HURRAY FOR DIVORCE!

One thing that I find unbearably funny about the fall-out from the Forbes article entitled "Don't Marry A Career Woman" is the notion I have seen bandied about that having a career is bad for you if you're a woman because your marriage is more likely to end in divorce.  In fact, divorce may be more common among two-career families, as Michael Noer posits (I haven't checked his underlying data), but the conclusion I reach from that is that having a career is good for you if you're a woman.  It doesn't necessarily mean that your marriage is more likely to fail -- just that you have the option to walk out if it does. 

I am a huge believer that divorce is a wonderful thing. Obviously, it's not fun.  It's disappointing and devastating.  It can wreak havoc on you emotionally and financially and it can be very rough on your kids (on the other hand, depending on the situation, it might be good for your kids, or at least it may be better than the alternative).  But it's a tool for fixing an unhealthy or destructive situation -- that of being shackled to a person who is making you miserable.  As Amanda Marcotte has noted in prior posts, it's like surgery -- heart surgery is a miserable, awful experience but it's a great thing because it is a tool to help people avoid the worse alternative of death.

Of course, if you have read this blog long enough, you will know that I view marriage as a serious obligation for those who undertake it.  I would be damn pissed if my husband walked out on me because another woman caught his eye or because I had health problems he didn't want to deal with or because he was a fair weather friend who got sick of me while I was going through a difficult period in my life.  As a matter of conscience, I certainly view it as my obligation to work through rough patches and to commit to my husband until the end of our lives and I expect the same in return.  That's the promise we made to each other.

But sometimes marriages don't work out. It's a positive thing when both parties have the ability to walk away.  I don't condone walking away lightly but having that failsafe option of divorce is essential.  Sometimes, people turn out not to be what you expect -- even the fabulous person you fell in love with.  If I had married my college boyfriend, who certainly seemed hip and fun and progressive and cool at first, I would have gradually found myself putting up with more and more crap until one day I woke up and found myself married to someone who regularly sought to undermine my confidence and my endeavors, a behavior which kind of defeated the purpose of being in a partnership with him.  Because we weren't married, I was able to walk away.  And if we had been married, I certainly would have opted for divorce. 

The problem with Noer's theory is that if one party is dependent on the other financially and has sacrificed developing a future earning capacity, that party is going to be up the creek if she walks away.  That kind of imbalance in power is inevitably going to be abused in some marriages, or perhaps even many marriages. (Don't forget that power corrupts.) Suppose hubby has affair after affair, or regularly humiliates his wife, or hits his wife, or engages in any number of nightmare behaviors.  A dependent wife is damned if she stays and damned if she goes.  So Wife often stays in a horrible marriage.  Trust me -- I was a kid who prayed every night for my parents to divorce, yet they never did.  And I know I am not the only one out there.

It can't be said too much.  Sacrificing the woman's ability to walk aways does not mean that a marriage will be more successful.  It just means that the woman doesn't have the means to end a bad situation.  Maybe from Noer's point of view, it's fine for him to have more control than his wife over whether the marriage ends.  But for a woman, an independent means of support is never a negative.

For more commentary on Noer's article, see the following:

Magnificent snark at Opinionistas

A post entitled Marry someone who will push you: another reason Michael Noer gets it so very wrong by Hugo Schwyzer

Echidne takes on Gary Becker's model of the division of labor in marriage which influenced Noer's article on career women.

Comments

[David Thompson]

heart surgery is a miserable, awful experience but it's a great thing because it is a tool to help people avoid the worse alternative of death.

That's a curious value judgement.

[Chalicechick]

Why would it be?

