Perceptions of Divorce

I think your views on commitment, marriage and divorce would carry more weight if your postings on the subject showed more evidence of your having succeeded at applying those principles in your own life. As it stands, though, your comments come off more like those of people who have never had kids themselves, but presume to lecture real parents about how they're doing everything wrong in their child-rearing.

I've seen you complain more than once about people you wanted to pursue a relationship with who turned out not to be interested. I don't believe I've seen any discussion of how you've found someone special, formed a mutual, longstanding commitment with that person, married, and successfully surmounted the problems that lead too many marriages to end in divorce.

I'm not trying to put you down for that. I'm no great shakes in the relationship department myself. But the above is the first thing that pops into my head on reading your response to Jill's comment.

JC: But the evidence you cite demonstrates that I'm applying the principles I espouse perfectly! Not having yet found anyone to build a relationship of love and committment with, I'm refraining from constructing a faux marriage based on nothing other than emotion.

Additionally, the whole "you can't understand until you do it" argument is absurd in just about every context. I don't have kids, but I've worked with kids for many years and I know more about them than do many parents. I've never been married, but I've been in relationships and I've observed many marriages (and I know what "dishonorable" and "failure" mean from the dictionary). The idea that only people of a given race can represent people of that race, or that only women can understand women, or that only veterans can understand war, or that only addicts can understand addicts and so forth is wrong-headed in the extreme.

John: The whole point of having this attitude about divorce is that it is supposed to affect how you view your marriage and act within it.

It's like your view on abstenance. You don't get into a sexual situation and then evaluate your experience about it and decide what your view on abstenance is going to be. If you do that, 99% of the time you're going to have sex.

Instead, you have a view on abstenance, and that view and how important it is to you controls how you act when you get into a sexual situation.

Doing it the other way around would be like trying to hook up the wagon to the horse after you yell giddyup. It's a whole hell of a lot harder to get it to work.

When I went into my marriage, it was with the attitude that it would absolutly not end in divorce. Now that I've been married for years, even though I may sometimes think "why did I ever marry this man?," divorce never enters my mind.

When you take away the divorce option, surmounting the problems within a marriage suddenly becomes a whole lot easier, or at least more likely. People work within the options that they see as open to them. If the only way they see out of a problem with their spouse is to work it out, then they'll work it out. You don't have to have been married 50 years to say that's true.

Certainly marriage is a lot more difficult than most unmarried people know, but that doesn't preclude them from having an attitude towards divorce.

I have a problem with the view that divorce per se necessarily implies anything about the goodness of character of the divorced. When I was eight or nine, my parents told me that each of them had been divorced once before they married each other. No children. Based on many years of direct personal experience, I assess my parents as both being of good character. They've been married to each other for almost 40 years now, quite happily, and I expect them to stay that way until they die.

People have free will, and that means they have the capacity to change in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Since I do view a marriage vow as primarily a commitment between the couple being married, I don't see a fundamental moral problem with dissolving that commitment if the other person changes in a fundamental way several years into the marriage. Things are more complicated if children are involved, of course.

The act of divorce is probably the clearest example adults set for kids that implies that its "okay" to break commitments.

Think it through. If it's okay for two mature adults to break the most sacred of vows, what message does that send to young people about keeping their word?

Marriage may be between two people and God, but the manner in which we publicly handle our marriages can have a strong effect on those younger folks who instinctively look to adults to show them good examples.

We might as well just tell them that honor is a dead concept- come to think about it, everytime a marriage "just doesn't work out", that's probably what they hear.

Disclaimer: Don't hammer me with slippery slope arguments. There are always exceptions (ie...infidelity, violence, etc...)

KH: The question here is whether divorce is a morally bad thing to do. Somehow you turned that into a question of people who have divorced have bad moral character. Don't you see a difference there?

Similar to what JC tried, this is another cliched rhetorical trick:

You say that doing X is bad. Therefore you must think that everyone who does X is an evil, wicked person who will surely burn in Hell. Why do you hate those people so much?

That kind of argument might have impressed people 20 years ago, but today it's just old and tired.

Ben: In the comment to which Michael was objecting, the claim was that "divorce is not a brand of dishonor". That's a question of character. Also, if an act is immoral, how can performing that act not reflect badly on those who perform it?

