The Real Cost of Divorce

Divorce is an enormous burden on society and individuals. Robert Wolfgramm talks from personal experience.

It doesn’t make me an expert on the subject, but I’ve been through divorce. It has nothing to recommend it. Whether divorce leads to an experience of first freedom or final alienation, exhilaration or desolation, there’s an underlying taste of failure left in one’s mouth. If not a howling rage, then a hollow residue.
How can something that began so right end up so wrong?

Whatever our status and experience in the aftermath of divorce, the fact of it, of having been-there-done-that, presents one with an abiding sense of loss and regret. It is a scar that reminds us of our spoiled humanity, a realisation that we are, at our core, like corrupted hard discs carrying Eden’s virus of imperfection. No wonder societies of all ages and peoples of all religious character and ethnicity have sought social guards against it.

I think of my seven immediate neighbours: five of us have been through marital breakdown; the other two, I don’t know about. Most of them are younger, have houses too large for their needs and drive powerful cars—for which they must both work. Inside their homes, one discovers a pocket of living near the kitchen and TV. Most of the walls are unadorned; most of the other rooms are empty. My children play with their children who are “steps” and “halfs” in blended families.

There’s a bleakness in their faces, a cynical world-weariness that comes from having seen the rug of certainty ripped from under them one time too often. (I know about this look; I used to see it on the faces of my own children when my marriage collapsed). Eventually, “For Sale” signs appear in the street and these children disappear from our local school, innocent victims of breakdown, separation and divorce.

How did things get to be this way? Why is divorce fast becoming the norm in Australian and New Zealand society?
Since 1975, the Australian divorce rate has trebled. The economic cost to the community is said to be about $A13 billion; the emotional cost is incalculable. This is an Australian tragedy: that a government proposal now proposes financial reward to encourage couples to stay together adds farce to tragedy.

In 1848, one observer complained that capitalism has “torn away from the family its sentimental veil and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” Indeed, capitalism leaves “no other nexus between man and man than callous cash payment.”
The vulgarity of the economic rationalism that pervades our world is that it reduces humans to one-dimensional, self-interested brutes who will do anything for money (even stay married). Not for reasons of moral concern, but because it costs too much!

Australia’s rocketing divorce rate is an unarguable pointer that something is fundamentally awry with the institution of marriage as we practise it in this country, in this era. While throwing money at it may repair the statistic, it will not bring happiness to the injured nor halt their dissolving faith in the relationship.

Another explanation for the rise in divorce is that our postmodern expectations of marriage are too high. We value it too much and expect it to do things it hasn’t had to in the past—like last longer and be perfect. Like lead to instantaneous material gratification and the demand for immediate social success. These make for pressures on couples that turn out to be destructive and unbearable.

Perhaps, some suggest, divorce is a fact of longer married lives. One hundred years ago, the early death of a spouse because of lower life expectancy may have pre-empted eventual divorce. Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect a couple to stay together for life when that means more than 50 years.

Some Australians think it useful to blame the Family Court and related legislation, but that institution is simply on the receiving end of relationships that have already begun the process of decay.

In the decade before the establishment of the Family Court of Australia (1976), divorce rates had already doubled. So it’s the matter of why the court is being bombarded with so much work since then, that has to be addressed. Blaming our system of no-fault divorce is faulty logic. It assumes that having a more coercive social fence around marriage will make it better and last longer.

Critics point to the past as evidence. But is longer necessarily better? A school of psychologists appeared in the postwar baby boom to tell us that “relationships,” not institutions, are what matter. If life, if marriage is not rewarding, better to get out of it and into something else that “works for you.”

In one area, they were right: some men—but mostly battered women and abused children—have benefited by the focus on quality of life rather than blind adherence to social structure for the sake of social respectability. For others, this advice simply paved the hard road to survival and wisdom with the slippery surface of an easy escape. Remedy intended for the suffering has become an addiction for the bored and sensual, a cop-out for the coward.

Yet others see secularism as the relevant factor in the rise of divorce. They say we have lost sight of God, but more particularly we have lost the respect and conservatism that only the practice of religion can bestow on social institutions such as marriage and family. The “God bit,” I think, is always true, but the practice of the religion bit just sounds true. The fact is, divorce among churchgoers is almost as high as it is among non-churchgoers.

It is true that Australians are turning more and more to civil than religious celebrants for weddings, and they’re postponing the final step with some 60 per cent of all wedded preferring to give cohabitation a try beforehand. This may mean a rising disrespect for the church, but again the question is why?

It is also interesting that failed marriage does not mean a loss of faith in the institution. Rising divorce has not led to increased singles. Rather, Australians who fall apart in an initial marital relationship soon commit to another. This indicates a strong propensity to social conformity, if not faith in the institution.

And engaging in serial marriages accompanies serial divorces. Indeed, one may interpret the data to indicate that Australians no longer expect to marry for keeps and will go into an initial marriage knowing, as Billy Ocean (and others) put it, “the tough get going whenever the going gets tough.” Or it may be that they want more out of marriage than they are finding in any single marriage. Or, as U2 put it, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

Making it easier to bail out of marriage and therefore making divorce easier cannot be ascertained as the direct outcome of institutional dysfunction or of liberal legislation. The issue has to be viewed against the backdrop of an entire evolving social ethos. In other words, times change, and it is change itself that prompts the liberalising of legislation and institutional failure in the first place.

Why have antipodeans relaxed their attitudes to the permanency of marriage? Why have we chosen to compensate divorcees with children at rates that might be seen as generous if not inviting? As my wife said recently, “You know, if you walked out on us, we’d be doing a lot better than struggling on your salary.” (Indeed, government payments and subsidies for a divorced friend of ours typically means she can afford a better home and school than we can! And I’m in paid employment; she isn’t.)

These are structural issues that have accompanied if not contributed to our loss of faith in permanent marriage. But when Jesus said that the “the Sabbath is made for mankind, not mankind for the Sabbath,” He intended to invert the blind obeisance His listeners gave to one of their most sacred institutions. He was saying that it is the human condition that comes first.

Social institutions (even divinely ordained ones) are intended to serve and enrich the human condition, not the other way around. No matter how it is enacted around the world, marriage was designed to uplift and ensure our development by housing, confining and nurturing human relationships and their procreative outcomes.

It is the thick insulation around a most powerful and profound current. If one weakens the current one renders the insulation redundant. Conversely—and this is probably a better interpretation of the data—if the current is too strong, the insulation will burn out. But either way, it is a tragedy.

Articles of interest: