Six years after the divorce - a travesty of justice or common decency - the pain is still intense. Not of the divorce but of the abuse that I had to live with because I thought nice people didnt divorce. Because of all the trivial, shallow, judgmental arguments of people who haven’t undergone that same suffering and presume to tell others what is good for them as though one size fits all..because of religions and laws written by people who were never married or never married badly..because of ignorant pampered women who clutch Bibles and ram their provincial ideas about what it takes to raise children or be a good wife or anything else down everyone else’s throat. As though anyone knows what will or will not destroy society. As though a man and a woman together are the epitome and peak of human relationships instead of just one…what about brother and sister or friends…

You breed so you’re blessed, right? As though the world has ever lacked for breeders and children. But it’s lacked for love and justice, alright.

What’s evil is fucking around on your spouse, being verbally/emotionally/physically abusive, trashing your spouse to your kids (yes, married people do it too, y’know), or other misbehaviors. And while it’s shitty and rotten for people to bail out of marriage for a newer model spouse, or a whim, or whatever, it burns me up that people assume that folks get divorced for dumb reasons. Or that it’s “easier.”

How, exactly, is making divorce harder going to help things? ‘Cause you know what? I wouldn’t want to be stuck with a guy who’d rather marry his secretary who’s twenty years younger than me.

We shouldn’t make it harder to get a divorce. We should make it harder to get married. Any heterosexual couple can go through a drive-through chapel in Las Vegas and tie the knot, even if they’ve only known each other a few days. You can get married for truly stupid reasons (oh, everyone I know is married, I always wanted that party, I think I’m supposed to do this, blah, blah, blah) and no one says a word about it. No condemnation there.

I don’t find my divorce (or the process that I went through to get the divorce) to be painful. I find the betrayal of trust (among other things) that led to my divorce to be painful. When I look back on it, I don’t regret or grieve my divorce. I regret my marriage and I grieve the loss caused by the betrayal of trust.

I don’t think that I know anybody who has gotten a divorce because they are tired of their spouse or too lazy to try to improve their marriage. But that’s just anecdotal. I don’t recall ever hearing about a study that concluded that many folks use no-fault divorce because it’s “easier” than trying to fix the problems that exist within their marriage.

Remember, when a conservative wins a debate, it’s an exercise of free speech; when a conservative loses a debate, they’ve been shouted down and silenced by the PC majority for comitting thoughtcrime.

Don’t be silly: a conservative never loses a debate. They’ll move the goalposts and start shouting personal abuse at you if you comment on this, but they never lose.

I guess this is a good a time as any to pimp my eyeball cake, eh?

Although, you’re just jealous of my great beauty.

Is it fair that, though I am the only mom around with a jack-o-lantern cake pan (it makes an upright, 3-D cake) and the willingness to decorate it, Zoë has insisted on having a skull cake with “real eye sockers”? I have baked an oval cake, and will trim the bottom to skullishness, and then split it in two horizontally, and cut two eye holes and a nose out of one layer and then put ganache on the bottom layer and the layer with holder over that, and then I am going to cover it with marzipan. Jesus. I think I’ll forego the royal icing, although I bet I could build up some nice cheekbones. This was that other cake pan’s moment! It lives all year for this, waiting, waiting at the back of the cabinet with the lamb cake molds. And the Boba Fett mold.

Today Violet learned to say something she will no doubt have many opportunities to use: “she hit. oooow. nooo.” She has an inexpressibly gentle voice, very quiet, and she puts her fat hands on top of her head to indicate the place she was hit, and her silly arms can hardly get up there. Zoë was startled when this happened. The days of getting away with stuff: looking numbered.

Now what I think you’re screwed up on is that the post Barry references is the post after her currently notorious exercise in devil’s advocacy, and it does apologize for treating as a high-school debate exercise the cheap bigotry in dismissing utterly the civil rights of the minority to protect the privilege of the majority—an issue of no little concern to some of her regular commenters, to whom she offered an appropriate apology.

Nothing whatsoever about recanting her unorthodox opinion on no-fault divorce: the topic ostensibly under discussion.

Also: no one who knows anything at all about Belle would ever pair her name with the word “grovellingly.” Thanks for the giggle.

In the next post of her blog, where she grovelingly apologizes for having dared offend the orthodox.

Not to worry, Mythago, belle has recanted her thoughtcrime.

I thougth thoughtcrime had to, you know, be thought rather than said. I’d say Belle says it pretty loud and clear in her post [emphasis mine]:

The last time a radical change to marriage was enacted on the grounds of maximizing individual liberty and happiness it turned out to be a disaster from a broader point of view, and especially for children.

And, anyway, where exactly does Belle retract, or even truly examine, her statement? I read through the entire post, even glanced through the more recent posts, and I failed to find it. Is it in the comments or something?

I am still waiting for some proponent of fault-only divorce to explain to me how such laws benefit children. The belief seems to be that most people who divorce are just lazy, and if we don’t let them divorce, they’ll grumble and go back to behaving themselves.

Being able to end a bad marriage has given women, especially, increased bargaining power within the marriages they already have. There is a paper by Wolfers and Stevenson showing that female suicide and spousal murder (of men by women) has gone down a lot since no-fault divorce (and, I’m sure, women’s shelters) has been enacted.

And my guess is that the same men who decide they’d rather have a cute young thang rather than their boring old wife are the same ones who would have taken young mistresses in the past. Perhaps the answer to preventing divorce for selfish or frivolous reasons is to change the consumer-oriented, bargain-hunting view of relationships in our society, or, short-term, to marry someone with a conscience and sense of honor in the first place.

That said, it seems to me (anectodal evidence only) that many people do have unrealistic expectations for their marriages, and no fault divorce makes it less likely that they will have/take the time to grow into their marriages. As John Gierach said, things that aren’t perfect have some value in this world, and that’s a good thing because there’s plenty of them.

However, being able to avoid a renegotiation of a relationship through dissolution is not generally a positive inducement to the (probably painful) renegotiation.

My folks have a similar story - but their happy ending was made possible by the fact that neither one of them had done anything that would justify divorce in their own eyes, and so they were left with a choice between fixing things or stewing in their own misery. They chose to fix it. If divorce had been an option for them - if one or the other had thought “things being not great” was sufficient justification to dissolve a lifetime promise - then they would have done that.

I suspect most people follow an incentive-response strategy closer to that of my folks than that of your folks.

I am constantly proud of them for what they did, it took great courage for both of them after more than 20 years of marriage, to acknowledge that things were not going well and act accordingly. But I wonder what would happen if there was no possibility for divorce. Would there marriage mend if there wasn’t a possibility that it could easily be terminated? I personally highly doubt it.