Should divorce be illegal or at least harder to achieve?

I believe it should be harder to achieve.

Divorce – except in the cases of life and death, is a very immature reaction. It’s high school all over again.

But I am in the minority.

I agree one hundred percent. Divorce seems to be a cop out. I don’t think siblings can divorce each other if they have problems between them. So I don’t see why it should be any different for adults.

I disagree. You can’t force yourself to stay in love, circumstances change and couples might find themselves less compatible than they originally thought, or one person might cheat or become abusive. If you fall out of love, or discover that your husband has cheated, or he starts to abuse you, what are you supposed to do, just fake love for the rest of your life, or be forced to stay with a dishonest or abusive husband forever? I think the solution is not outlawing divorce, but waiting longer to get married so you can be certain you want to spend the rest of your life with that person. But even that won’t always guarantee love that lasts forever.

You can choose not to spend time with your sibling. You can distance yourself from your siblings once you’re out of your parents’ house, so you can “divorce” them in that way.

Harder to achieve? Maybe.

Illegal? NO. Read this article from the June issue of National Geographic. I know the situation isn’t the same in the Western world, but similar things happen everywhere.

Should an abused wife (or husband, for that matter) be denied a divorce?

Also: Not all marriages are performed by priests.

I understand (and even agree) with your frustration with the current situation, especially considering the ridiculous “sanctity of marriage” argument against gay marriage.

But making divorce too difficult (as it was when my mother was young) potentially puts women at risk for suffering from continuing emotional or physical abuse (as it did for my mother). Granted, it was largely social pressure that made divorce such a scandal in my mother’s era, but the effect was the same.

Why don’t we worry about allowing all people who are in love to legally marry before we start making divorce laws stricter?

Harder to achieve.

Man, I wish divorce were a lot easier! I have been trying to get divorced for five years now, while my ex drains every cent we’d saved, and delays every step of the way.

Why do you want to make it harder? What societal burden outweighs the emotional toll of being in a bad marriage?

I certainly don’t think it should be illegal. People sholdn’t be forced to stay with each other if they no longer love each other or are unhappy in each others company. I agree that people seem to get divorced without even trying to make their marriage work but I know many couples that have been together for a very long time only to find that they have grown apart and no longer love each other. People like this should be able to move on with their lives and find love and happiness with someone else.

As humans we grow and change and sometimes, no matter how much you once loved someone, those feelings change too.

I’m probably the worst person to answer this question though as I am fairly against marriage in the first place. To me, marriage is making a promise to love someone forever when you don’t know if you will be able to keep that promise. How can anyone say that they will definitely love the same person in 20 years time?

Harder to achieve.

Thinking people should stay together forever is a fairytale. things happen and people change. What if the woman is being abused? What if one of the parents is Casey Anthony lol?

I don’t want to go back to the dark ages.

I have been divorced and it was pretty damn hard to get as it was. In Illinois having an affair was not good enough grounds for divorce and I had to make up some BS story so the judge would grant me my divorce from the bitch!

No. Who cares what the priest says? Don’t mix religion with the law.

Maybe I’m missing something, but what business is it of the government if someone wants a divorce? What would making it illegal accomplish?

First, not everyone takes those vows. Not a single marriage I’ve witnessed has involved the words “until death do you part.” Many traditional vows (that is, the one’s before Christianity) include no such thing.

Second, why think that money is wasted just because something gets undone? We’re all going to die someday. Does that make everything we do a waste? I don’t think it does. You denigrate high school relationships as if they aren’t meaningful, but our lives are like photographs: we develop from the negatives. If we grow and learn from the past, the fact that not every bit of it was happy does not mean we made a mistake.

And if death means everything in life is pointless and a waste, then why worry about it? If our actions are a waste no matter what we do, then one action being a waste cannot be a reason against it and for some other action as that latter action would also be a waste.

Third, maybe we should be making marriage harder to achieve if we want divorce to be harder to achieve. If you want marriage to be more sacred, why imprison people in bad marriages? That just degrades the institution as a whole. A world of sham marriages is not a world in which marriage is sacred.

Fourth, people do not get married with the idea that they’re just going to get divorced later (at least not usually). They try something, perhaps a bit prematurely, thinking it will work. It ends up not working, and they make the decision to separate rather than live a lie or deny themselves and the other person the chance to find real love. Good for them.

