American Culture and the Problem of Divorce

by James Hitchcock

Any consideration of divorce in contemporary America cannot overlook the central irony of the situation—that the divorce rate continues to increase even as married couples have access to resources unequalled at any time in human history. The very openness of society is one such resource. Merely from living amidst their own relatives and neighbors, engaged couples probably learn more about marriage than formerly, when relationships were more formal and therefore less open to view. Parents are likely to speak to their children about marriage more frankly than their own parents spoke to them. Television adds to this familiarity, since it no longer portrays idealized, essentially untroubled marital relationships (Ozzie and Harriet) but puts married people on the screen warts and all (Rhoda, the Jeffersons). There is little excuse today for a person to enter into marriage naive and starry-eyed. Moreover, there are formal courses on marriage and family life taught in the schools as part of the regular curriculum. These include not only factual courses about sexuality but those which cover the entire range of things deemed necessary for a good marriage—basic psychology, differences between the sexes, economics and house-keeping.

The contemporary approach to sexuality in particular represents a remarkable change from the past. If sexual dysfunction was a principal cause of problems in marriage, then those who marry today are maximally protected against it— they have much more formal instruction, more actual experience, and greater access to professional advice than their ancestors would have thought either possible or proper. Organized religion makes its own contribution to this preparation. Not only do many churches offer engaged couples instruction which in many ways duplicates that already available elsewhere, including advice about sexuality and house-keeping, they also seek to instill in them a highly personalistic and in some ways even mystical understanding of marriage. Although in the Catholic Church, to take one example, the theology of marriage seems to have undergone certain changes in the past quarter century, it is also true that, for those couples who are paying attention, the Church seeks to introduce them to a far more sophisticated understanding of matrimony than was taught in the past.

An indeterminate but apparently rather large number of couples now choose to live together before marriage, enjoying, as it were, the opportunity for testing their relationship in a laboratory setting. Many people now marry only after they have had the opportunity to test whether they can live together happily. Once married, the couple finds that the resources at their command have not diminished. If money is another major cause of marital tension, today's married couples are likely to be far better off than their parents were at the same age. Not uncommonly, both spouses have full-time jobs. Credit is easy. Houses and cars, which earlier generations had as distant goals, are usually obtained by the time of the wedding itself. Most middle-class couples find that, although they may need to pinch pennies from time to time, there is usually enough money for annual vacations, dinners in good restaurants, shows and athletic events. Scarcely anyone today is confined to home merely because of financial embarrassment. Large families can be a cause of strain on parents, and most of today's parents have chosen to have only a few children, and to have them only under optimal conditions—exactly when they want them and only after they have planned carefully for them. Their children are by far the healthiest in the history of the world, most of them causing their parents little anxiety in this regard.

The concept of parenthood has also changed. Increasing numbers of parents share with one another the responsibilities of caring for children so that the mother need not feel weighed down. Baby-sitting services are available to almost everybody. Within the home television, electronic games, and other kinds of recreation are constantly available. The relative cheapness of telephone calls makes it possible to remain in contact with relatives and friends in other cities and thus to feel less isolated. Married couples now generally practice the kind of "togetherness" ritualistically extolled in the slogans of the 1950's. There is no longer a rigid division between male and female activities, so that husbands and wives can do most things together, exploring new facets of their relationship and broadening their common interests.

If the marriage should begin to falter, unprecedented resources are available. It is now socially acceptable to talk freely about marital problems, so that friends and relatives are more sympathetic and helpful than in the past. There is also a vast array of professional services available—married couples can get expert advice (often free or at nominal cost) on everything from balancing their check-books to improving their sexual performances. Personality conflicts can be talked through endlessly in the presence of trained counsellors who seek to help the couple identify the precise root of their problem and who make suggestions for overcoming it. Beyond this, there is even a large industry dedicated simply to making people better people. An endless series of workshops, retreats, and therapy programs exist to help people find "self-fulfillment," "discover who they are," "actualize their potential," etc. As part of this industry there is also an endless flow of books, magazines, television programs, and tapes. Yet one overwhelming irony emerges from all this—this generation of married people, better prepared and more thoroughly supported than any generation in the history of the world, is also the generation which is getting divorced in larger numbers than any generation in the history of the world. All the resources put into the effort to enrich and strengthen the marriage bond seem almost to have the opposite effect.

It is useful to divide divorces into two broad categories, those attributable primarily to what might be called "hard" causes—alcoholism and drug use, personal violence, desertion, chronic infidelity, or mental illness—and those attributable to intangible and elusive discontents. The literature of divorce, documentary and fictional, as well as personal experience with the modern middle class, suggest that divorces for "soft" reasons are now becoming more common, that is, divorces not for any specific and definable cause but from a vague sense that, as it is variously put, the marriage "wasn't working out any more," "we weren't growing together," "I felt unfulfilled." Divorces are now much easier to get than formerly, and attitudes towards marriage have themselves undergone a revolutionary change.

