Traditionalists like to cite the high (and rising) divorce rate as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of modern society. It is an effective citation since most people seem to agree that divorce is a bad thing, though I do not think this is necessarily the case. In fact, in and of itself, I can think of only one reason that divorce is bad, that is that the parties involved are breaking “a promise” that they would be together forever.
Can you really blame people for getting divorced when society offers such a limited set of options? It's either you commit for a life-long affair, or none at all. According to our culture, people are meant to be eternally attached to another person. This isn't true for everyone. Couples should be able to determine their own level of commitment. If they want to be together for the rest of their lives, that's fine. If they want to plan on being together just until their kids are grown, then thats fine, too.
A misconception about the divorce rate is that it is equal to the rate of bad marriages. How do you know that years ago, when the divorce rate was lower, there weren't just more unhappy, loveless marriages? Indeed, being in a bad marriage is worse than getting divorced.
To me, the high divorce rate means that people are less tolerant of unhappiness. This is generally a good thing, but it is a tragedy when children are involved (albeit an exaggerated one, since kids are often better off not living in a household with unhappy parents). I would be interested to know the percentage of divorced couples that don't have children (or only children that are grown up.)
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You're dead on the money on this one, and there's more to the issue.
Let's ask ourselves a question. Suppose that you marry a person who seems ideal in every single way. That person makes you happier than you've ever been, and you feel that life without her would be intolerable. Consequently, you marry her. Twenty years down the road, things have changed. The woman you fell in love with no longer exists: due to whatever mechanism, she is an impossible person to be around. She lies to you. She cheats on you. She steals your money and abuses your children. The question is: what do the ideas behind marriage have to say about this situation?
I think that the tenets of marriage (a belief in true, eternal, unconditional love) suggest one of two things:
A) You ought to continue the marriage despite all obstacles.
B) These circumstances cannot arise in the first place.
The only other course of action in response to the dream girl gone bad situation is divorce, which is obviously in contradiction to the ideas behind marriage. Therefore, let's talk about the first possibility.
I'd argue that being in a marriage, at least as far as traditionalists are concerned, is about trust and love. If your wife is constantly lying to you, do you continue to trust her? After she's lied and stolen from you so many times that she's taken every possession you have, do you continue to trust her? Only a fool would say yes. So you stop trusting your wife. Bare with me a moment longer.
If your wife becomes the most brutish, childish, abusive, selfish and emotionally distant person you've ever met, do you continue to love her? What if your marriage is only happy for six months, then your wife abruptly changes, and you suffer her new personality for thirty years? Do you continue to love her? Though some romantics might say true love is everlasting, I say: absolutely not. How many times have we thought we've loved a person, only to have that person change, or to have circumstances change, and been forced to end the relationship? I think the only reasonable response is: no, if the spouse becomes that horrific, then in most cases, over a long period of time, love will disappear.
So what we have, given the hypothetical circumstances I've set up, is a marriage without trust or love. What, then, makes your supposed union a marriage at all? The marriage only continues to exist on paper. The reality is that the marriage has effectively ended. At this point, to obtain a divorce is not to end your commitment or love. Those have already been destroyed. You're only changing your status on paper. You're only letting the government know what's already happened.
Yet, it's this act of filing a form, of feeding the bureaucracy a piece of paper, that is frowned upon. It's the frequency with which this act occurs that is used as moral measuring tape, not the events that led up to it.
So, from possibility A), we can only draw the conclusion that what's really important about marriage is the certificate. Yet traditionalists obviously wouldn't agree to that.
Now, for possibility B, the idea that marriage holds that the "bad spouse" scenario simply won't happen. Simply put: it does, because people get divorces.
So, what conclusion can we draw from all of this? Bare with me a bit further and I'll demonstrate.
What is marriage, in the ideal form we see on television? A symbolic affirmation that two people are to form a union that will never break--'til death do us part. So marriage, in the way we sometimes think of it, presumes that the love between the bride and groom will never be broken. But as we've seen, that can and does happen, despite the best intentions. Marriage is essentially a stupid promise. You promise something that you could never be completely sure of--that you'll always love and trust someone. Circumstances change, and people change. Given this ever-present possibility, why make the promise in the first place?
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