(a) a slight majority of divorces (50 - 66 percent) are unnecessary, "unnecessary" in the sense that these divorcing couples experience average happiness and low conflict,
(b) a lowered divorce rate would be in the best interest of children (e.g., adjusted for parental income and education, children of divorce are at higher risk of poverty, lower family wealth, higher risk of school failure, stunted educational and professional achievement, higher risk of substance abuse, incarceration, and teen pregnancy, and higher risk of physical and/or sexual abuse),
(c) our current divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing rates cost US taxpayers estimated $112B annually,
(d) many divorces are preventable, in that about "40% of US couples already well into the divorce process say that one or both of them are interested in the possibility of reconciliation", and (e) around 1/3 of marriages that ever experience low marital happiness "turn around"...in other words, they recover. This fraction is uncannily similar to the fraction of spouses that are open to pursuing
reconciliation.
The report also makes several recommendations for action. The report authors suggest:
(1) requiring a longer waiting period between the filing of a divorce petition and when the divorce would be granted. Some states do not require any "cooling off period", some a mere 20 days, and others a period of 1-2 years. The report advocates for a one-year waiting period,
(2) require a "divorce warning" to be issued from the petitioner to the respondent prior to being able to file a divorce suit, coupled with connecting the two parties to reconciliation resources,
(3) encouraging marriage counselors and therapists to adopt a more pro-marriage counseling stance (the report claimed a slim majority of marriage and family counselors are neutral-to-negative toward marriage, a factoid this author found simply astounding), and equipping clergy with better skills to assist struggling couples with marital issues,
(4) court-ordered mediation,
(5) require divorcing couples with children to complete parenting/co-parenting classes prior to being permitted to filing divorce petitions,
(6) tax rebates for marriage education, and
(7) establish centers at universities to help prevent unnecessary divorce
Analysis and discussion of this article: My own personal experience with divorce corroborates much of what this report discussed. My former wife had already absconded with my children across the country when she served me with divorce papers, thus her act of filing for divorce was both the beginning and the end of the divorce process. It was all over but for the court date to make it official. This single act set us both on what the report calls the "divorce superhighway"; only in my case, it wasn't necessarily the speed, but the relative lack of "exits" providing opportunit(ies) for reconciliation that confounded me. I was reduced to attempting reconciliation via attorney-attorney communication, 6 unanswered personal letters, the only face-to-face meeting she would agree to, and via pastoral communication. None were effective.
Incidentally, her Catholic priest recommended to her that she seek a divorce (and later the Archdiocese of Washington would breezily approve the annulment, after having the sac to ask me for a $500 "donation" to finance their declaring that my marriage to her never happened and my children were henceforth bastards).
In short, I was one of those 40% who want to reconcile, despite all the false allegations she had levelled and the bad feelings that had been built up in the months since she left, but it was as if every person and agency involved in the process either considered divorce a foregone conclusion, or had a pecuniary interest in seeing my marriage dissolved.
Moreover, the online "parenting classes" we had to complete prior to the hearing were too little/too late of a reminder that the interests of the children should come first; besides, when dealing with a former spouse who had convinced herself that her acts were in the best interests of the children, such "education" serves as a poor brake on the bullet train to splitsville.
Thus, I found unpersuasive the study authors' recommendations to impose/extend waiting periods, impose a "divorce warning" measure prior to the filing of papers, and providing education about divorce and its impacts to counseling professionals, require co-parenting classes, offer tax rebates for married couples, and establish anti-unnecessary-divorce centers at institutions of higher learning. To be sure, these steps will probably be helpful and on that basis alone deserve to be implemented, but my sense is that, since they the measures merely nibble around the margins of the divorce problem rather than step outside the entire divorce mill framework and address root causes and social/financial/legal incentives to divorce, these measures will prove insufficient. Indeed, the report's recommended legal language for state legislatures leaves the entire human trafficking language wholly in place, namely:
Married persons living apart, whether or not they have asked a court for divorce, separation, annulment, or dissolution, may nonetheless ask for any of the following temporary relief, in a court that would have jurisdiction in a divorce case or other domestic relations case between the parties:As this and likely any mother or father on the receiving end of a parendectomy knows, "parenting time" is more popularly called "visitation" for a reason, and is not likely to be enforced with nearly the same vigor as is chalimony. Have fun enforcing access to your children in the court system. And temporary restraining orders are notorious for being convenient vehicles for launching scorched-earth campaigns to separate a parent from his/her child(ren), on the way to establishing the precedent of a domestic situation sans the other spouse that courts are loathe to change one year hence.
a. Parenting time (i.e., child custody, visitation, access, etc.), subject to state and federal laws on jurisdiction for such cases.
b. Child support, subject to state and federal laws on jurisdiction for such cases.
c. Protection from domestic violence.
d. Spousal support; preservation of marital or community property, and fair, equitable access to marital or community property.
e. Preservation of evidence of the existence, character, and value of property, grounds of divorce, or any other issues in a future divorce or separation case.
f. Court-ordered marriage education, marriage counseling for the purpose of repairing the marriage, custody/parenting education, or mediation.
