Because other kinds of misery are not a problem? We have to meet some kind of misery quota? Is quantity of misery taken into account at all, or only quality of misery?
So gambling away the family finances wouldn’t count. Or financial irresponsibility. Or emotional distance. Or mental illness, or unhealthy housekeeping, or chronic unemployment, or bigotry, or (fill in the blank)?
I think we can all agree that crazy circumstances can pop up that make divorce a better option than remaining married. Thing is, many of us have seen situations where divorce is considered a first resort instead of a last- where the ending of the marriage is the result of, to be blunt, weakness on the part of the people involved- whether they don’t work hard enough to make it work, or else the divorce is just the ending of what was always a really bad idea. It can be frustrating at times, especially since *everyone * thinks they have good reasons for marriage and divorce- no one really wants to admit to being weak, or frivolous, or selfish, or a plain waste of space- or worse, being gullible enough to marry someone like that.
I know that you struggle with the issue of overgeneralizing, given this thread
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=353118 that you’ve begun in GD. Please understand that some of the disgust for divorce on the part of some folks here (I’m in the ‘it’s bad, but not the worst ending to a marriage’ camp) stems from too many interactions with people that divorce because they should never have been married.
As for kids…I think that they should inspire parents to put more work into their own relationship…but I think that, for terminal problems, whatever is good for the parents is good for the kids.
In other words, if you can’t stand the person, or they are ruining your life, there should be no legal means of escape - just fleeing the country, framing the spouse for a crime, or murder. That should make things better.
And yes, I do think your idea would boost the murder rate. People who feel trapped and desperate tend to do irrational and often violent things.
No…MOST of us can agree on that. But the response to the poster’s stating twice that there was a narrow list of marital problems involving families with children that would make divorce an option was erroneous and needed to be pointed out.
In the cases you’re referring to, at least ONE person in the marriage doesn’t think it’s better to stay married and try to work it out. You can’t have a marriage if one partner doesn’t feel it’s worth saving. I know of no one with children who didn’t think long and hard about divorce before taking that step. The fact that one parent feels the relationship is salvageable doesn’t make it so for the other person.
I’m not the one overgeneralizing in this thread. Duh.
And that would be putting closing the barn door after the horse is already out. What better reason to divorce than because it was a mistake to begin with. Now…if you want to talk about knowing the person before you marry them, you might consider opening a thread for that. But this thread is about divorce.
I couldn’t agree more. Sadly, the love for one’s children doesn’t always inspire people to stay together if they dislike each other. It’s two separate issues.
For those who feel that divorce should only be an option in extreme circumstances such as abuse, do you feel that failing to give people a paper divorce would actually stop them from moving out and living separate lives anyway? Sure, it would impede them from legally remarrying, but it wouldn’t necessarily stop them from carrying on their lives, finding new loves and doing everything they would have done had the courts given them the official stamp.
They probably want to make adultery/fornication/unmarried cohabitation a serious crime; otherwise, as you point out, making divorce illegal won’t force people to stay together when they hate each other. Either that, or the posters didn’t think it through.
I don’t have a variety of experience on the subject. I’ve been married only once. After 26 years, we still haven’t been divorced.
However, I do see divorce as a reasonable course in many families. The “until death” part of the traditional oath is only tradition. My parents should have divorced at least ten years before they did.
Many marriages that fall apart should never have been wed in the first place. Too many couples rush into marriage without finding out what their partners are really like.
I believe that many people don’t work hard enough at making a marriage work. When they hit a rough stretch, bang, they’re singing along with Tammy Wynette, D-I-V-O-R-C-E.
Abusive marriages should not be preserved for any reason. No one deserves to be battered.
I’ve been “taking charge of me” for at least the last 4.5 years with a therapist, just so’s you know. But that doesn’t change my opinion on the subject in the least. Taking charge doesn’t ever, nor should it, cancel out the fact that it sucked and affected every relationship I had after that, and that I struggle with it still. Taking charge isn’t a cure, but it is a way of dealing with the very real effect.
Just curious…does your therapist think the divorce itself, or your mother’s bad rapping of your father, is the cause of your problems?
I see where you’re going: is it divorce itself that’s bad or is it the inability of my parents to get along (both have their faults) that’s bad? Of course it starts with the parents. They sucked at their job of being married and raising kids and keeping it all together. Their priorities were shit. They failed. But to me that doesn’t therefore make divorce a “good guy”.
But it also doesn’t make it a “bad guy” necessarily. There are no guarantees in life. You make the best of what you have.
Amen.
I think sometimes the opinion “divorce is wrong” is a code word, or a lazy summary of, one of the following:
- too many people get married and divorced frivolously
- too many people are too lazy to try to make it work
- divorce undermines the Cleaver-like image that society has of itself
- people put their own desires over the desires of people who want/need them to remain married (like kids or perfectionist parents)
Sometimes divorce can improve people’s lives and sometimes it can make things a lot worse. The problem is that so few of us are equipped with the wisdom and foresight to make these decisions, absent obvious cases of abuse or mistreatment. But in that way, divorce is not so different than any other life decision, it’s just one of the few where the state forces you to sign a paper saying “I fucked up” and potentially pay a humongous fine.
The most frustrating thing for me about the attitude that divorce is wrong is that my friend, the one whose husband walked out and who now says that if she gives him an amicable divorce maybe he’ll come back to her someday, that friend didn’t have a choice in the matter. She simply got dumped.
But it’s still going to be assumed she just didn’t try hard enough.
I count three. Divorce, annullment and death. I know that annullment is always described as meaning the marriage never happened, but that’s just a technicality until somebody comes up with a working time machine.
Not necessarily…but it might be assumed that she should have seen it coming and not married him in the first place. And that just sucks, even if it’s true.
Our government should provide for varying levels of marriage with different escape clauses. I wonder how many would opt for the least-committed options.
Imagine you’re getting married in a fast-food kind of environment. You have your choice of marriage happy meals. Ordering a “small” means something like, “let’s do our taxes together and share health insurance and car registrations and pool our incomes to afford a house but not actually make any big commitments.” Ordering a “medium” means, “I love you so totally (today) that I can never forsee a day when we would be parted, but just in case let’s have a ripcord installed.” Ordering the “large” means, “I love you so much that I will never leave you for any reason whatsoever, and I will never fail you, even in the face of insanity, obesity, limited mobility, or frigidity.”
Then imagine someone proposes to you and says, “I love you more than life itself. Let’s engage in a “small” commitment in front of all of your parents, friends, co-workers, and family.”
Would you ever say yes to such a romantic proposal?
Personally, I would take my chances and keep dating in hopes of finding someone that actually loved me.
It depends. What are the penalties for breaking the bigger contracts? I’m risk averse.
I’m still scratching my head about this. I don’t know the situation, but, unless there’s more to the story, if it was the husband who walked out, isn’t it the husband who should get the blame?
In other words, I see “He shouldn’t have walked out on her” as following more readily from the premise “Divorce is wrong” than I do “She shouldn’t give him a divorce after he walked out on her.”
Or, the wrongness of divorce doesn’t lie in the legal termination of a marriage that is, in reality, already over, but in what one or both people do to kill the marriage itself.