I'd also quibble with the idea stated above by Jim that divorce is the clearest example adults provide to children that it's OK to not keep commitments. In my own case, just about any commitment my parents might have made to me and then not kept (and I can't think of one; they were and are good parents) would have loomed larger to me than their earlier divorces. Divorce looms large when it breaks up families with children, but when children aren't involved it isn't anywhere near as serious.

If you want to engage the question of whether divorce per se is morally bad, the obvious question is bad for whom, and by what standard? I'm not a theist, so I consider marriage to be a commitment between the couple themselves. If both members of the couple come to the conclusion that they would be better off separated, and there aren't any children involved, then where's the harm?

KH: Not to derail the discussion, but your position rejects any notion of morality external to the preferences of the people involved, which renders my the question of divorce basically moot. Which is fine, since I was asking about everyone's perception, and your perception makes perfect sense given your belief system.

I agree that a divorce does indicate a failure, but it doesn't necessarily indicate blameworthiness. It takes two people to make a marriage work, but only one to break it. I've seen annulment applications in the Catholic Church, and many times one party disputes the annulment (I believe that's happened with some/one of the Kennedys) - one side does not want to revoke the vow, declare it null, because they had made it with full intention and faith.

Perhaps y'all's experience has been with mutual divorces, but I'm much more familiar with unilateral divorces.

And then there are the cases I know of women leaving husbands due to physical abuse, and I doubt few have trouble with condoning divorce/annulment in such a situation. The husbands obviously broke their wedding vows when they beat up their wives.

So no, I make no snap judgments in knowing someone was divorced - but sometimes people tell their own side of the story and they do themselves no favors by saying they just "fell out of love". At that point, my judgment is made. That is one excuse that I give no moral credit to.

Kyle: "if an act is immoral, how can performing that act not reflect badly on those who perform it?"

You've put your finger on the issue! How can we say that doing X is wrong without implying that the people who do X are bad people?

The Christian resolution for that question is quite simple and familiar. There are no ‘good people’ or ‘bad people’. We are all sinners. We should all seek forgiveness for our sins. When others sin, we should hate the sin but love the sinner. You know the tune. Sing along!

No doubt you're holding your nose at these Sunday School cliches. But the alternate view that you imply is completely unworkable. Many groups have tried moral systems in which all good people must do or believe X, Y, and Z, while all the others are branded with dishonor, considered to have low moral character, and essentially thrown out of polite society. Those groups tend not to prosper.

I find it quite easy to tolerate and respect people who do bad things, because everyone does bad things, myself included. But tolerating and respecting those people in no way obligates me to pretend that what they're doing isn't bad.

Suppose that I have an alcoholic friend who denies having a drinking problem. Must I despise him and refuse to be his friend because he is an alcoholic? Of course not! If I don’t despise him and keep him as a friend, must I agree that his alcoholism isn’t a problem? Of course not! I can view my friend as merely human: neither a devil nor an angel, but somewhere in between, like all the rest of us.

BB: "I find it quite easy to tolerate and respect people who do bad things, because everyone does bad things, myself included. But tolerating and respecting those people in no way obligates me to pretend that what they're doing isn't bad."

Who is to say what is bad and what isn't. I agree with KH if you are unhappy in a marriage why should you not remove yourself from an uncomfortable situation.

As for Kh's comment "Divorce looms large when it breaks up families with children, but when children aren't involved it isn't anywhere near as serious." I find that silly.

Children can come from parents that are divorced and not suffer at all from it. Saying that you are a messed up person because your parents were divorced is a cheap arguement.

I come from a broken home...parents divorced befor I was born and I am a perfectly "normal" human being.

Divorce is a good thing. It is unhealthy to stay in a bad relationship for any reason what-so-ever.

JP: I have read your postings on other topics as well and I have found that you seem to worry too much about your children.
Instead of allowing them to determine what does and does not harm them...you are choosing for them. you said, "The act of divorce is probably the clearest example adults set for kids that implies that its "okay" to break commitments." that is entirely untrue. Children will break commitments if they choose to. And who is to say that at the age when a child is deciding what is right and wrong that they will understand the committment of marriage enough to realize that their parents are breaking one?

