It's a shame he cheated on his wife :(
70% of divorces are initiated by women, and more in higher income brackets, yet only 50% of men undergoing divorce are unhappy about it, which means about 10% of married men are just waiting for their wives to take the first step in separation.
I do not want to excuse dishonesty, deception, breach of trust etc., but marriages are hard, humans are fallible, and age has taught me to be less judgemental of people failing on a difficult endeavor.
I don't know if this is just "creativity breeds madness", "fame allows people to be shitty", "most marriages fail", or simply "reporting bias" (happily married couples aren't juicy news).
Starting around 2003, Jim O'Rourke (go listen to Bad Timing and Insignificance, which are both amazing records and very different to each other) was in a relationship with Eva Prinz while she was in a (maybe?) open marriage to her first husband. In some order, then:
* Jim and Eva break up
* (2005) Jim a) leaves Sonic Youth b) moves across the country c) moves to Japan
* (2006) Eva and Thurston Moore start a publishing company, Ecstatic Peace Library
* somewhere in here, Eva Prinz gets divorced
* (2009) Eva Prinz marries Bernardo Guillermo, a furniture designer and the son of Princess Christina of the Netherlands; they have two kids, one before and one after the wedding
* (2010) Kim Gordon finds out about Thurston's affair with Eva
* (2011) Kim and Thurston separate; Sonic Youth split up
* (2013) Kim and Thurston divorce
* (by 2017) Thurston and Eva relocate to London
* (2020) Thurston and Eva marry
From the outside, assigning responsibility for anything here is kind of impossible and immoral, but the whole thing is remarkably cliched rock-and-roll nonsense for a band like Sonic Youth were...
They were married almost 30 years. It's a rock cliche to be dead by the age of 30, not to get a divorce after being married that long.