All these criticisms aside, a greater emphasis on reconciliation versus fast-tracking divorces to the courthouse will likely be a step in the right direction, although I think the marginal effect will be small and the entrenched interests of the divorce-industrial-complex left fully intact. Thus, in the spirit of incrementalism, I suppose I am supportive.
* I was shocked to learn from the above-linked report that a child of divorce, who marries another child of divorce, has a 200% higher risk of divorce him/herself than average. Thus do the sins of the father or mother self-reinforcingly reverberate from the past through the present to the future.
10 comments:
Well intentioned, perhaps, but unlikely to be effective. Most of the people who want to reconcile are men, likely, because once a woman decides to cut the cord on you, she's generally *done* in a more or less irrevocable way. There are exceptions, but these are exceptional. Most of the time, she's just done, and she will not reconcile because that would be like agreeing to marry her brother.
So, I agree with your comments. The only thing that will work here will be to skew the incentives to opt for divorce to begin with, not to slow it down once it has been opted for, because once that rubicon has been crossed, slowing it down isn't going to have much of an impact on the end result other than, well, making it slower to realize. Reconciliation after separation is extremely rare -- and the reason is that once women have decided to leave, they are going to leave, no matter what, no matter how long it takes. The only thing that would be effective are changes that impact the decision to leave the first place.
Even so, I think the kinds of changes proposed in the paper are very unlikely to pass in most places, because women's groups will oppose them on the grounds of empowering "women's abusers" and so on.
I recently wrote an article about the same issue but with a different solution. I think that in order to solve this problem we need to strengthen the foundation rather than try to prop up the marriage after it starts to crumble. Here's my take on this whole mess:
http://elephantsandtrees.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/marriage-2-0-and-the-church/
Perhaps it's just my own ineptness, but I had a good deal of difficulty downloading a copy of the American Values PDF file.
In case anyone else is also having trouble getting it, http://db.tt/BdDrZ6Uy
As an aside, I posted a link to this item on a thread on http://flirtyintrovert's site (linked to from a comment on Dalrocks) alnog with an invitation for some of her readers who've become wary of the Manosphere to read this as an example of the more thoughtful side of the Manosphere.
What your wife did to you would traditionally be called "abandonment" and "kidnapping". Until we return to the traditional laws, which also criminally punish "adultery", we will never have real marriages.
E.W., as you know, I strongly support the recognition of private marriage contracts as a way of returning to traditional marriage. If individual couples desire to be married according to traditional rules, they should be allowed.
What MRAs in the manosphere (notably Citizen Renegade, In Mala Fide, The Spearhead) do is to dismantle the myth of female superiority.
We are slowly exposing feminism for the heap of lies and its damage to families. This will eventually result in feminism being a sad joke, irrelevant and a warning to future cultures.
We are slowly exposing feminism for the heap of lies and its damage to families. This will eventually result in feminism being a sad joke, irrelevant and a warning to future cultures.
Right. We are destined to be like Mass Effect's Protheans.
@ Knightblaster, I think you are correct that even such mild pallatives as suggested by this study would be steadfastly opposed by various women's groups...for reasons that you suggest.
@ elephants & trees, thanks for the link and I've reciprocated.
@ slwerner, thanks for the link brother, and I appreciate the mention.
@ Justin,
That was the rub for me. My former spouse had license to do, while married to me, that which I was prohibited from doing, as soon as she filed. Kidnapping is okay on the way to the courthouse.
@ Lovekraft,
I used to think a point-by-point debunking of feminism was useful. I am however coming to VD's way of thinking that to do so is a waste of time. Better to confront the whole edifice of equalitarianism, rather than get bogged down in critiquing one of its outgrowths. Equality is a legal, physical, spiritual, and metaphysical falsehood. Why bother ceding this ground to meet feminists and other equalitarians on their home turf?
Incidentally, her Catholic priest recommended to her that she seek a divorce (and later the Archdiocese of Washington would breezily approve the annulment, after having the sac to ask me for a $500 "donation" to finance their declaring that my marriage to her never happened and my children were henceforth bastards).
This is just plain evil and causes untold suffering and scandal. Up until about 1960, the number of annulments granted by the RCC worldwide was under 100. The RCC used to be a beacon in upholding the sanctity and permanence of marriage. Today, in the USA alone, the number is in the tens of thousands. (The number has decreased recently only because fewer people bother to get annulments or even bother to marry a second time around. Surprise!)
Even if one grants that the annulments were valid when the numbers initially started going up, that still means the RCC should have instituted programs to instruct priests to better discern consent. That was never done, and priests routinely advise divorce, which is a mortal sin.
This, among other things, leads many Catholics to the opinion that the institution and hierarchy are not part of the RCC, regardless of the name on the door.
