Well, some weeks back I drew some hot, hot flames for a diary arguing that, given a 50% divorce rate and what happens to fathers and children in the no-fault divorce, maybe U.S. women are, statistically speaking, a lousy bet as wives.
Half-seriously, I suggested that American men consider marrying foreign women instead.
The other day, I read a reference to a remark attributed to Germaine Greer that I found somewhat disheartening. So, being a glutton for punishment, I'm again going to disagree with a feminist. Yow! Where's my asbestos overcoat at?
The influential feminist, Germaine Greer, reportedly said that current divorce rates should be celebrated as a major achievement of the feminist movement, as they reflect women escaping from unhappy marriages.
I don't disagree 100% with the remark attributed to Ms. Greer. I am sure that some women who would have remained in marriages that ranged from deeply and permanently dissatisfying to flat-out abusive before, say, 1970, found themselves better off after they divorced.
However, on the whole I am distressed by the sentiment, because a divorce rate of 50%, the statistic that fewer than 1/3 of American children live with both Mom and Dad, and the negative impact - emotional, social, financial and otherwise - of divorce on at least some women, as well as on their husbands and children, do not impress me as deserving of celebration.
Divorce is a sword of Damocles, I think, over every couple's marriage (and every reasonably happy childhood), and one that as a father makes my relationship to my children especially tenuous. Given the all-but-routine award of custody in divorce to the mother, the loving and conscientious father invests a huge stake in something that can be (and often is) taken away from him without any wrongdoing on his part.
I am a middle-aged male, hanging in in a difficult marriage largely because of a deep attachment to my two young daughters. The grown son of my first marriage is a "poster boy" for all of the bad things that happen to children as a consequence of divorce; from emotional insecurity, substance abuse, underemployment right down to his many tattoos. Of course, there is much that his mother, his stepfather, and I could have done differently to help produce a better outcome, and I am aware that not all children of divorce have so difficult and painful a life as he has. But I have been touched by this individually, as have many Kossacks, I am sure. And, of course, my past history makes me doubly hesitant to leave a marriage that my shrink and friends (of both sexes) have suggested I give up on.
I am posting this diary neither for snarky judgments nor for consolation, but to invite discussion of the following questions: is Greer correct? Should society as a whole celebrate a 50% divorce rate? While nearly all would, I think, agree that there are individual cases in which women who divorced in recent years, who might not have done so in an earlier era, bettered their lives as a result, does a divorce rate of 50% imply a society in which women, as a group, are happier, and otherwise better off? Does honoring some individual woman's decision to divorce her husband and the father of her children absent "fault" grounds mean that it cannot be suggested that the number of women doing so (roughly 3/4 of present-day divorces are initiated by wives) might be too high? Does depicting a high divorce rate as a major achievement of feminism show too little sensitivity to the effects of that on children? On (gasp) men?
I do not think anyone should endure a genuinely abusive marriage. I do feel that parents ought to go the second mile and the third, even, where the issue is not abuse, but merely dissatisfaction. I also feel - but do not wish the focus of this diary, or responses to it to be - that child custody and support issues often result in serious injustices to fathers, and bad consequences to their children.
I know some responses will be from women who feel that no-fault divorce beats the shit out of sliced bread. Fine, everybody gets a swing here at dKos, but additionally, I would like to hear from youngish children of divorced parents, and divorced men, as well as from women. (Not devaluing the women, here, but I'd like a "Fair and Balanced" discussion).