kind of reaction GreenBottles had.
The term "Alpine Divorce" isn't a new trendy term coined from TikTok, y'know.
It's a common enough occurrence for a journalist to decide to write an article about it and have enough stories from different women to deliver a solid read.
Deciding that it doesn't happen at a high enough frequency for anyone to want to read about it or talk about it is certainly a stance that you can take, but clearly this has generated enough conversation in this thread alone to argue against that.
Just because it's a type of abuse that happens at lower rates than other types doesn't mean it's worthless to talk about. For these women, it is a very real occurrence that happened to them. Why not give them space to share their stories?
Meanwhile, the very first sentence of its Wikipedia page, lol:
I was sincerely open to a conversation with you, but I guess downvotes and scorn is all I'm going to get from you.
Thanks, I guess.
No, you weren't. Your comments are dripping with condescension and sanctimony, not to mention projection (care to cite the "scorn" in anything I wrote?).
When you reply to my comment:
with an 'lol' and deflection, yeah, it feels scornful.
Just say you don't want to hear about women's abuse stories and be honest.
The only time I wrote "lol" was when I noticed that the very first sentence of the Wikipedia entry of the term "alpine divorce" directly contradicted your assertion that it "isn't a new, trendy term". I found that funny. That had literally nothing to do with the actual subject matter of the OP, and had everything to do with discussion of the rate of incidence of a slang term in colloquial parlance.
It's literally the opposite of "deflection" to directly address what you wrote (I quoted exactly what I was responding to), and it's definitely not "scorn" to be amused by a contradiction. To even consider assigning the word "scorn" to something so trivially insignificant only bolsters your first impression of being an outrage junkie.
If anything in this thread actually deserves an exasperated "oh my fucking god" reaction (and/or a "lol"), it's this. Come down from your cross, drama queen.
The entire article is women sharing stories of being abused in a specific way and the men in here are clutching their pearls about having to read about it. So many “not all men” type comments.
I don’t care if you think I’m a drama queen. Women deserve to be heard.
I don't "think" you are a drama queen. It's self-evident, from what I quoted. Not a single word of anything I said could genuinely lead to the ridiculous conclusion you did, in any rational mind.
That said, it matters much more that you don't care about objectivity, accuracy, and intellectual honesty. You're unfortunately more interested in labeling merited refutations of your demonstrably-bogus assertions as misogyny (which, naturally, magically justifies dismissing them outright), than actually accepting your error and learning from it.
Literally in the article that we're all talking about.
Edit: Oh my fucking god, it's on the wikipedia page as well if you had bothered to read further:
You're being deliberately obtuse, and the feigned indignation ("Oh my fucking god") just amplifies its obnoxiousness, in my opinion. It was used once in a short story over a century ago, but it's only started to become a common term very recently.
Would you argue that "sus" doesn't count as modern slang, because it was used as slang for "suspicious" in the early 1900s? Or would it be moronic to seriously argue that, because it's obviously only exploded as common slang much more recently?
Alpine divorce may not have been the most popular way to describe these type of circumstances where a man leads his partner into the wilderness and abandons her to die before this tiktok trend, but its a term that has been around for a long time and there have been plenty of men who have taken these kinds of actions against their partners.
Facts don't care about your feelings.
Firstly, cite what you quote from elsewhere in the future, if you want to be taken seriously. I found it myself, so no need in this case, anymore.
Secondly, that cited study of hiking accidents has literally nothing to do with 'alpine divorce'—it makes no differentiation between hiking injuries following from someone being abandoned by someone else (much less specifically a man abandoning a woman) after going hiking together, and accidents that happen under any other circumstances. It's a study about hiking accidents overall, and it's extremely disingenuous to even attempt to reach any conclusions about 'alpine divorce' based on its data.
This is the study that was cited. Here are the variables about the accidents it had access to:
Can't help but notice not a single data point related, at all, to even going hiking with someone else, much less anything about being separated from them during the hike.
It's a massive, desperate straw grasp by the author to cite this study in support of any assertion about the frequency of 'alpine divorce', and no less of one by you to try and bolster your assertion with it.
"Facts don't care about your feelings." Once again, your own words come back to bite you; it's obvious your feelings/biases led you to willfully discarding the part of your brain that would easily have seen how nonsensical that article's claims are. I can find literally no data about how common this 'phenomenon' even is, much less anything about it becoming more or less frequent over time, and from what you've written so far, I have a feeling that I've ironically looked harder for it than you have, being the one of the two of us who isn't driven by bias.
Apparently you can't write lol
I think sharing is fine, and the actions of these boys are deplorable. But the story makes it out to be a major trend, instead of just sharing the stories. And to me, that is likely to make it happen more often, not less. So that bothers me.
“Shhhh don’t talk about abuse you’ve suffered because it might bring more abuse”
Do you ever look yourself in the mirror? You keep misrepresenting what other people are saying and being an ass, but in another comment you complain it's impossible to have a conversation with someone because they are being scornful.
I'm guessing this is why you have a new account; probably banned a lot for being a dick.
I was thinking the same. Some people just enjoy a fight. Triggers adrenaline and such. I do feel bad for them that they don't have better ways to get happy feels.
I'd agree, and this sounds more of a failure of communication and expectation setting from the get go, from both parties.
Why would the woman in the story have to express that she expects her partner to hike with her the whole time?
Edit: Who are all you men who think that it's acceptable to abandon your hiking partner while on a hike?? What the fuck is happening here? Fuck all of you.
Because it obviously wasn't clear to her partner. Instead of assuming, communicate. Women do this often and yes I'm generalizing but men aren't mind readers. Different people will have different expectations unless you talk and agree.
How is it not clear that when planning a hike where there is only 2 people, that the assumption is those 2 people stay together unless there's an emergency?
That's the whole issue here, right? Why are these men deciding on their own that they no longer want to hike with these women and are abandoning them on the mountain? Why didn't these men communicate with their partner?
You are again assuming. It's obvious you shouldn't. The confusion is your own.
Why are you telling me that it is not an expectation that hikers stick together while also saying that it is basic decency to stick together on a hike?
Do you expect group members on a hike to stick together unless there's an emergency?
I asked you a bunch of questions. No assumptions here. Why can't you answer them?
Why didn't any of the men in these stories communicate that they no longer wanted to stick together?
Why didn't these men communicate to their partner that they no longer wanted to hike with them?