Divorce: causes, effects, and societal implications

Divorce

The Significance of Present-Day Changes in the Institution of Marriage:

Today, it is a fact that more and more marriages are becoming impermanent and less long lasting than they ever have been before. What is the cause for this phenomenon? Levi-Strauss maintain that today, there is an equal division of labor, and as a direct consequence, what happens is that the rights and responsibilities between both the partners of opposite sexes becomes equalized, and as a result, there is less dependence of one partner on the other. Perhaps the so called 'woman's movement' may have also contributed to this type of occurrence, and various other changes in society, including a considerable lessening of housework, and also the sexual revolution that took place during the sixties may also have contributed to the upsetting of the balance of the equation between men and women. Consider housework, for example, today. (Nazzari, pp: 333- 335)

In the modern times, a man no longer has to actually 'marry' a woman in order to look after his house and make his meals for him; all he has to do is to acquire paid help, which would achieve the purpose, except maybe in the provision of personal care for his children. Today, almost areas of household work have become mechanized or phased out, or are provided by the service industry, like for example, when clothes need to be ironed, then there are dry cleaners or presses that provide the service, which one can avail of any time. Sewing and darning need not even be done any more, what with the availability of cheaper clothing, which can be disposed of after they have been worn.

In the same way, the deep freezer serves the purpose of enabling an individual to prepare and stock semi-cooked or fully cooked meals, which one can simply thaw out and consume, and one also has the potion of buying food from fast food restaurants and other similar places, and, in fact, a study conducted in America in 1980 has shown that half the meals eaten would be eaten outside the home. All this lessens the burden on the housewife to a considerable extent, and although this means that a wife would now be bale to spend time outside her home working, it also means that a man can easily dispense with a wife, as he would be very well able to manage living alone, as there are services available for money that he can use. This is a change from the beginning of the century, when a self-respecting man would have to have a woman to take care of his needs, while today, a man can live all alone, and very happily so. (Nazzari, pp: 333- 335)

However, the one area in which a wife is necessary is in the area of generational reproduction, since this is a service that only a wife can provide, not only to her husband, but also to herself, and to the society as a whole. The husband on the other hand, would only be able to appreciate the value of these services if the emotional bond that he shares with his wife is strong; otherwise, he may start to feel that his family is indeed a burden on him. There was a time when common law maintained that a father was entitled to the services of his children in return for the services that he had provided them with, but those times have now changed. Today, although the duty of providing maintenance for the children still rests on the father, the return favors or material rewards do not exist any more; Jessie Bernard has found in a study that this is perhaps one of the reasons that men are today avoiding marriage, and the responsibilities that he would have to face with his children.

Today, children are only an emotional reward, and most men feel that they can do very well without such rewards. After a divorce, therefore, it is the wife who maintains the rewards as well as the burden of children. The sexual revolution, where women especially started to rebel against the norms of society wherein conforming or withdrawing form marriage would bring appropriate rewards or punishments, was also a major cause for the breaking up of marriage as an institution. Today, one need not wait for marriage in order to obtain sexual gratification; today there are all kinds of lifestyles, and society does not frown upon such different people any more. Cohabitation is the most popular trend today, and there is the Marvin case of a woman who sued her companion for maintenance when there had been no marriage between them. The court treated the woman as if she had been married to the man, and awarded maintenance. This decision in itself shows the changing trends of society regarding marriage and cohabitation. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski has stated that in general, a male will always refuse to take the responsibility for his own offspring, unless society compels him to do so. (Nazzari, pp: 333- 335)

2. Marriage Breakdown:

Why is marriage breaking down today, and what are the important causes? When one considers environmental factors, one can simply say that girls and boys today are not being taught the basic and necessary skills that are needed to manage a home. Girls, one hand, are being increasingly encouraged to seek jobs outside their homes, and they find it difficult to perform the balancing act needed to keep things together, and boys are being encouraged to indulge themselves when they can, and they find it difficult to adjust to married and home life. This causes resentment and irritation with each other, and this becomes the main cause for the breakdown of marriage in the early years. Another important issue is whether there is more happiness within a marriage if the partners are similar, or if they are dissimilar. While on the one hand, too much similarity may cause the onset of boredom, too much dissimilarity may cause volatile situations that may eventually explode. (Coughlan, pp: 336-340)

The economic status of the couple, the social status that they enjoy, their educational qualifications, may all contribute to the similarities and differences between two people, and feelings such as superiority, snobbishness, and so on may well arise between them if there is a wide disparity. Perhaps, it is indeed better for the man to be better in wisdom and in status than his wife, as long as he does not dominate, or treat his wife with contempt as he does so. However, it is an indisputable fact that as women seeks to better their positions and seek an equal status with men; more and more marriages are breaking up. As the woman becomes more empowered, she becomes less tolerant of her husband's various vagaries and discrepancies in behavior, and she therefore cannot endure physical and mental cruelties that many women of the past used to accept as being part of a broken marriage.

