Alpine Divorce: When Leaving Is Not a Breakup, It Is Abandonment

Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift · Apr 28, 2026 · 9m

Alpine divorce is the term circulating online for something that is not a divorce at all. Tony Tedesco and Jen Kirsch say it is abandonment with a trendy name, and the conversation it opens is about what a partner does when things get genuinely hard.

The term comes from a climber in Austria who left his exhausted girlfriend at a summit. She died. He was convicted. But the conversation Tony Tedesco and Jen Kirsch build around it is not about mountains. It is about the smaller versions most people have actually lived: being left on the side of a road mid-argument, being abandoned in an…