Yesterday my wife filed for legal separation. In the state in which I live, that means all the property is divided, child custody is determined, financial interests severed, etc. -- everything a divorce is, just without the name.
This was very unexpected.
Evidently my wife has been feeling beat up by me emotionally for a long, long time but has just been absorbing it. And I haven't given the complaints she has expressed the gravity they deserve. I found out in early May that she's profoundly dissatisfied with our marriage.
That wasn't good news to me. I welcomed the opportunity to get things healthy and seek counseling or something. But, surprisingly to me, she wasn't interested.
Basically, she's so distanced herself from me emotionally that she's come to believe that she will never again have feelings for me. And now that I've forced her to contemplate the situation by requesting we get help, she says she no longer wants to "live a lie" -- pretending to be happily married when really she isn't. My solution is to get the relationship healthy. Hers is to leave. At least that's how she's leaning right now. One of the real struggles I'm having is convincing her that things can get better.
For my own part, I'm deeply repentant and have entered into long term counseling to work on issues on my side. And I still have a little hope because she did file for separation rather than divorce (which she just as easily could have done). But I'm just devastated, because I really love her, and I really meant "for better or worse" for the rest of my life. And the thought of my kids growing up in a broken home is just horrifying to me. I never imagined this could happen. Especially so quickly. Especially without us both fighting desperately to save the marriage.
Not surprisingly, I've been researching divorce lately. In doing so, I came across a powerful argument by Maggie Gallagher in First Things as to the damage no fault divorce laws have brought on our culture. It describes very well the cause of my own deep feelings of betrayal. It underlines how our current laws not only do not affirm the sanctity of marriage, but in failing to do so, they make marriage potentially a cruel institution. I can certainly relate.
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Here are the highlights:
The right to leave ASAP is judged so compelling that it overwhelms the right to make (and be held responsible for) our commitments. For twenty-five years we have talked and written and legislated about no-fault divorce as if it represented an increase in personal choice. As the letters I received from divorcees suggest, this is a simplification and a falsification of our experience with no-fault divorce. For in most cases, divorce is not a mutual act, but the choice of one partner alone. "We might expect that both partners would be ready to end the relationship by the time one leaves," note family scholars Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr. and Andrew J. Cherlin in their book Divided Family. "But the data suggest otherwise. Four out of five marriages ended unilaterally."
No-fault divorce does not expand everyone's personal choice. It empowers the spouse who wishes to leave, and leaves the spouse who is being left helpless, overwhelmed, and weak. The spouse who chooses divorce has a liberating sense of mastery, which psychologists have identified as one of the key components of personal happiness. He or she is breaking free, embracing change, which, with its psychic echoes of the exhilarating original adolescent break from the family, can dramatically boost self-esteem.
Being divorced, however (as the popularity of the movie The First Wives' Club attests) reinforces exactly the opposite sense of life. Being divorced does not feel like an act of personal courage, or transform you into the hero of your own life story, because being divorced is not an act. It is something that happens to you, over which, thanks to no-fault divorce legislation, you have no say at all.
The spouse who leaves learns that love dies. The spouse who is left learns that love betrays and that the courts and society side with the betrayers. In court, your marriage commitment means nothing. The only rule is: Whoever wants out, wins. By gutting the marital contract, no-fault divorce has transformed what it means to get married. The state will no longer enforce permanent legal commitments to a spouse. Formally, at least, no-fault divorce thus demotes marriage from a binding relation into something best described as cohabitation with insurance benefits.
Rather than transferring to the couple the right to decide when a divorce is justified, no-fault laws transferred that right to the individual. No-fault is thus something of a misnomer; a more accurate term would be unilateral divorce on demand.
What the current no-fault debate revolves around is the question: Is marriage less than a legal contract between two people? Is the marriage contract enforceable, and if so how? When we marry, are we making a binding commitment or a fully revokable one (if "revokable commitment" is not an oxymoron)? If the latter, what is the difference, morally and legally, between getting married and living together? Why have a legal institution dedicated to making a public promise the law considers too burdensome to enforce?
These are on top of the intrinsic cruelty of divorce itself; of saying to the one person one promised to love forever, I’m not going to care for you any more. Constance Ahrons' 1994 book The Good Divorce is a decidedly optimistic account of middle-class divorced couples. Yet she found that just 12 percent of divorced parents are able to create friendly, low-conflict relationships after divorce. Fifty percent of middle-class divorced couples engage in bitter, open conflict as "angry associates," or worse, "fiery foes." Five years afterwards, most of these angry divorced remain mired in hostility. Nearly a third of friendly divorces degenerate into open, angry conflict.
These statistics are matched by what Judith Wallerstein found in her (nonrandom) sample of mostly middle-class couples: Ten years after the divorce, fully half the women were still very angry at their ex-spouse.
Where once we seriously fretted over the possibility of breaking up marriages, today we are far more concerned about the dangers of discouraging divorce.
No-fault divorce laws may account for somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of the increase in divorce that took place in the seventies.
In other words, while there are many social and economic factors conspiring to weaken our marriages, no-fault divorce laws have pushed us over the edge from being a society in which the majority of marriages succeed to one in which (according to demographers' estimates) a majority of new marriages will fail. When divorce is made quicker and nonjudgmental, more marriages fail. And the story about marriage contained in the law---of marriage as a temporary bond sustained by mutual emotion alone---is becoming the dominant story we tell about marriage in America, eclipsing older narratives about stubborn faith and commitment, "till death do us part."
No-fault divorce is thus both a cause and a symptom of our current marriage crisis. When the law treats divorce as a unilateral right of one partner, culture can hardly take seriously the moral claims of marriage.
How will we know when America has begun to rebuild a culture of marriage? When the terror of a divorce delayed pales in our minds in comparison to the horror of seeing an innocent spouse dumped---then and only then will Americans have escaped the divorce culture we now inhabit.
