The real divorce marriage problem
This week I am going to be giving evidence before a canon lawyer regard a request for an annulment of marriage AND attending a wedding so marriage is on my mind. The short version of what follows is: the problem is not the divorce rate but the declining marriage rate.
Is divorce a problem worth worrying about in a political sense? Divorce is obviously a problem for the two people getting divorced. It is also a problem for their family and friends who will be hurt and divided by this action. We all worry about the children, of course, but there is evidence that divorce affects a wider circle of people more deeply than we suspect. One person deciding to leave their marriage will often trigger their friends to make similar moves.
Those things are political in the very broad sense that they affect more than just the people immediately involved. I do not think they are enough to justify a response by politicians. If anything, I think politicians need to be much less involved in marriage and divorce than they already are. Most of what politicians have done regarding marriage, divorce and care of children since the 1960s has made matters worse not better and it seems to me that any truly caring person should be working to more severely limit the amount of damage politicians can do rather than giving them an excuse to do more. That said, however, I still think we need to ask ourselves what is a political question regarding marriage: What, if anything, does the high divorce rate say about the health of our culture?
If divorce really were the primary symptom of a cultural problem, we could reasonably conclude that the disease in retreat as the divorce rate is falling and has been for a number of years now. We might also note that the divorce rate has been exaggerated in the past. It never reached fifty percent; reports that it had were the product of sensationalist journalists with a poor grip on statistics.
In fact, even though divorce rates have been rather high in the past, the truth is that most marriages succeed and most marriages continue to succeed. The marriages that do fail tend to be mostly, although not exclusively, marriages that can be easily identified as fairly high risk to begin with. People who remarry after divorce, for example have a much, much higher divorce rate than people marrying for the first time. But most people outside the high risk groups who get married figure it out just fine.
The problem is the people who never get married. Now, this would not be a problem for them or society if they didn't want to get married. If you don't want to go to swimming, it's not a problem that you don't know how to get to the beach. But a society where virtually everyone wanted to go swimming but an increasing number of people couldn't find their way to the beach or the pool has a political problem and we might begin asking if the issue is poor signage or if it is an education system that has left the majority of people unable to follow simple directions.
In our culture, the vast majority of people want to get married. In fact, their desire to get married has been increasing in recent years. Young women and men at universities now rate getting married higher than young people in the 1970s and 1980s did. And they not only want to get married more they want to get married younger. In the past young women said they wished to establish a career before getting married. Today, most young women at university say they are willing to postpone a career in the interest of getting married and having children.
No the problem is that they are failing to negotiate their way to marriage. The marriage rate is falling because people are not succeeding at getting to go. And there is no evidence that suggests that they are changing their minds about wanting to get married. The path is not from young idealist who wants to get married to mature adult who decides she doesn't want it. The path is from young idealist who wants to get married to embittered adult who can't figure out why she has been denied this thing she so wanted.
Following my swimming analogy above, I don't think the problem is that people need better signs to help them drive to the beach. The problem is that we now live in a culture where an increasing number of people can't find their way to marriage even with good roads that are well signed.
Why? I think it is this: if someone is getting married because they really love someone and want to spend the rest of their life with them, then they are getting married for the wrong reasons. Marriage is a project that exists outside of you and getting married means understanding and embracing that project.
Contrary to what some of my fellow Catholic bloggers would argue, openness to having children is not enough either. If anything it is worse to get married because you want to have children and the most spectacularly ugly and painful divorces I have seen have been from marriages where one or both partners were driven primarily by a desire to have children.
No, there is a project implicit in being a married couple before any children you do or don't have that is bigger than either of you. To marry is a political act because you make your vows before the community*. Your marriage vow is a promise to every single person in attendance. You promised every single person that you invited that you would be something as a couple. Otherwise, why bother invite them? You could just as easily have flown somewhere romantic, stood on the beach, looked deeply into one another's eyes and said, "I will love you forever".
That sort of vow would be easy to break, of course, but it would be easy to break precisely because it is so easy to make in the first place. Thousands of high school couples will make such a vow this year about relationships that won't last until graduation. Young women all across the continent will vow to be best friends for ever with other women they will soon decide they hate. It is the political aspect of marriage that makes it more durable.
This is why the whole debate about marriage rights is a farce. Who has a right to get married is a stupid and trivial question. The important issue is the responsibilities of marriage and the most important one is the responsibility to actually be married: to have and to hold**, forsaking all others, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad ...."
I met an old girlfriend on her way into her second marriage this winter. She has been in a number of serious relationships that have failed besides her marriage that failed. Comparing the guy she is living with now to the husband she divorced, she said, "This guy is much better for me." Those words did not seem to trouble her at all as she said them.
*You also make them before God and I think that is even more important but I am making a secular political argument here. In any case, I know some non-believers who have made a better job of marriage than many believers.
**It's amazing how many people forget that "to have and to hold" is a marriage vow. At the time you make it, this can seem so easy as to not be worth promising about. The tendency is to think that the really hard part is forsaking all others as if sexually irresistible people will be breaking the doors down trying to get at you and tempting you away from your spouse. The more important vow, and the one people are far more likely to break, is that you will maintain and nurture your desire for the other person until one of you dies.
