(Our attitude to) divorce is weird
- Mar 19, 2019
- 7 min read
What is up with the discourse on divorce?
Why is it that STILL, in the year of our Lorde 2k19, we are still stigmatizing divorce, and disproportionately women who get divorced? Sure, divorce is becoming more and more common. In some circles, people celebrate their divorces and even hold divorce parties. But it is still, on the whole, seen as a Bad Thing™ to have happened. Children of divorce are pitied and heads are sadly shaken. Some people even stay together ‘for the sake of the children’. But when weighed up against the damage children would go through living in a house with parents who are always fighting, or don’t love each other, the brief trauma of divorce seems much preferable to me. Tabloids panic about rising divorce rates, and even respectable publications can associate them with some worrying lack of stability. But to me, rising divorce rates are simply an indicator of the fact that more people are finding the courage to admit that they shouldn’t be together anymore. Also, more people (mostly women) are finding the strength to get out of abusive or controlling relationships. Seen in this light, divorce is a positive thing.
My aunt once told me that the day she got divorced was the best day of her life. She tells the story beautifully, describing the sexy dress and Jackie O sunglasses that she wore. She felt freer than she had in many years. She had studied physical therapy at university, but as soon as she got married her husband threw out her physical therapy books, saying “no wife of mine will ever work”. No doubt he was performing the idea of a virile businessman provider, who considers it a failure on his part to have a working wife, and other such forms of toxic masculinity. Leaving a relationship like that, in my opinion, is something to applaud. Also note that this was deep in apartheid South Africa, when divorce was far more stigmatized in white communities than it is today.
However, putting aside for a moment the issue of toxic or abusive relationships, and imagining some kind of utopia where everyone respects each other and only gets married out of mutual love and partnership, I would argue that divorce could still exist, and it would be a non-issue (whether or not we would still have marriage in such a society is another topic for another day). There is nothing inherently positive or negative about divorce. In a perfect world, we would simply be together while it felt right and break up when staying together wasn’t making us happy anymore. Divorce isn't weird, but our attitude to it is.
Of course, there is a sense of loss in the ending of any serious relationship, even if both members agree that it should be the end. But the idea that if a relationship ends it has ‘failed’, as if relationships are some kind of race where the ultimate goal is to arrive at the finish line still in the same twosome you began as, is bizarre and unhelpful. And the image of dating as ‘testing out’ various people until you find the ‘right one’ to marry, is also a little ridiculous.
A participant on the popular Japanese reality show Terrace House (the ever popular Seina) said that she had felt like she could marry every one of her previous boyfriends. Forgive my lowbrow example (although watch it at your peril, for you will become addicted), but I think feelings like that are pretty common. If she had married any one of them earlier than the time it took for the relationship to end, suddenly ending it would have become highly controversial. Yes, most marriages do involve promises to stay together until death. However, no matter how strongly two people feel about that promise at the time, the future is wide and holds a myriad of possibilities. You simply cannot know that you will both always feel that way about each other. You may hope that as you grow and change over time, you grow and change together, and your roots become more entwined. But sometimes, a divergence occurs. The idea that such a divergence could occur, and two people could find themselves having a change in heart and mind about the promise of staying together forever, should not be so controversial.
I was brought up to respect many different kinds of families. “A family can have a mom and a dad, or two moms, or two dads, or only one mom or dad. It can have a mom and a dad who don’t live together, and one or two or three step-parents”. These lines were drilled into me, and I feel very grateful to have had such an upbringing. I knew many kids whose parents were divorced, and most of them didn’t fit the image I got in media of divorced families. This consisted of children sitting sadly on the stairs or hiding under the bed while their parents raged at each other, and were then punted around between parents and used as proxy for more toxic raging post-divorce. Not that this doesn’t happen, but putting it forward as the single story of divorce is untrue and harmful, because it perpetuates the notion that staying together is always better than getting divorced.
