Is it too easy to get divorced?

[DisneyBamaFan]

This post is a recurring theme in this thread. However, in my opinion, it ignores the simple fact that had the two people respected their marriage and continually put work into it, then they likely would have felt differently about one another and their marriage.

People act as if they shouldn't consider working on their marriage until it is ready to be thrown away. The time to begin respecting your spouse and working on your marriage is day one, not the day that you wake up and decide that you want a divorce (or are told that you need one by some jaded stranger on the disboards).

 

[Colleen27]

Thanks for clarifying, Colleen. I do agree that if the partners are not on the same page about something, it will definitely degrade the relationship. I know I'm in sensitive mode - it feels like every 2nd or 3rd page I open on the DIS has a random anti-AP sentiment. I'd love to just chit chat and talk Mouse without feeling like defend my lifestyle (usually from people who know little about it). I realize this is a mainstream message board, but I didn't honest think I would feel like such an outcast here.

I know the feeling. The further DH & I get from the mainstream (in our case, economy/work world more than parenting styles - we're both self-employed and live very well in a rather lower tax bracket than most would be comfortable with) the more I feel a little odd-man-out in discussions in venues like this one. Usually I hang out on the budget board between trips and I've learned a lot there, but more and more I find myself so at odds with the things I'm reading that it hardly seems worth speaking up. So I just lurk on the savings-related threads and skip the rest.

 

[MrsPete]

Back to being on topic, when HD and I decided to get married/have children, we sat down with one of those cheesy internet questionnaires one day as a joke. It was one of the best things we ever did though. (Copy of one here at - http://premarriagequestionnaire.com/) It led to a great discussion, and had a lot of things that we didn't think about at 25-27. (Ex. Mother/MIL falls at 80 and breaks a hip. How do you manage her treatment?)

Yeah, we did something similar to that when we were going through pre-marital counseling with our pastor. I agree that it forced us to look at topics that we wouldn't have discussed otherwise: Expectations about disciplining children, saving vs. spending, financial goals for the future, dealing with extended family situations. Some of the questions were very specific. Example: You have three adult children. Two of them have done well financially, are married and have children of their own who'll need to be educated . . . the third dropped out of school, has dabbled in drugs, is under-employed but lately seems to be trying harder. How do you arrange your will? Do you divide your assets equally, do you give more to the one who has greater need, or do you give more to those who've worked hard and proven themselves more worthy? These questions don't have right and wrong answers; rather, they're meant to start discussions and make sure that you and your future spouse feel the same way about difficult topics.

I apologize. Next time I post statistics about the status of women in America, I'll pm you. Your personal experience is definitely the deal breaker on the truth behind my statistics (most of which i derived from the UN published paper "The Status of Women" and a paper presented before the united states congress in 2000, and the rest from my own study on the subject

Love the sarcasm. I still don't believe the statistics.

Also, abusive behaviors are strongly associated with certain social and economic traits, so those of us who are middle or upper class income-wise, married, white, and have friends who are mostly the same aren't likely to know many people who have been abused. Plus white and middle class women are less likely than other groups to report abuse, so the odds are higher that if we know someone who is being abused we wouldn't necessarily be aware of it.

I totally believe that, but many of the students I teach are far from upper-class, and I don't hear about THIS MANY situations like this. Believe me, I hear all sorts of other sordid things on a weekly basis. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that domestic abuse doesn't happen -- I just think these stats are heavily biased.

 

[hippiemama76]

I know the feeling. The further DH & I get from the mainstream (in our case, economy/work world more than parenting styles - we're both self-employed and live very well in a rather lower tax bracket than most would be comfortable with) the more I feel a little odd-man-out in discussions in venues like this one. Usually I hang out on the budget board between trips and I've learned a lot there, but more and more I find myself so at odds with the things I'm reading that it hardly seems worth speaking up. So I just lurk on the savings-related threads and skip the rest.

Maybe we should start a DIS outcasts thread?

 

[Experiment_626]

You only have one life to live there's no point spending it with someone that you are not happy with.

Regardless of who is hurt by the unilateral decision to end the marriage?

 

[ZeitgeistDuck]

This post is a recurring theme in this thread. However, in my opinion, it ignores the simple fact that had the two people respected their marriage and continually put work into it, then they likely would have felt differently about one another and their marriage.

People act as if they shouldn't consider working on their marriage until it is ready to be thrown away. The time to begin respecting your spouse and working on your marriage is day one, not the day that you wake up and decide that you want a divorce (or are told that you need one by some jaded stranger on the disboards).

Really? Please quote for me any poster on this thread who acted like they shouldn't consider working on their marriage until 'throwing it away'. The condescension here is nasty. I am not divorced. I am happily married and we work hard to keep our marriage strong and healthy. But I know several people who are divorced in the last several years, and I don't know a single one who just threw it away, who didn't try to work on the marriage first.

I'm sure there are some out there. I'm also sure that is a minority. I love how folks think that because they don't know every detail of some couple's intimate life and their decision to divorce that the agony and work hasn't been done, that every effort hasn't been made. Geez... people need a big old dose of MYOB.

 

[sunnyday123]

This post is a recurring theme in this thread. However, in my opinion, it ignores the simple fact that had the two people respected their marriage and continually put work into it, then they likely would have felt differently about one another and their marriage.

People act as if they shouldn't consider working on their marriage until it is ready to be thrown away. The time to begin respecting your spouse and working on your marriage is day one, not the day that you wake up and decide that you want a divorce (or are told that you need one by some jaded stranger on the disboards).

