AMERICANS do just about everything a bit more spectacularly than
most other people. That includes marriage and divorce. The U.S. has the
world's highest divorce rate, but it also leads in the rate of
remarriage after divorce, an occurrence that frequently boosts the
statistics by leading to yet another breakup. Americans, in short,
appear to be marrying more and enjoying it less. This situation
distresses clergymen, sociologists and anthropologists, who rightly
regard stable marriage as the foundation of society. But it is only
half the tragedy of divorce in America. The real scandal is not that so
many Americans resort to divorce. It is that so many of the laws of the
land are sadly out of step with the growing recognition that, for both
married couples and society, divorce is often preferable to a dead
marriage. The most significant happening in the divorce field is a widespread and
growing attack on those laws. Whatever else marriage may be, the state
regards it as a public contract that only the state can dissolve. The
laws that govern that dissolution in the U.S., however, are not only
widely conflicting and confusing—all 50 states have their own laws
—but are based on notions that are out of touch with the changing
realities of modern society. Most of them tend to embitter spouses,
neglect the welfare of the children, prevent reconciliation and produce
a large measure of hypocrisy, double-dealing and perjury. Looking at
the welter of divorce laws in the U.S., David R. Mace, executive
director of the American Association of Marriage Counselors, can only
call it “an absolutely ghastly, dreadful, deplorably messy situation.”
Across the U.S., judges, lawyers and marriage experts are raising an
urgent cry that it is time to reform and humanize the divorce system. A Confession of Failure The system has not only succeeded in making divorce unpleasant,
complicated and expensive; it has been woefully ineffective in its
original aim of holding down divorce and protecting society from the
problems that breakups produce. Roughly 400,000 U.S. couples are being
divorced each year. About 40% of them are childless; the rest have some
500,000 children, two-thirds of them under the age of ten. More than
6,000,000 Americans are now divorced or separated, and divorce seems to
breed divorce: probably half of all divorced Americans are the children
of divorced parents. Divorce or separation occur most among the poor,
the least educated and Negroes, least among the affluent , the well-educated and couples with three or
more children. Increasingly, it is a problem of the young: 46% of all
divorces involve girls who marry in their teens, and 74% those who
marry under 25. Conversely, an estimated 85% of Americans who marry at
the age of 25 or over stay married. Even so, there is a growing trend
for couples to split up in middle age after the kids have left home and
husband and wife have discovered that they no longer can, or want to,
get along. Though Roman Catholics get fewer divorces than others
because of their church's proscriptions, they are not very far behind
the Protestant breakup rate because of desertions, separations and
annulments.