My parents got divorced when I was 15, so my experience was very different to those whose parents got divorced when they were young children. I was pretty much aware of everything that led up to the divorce. My parents’ relationship was no longer the happy entity it once was, and I was acutely aware of it. At the time, my father had already begun to sleep in the spare bedroom. When my parents bought me fast food from Steers and sat me down to tell me the news, my main feeling was one of relief. Finally, I thought. The stressful period of uncertainty and confusion was over. We could all get on with our lives! Well, it was a little more complicated than that, and it was at times uncomfortable, awkward, and sad. I had feelings I didn't understand, and seeing my dad alone in his un-lived in apartment was a little miserable. But on the whole, it was much better than some of the things that had come before it. And now, fast forward ten years, I have two wonderful parents who lead separate lives, and a great new stepmom and stepbrother.
In Japan, divorce seems to carry far more of the stigma than it does in South Africa. I have only met one person who has openly told me that she is divorced, and then it was because of ‘DV’ (domestic violence). The other times I have heard about divorce it has been in hushed tones over women-only lunches, or only after several drinks. However, divorce has not always been so stigmatized in Japan. According to Hiromi Ono and James Sanders, in pre-Meiji Japan, divorce was actually a lot easier and people even had ‘trial marriages’ whereby the first few months of marriage were considered a trial period. At that time, Japan had a very high divorce rate when compared with the rest of the world. Moreover, women had a fair amount of economic independence in a family based agricultural economy, because they could simply go back to work for their family’s farm if they left their husband’s family. With the industrialization and ‘Westernization’ of the Meiji period, women came to have no natural financial alternative to being supported by their husbands. The ideal of the nuclear family with one main (male) breadwinner and one housewife, began to gain traction.
We can debate whether humans are “meant to be” monogamous or what they are “by nature”, but the truth is that there are a good number of people, who, for whatever reason, change their minds about a marriage. Perhaps the relationship became toxic. Perhaps they fell in love with someone else. Perhaps they realized monogamy was not for them. Perhaps they just weren’t in love anymore. Perhaps they never were in the first place and they just found the strength to admit it. The number of reasons for people getting divorced are as varied and numerous as the reasons for people getting married. The decision may be very difficult, or it may be the easiest thing in the world. Either way, can we stop punishing people for making it?
Anti-Wedding Inspo
Today in #anti-wedding inspo, we're going literary: Dorothea Brooke and Mr. Casaubon from George Eliot's masterpiece 'Middlemarch'. This book is genius in so many ways, and is still relevant today in terms of it's reflections on human nature and relations of class and gender. But one of the most obvious messages of the book is about the perils of marrying rashly, which was all too easy at a time when marriage was proposed after meeting each other in social situations and just a few snatched moments alone.
Wow, that gorgeous #vintage #shawl adds a pop of lightness to the stately pair. Might as well stay warm while you're throwing your life away because you were taken in by a man's overconfident mediocrity! #puritancouture
There are several couples in the book that illustrate this, but the central one is probably that of Dorothea Brooke and the dour, intellectually shallow Mr. Casaubon. She marries him after being taken in by the mistaken idea that he is a man of great intellect and morality, and her life would be best served by helping him in his scholarly and religious pursuits. We've all been taken in by false brilliance before, but Dorothea's youthful certainty conspires with the social norm of marrying young and quickly, and the consequences are far worse than a little embarrassment. (Imagine you had married that one guy from your philosophy class in undergrad who seemed so smart for a few months, until you suddenly realized he was just enunciating his words very intensely. Then imagine you couldn't even divorce him). She gradually realizes her mistake, but she is trapped with him until he dies a year later, after which she is still in a sense trapped by a cruel addendum he has added to his will.
Keep it #classy with a feather quill and middle-parted updo. Be sure to match your #19thcentury muted glam with a pile of #leatherbound books and a #melancholy look of marital imprisonment.
It really seems that the accepted and uncontroversial existence of divorce would have helped the characters of 'Middlemarch' out considerably, although it would have made for a much less interesting book. Thank goodness it doesn't require death to get out of marriage today.
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