"We might as well just tell them that honor is a dead concept- come to think about it, everytime a marriage "just doesn't work out", that's probably what they hear."

Children understand failure...honor is a dead concept only to those who choose to believe it is. If I told myself that when my parents broke up it was a sign that honor was dead, that is what I would believe to this day...but it isn't.
It is a matter of choosing differently and more carefully that your parents and learning from others mistakes, is that not what we try to teach children these days?

Jenna: "Who is to say what is bad and what isn't?"

I am. That's who. You too. And everyone reading this. We all have the capacity to distinguish good from bad. We use it all the time. We couldn't survive otherwise.

Perhaps you mean that we can distinguish good from bad for ourselves, but it would be wrong for us to share our conclusions with others. But why we shouldn't give others the benefits of our moral thinking? And you aren't bashful about sharing your own moral conclusions with us, based on your personal experience.

So let's just be up front about it: We all make moral decisions, we ought to make moral decisions, we ought to let those decisions guide our actions, and we ought to share those decisions with others when appropriate.

Jenna: Interesting assesment. Glad you're well versed on my other posts. What others see as "too much worry", I see as commitment. If more parents "worried too much" about their children, this world might be a much different place.

This piece of your comment stood out the most to me:"Instead of allowing them to determine what does and does not harm them...you are choosing for them"

A question first, Jenna, and then I'll try to finish quickly: Do you really think anyone can simply choose to decide what harms them and what doesn't, let alone a child? If someone hits me with a baseball bat, it's gonna hurt, no matter how much I would like to choose for it not too. If people could control what hurts them and what doesn't, like you say they can, who would even choose pain in the first place?

While I do find your comments interesting, I also find them to be irresponsible. I have 18 or so years with my children under my roof. It is my responsibility to guide them completely. When they are adults, then it is up to them to choose for themselves; hopefully, they will remember the wisdom of their father. Yes, I will make mistakes. We all do. How I handle them will greatly influence my children in the future, as they seek to handle their own difficulties.

These two verses sum up pretty clearly what God's views are on parenting:

Proverbs 22:6 "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."

Luke 12:48 "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more. "

On your last paragraph, yes it's important to learn from others' mistakes. But I fail to see why that absolves us from being responsible and honoring our commitments when we have the choice, and the duty to do so.

BB: Others already have the benefit of moral thinking, we are born with the ability to reason (Rousseau) I agree that we should share our beliefs of morality with others...but not condemn them if they do not share a common belief.

JP: I agree that we have no control over what does and doesn't harm us, I said that wrong, what I meant was that you said divorce hurts children in one way or another and I think you are wrong. Certainly not every divorce hurts the children that are involved in it.

"But I fail to see why that absolves us from being responsible and honoring our commitments when we have the choice, and the duty to do so."

That is a sad thought to me... In a situation involving domestic violence, is it still the parents duty to stay married for the children, or is it up to the parents to divorce for the children?

Divorce is not a good thing. Niether is making a lifelong committment to another person when you are too immature to make such committments. Whenever i hear these domsestic violence disclaimers, i want to scream "THEN WHY DID YOU MARRY SUCH A SCUMBAG?!?! "

People taking the committment too lightly, or marrying for the wrong reasons, is immoral. Divorce only compounds the problem, because we all know two wrongs dont make a right.

If we cannot stigmatize divorce, then how can we teach our children that making grave committments they are not fully prepared for is a mistake?

Jenna: "I agree that we should share our beliefs of morality with others...but not condemn them if they do not share a common belief."

How can you hold a moral belief without condemning those who don't share it or act according to it? That would contradict the very idea of a moral belief.

I believe that murder is morally wrong. Could I then say that I shouldn't discourage murder, nor should I encourage people to believe that murder is wrong? Could I step even farther and say that others are wrong to discourage murder, and wrong for encouraging people to believe that murder is wrong? (Come to think of it, that sounds an lot like Kerry's view on abortion.)

If you keep your moral belief entirely to yourself, then you don't have much of a moral belief.

Jenna: About your last paragraph, don't be sad. Read the disclaimer on my first post, where I emphatically stated that abuse, violence, etc... are a different story.

HI I WANT KNOW WHY PEOPLE DIVORCE, TO DIVORCE ONE ANOTHER IS IT A WRIGHT THING TO DO.