There are certain major forces that must be brought into a marriage if it were to survive against adversity, and therefore, one must understand the fact that today, most marriages have become 'syncratic', or democratic, and this means that today, both the partners require many more skills and capabilities and maturity than their forefathers to enter into a marriage, and when these qualities are not present, in today's threatening environment, and not the nurturing environment of past years, then the marriage must inevitably break down finally. There are more provisions for the dissolution of a marriage today than before, and maybe this is one of the reasons that people seek out the courts that encourage the break ups. (Coughlan, pp: 336-340)

3. Putting Asunder:

When one peruses the sixteenth century divorce doctrines one does get the impression that they laid more emphasis on marriage rather than on divorce as such. Within the divorce documents there were provisions made for the supervision of marriages, and this meant that conflicts and disputes between spouses could be dealt with before they escalated beyond control, and even when the couple would petition for divorce, the legal mechanisms would attempt to minimize the possibility of divorce and would try to save the marriage. It was only when such measures failed that divorce would be granted, at which point attempts would be made to try for a new marriage. All this meant that the main concern was to save an existing marriage and preserve its basic integrity. While the Catholic Church would take upon itself the right to separate spouses for reasons of adultery and so on, and leave the partners in a sort of ambiguous state where they would neither be married nor would they be divorced, the Reformers stated that they were not able to tolerate this state of neither here nor there, and also said that this was dangerous to society. They felt that marriage was indeed a weapon that one could use against 'evil', where one could contain sins of the flesh, and remain virtuous. (Philips, 340-345)

As a matter of fact, Calvin advised a Protestant woman who was being cruelly tormented by her Catholic husband that she must endure it bravely, and not leave him, or else, he would be converted. Protestants did not believe in celibacy for the main reason that young unmarried people would more often than not be tempted by outside influences, and this would mean that marriage would protect them from temptations. If divorce were to be granted, then the very maintenance of social order would become impossible. Therefore, even if divorce were to be granted, remarriage must happen almost immediately, and if not, then the society would be affected adversely. When taken in a broader context, the various rules and regulations and the roles of men and women within a marriage were in fact linked to a general social stability and numerous writers and philosophers of the time like for example, Erasmus, Vives, Bullinger, and Agrippa were all in praise of marriage. (Philips, 340-345)

It can therefore be said that both Protestant laws, as well as Protestant attitudes towards divorce broke away from their Roman Catholic precedents, and this perhaps reflects the very nature of divorce itself, where divorce is negative, and ruins the family, and anyone who advocates divorce is taken as somebody who is desiring of wanting to break up marriage as an institution. In the later years, marriage as such was dissected on the table, and many remedies were prescribed for its break up, and this gave rise to numerous issues, some among them being polygamy, free love, fertility issues, and so on, most of which were completely unsuccessful in practical terms. A survey that was conducted by the Women's Cooperative Guild in Great Britain during the early part of the twentieth century was presented to the Royal Commission on English Divorce Law, and it stated that cruelty, insanity, desertion, and the husband's refusal to support his family were all reasons for divorce, and none other.

The process of 'simple accretion' as the grounds for divorce stopped in the 1960's, and no-fault divorce laws became more prominent in the 1970's, wherein the circumstances of the breakdown were not considered; rather, the very fact that a marriage had broken down was considered. This no-fault has been included in the modern divorce laws of today. The number of divorces has been rising steadily from the 1960's until today, and the fact is that it is not due to changes in legislation, but due to changing attitudes and the changing society. (Philips, 340-345)

4. The Transformation of Family Law:

While it can be said that traditional family law as such remained stable until the 1960's, cracks had in fact started to appear much earlier, and for the past twenty years, there have been egalitarian and individualistic trends in family law since that time. These trends demonstrated the assumption of people of that time that marriage and family life were the two most important things in life, and they were also indicators of an individual's social standing and his economic security. While in the past, an individual's social standing was determined by his family and status in life, today, these are determined by the individual's personal power and his own social standing, and his labor force activity, and therefore, his relationship with his government. Although today families still play a very important role in society, the needs of a family have shifted from older times to today when the influence of a family depends on how many material things one can give the children of the marriage, like for example, the provision of a good education and so on. (Glendon, pp: 345-348)

In fact, modern family law has incorporated this change to a large extent into its laws, but at the same time, it remains marriage tolerant at all times. Family law today also treats marriage as being the sole responsibility of the two individuals who are involved, and this means that the law reflects the instability and insecurity of a marriage that is held together more out of emotional rather than out of economic ties between the partners. In addition, since children no longer serve as an insurance against old age, and as an investment, they also fail to hold the marriage together and the parent-child relationship also becomes affected as a result. Rene Konig has stated that today, marriage seems to be depending more on outside influences rather than on the two people involved, and this phenomenon makes itself felt on the inner workings of the family. What impact does all this have on the relationship of the state to the family, as demonstrated through law? (Glendon, pp: 345-348)

It can be said that today, marriage is in a state of dejuridification, and on the other hand, the distance that the law seems to be keeping on matters like who marries whom, what problems do they have, and so on, is not so new. It has been believed that law has always made exemptions for the haves and not for the have-nots, and family law as such was meant for a broad clientele of the working classes rather than for the rich. The phenomenon of the so called 'loss of functions' within a family, where most duties are taken over by external sources, has been discussed frequently in family law, and although it is indeed a fact that families have almost always been interacting with external social institutions, it was not as bad as it is today, with the distinct bureaucratic entities like the large school systems, social welfare systems, and so on of today, rather than the friendly neighbor, or the local school or parish of yesterday.

Therefore, it must be stated that as the nature of the interrelationship between external agencies and the family is changing, so is the family law related to them, since these laws tend to become lost in the broader range of laws and plans that affect the family as a whole. In the process involved in withdrawing regulation from certain aspects of family life, while at the same time, involving them in other forms of regulation, but the fact remains that since families are specialized units, the law takes this into account. Even so it remains a fact that individuals are considered more often than family units by the law, and if an individual has made a bad choice in his marriage partner, he also has the right to be free of that marriage partner through divorce, and feel free to choose another. Family law can be seen as having been influenced by several new ideas, not about families, but about law and morality, and these are the primary influences on family law today. (Glendon, pp: 345-348)