This week I am going to be giving evidence before a canon lawyer regard a request for an annulment of marriage AND attending a wedding so marriage is on my mind. The short version of what follows is: the problem is not the divorce rate but the declining marriage rate.
Is divorce a problem worth worrying about in a political sense? Divorce is obviously a problem for the two people getting divorced. It is also a problem for their family and friends who will be hurt and divided by this action. We all worry about the children, of course, but there is evidence that divorce affects a wider circle of people more deeply than we suspect. One person deciding to leave their marriage will often trigger their friends to make similar moves.
Those things are political in the very broad sense that they affect more than just the people immediately involved. I do not think they are enough to justify a response by politicians. If anything, I think politicians need to be much less involved in marriage and divorce than they already are. Most of what politicians have done regarding marriage, divorce and care of children since the 1960s has made matters worse not better and it seems to me that any truly caring person should be working to more severely limit the amount of damage politicians can do rather than giving them an excuse to do more. That said, however, I still think we need to ask ourselves what is a political question regarding marriage: What, if anything, does the high divorce rate say about the health of our culture?
If divorce really were the primary symptom of a cultural problem, we could reasonably conclude that the disease in retreat as the divorce rate is falling and has been for a number of years now. We might also note that the divorce rate has been exaggerated in the past. It never reached fifty percent; reports that it had were the product of sensationalist journalists with a poor grip on statistics.
In fact, even though divorce rates have been rather high in the past, the truth is that most marriages succeed and most marriages continue to succeed. The marriages that do fail tend to be mostly, although not exclusively, marriages that can be easily identified as fairly high risk to begin with. People who remarry after divorce, for example have a much, much higher divorce rate than people marrying for the first time. But most people outside the high risk groups who get married figure it out just fine.
The problem is the people who never get married. Now, this would not be a problem for them or society if they didn't want to get married. If you don't want to go to swimming, it's not a problem that you don't know how to get to the beach. But a society where virtually everyone wanted to go swimming but an increasing number of people couldn't find their way to the beach or the pool has a political problem and we might begin asking if the issue is poor signage or if it is an education system that has left the majority of people unable to follow simple directions.
In our culture, the vast majority of people want to get married. In fact, their desire to get married has been increasing in recent years. Young women and men at universities now rate getting married higher than young people in the 1970s and 1980s did. And they not only want to get married more they want to get married younger. In the past young women said they wished to establish a career before getting married. Today, most young women at university say they are willing to postpone a career in the interest of getting married and having children.
No the problem is that they are failing to negotiate their way to marriage. The marriage rate is falling because people are not succeeding at getting to go. And there is no evidence that suggests that they are changing their minds about wanting to get married. The path is not from young idealist who wants to get married to mature adult who decides she doesn't want it. The path is from young idealist who wants to get married to embittered adult who can't figure out why she has been denied this thing she so wanted.
Following my swimming analogy above, I don't think the problem is that people need better signs to help them drive to the beach. The problem is that we now live in a culture where an increasing number of people can't find their way to marriage even with good roads that are well signed.
Why? I think it is this: if someone is getting married because they really love someone and want to spend the rest of their life with them, then they are getting married for the wrong reasons. Marriage is a project that exists outside of you and getting married means understanding and embracing that project.
Contrary to what some of my fellow Catholic bloggers would argue, openness to having children is not enough either. If anything it is worse to get married because you want to have children and the most spectacularly ugly and painful divorces I have seen have been from marriages where one or both partners were driven primarily by a desire to have children.
No, there is a project implicit in being a married couple before any children you do or don't have that is bigger than either of you. To marry is a political act because you make your vows before the community*. Your marriage vow is a promise to every single person in attendance. You promised every single person that you invited that you would be something as a couple. Otherwise, why bother invite them? You could just as easily have flown somewhere romantic, stood on the beach, looked deeply into one another's eyes and said, "I will love you forever".
That sort of vow would be easy to break, of course, but it would be easy to break precisely because it is so easy to make in the first place. Thousands of high school couples will make such a vow this year about relationships that won't last until graduation. Young women all across the continent will vow to be best friends for ever with other women they will soon decide they hate. It is the political aspect of marriage that makes it more durable.
This is why the whole debate about marriage rights is a farce. Who has a right to get married is a stupid and trivial question. The important issue is the responsibilities of marriage and the most important one is the responsibility to actually be married: to have and to hold**, forsaking all others, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad ...."
I met an old girlfriend on her way into her second marriage this winter. She has been in a number of serious relationships that have failed besides her marriage that failed. Comparing the guy she is living with now to the husband she divorced, she said, "This guy is much better for me." Those words did not seem to trouble her at all as she said them.
*You also make them before God and I think that is even more important but I am making a secular political argument here. In any case, I know some non-believers who have made a better job of marriage than many believers.
**It's amazing how many people forget that "to have and to hold" is a marriage vow. At the time you make it, this can seem so easy as to not be worth promising about. The tendency is to think that the really hard part is forsaking all others as if sexually irresistible people will be breaking the doors down trying to get at you and tempting you away from your spouse. The more important vow, and the one people are far more likely to break, is that you will maintain and nurture your desire for the other person until one of you dies.
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