On Marriage and Divorce

On my travels through the web this morning, I found this post which was bemoaning all of the "damage" that has been done to the institution of marriage. Apparently what set him off was a lawyer advertising low cost divorce filings in Toronto.

However, the author seems to feel that divorce is damaging to the notion of marriage:

I am against divorce, unless it is under the most extraordinary circumstances – such as if a man abuses his wife or a woman commits adultery.

Around about here, my willingness to accept the author's premise went flying out the window. Marriages are complex relationships, and outside of the couple themselves, nobody will ever fully understand what goes on in the privacy of that relationship.

Abuse and adultery are but two of many reasons that couples decide to go their separate ways. Sometimes, people simply grow apart as a result of experiences in life.

While adultery is relatively absolute, even it resides in many shades of grey - is a spouse who spends a lot of time with a close friend having an affair? Perhaps; perhaps not - it may be no more than a close friendship, yet a spouse may perceive it as an affair either because they are jealous, or perhaps because they simply do not understand.

Abuse sounds easy, doesn't it? Just look for the bruises, right? Wrong. As we have learned, abuse can take many forms that don't leave bruises. It can range from slapping someone around to psychological abuse and near hostage situations. What I consider to be abusive isn't what someone else will consider abuse.

Marriages that are held together "for the children" or the "what will the neighbors think?" are inevitably some of the most screwed up relationships I've ever seen. The impact on the children can be as damaging (or worse) as a divorce.

The author goes on to argue:

I do think the government should regulate it, so that it is harder for couples to split, force them to go through counseling, and fairly assign fault to one party when possible. At least then, there would be fewer divorces.

We've been there before. That was the divorce law regimen up until sometime in the 1960s (or was it the early '70s? - whatever - over 30 years ago).

1) Fault divorce (adultery, abuse, etc.) created a horrendously nasty environment where a separating couple wound up creating a fiction of one or the other having an affair, or having "abused" the other. A whole industry emerged of people taking staged pictures, and signing false affidavits to "substantiate" a fiction. The result? Divorces still took place, but at the price of someone's reputation being unnecessarily besmirched in the courts (and possibly the press).

2) Counselling only succeeds when both parties are willing to be brutally honest with themselves. It requires a degree of introspection as well as communication that few people are able to engage in; and even fewer will be successful at.

3) An amazing number of couples simply separated and lived apart - separate lives and identities in that time. The cost and adversarial nature of the divorce laws was such that they simply went underground and lived their lives quietly apart from their spouse. Even if they were not divorced "in law", in practical terms they were.

The current "no fault" approach works well for a number of reasons:

1) By taking the "blame" out of the picture in most cases, it makes it much easier for the separating couple to begin to heal both individually and as a pair of people. Whether or not we like it, when children or mutual friends are involved, a divorced couple still has some kind of relationship - direct or indirect. The door is now open to heal that relationship and form a new relationship that is positive.

2) Where children are involved, the process can be much less acrimonious (and therefore, less harmful to the children). A degree of honesty can come to the foreground with both parents that is ultimately much healthier for all parties - including the children - than a festering marriage filled with conflict. While it might be "best" for children to have both loving parents living in harmony, having both parents living with each other in disharmony is even more damaging to them.

- Contrary to popular mythology, the courts are pushing very heavily on shared custody/shared parenting arrangements when a couple with children splits. The days of "the mother gets custody" are slowly waning, replaced by a shared parenting model that ensures that both parents remain an active part of the child's life.

3) It is a rare situation where the "fault" for a failed relationship can be laid at the feet of one spouse or the other.

4) Honesty - pure and simple. I would much rather be honest with myself and divorced than living in a marriage filled with resentment because I felt "trapped" by the laws and social pressures. (I hate to imagine what sort of person I would become)

The notion that "marriage is in trouble" or "under attack" is a complete crock. Marriage is a social construct, no more and no less. The human animal is hard-wired to form social groupings like couples and families. Those groupings are not perfect, and rigid, but rather tend to be very fluid. Human laws have tried to codify those relationships for various reasons, but the reality is that codification is just words on a page - relationships happen between people and in their minds and hearts, a much more dynamic environment than law provides for.

If you don't "agree with divorce", then don't get divorced - but don't think for one moment that you know enough to even begin to guess at someone else's circumstances in this regard.