Quite frankly, it is the anti-divorce position that seems immature to me. It makes the childish assumption that every story can end like a fairy tale. It asks other people to live their lives a certain way just so that a false image of the world can be upheld. It speaks to a strident refusal to grow up and accept how the world works. No thanks.

@CunningLinguist – Well said.

There is no reason why the government should be trying to keep people together. Its a horrible way to try to control people’s personal lives. If you don’t like the high divorce rate, and I agree its something of a problem, the solution is to find a way to get people to be more careful when the marry and/or control people’s expectations about what marriage is.

Quite honestly, I don’t think the government should be involved in marriage either, but thats a separate topic.

That being said, if there is solid evidence that you can make divorce harder in a way that helps the kids caught in the middle, I might change my position.

I think it should be harder to achieve. like, for example, couples should be required to attend several months of marriage counseling before divorcing.

@Blackberry To be fair, any reasonable proposal to make divorce harder would probably try not to make it harder (maybe even make it easier) if one person were being abused.

Edit: Although the harder you make it, the higher chance someone will lie to get out of their marriage.

@marinelife But it’s impossible to do that. The easiest method of divorce is abandonment. Someone just gets up and leaves. Should the remaining person not be allowed a divorce only because the partner who left won’t come back?

There are times and places for divorce, but I think that people reach for it far too easily these days.
This is one of those issues that you can only really fix by fixing the heart of the person in question.

@CunningLinguist I think a law maker could make a carve out for that as well.

Though, at some point, we may need so many carve outs that the law becomes effectively meaningless.

I am in the minority with you @squirbel. Says me, the happily married living in a faiyrtale for 20 years immature lil’ o’l me

I think divorce is plenty hard enough, and not a decision entered into lightly. The people I know who have been divorced were devastated by it.

I think your question, “Why get married in the first place if you’re just going to to get divorced later?” is a a great one. As a society, we need to re-examine why we get married, and see if there isn’t another kind of contractual arrangement we could make instead that’s better suited to the way our relationships evolve. Marriage was created long before we were living 70 or 80 years, when women were considered property to be traded for goods or political alliances. We don’t live in that world anymore; seems stupid to get married like we do.

Yes, marriage is like a contract. In that sense, I condone divorce if one of the parties breaks those vows. Not because they got tired of each other.

People should be able to get married and divorced as they please. I don’t see how what others do within their marriage, be it stay together forever even though they’re miserable or divorce once they no longer like each other, has to do with the way you feel about marriage. No one should be forced to enter or stay in a marriage; I don’t think divorce should be made illegal or harder to achieve.

Honestly, I think it should be left alone. I got divorced after my ex-husband walked out on me and our 10-month-old son. Why would I want to stay with a man that doesn’t want me or his son? For that matter, why should I have to stay with a man that didn’t want me or our son? Why should I have had to continue to have a legal tie to him in marriage when we were no longer together? If divorce were not possible, I wouldn’t have been able to get married to my current husband and my son wouldn’t have the wonderful father that he now has.

@Nullo Isn’t getting tired of each other breaking the vow to love and cherish forever?

In Germany we have the so-called Zerrüttungsprinzip which can be roughly translated as the principle of irretrievable breakdown. Sometimes marriage counseling makes sense, but in some extreme cases it doesn’t. A very extreme case would be raping one’s wife.

@roundsquare Yeah, I think divorce should be easier, but that’s just my opinion. I had an uncontested divorce and that still seemed like a long time to me lol. I can’t imagine getting divorced with kids and property.

I think it should be up to the two people whether or not to be together. Marriage has never been about love and vows, not in the many centuries prior to the last one, anyhow. Keeping two people together when they’re not in love is ridiculous, making divorce illegal is archaic. Sure people should give it all they’ve got and take marriage seriously but when and how that comes about is no one’s business. Perhaps, marriage should be harder to get into, don’t you think, if at all? Why are there so many legal and otherwise benefits tied to a piece of paper if the focus is on love and vows till death do you part? This kind of philosophy that you espouse sounds a bit like pro-lifers talking about how abortion is used as a cop out to having children and is used as contraception when in reality, just like with divorce, an abortion is a difficult decision for most and there is enough grief and bother attached to divorce that making it harder to get it legally isn’t helping anyone.

