Should Government Make it Harder to Divorce?

Introduction

It is very easy to be dismissive about other people’s divorces. However, one’s own divorce is always a big deal. Divorce is the abolition of marriage. As wedlock, divorce in the United States of America is the sphere of authority of the central government, not the federal one. Divorce or “dissolution of marriage” is a lawful procedure in which a judge gives legal dissolution to the existing lawful wedlock between couples, and after this, they are regarded to be single and have the possibility to marry someone else. Apart from this, there are certain important issues which are involved in the lawful procedure for divorce, namely, spousal assistance, child maintenance, child custodianship, dispensation of belonging and distribution of backlogs, and others. Unfortunately, divorces appear very frequent in nowadays life. Although almost everyone would agree that divorce should not be an easily procedure – particularly if there are young children – apart from this, there is one point of view that divorce should be optional in order not to spoil child’s health in dreadful atmosphere. That is why there is an argument whether the government should make it harder to divorce or not.

Body

Supposedly, the answer is definite – it should make divorce not easily to obtain. Beverly Willet is the head of the Coalition for Divorce Reform. Her Parental Divorce Reduction Act is supposed to give the couple reason not to pause the marriage. Its goal is a “broad consensus of studies finds that divorce has serious negative lifelong psychological consequences for children and costs taxpayers billions of dollars annually. A significant number of these divorces are unnecessary. The goal of this Act is to reduce “unnecessary” divorces where minor children are involved.” (Coalition for Divorce Reform 1) The couple is required to visit certain classes where they can learn how to save marriage and acquire several important skills for healthy relations. Nevertheless, her insistence on making divorce harder does not find too many followers. Supposedly, making divorce harder, it becomes more predictable that instead of marriage they can decide just to cohabit. The law cannot teach the couple to build a happy marriage. There are certain differences in the law in different states, but on the other hand, in the developed world, United States has the highest divorce rate, having the most indulgent divorce laws. Stephen Carter states:

I think about this when I think about the problem of divorce. Everyone agrees that our divorce rate is too high. For a while, the divorce rate was close to one-half the marriage rate, although it has recently dipped a little bit, and there is a widespread view that the reason the divorce rate is so high is that we make it too easy to get divorced. Therefore, if you make it harder to get divorced, the divorce rate would be lower. (219)

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It is interesting to know that in New York State until 1966, adultery was the only ground for divorce, and the rules for proving it in court were extremely tough. Not only could not one divorce someone for eating with their fingers, they could not divorce their spouses even if the other part stuck pins in spouse’s eyeballs while ramming the spouse with a telephone pole every night.

Unfortunately, having such a stringent divorce law did nothing to reduce the number of divorces. People who wanted out bent over backwards to receive a divorce. They traveled to jurisdictions that granted easy divorces (incidentally, one theory is that this is how the whole Caribbean tourism industry became jump-started at the end of the 19th century); spouses colluded to stage adulteries, submitted perjurious affidavits to court, and petitioned for annulments. In fact, if anything, this law encouraged adultery on the part of people who desperately needed to create a ground for divorce. Moreover, if everything else failed, if they were too poor or too lazy to do any of these things, they simply terminated the relationship and lived apart, pretending they are still “married”, because there was no formal divorce. When the law was amended in 1966 to add more grounds (though NY remains a “fault state”), the number of divorces among New York couples remained. The real problem is not the high quality of matrimonial relations that lead to the resolution to divorce. Perhaps, it will work better if it is harder to marry.

Divorce leads to emotional problems and different behavioral problems for innocent children. They suffer much. According to L.Landro in the Wall Street Journal:

Their results are based mostly on sifting participants’ self-reported data, with death certificates providing the only verifiable information: age and cause of death. Data on factors like genetic predisposition to disease weren’t gathered.

Moreover, the study’s subjects lived most of their lives in a dramatically different time, before AIDS threatened longevity and before medical advances such as angioplasty and the development of cholesterol drugs came along to improve life-span. The respondents were almost uniformly white children from middle-class families, so the results don’t tell us much about the longevity of other groups. And many of the girl students did not go on to have careers, so “The Longevity Project” focuses on men when it discusses workplace matters and their role in long-term health. (Landro)

Nevertheless, marriage is the great responsibility not only for children but for the beloved partner. Certainly, it is a difficult to make it work and make couple work hard in order to rescue the family. In order to prevent divorces, many states introduced longer waiting periods. On the one hand, it may help prevent some couples from impetuous and spontaneous decisions to divorce. On the other hand, as a rule, there is no step back in this decision. It is too late to do something in order to save the relations. As a fact, in most cases, marriage is ruined totally. There are two dissimilar concepts such as dedication and constraint. As it is stated in Scott M. Stanley and Howard J. Markman’s work.

Dedication refers to the intrinsic devotion of one to another, and it is evidenced by thinking as a team, desiring a future together, placing a high priority on the relationship, and protecting the marriage from attractive alternatives. Constraint refers more to forces that tend to keep people committed when they might want to leave: e.g., children, limited financial resources, social pressure, moral beliefs about divorce, and the difficulty of the steps to end a marriage. (Stanley and Markman)

In fact, laws about divorce are too liberal; it must not be so easy to terminate the marriage. Lawful policy to make divorce harder or warrant existing before marriage preparation may work. Additionally, there can be not positive aftermath in spite of the good purposes. The bottom line is that governments and couples can conduce to look for easy decisions to difficult problems when those solutions can lack or enlarge disappointment and collision. That is why the legal initiatives may be the wiser course. As it is highlighted about efficient immediate strategies:

With a growing national consensus, a large scale public health education campaign could bring together educators, clergy, mental health professionals, and politicians to focus on two key goals: 1) To extol strong and happy marriages as a high value and a high priority, and 2) to encourage couples to take advantage of effective tools to make their marriages not just more stable, but truly better. (Stanley and Markman)

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is necessary to mention that ideally, people’s awareness of divorce, like people’s awareness of matrimony, should be driven by a feeling that the matrimonial responsibilities should not be discoursed incidentally. It does not imply that no one is ever going to be divorced, and that does not imply that each marriage can be everlasting. Nevertheless, it is important to strive to make differentiation between marriages that cannot be rescued through any act of confidence by the people who are involved and marriages that end for other reasons. Marriage, being an institution that is made by organs of government or religious ones, provides equal lawful rights for a wife and a husband and their children. Certainly, government should set grounds for a happy marriage but not the divorce.

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