End No-Fault Divorce?
By Maggie Gallagher & Barbara Dafoe Whitehead
Recently I proposed that states require a five-year waiting period for a contested no-fault divorce. If you want a quick, no-fault divorce, such a law would say to anyone contemplating divorce, you are going to have to negotiate with the man or woman you married in order to get it. The idea provoked quite a bit of mail that fell rather neatly into two categories: applause from spouses who had been abandoned, and outrage from spouses who had ended their marriages. This was not a gender divide. I received anguished letters from both men and women who felt their lives have been ripped apart by no-fault divorce. And I received at least as many letters from women as from men who simply could not understand the reasoning behind such a proposal. “What good excuse would keep a person in an unhappy, unrewarding relationship?” asked one respondent, a woman who left a twenty-five-year marriage because she was “tired of trying to please, gain love, do the ‘right thing.’“ “Would it be denial of a problem?” she asked. “Would it be financial gain, would it be ‘for the children,’ would it be for all the wrong reasons? My question”why would an unwanted spouse wish to stay in a marriage? What is, therefore, wrong with no-fault divorce?” This is a common sentiment among Americans, one strategy we employ to resolve the moral conflict between two spouses, one of whom wants a divorce and the other does not: You want to hold onto someone who doesn’t want you any more? What kind of loser are you? On the other side, another woman wrote to tell me of her husband’s decision to divorce her: “At age fifty-seven, he announced he would seek a divorce. All my dreams, hopes, and looking forward to some well-earned ‘golden time’ were dashed and smashed to smithereens. Our thirty-seven-year marriage was to be erased. My former standard of living was obliterated and can never be reached again.” “Our laws,” she complained, “do not differentiate between four months or forty years.” Nor do they differentiate between a woman who wants to leave an abusive husband and a man who wants to trade in an aging wife. Our laws make no distinctions at all, because no-fault’s primary purpose is to empower whichever party wants out, with the least possible fuss and the greatest possible speed, no questions asked. The right to leave ASAP is judged so compelling that it overwhelms the right to make (and be held responsible for) our commitments. For twenty-five years we have talked and written and legislated about no-fault divorce as if it represented an increase in personal choice. As the letters I received from divorcees suggest, this is a simplification and a falsification of our experience with no-fault divorce. For in most cases, divorce is not a mutual act, but the choice of one partner alone. “We might expect that both partners would be ready to end the relationship by the time one leaves,” note family scholars Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr. and Andrew J. Cherlin in their book Divided Family . “But the data suggest otherwise. Four out of five marriages ended unilaterally.” No-fault divorce does not expand everyone’s personal choice. It empowers the spouse who wishes to leave, and leaves the spouse who is being left helpless, overwhelmed, and weak. The spouse who chooses divorce has a liberating sense of mastery, which psychologists have identified as one of the key components of personal happiness. He or she is breaking free, embracing change, which, with its psychic echoes of the exhilarating original adolescent break from the family, can dramatically boost self-esteem. Being divorced, however (as the popularity of the movie The First Wives’ Club attests) reinforces exactly the opposite sense of life. Being divorced does not feel like an act of personal courage, or transform you into the hero of your own life story, because being divorced is not an act. It is something that happens to you, over which, thanks to no-fault divorce legislation, you have no say at all. The spouse who leaves learns that love dies. The spouse who is left learns that love betrays and that the courts and society side with the betrayers. In court, your marriage commitment means nothing. The only rule is: Whoever wants out, wins.
Read more from this article by clicking the following link: http://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/08/001-end-no-fault-divorce
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