As for the whole ‘love contract’ thing – sure, but that love of yours might not last forever, obviously and anyone who thinks that they can force themselves to ‘work it out’ despite no longer loving their partner is entering into a roommate situation that only looks like a marriage but isn’t.

Marriage and Procreation should be harder to achieve. Divorce, not so much.

Bravo @CunningLinguist! You said a few things I wanted to say.

Let me emphasize that the marriage vows you are talking about are Christian vows. They are not universal. Many people write their own vows, and don’t include the “until death do us part” part.

I also think your focus on the money spent on a marriage ceremony going down the drain if you get a divorce shows a lack of understanding about the relationship between a ceremony and how people live. A ceremony is designed to provide people with a sense of importance about what is happening. It is designed to get you a little bit out of your mind. This is why so many people will cry during a ceremony. They are connected to the ur-story instead of just watching this event.

Wedding ceremonies, in particular, are designed to get people to support the couple. They bring together two extended families and friends, generally for the first time. People get to meet each other and learn that they all have a stake in this marriage.

But people make mistakes and people change, and love does not always lead to optimal results. When people divorce, that does not make the ceremony a waste. Not at all! That was then, and it served its purpose. It’s gone now.

Why get married in the first place? Financial planning. There are thousands of benefits to being married. From filing taxes jointly to being automatically included as a beneficiary on thousands of financial products, marriage makes it simple. All you have to do is say you’re married, and poof! It is so! You don’t even have to show a license. Just claim you’re married and you are. I don’t think anyone ever looks it up.

No. I don’t think divorce should be harder to achieve. I think it should be easier to achieve. If we want to preserve marriages, we should be teaching people how to communicate and solve problems. That’s the advice I give here all the time, and it is totally appropriate here, as well. If you want to fix your marriage, you got to talk and you got to listen and you got to know how to find an agreeable solution to your problems.

I wish it was easier. If you’re just staying together because a divorce is hard to get, your marriage isn’t strong nor should it be considered a role model. Some people may get divorced too quickly, but others not quickly enough, and either way, it’s none of the states’ business.

Both divorce and marriage should be harder. The marriage license should only be granted after a series of classes or counseling is met, and the same for a divorce decree.

Absolutely not. It’s such a myth that everyone in the “olden days” was happily married and in love. The only difference between now and then in regards to divorce is that divorce was so stigmatized that you’d stay in a bad marriage to avoid the scorn of your friends and family. Not to mention women had little say in anything so if they were abused, it really didn’t matter; they were the husband’s property and that’s all there was to it. That’s not how it works anymore. People change their feelings and their minds; problems arise. What might seem like love at first might turn out not to be later on and you can’t force people to stay together if they can’t stand each other.

The only problem I do have is when kids are involved. I know people who have divorced parents and it always has some kind of negative effect on them. But a fighting couple staying together “for the kids” isn’t much better either. In that case, all you can do is try to evaluate the relationship you’re going into and hope you’ll be able to determine what may go wrong. Still, in many cases it can be unpredictable and that’s just the sad reality of life.

@CunningLinguist and @Simone_De_Beauvoir made great points. The only thing I have to add is that legislating people’s behavior won’t really change it. Prohibition didn’t make people stop drinking, and most drugs are illegal today but people still find ways to get them. Making divorce illegal or harder to obtain won’t make people love each other more or be happier together. It will just make it harder for them to separate when they are unhappy.

Of course it would be best if all marriages ended happily. But there is no way to make people be happy together. People change over time, and people make wrong decisions all the time. Luckily, we can do our best to fix some of those mistakes.

Why the hell would anyone want to make divorce harder when the long, slow process that leads downward to the breaking point is already unbelievably soul crushing and painful? Divorce is currently ugly enough and difficult enough as it is. If it was to become even harder and legislated, just who should be given the unbelievably arrogant right and power to judge the adequacy or inadequacy of anyone’s suffering so they can gain permission to divorce??

That makes me sick to imagine I’d have to justify myself to anyone—would my 10 marriage self help books read from cover to cover be enough? or 6 years off and on of individual counseling? or my 1 year of marriage counseling? or my memory of my children cowering in terror? or 12 years of emotional abuse? or maybe the emptiness I found… how can I prove this was “good enough” to anyone? I can’t.

In comparison, I had 3 hours of rushed through pre-marital counseling. Make getting married much harder than going after the ones who already are in hell.

@linguaphile And you shouldn’t. Thank god you left.