No-fault divorce

[El_Machinae]

You need to do a bit of reading about divorce, since you claim abuse was never a fault in marriage.

That's not what I said. I'm just saying that traditionally abuse wasn't rated as highly - my evidence is that spousal rape was legal for a long, long time.

You can try to argue that spousal rape is not 'real' abuse, I guess. That there's worse abuses that earned a divorce. Okay, if it's true, it's true.

 

[Truronian]

That depends. In some cases, divorce may be the right call, even if it results in single-parenting situations. However, these were rather extreme circumstances that do not apply to all single-parenting cases.

This counts on a very broad meaning for 'unhappy marriages'.

If you mean 'dad comes home, gets drunk, and punches mom' then yeah, single parent household is a distinct improvement.

If you mean 'hey the Beatles promised us that Love Is All You Need and it turns out living with another human being is hard, and these little ruggers make it really hard' then that's just parents that need to grow up and deal with reality, because no one's situation is going to be significantly improved when they split up, least of all the children's.

Ultimately it comes down to the individual circumstances of each marriage. While I'm not a psychologist by trade, I have seen a few kids go through this as part of my job. There tends to be understandable short-term angst, but long term consequences are varied. Some kids go noticeably off the rails, while others end up seemingly happier.

This is why I don't think rising divorce rates should in and of themselves be seen as a bad thing. There doesn't seem to be the corresponding breakdown of society going alongside it (as some fear), so I don't see any merit in trying to 'tackle' divorce rates. Offering support for families in tough situations is something I favour, but trying to limit their options by making divorces harder to come by is something I oppose.