Are High Divorce Rates Really a Bad Thing?

Before reading this, keep in mind that this is being written by a bald man who is married to a great woman, has been married for 20 years, and intends to stay married to her for the rest of his life.  The question isn't weather marriage is bad, its a question of weather marriage really needs to be the core of human relationships any longer.  For several decades we have seen marriage decaying as an institution, with divorce rates now reaching 50%.  What does this mean?  It means that if your newspaper annouces the marriage of 10 couples, 5 of those couples will be divorced.  For many years this has been the rallying cry for those who panic about the moral fabric of our society falling apart and has been the rallying cry of traditionalists to go back to the way things were done in the "good old days" to restore marriage.  But, is that really the way to fix the high divorce rate?  In fact, why do we assume that the increasing divorce rate needs to be fixed?

As in all things, its important to understand what we are really talking about.  Without really defining a thing, we can't really discuss that thing.  So what is marriage?  Although there is a lot of disagreement as to what a marriage really is , most of us would agree that a marriage consists of the following factors:

• An agreement between partners to ensure sexual fidelity
• A close bond of emotional intimacy
• An agreement to share child rearing responsibilities in some way
• An agreement on how to share financial resources
• An agreement to ensure inheritence
• A legal, social, and often, religious bond

In summary, marriage is a legal, social and sometimes religious, contract between individuals to stay within prescribed sexual guidelines, to share financial and child rearing responsibilities, and to ensure that wealth stays within the family. 

We also need to know how marriage arose.  Historians agree that marriage has been with us in different forms since the dawn of the human race.  From a historic/anthropological perspective, marriage was a necessary social arrangement that enabled the human species to survive during times of resource scarcity.
Women, physically not as strong as men, were not able to provide for themselves and their offspring.  Large game and defense required the greater size and physical power of males so women had to have a way to bind males to them to help obtain food for self and offspring and protect them from predators both human and non-human.  Men, on the other hand, didn't need women to defend them, but did need to ensure the survival of their own offspring.  A man also needed to know that when they he was risking his life to protect and hunt for a baby, that it was his baby and not another tribesman's.  Thus marriage was born. 

Marriage did not arise from loving or spiritual reasons; it arose as a means of securing and protecting resources in a primitive economy dependant on the brute force of physically powerful males.  As our social and economic connections became more complicated, the bond of marriage became enforced by governments and were sanctioned by spiritual forces, leaving little option but for people to enter marital bonds and to stay them.  After all, Mr and Mrs. Primitive are told, if the state and god say that they have to remain married, how dare they defy that order?  As man spread over the earth, the institution of marriage remained central to his existance because the subsistence, hunting/labor intensive society required it.

But is it still necessary?

In those days, women couldn't survive on their own because their relative physical weakness prohibited them from achieving material wealth on their own.  But is that the case any longer now that women have the same ability to earn money as the men?  Of course not.  In those days, men could not ensure paternity so had to use the threat implied in the enforcement of marriage to secure fidelity.  But in the days of DNA testing and paternity testing, is that still necessary?  Of course not.  Today, marriage is no longer a tool to ensure the allocation of resources but is, instead, a focal point for romantic love in the advanced economies of the western world.  The point of marriage is no longer resources; it is happiness.

Marriage is now entered into to find love and happiness with a romantic partner.  Since all of the original purposes of marriage can be met without a spouse, happiness is the only remaining purpose of marriage.  That being the case, there is no reason for us to consider a 50% divorce rate to be a social evil.  After all, if a couple is no longer happy together, why should they stay togther?  If the point is happiness, and your spouse isn't making you happy, why stay with your spouse.  And finally, why is that viewed as a social evil.

One of the reasons is always considered a problem because it is felt that the divorce process is difficult for children, which is true and how a couple handles there divorce is going to largely impact how traumatic the divorce is on the children.  Also, there has historically been concern over the fact that children from divorced couples are from "broken homes".  This, however, is only that way because the majority of couples did not go through divorce.  The only reason we recognize a home as "broken" is because the majority of homes are "unbroken".  Now, however, that distinction is becoming less and less relevant.  Being from a divorced couple is not difficult on the child if the divorce is handled responsibly by they parents in an environment where divorce is equally as common as not being divorced.  In such a case, fully half of the child's peers have a similar home life toher own weather her parents are divorced or not.  When single parenthood is the common state, then the stigma of being a child of divorced persons evaporates. 

This is very much akin to the trauma experienced by children who've had sexual relationships with adults. This is traumatic largely because of the extreme isolation children in this situation go through in a culture where sex with children is such a taboo.  In cultures where sexual relations and even marriage between adults and children is the norm, the trauma isn't there.  The trauma is largely a social construct.  (This is not to deny that usually, in our culture, sex with minors is usually of an extremely exploitative nature which also causes tremendous trauma for the child!  But this doesn't negate the point that even when the adult genuinely loves the child and isn't being exploitative, the child is traumatized in the long term because of the shame and isolation s/he experiences)

 My argument is that our aversion to divorce is largely due to the social habituation to marriage; the fact that marriage is traditional.  Since the original purpose of marriage is gone and has been replaced by the pursuit of happiness, it makes no sense to cringe at rising divorce rates because this is merely a sign of progress and the freedom of individuals, liberated from life in primitive conditions, to pursue happiness.

Mind you, I am a married guy.  I like being married and actually have, as a goal, to achieve a 100th wedding anniversary with Dina.  I am not against marriage, I am simply saying that marriage is not for everyone and that divorce is necessarily an evil.