CC

[jen]

happy i loveyouloveyouloveyou!!!
maybe this seems strange to you, but actually this is the very first time in my life that someone (who is not me heh) utters the opinion that divorce is something very positive (like you said, its not fun and may be a horrible experience itself - but the choice to do so most likely has saved many, many people from a lot of bitterness in their lives) and doesn't interpret the increasing divorce statistics as "the end of love" or a prove that this world is going downhill or something like that.... thank you! yay for happy!!

i have a very good friend whose mom got divorced when she was 5 and she often worries that if she marries one day her marriage will, like, automatically fail just because the statistics say that children of parents who got divorced are way more likely to get divorced, too (she lets herself deeply influence by statistics - she's a sociology student, what can i say...).
and i always tell her that she should see it positive: her mom had not the slightliest idea how to manage finances and other things when she got divorced since that always had been done by her (ex)husband. she learned it, she got really successfull, happy and raised 3 wonderful and really strong daughters, my friend being one of them. and i always tell hey, if you ever happen to marry a guy who does not treat you right, you won't hesitate a second and LEAVE, you won't be even able to let yourself be humiliated. and if that happens, which i do not hope, say thank you to yourself and to your mom - cause she is a wonderful role model that divorce is not the end of your life but a start into a new, obviously better life. a woman who has been raised in an oh-so-perfect family (be it only seemingly so or really) is more likely to be scared by the fact of divorce itself and may hesitate way longer or not dare it at all.
i really mean what i say and i hope one day my words sink in and she stops worrying.

[jen]

wait... i of course did not want to say that this is the first time in my life someone utter something like that... i wanted to say thats the first timein my life i actually see someone uttering this.
sorry

[Natarajan]

Had you heard about Stevenson and Wolfers' research suggesting that adoption of unilateral/no-fault divorce laws may be responsible for reduced rates of domestic violence against and suicide among women?
From http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/econ_divorce.shtml:

Because states changed their divorce laws at different times, the researchers could examine the impact in state-by-state comparisons. For example: California changed its law in 1969, Massachusetts in 1975. "If we expect the suicide rate to fall, we expect it to fall six years earlier in California than in Massachusetts," said Wolfers.

Tapping into the national database of death certificates, Wolfers and Stevenson traced suicide rates before and after divorce reform and found a statistically significant reduction of nearly 6 percent in the female suicide rate following a state's change to unilateral divorce. There was no discernible change in male suicides. Looking longer term, they found close to a 20 percent decline in female suicides 20 years after the change to no-fault divorce.

[The Grouch]

Yes. It bugs the hell out of me when people, even of the non-social-conservative variety, pay obsequious lip service to the notion that divorce is oh-so-tragic and devastating. Divorce may be "tragic" and "devastating" compared to a nice picnic in the woods. But it's not tragic or devastating compared to a really terrible marriage. Just like, as you point out, heart surgery is painful and horrible compared to having a delicious ice cream cone. But people in that situation don't have a choice between heart surgery and ice cream--they have a choice between heart surgery and death.

[Dana]

This is wonderful; thank you. I've always been a little confused by people's idea that rising divorce rates are always 100% bad...I think it has more to do with women having greater opportunity to support themselves than it does with irresponsibility or "selfishness".

[Natalia]

My mother went through two divorces before she met my dad. Her first husband turned to alcoholism and beat the shit out of her, and her second husband embarked on a very public, in-your-face affair.

My father went through two divorces before he met my mom. His first wife had a very public, in-your-face affair (yes, this actually happened to both of my parents), and his second wife tricked him into a quickie marriage by lying about being pregnant.

Hooray for divorce.

P.S. Yes, yes, I know what people are going to say, they shouldn't have been married in the first place, blah blah. But Soviet society, like many societies, pressured people into marrying young. And it sucked, and still does suck.

[David Thompson]

Why would it be?

We all die sometime (unless you're Dana Scully). I find it rather odd to assume that undergoing a massively expensive, painful procedure to extract a few more miserable months is inherently preferable to an inevitable and usually painless moment.

[sorenlerby]

Comment edited by Happy Feminist:

Sorenlerby reposted his blog post on the Forbes article in this comments thread. Since his post is too long for this comments thread (i.e. it was more than 250 words) and not quite on point with regard to the issue on divorce, I am simply going to post the link to his post here.

If you want, you can discuss it with him over at his place.