Hard

By: Gabriela Yareliz

We are zooming out on the timeline. We move from album 25 to 30. We now meet an Adele who is deep in motherhood and divorced. Adele leaves a relationship that was seemingly normal given her expressed track record. She speaks highly of her ex-husband and says she trusts him with her life and that no one “did anything wrong.” (Source)

She told Vogue, “I was just going through the motions, and I wasn’t happy.” I get annoyed when I hear stuff like this. I am annoyed for the kids involved and for people who are hurt. You have a presumably perfectly good man next to you, and it’s like, “Nah I am bored. I miss the pain of dysfunction. This isn’t me.” WHAT IS THIS? This is what defines Adele’s 30 album for me. It’s a woman who was bored and leaves her husband, and now, to top it off, she is going to write sad songs about it and about how she is finding herself (something any well-meaning adult does before marrying another human being who has feelings). (TF). Also emerging with the album was a woman who had a totally new look. In some photos, some said she looked unrecognizable.

Maybe, she knew how Eat, Pray, Love this album was going to be (hate that book), and so she started with the single “Easy on Me” for people like me. Meh. As someone who has experienced the aftermath of a divorce in a family, I am not really into the whole recklessness of making life-altering decisions and going back on commitments. People go into these commitments so negligently. In family law, professors half-joke that we should make getting married harder and less will face the even harder concept of getting divorced. I know the world sees this Adele move as empowering and will have a very different opinion than me, but I don’t take things like marriage and children lightly. People just need to grow up. We, as people, are always changing. If this was an excuse to leave someone, no one would stay married. Everyone would have an out.

“Easy on Me” comes off as a song of excuses, it is riddled with phrases like:

/I was still a child
Didn’t get the chance to
Feel the world around me
I had no time to choose what I chose to do/

Woman, you were not 12 when you got married. It was a full-on adult choice. The time to realize you had not “felt the world” was before having a child and involving another person. I guess what bothers me most is that her past is filled with all these supposedly evil men she sings about, and then she finds a good one, and she leaves. On one hand, she is changing, her look is changing, she is finally “feeling the world” around her, but when it comes to the relationship, she sings, “There ain’t no room for things to change; When we are both so deeply stuck in our ways”.

She states that she changed who she was for this person and tried and tried, and now she gives up. She had “good intentions” and “the highest hopes.” Album 25 felt like a woman who had matured and “let go of her ghosts,” and here, at 30, we find ourselves with a woman who is possessed by her ghosts and sort of lost again. It’s common knowledge that she hasn’t been alone since separating from her husband. Is this still an Adele trying to find herself in the reflection of other’s eyes? She asks for us to go easy on her, but I recognize I’ve gone full on hard. The music video goes from black and white to full color. It’s brighter than some of her really old videos, which were always filmed with darkness as a sort of theme, but given the recent Adele headlines, I wonder if she has really left the black and white behind.