I feel like I keep :banghead: in pointing this out but it frustrates me when I see everyone point the finger at no-fault divorce with minimal / no additional examination of this assumption. Although, admittedly, were it not for no-fault divorce I probably wouldn’t be alive today to sit here and argue with you all, extolling the virtues of no-fault divorce, so that’s probably coloring my opinion a bit.
What can I say? I like being alive.
Look, I’m very sorry that you had to go through such a dangerous experience, and I’m glad that you were able to escape safely. But the majority of no-fault divorces have nothing to do with abuse. You may notice that I didn’t suggest getting rid of no-fault divorce, I just said it had a problem. No-fault divorce may be necessary, because of unusual cases. That doesn’t mean that, on the whole, its effects are good.
And just because someone doesn’t agree with you, it doesn’t mean they have not engaged in “additional examination of this assumption.”
Anyway, no one gets married with the expectation of anything less than forever. No one gets married without the intellectual understanding that there will be hard times. If you can find one couple that gets married with a different set of expectations and the idea that “oh well if things go too wrong we can always divorce,” I will happily stand corrected and yield my entire argument. No one lacks the intellectual understanding of what forever entails or that marriage is forever.
Sorry, time to yield your argument, unless you want to restrict it to Catholics. I have several sets of non-religious (or not-particularly-religious) friends who went into marriage with EXACTLY that expectation.
In any case, you don’t have to go into marriage with that expectation for my point to be valid. It was only a couple of months into my marriage before the thought crept into my mind, and before marriage, I would never have expected it.
What IS lacking is: 1) an understanding of unhealthy vs. unhealthy relationship dynamics and 2) the skills required to create a healthy relationship (i.e. be the spouse you want to be married to).
I can see your passion about this issue, but I’m afraid I disagree. Not all relationships that lack “unhealthy dynamics” are good relationships. People are just a lot more complicated than that. Not all marriages break up because of “unhealthy dynamics.” What about a man who has sex with another woman? I mean, sometimes it can be the result of “unhealthy relationship dynamics,” but sometimes he’s just horny, and doesn’t think his wife will find out. It’s important to distinguish between being abusive and just being self-absorbed.
Anyway, there is more to a relationship than mere health or lack thereof. “Healthy” relationships can be distant; people can grow apart; people can have not been well suited in the first place. The fact that a relationship isn’t close doesn’t make it “unhealthy” in the sense that term is usually used (and which is the sense in which you appear to be using it). Not every bad relationship is abusive. Not even psychologically.
And #2 appears to consist of scripted interactions. There is NO one technique that works in every situation, and TV shows are not a great place to judge the success of a particular technique, since you don’t know the people, and you can’t see how long any change really lasts. “Reality” TV isn’t real.
On the other hand, I see far too many people
cough including me 10 years ago
cough who are determined to stick it out forever because marriage is sacred (and it is!) with no concept of UNhealthy relationships. These people tear themselves apart emotionally trying to forgive abuse; sometimes these people end their marriages as an act of self-preservation, and sometimes these people never leave and end up a tortured, twisted excuse for a human being. Is no-fault divorce responsible for these, too?
What a strawman. I said, the problem with no-fault divorce is “that it creates a mindset in marriage from day 1 that ‘well, if things go too wrong, we can always divorce.’”
Somehow you have twisted this into my desiring someone to remain in an abusive relationship until she is “a tortured, twisted excuse for a human being.” What? Where the heck did that come from? Besides, apparently the existence of no-fault divorce doesn’t save them either, as far as I understand the point you are making.
You can club people over the head with canon law and the definition of a sacramental marriage all you want, but unless the above two things change, you will NEVER get anywhere. Relationship literacy needs to be an area of educational focus just as much as language literacy.
You can club people over the head with the need for no-fault divorce to protect people in that minority of cases where abuse is involved, but that doesn’t make it an unqualified good.
In addition, understanding about how relationships work is a lot more complicated than you describe, and there are simply some things that can’t be taught–they have to be experienced. For example, I agree that it would be good for more young people to understand what the characteristics of an abusive relationship are. It would be good if people could be taught this in the home and the church growing up.
However, that really isn’t going to help everyone, because one of the things that people always seem to do is assume that their situation is somehow special or different. “Yes, if these things are happening in a relationship, it usually means the relationship is abusive, but our case is different. He really loves me, and anyway it’s my fault, so this isn’t really abuse.”
I’m sorry to have continued with the off-tracking of this thread, but nothing you said invalidated my point. There is a problem with the culture of no-fault divorce, people (not in abusive relationships) do change their assumptions about what their options are because it exists, and people do try less hard to save a marriage because it is so much easier to just get out and start fresh.
If I had made the point that no-fault divorce should be abolished, you would have refuted that point. But that isn’t what I said.
–Jen
