Since picking up my kids on the weekend I’ve been spending a lot of time with them and their grandparents, who are visiting from California. It’s been hard to get anything at all done with such a full house. Add to that the fact that I’ve been preoccupied with catching up on some of the typical parenting duties and issues (e.g. school report cards, etc.) that, as a divorced dad, I don’t have the option of dealing with on a day to day basis, and it’s been nearly impossible to focus on much else.
I’m sure I’ll be on top of things soon, but it does remind me of the difficulties faced by separated and divorced parents and, of course, their children.
For all the talk about divorce being “empowering,” the truth is that for the most part it’s an enormous pain in the neck. Rationally speaking, it’s a bad idea — even if your marriage isn’t awesome. If you have kids, you’d better have a damn good reason for it, otherwise it just looks dumb.
Often, when we discuss divorce, we think of middle-aged or near middle age couples. We imagine a wife seeking to maximize her share of the spoils while carrying on with the pool boy and extorting a windfall from her spouse. Sometimes, there’s the stereotype of the middle-aged man running off with his young secretary or having some other similar midlife crisis.
The reality is significantly different. Divorce peaks at a young age. For women, the median age of divorce is late 20s, and for men early 30s (my divorce was right about on par with these statistics). Assets are usually low, and there is no windfall to speak of for either party. Financially, both suffer.
So why do people do it? Because they aren’t thinking with their heads. In the typical American divorce, a young woman initiates divorce from a young man for what are often irrational reasons. In many cases, the motivation is purely instinctive. She has weaned her last child and, thoroughly disgusted with her domesticated and often demoralized husband (raising young children is hard for men, too), is ready to find another mate. Given the benefit of hindsight, many of them regret it, although few admit it openly.
I once heard a woman – right around the time I got married – tell me after a few drinks how much she regretted blowing her marriage to the father of her children by running off to have an affair with a male dancer. She was a nice, reasonable, and fairly attractive woman who had remained on cordial terms with her daughters’ father. If she’d had the presence of mind while in her 20s that she did in her 40s, the divorce wouldn’t have happened. Instead of fulfilling her dreams, she ended up with nothing but a big mess on her hands.
This is the typical divorce: the result of some dumb, impulsive mistake. It’s sad and pathetic, and causes everyone involved some pain. Children are permanently scarred, and both husbands and wives end up financially worse off than they would be otherwise. The party who was abandoned/betrayed bears the greater emotional burden, and if male often suffers from poor health and a shortened lifespan.
But instead of warning people against making such stupid mistakes and encouraging them to tough it out, we have developed a culture and legal regime that goes to any length to justify divorce. When a young woman starts complaining about her husband, she instantly finds a pack of women to support her in her criticism. Instead of being chided for adding to domestic problems by running the man down, she is assured that he is the sole problem, and encouraged to place the kind of unreasonable demands on him that so often precede separation.
When she finally decides to really screw things up by initiating an affair or separation, an impenetrable wall of female support rallies around her, ensuring that there is no hope of reconciliation. In the meanwhile, an attorney sets the law into motion, the state steps in to garnish the man’s pay, and a broken family is born.
The evils of divorce have become impossible to ignore, yet feminists have continued to defend and promote it long after it became one of the biggest social ills of our time. Their stubborness defies reason, and brings up the question of why they would so doggedly defend such an awful institution. Sometimes, the simplest answer is the only one that makes any sense: they are bad people.