Really? Because you think you can't respect marriage as a whole and still have one that fails? And you think people randomly wake up and say, "Oh, I think I'll go get a divorce today!"?? Do you have any idea how agonizing it is to live in a home where the parents "stayed together for the children"? How misreable the children are and how they perception of a relationship between two people is affected?

So in your opinion, divorces happen because people don't put the effort into it from day one? How anyone can judge someone else's situation without knowing all the details-and many people don't share them because of the judgemental attitudes that are received, no one takes the information at face value, it's jumping from one rumor or their idea of what and why it happened-is beyond me.

Oh, and abuse does happen in white, upper-middle class marriages. Most of my friends are the same, but not all.

And I didn't report the abuse either. But only because I hit back.

 

[chloelovesdisney]

Regardless of who is hurt by the unilateral decision to end the marriage?

Yes. You live ONCE, make the most of it. It's not an issue for me right now, but if dh becomes cold, uninvolved, withholds affection and I feel like I am living with a roommate, yes I will leave because I am not okay with that. If both partners want to live like that it's fine, but one shouldn't be forced to.

 

[krcit]

Yes. You live ONCE, make the most of it. It's not an issue for me right now, but if dh becomes cold, uninvolved, withholds affection and I feel like I am living with a roommate, yes I will leave because I am not okay with that. If both partners want to live like that it's fine, but one shouldn't be forced to.

 

[mariolatry]

Yes. You live ONCE, make the most of it. It's not an issue for me right now, but if dh becomes cold, uninvolved, withholds affection and I feel like I am living with a roommate, yes I will leave because I am not okay with that. If both partners want to live like that it's fine, but one shouldn't be forced to.

If partner A is miserable and leaves for the sake of happiness, partner B is miserable. If partner A is miserable and stays, partner B keeps his/her happiness. Either way, one is miserable, one is not.

I've known lots of divorced people and none of them has given up too easily. Honestly, a lot of people shouldn't have married each other to begin with!

 

[tasha99]

Well I gave up on one marriage too easily. Actually, I made the stupid comment during a fight, "So do you think we should get a divorce?" and he said, "Yes." We were way too young and only got married because the military was going to station me in the US and him in Korea. So the army changed our orders after we got married and he got stationed in dongduchon (near the DMZ) and I was near Pyongtek (couple hours south of Seoul)--hours away. We only saw each other about once a month. Stupid reason to get married, and of course it didn't last since the only thing fueling it was hormones. I am sure there are tons of these kinds of divorces out there, and they probably mostly involve very young people with no kids and no property to speak of.

(Second marriage which I talked about in other posts was horrific, and I tried to make it work for far, far too long. If divorce got any harder, I'm not sure I would have made it.)

 

[Experiment_626]

Yes. You live ONCE, make the most of it. It's not an issue for me right now, but if dh becomes cold, uninvolved, withholds affection and I feel like I am living with a roommate, yes I will leave because I am not okay with that. If both partners want to live like that it's fine, but one shouldn't be forced to.

That's not the situation you described in the original quote. You said "You only have one life to live there's no point spending it with someone that you are not happy with."

"Not happy" covers a lot of territory. And it sounds like the textbook definition of selfishness to me.

 

[FireDancer]

I think the question of "is it too easy to get divorced" is very different then "do people give up to quickly on marriage" and that is an important distinction.

To address the "is it too easy to get divorced" I would say no because it should be easy. Essentially it is nullifying a contract and in a society of choice we should be free to do so. I don't think it is the courts place to force people to stay married, that has to be a mutual choice and if they decide to get divorced for any reason there should be a legal remedy to do so and it should be as easy as allowable.

Now, for the "do people give up to quickly on married" question, I think in some cases yes they do. It is a very difficult statement to apply broadly though because every situation is different. While I know there are people who get divorced at the first sign of trouble as opposed to trying to work it out there are also people who stay in marriages far too long because they are too focused on the idea of marriage as opposed to their individual reality.

Coming from a family in which one spouse stayed married way too long to another I would never judge whether or not someone got divorced too quickly without hearing both sides of the situation and even then it would have to be pretty cut and dry for me to say someone should stay in any situation in which they are unhappy if there is a way out of it.

 

[Experiment_626]

I think the question of "is it too easy to get divorced" is very different then "do people give up to quickly on marriage" and that is an important distinction.

I think you're correct, but the relative ease of divorce aids those who want to give up too easily.

Lots of good points (and some that aren't so good) have been made in this thread. I'm not sure of the solution -- if there is one -- and we're not going to solve it here. But sometimes the first step is an examination of the problem. As I said, I don't think the solution is to go back to the way things used to be, because it made things too difficult for people who needed get out of dangerous situations. Now we have the opposite problem -- one person can come home and simply announce that the marriage is over, and if the other partner doesn't like it, that's just tough. People have said that someone shouldn't be forced to stay when they're not "in love" or however you want to quantify things, but that isn't the only situation. There's a difference between discontent (which can pass) and true incompatibility. Good people are hurt and lives are shattered ending marriages that could be restored, if it weren't so easy for one or both to simply give up. Yes, there are other situations -- but it doesn't change the fact that in some cases, good marriages (or those that could be good again, with a little work) end, and the law makes that easy in many cases. These are marriages that should be preserved that I'm talking about, and the current state of the law is not a boon in those cases.

 

[Colleen27]

Maybe we should start a DIS outcasts thread?

That would be interesting, wouldn't it? I wonder how many of us there are out there in DISland?