I already said I'm not apologizing for my love of Star magazine. Ok? It has been a valuable research tool, allowing me to keep up with what is supposedly going on between Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, and Bruce Willis all these last years. And to thereby track our national obsession with what I will call the Overly Cozy Divorce.

Apparently, Demi, Ashton, and Bruce get on famously. They go out together, all of them, take vacations together, take the kids to sporting events together, and so on. It all looks so fun, so unproblematic, so modern, that people reading and hearing about it might just assume that every divorced couple should be that close. In fact, over the last three years, as I spoke to people about the book I was writing, I was surprised by the frequency of questions like, "But most divorced couples still do stuff together for the kids right?" and "Don't you think dads who divorce should do holidays with their kids at their exes' place every year, and just bring the new wife along?" After all, the thinking goes, that's the best thing for everybody, right? Especially the kids!

Not so fast. When sociologist and divorce and remarriage expert Constance Ahrons came up with the concept of the "Good Divorce"  fifteen years ago (The Good Divorce: Keeping Your Family Together When Your Marriage Comes Apart), she also suggested a paradigm called the "binuclear family" — a post-divorce family that spans two households.  This basically  means the divorced parents who live apart communicate with each other so that the kids' needs are met, and cooperate as a parenting team as much as they can, since parental conflict is so bad for children.

So far, so good. But highly cooperative ex-spouses, bless them if they can pull it off, usually hit a speed bump when one of them — he is likely to do it more quickly than she is — remarries or gets into a serious, live-in re-partnership. Before divorced dads re-partner, a typical pattern, according to women I interviewed, was moms dropping the kids off with Dad not only for times outlined in the separation agreement, but also pretty much whenever they needed or wanted to. After all, divorced dads who are living alone are likely to want to see the kids they're no longer living with at every chance. 

The introduction of a serious girlfriend will surely shake things up. No matter what he has told his partner about wanting time with his kids, and no matter how understanding she is about it, couples would be unhealthy if they didn't want some time alone. Which is all too often, in my experience as a researcher, viewed as "Dad not having any interest in the kids any more" by an ex-wife. Who might really be stinging not from her kids getting a little less time with Dad, or a schedule that's more structured, but from the sense that she herself has finally been replaced.

If Dad has been spending holidays with his ex and the kids up until this point and he and his partner decide to discontinue that tradition, there are likely to be fireworks, of course. But I don't see anything wrong with a couple celebrating holidays together and inviting his kids to join, if they're not in the mood to continue the wanna-be- Norman Rockwell-esque weirdness with his ex — which is how it is likely to feel for most of us.

Let us not forget the obvious point: people divorce because they can't get along. Usually, they've put years of effort into saving the relationship and just can't. Do we really expect them to get along any better when one of them repartners after the divorce? 

There's something very warped about our expectation that the only people with the best interests of their kids in mind are those who do everything from home repairs to birthday parties with their ex "for the kids' sake." Indeed, Bruce and Demi are statistical anomalies — E. Mavis Hetherington found that less than a quarter of her Virginia Longitudinal Study participants who were exes could make "cooperative parenting" work. The majority of them, like the majority of people in the country, fell into "parallel parenting," essentially ignoring each other, communicating by email rather than phone and setting their own rules in their own homes for the kids. Hetherinton was surprised to discover that kids actually do well with this arrangement, and are able to assimilate the notion of "this is how it is at dad's house" and "it's like this at mom's house." It may also be better for stepmom than the constant communication dance: she's spared unnecessary aggravation and gets more of a say about parenting practices in her own home when exes aren't constantly in touch.

The real kicker, though, is that a high level of warmth and cooperation between exes is actually not healthy for the kids. In an interview, Francesca Adler-Baeder of the National Stepfamily Resource Center told me about the research on the topic, explaining to me, "When the exes are highly cooperative and chummy, the research shows that this is very confusing for kids, who wonder, 'So why did they even get divorced?' and 'If their marriage didn't work even though they get along so well, how can any marriage work?' "

The all-together-now Turks and Caicos wedding party might have been fun for Bruce, Demi, and Ashton. Maybe even for Bruce's now-wife. But most of us would rather just send a gift. And there's nothing wrong with that.