I wanted to add something about the Catholic dimension:
First thing first: The children of an annulled marriage are NOT considered to be bastards unless both parents believed themselves to be unmarried at the time of the child's birth...and even then that's on the conscience of the parent and no disgrace on the child. Your kids are NOT illegitimate according to the Canon Law of the Church.
To put it another way: The difference between a valid or not-valid marriage is whether it has a "sacramental character." But if a marriage lacks that character, but the couple is innocent of that fact and has children, the very fact of choosing to have children together makes their marriage somewhat closer to having that sacramental character. (For Christian marriage by definition includes openness to childbearing.) So if anything, the children represent a further cementing of the bond, and no "illegitimacy" label should be associated with such a very great good.
That's the bastardy issue.
What about the Church's teaching and behavior on marriage?
There is a difference, it seems, between having the right dogma and actually having programs and procedures and staff that support it.
The Catholic Church's teaching is extremely pro-marriage, from the dogma standpoint. In the Church's view, a valid (i.e. real) marriage is simply binding until the death of one party, no ifs, ands, or buts. That means if the people get fed up with one another later in life, they can separate and they can obtain a civil divorce, but in God's eyes and the eyes of the Church they're still married. In the Church's eyes, if they ever get remarried or sexually involved with another person, it's adultery, because if the original marriage was valid, it is unseverable by any event but death.
To put it another way: The Catholic Church does not believe in divorce.
I don't mean it doesn't "believe in" it meaning that they think it's unwise (the way that you don't "believe in" riding a motorcycle on the Interstate in hotpants and a tanktop).
I mean, that the Church doesn't believe that divorce exists if the marriage was valid. The Church doesn't believe in divorce the way you don't believe in the Easter Bunny.
And, all marriages are assumed to be real ("valid"), even those not conducted by a Catholic priest, unless something during an investigation shows otherwise.
(Things that can cause the original marriage to be determined to have not been valid include: one party was too young, or was mentally ill and couldn't consent, or entered into marriage lightly on a lark and without serious understanding of what they were doing, or the couple was never planning to have a sexually exclusive marriage from the start, or they were never open to having children together; that kind of thing.)
...continued...
...continued from above...
Now if you think about all that, from a doctrinal side, that's about as anti-divorce as one can be.
So priests should be recommending reconciliation, if it's remotely plausible. If investigation shows that the original marriage was valid, then any later marriage is mere prolonged adultery, and a Catholic living in a second (civil) marriage whose first marriage was real is barred from taking Communion in a Catholic Church, no matter how orthodox he/she may otherwise be. The Church seriously counsels that person to begin living continently -- that means as brother and sister, with no sex -- if it isn't practical to end the second marriage and return to the first (real) spouse.
That's Catholic dogma.
So what about these annulments?
Well,
(a.) Priests dealing with the fallout of the decline of American marriage get tired of being orthodox and giving people news they don't want to hear. That sounds bad, and it is. But imagine yourself with a nice new couple who begins attending church at your parish; they've been away from the life of faith and want to come back because they have kids they want to raise as Catholics. They weren't faithful Catholics when they married, which makes their marriage "probably valid, but irregular" in the eyes of the Church, so they ask to have their marriage "convalidated" (declared kosher). Then you find out that they both have former spouses. So you tell them there's a 1-3 year investigation about to happen. Their faces fall, but they go for it, and in the investigation you find that one original marriage was to a Catholic who still wants to reconcile, and there's no reason to declare that original marriage null. Oops. Now you have to tell this nice couple who wanted to raise their kids Catholic that they're objectively living in sin, can't take communion while they do so, and in theory one of them should go reconcile with the former spouse...except where does that leave the children from new pairing? So for the children's sake you have to tell them: Either stop having sex, or you can't take communion.
(b.) There are always a few priests who're just theologically (and usually, politically) liberal and think that God doesn't exist and the whole reason for this Church thing is to be nice to people and support the Welfare State and Nuclear Disarmament. That crowd will be quick to make a girl feel ever so good about the "healing" her divorce will bring. The term "Judas Priest" wasn't originally a band name.
(c.) Marriage in American culture generally has gotten trashed recently, and a lot of people (not saying you're one of them) entered into it unwisely, or with thoughts that it might or might not be a permanent thing, or writing funky vows like "as long as our love shall last," or planning to contracept the whole time for a nice DINK lifestyle, or thinking the whole God thing is a sham anyway so why not just get a Justice of the Peace and have a party. Our great-grandparents never thought that way; folks more recently do. So a lot of more recent marriages really do lack the "sacramental character" that is required to fit the true Christian definition of the word "marriage," and thus to be an unseverable union.
(d.) Catholic parishes are trying to catch up, but have been slow to establish things like Marriage Encounter and good solid counseling to rescue troubled marriages before they're irreparable. Just because you have very pro-marriage dogmatic policies, doesn't mean you're good at helping your parishoners stay happy in their marriages.
That's all I wanted to say. I'm not really defending the bad priests and the too-many, too-easy annulments. I'm just saying that the teaching is right, and I hope they'll get their act together and make the experience for the Average Joe Catholic match the teaching.
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