In one sense the wonder is not that divorces have become common but that they are not even more common, because there is little doubt that prevailing cultural winds strongly militate against marriage. This, of course, is reflected in the large number of people choosing to live together without benefit of marriage, as well as the probably even larger number who are satisfied to have a series of passing romantic encounters. When living together out of wedlock first became respectable, in the late 1960's, some pains were taken to insist that such an arrangement differed from marriage only in the absence of a "piece of paper." Wedded cohabitation was even invested with a kind of moral superiority; the participants, allegedly, could make a deep and lasting commitment to one another without the "security blanket" of a legally binding agreement. It is doubtful, however, if very many people ever seriously believed this claim, for it has always been obvious that the main reason for not entering into a legally binding commitment is to be able to abandon such arrangements with the least amount of trouble. Cohabitation replaced marriage in some circles since temporary relationships were to be preferred to permanent ones, established by the pattern of "serial monogamy" notable among society's avant-garde for many years.

This pattern can perhaps be explained simply by the low tolerance of boredom seemingly bred into people by the conditions of modern life. Those who change houses and jobs frequently, who expect constantly fresh stimuli from life, are likely to find a lifetime with one spouse unendurably constricting. Some respected authorities seem to say that all married couples ought to divorce at some point, that failure to do so is prima facie evidence of personal stagnation. There is another subtle irony here. Modern culture promises to teach people how to explore "inter-personal relationships" more deeply than ever before. Each such relationship is now held out as, ideally, an adventure. The depths of human personality are thought to be such that one could spend a lifetime plumbing both one's own psyche and that of another without exhausting their possibilities. All this supposedly in opposition to even the recent past, when people were content to live on a superficial psychological level. Yet in practice human relationships, despite all the resources invested in improving them, seem to exhaust themselves remarkably fast. The divorce statistics, and the rationales offered by sophisticated people to explain those statistics, help to bear this out. Divorce in modern America, as well as virtually all other forms of personal behavior, cannot be understood apart from what can be broadly termed the "therapeutic culture"¹ a culture which systematically encourages people to expect from life a sense of total personal well being, achieved at little cost and based upon the systematic rejection of all "impositions" on the self by society. It is a culture which at least potentially treats every person as a patient—not as emotionally sick but as emotionally impoverished and, with proper help, capable of achieving complete emotional fulfillment.

Much has been said about the "me decade" of the 1970s, supposedly a departure from the politically oriented altruism of the 1960s. In fact there was a direct continuity between the two decades, in that the essence of 1960s culture was the radical assertion of selfhood in the face of a "repressive" society, not a truly empathetic concern for others. The 1970s differed from the 1960s only in their more explicit concentration on self-gratification, a concentration so far not materially altered in the early 1980s despite a supposed "swing to the right." (Politically and economically, such a "swing" is perfectly compatible with egocentrism, as in the philosophy of Libertarianism.)²

The roots of this attitude probably date back to the end of World War II, and its chief cause has been the prolonged prosperity Americans experienced after about 1945. Put simply, during the period 1945-65. Americans came to expect that all their desires would be satisfied. Each year they found themselves better off than they were the year before. For a time this pattern coexisted quite comfortably with a remarkable degree of social stability. In the 1950s the divorce rate actually declined for a time. For the first two decades after 1945 burgeoning prosperity mainly supported and strengthened family commitments. It enabled people to find suitable housing, beget more children, and enjoy enough leisure to engage in family activities. By the middle 1960s, however, the balance had begun to tip sharply, as the effects of prosperity began to make people more frankly individualistic. The pattern first manifested itself among the children of affluence, who in the 1960s were estranged from their parents to an unprecedented degree. (The "generation gap" was one of the most analyzed phenomena of the decade.) In the next decade the estrangment caused by radical individualism was felt most keenly between spouses rather than between parents and children. So long as the sense of self-gratification remained on the material level, it caused strains in personal relationships but was rarely fatal. However, once a certain level of material prosperity could be taken for granted, the search for self-fulfillment began to involve less tangible things as well. Gradually it came to include the desire of individuals to place themselves in whatever emotional state seemed attractive, no matter what social barriers stood in the way. The radical young of the 1960s had led the way, defining every kind of social relationship—parent and child, pupil and teacher, citizen and government—as oppressive and destructive of human freedom. Inevitably the marital relationship was bound to be experienced in the same way. Little had changed with respect to marriage; if anything, the conditions of its existence had improved greatly since World War II. What had changed were people's expectations. Hence arose the irony whereby the relentlessly growing phenomenon of divorce has been accompanied by a massive industry endeavoring to help people live more successfully within marriage. Despite its rapid growth, and despite the sincerity and intensity with which it has been pursued, it cannot run fast enough to keep up with people's expectations. Arguably, in fact, it makes conditions worse by reinforcing and legitimizing expectations which in the nature of human relationships few people are likely to fulfill.

There are many possible explanations of this mystery, among them the question whether it is possible, in a formal educational setting, to teach people how to live. Beyond that is a tendency, perhaps typically American, to see all failure as technical failure, hence the solution to all failure as the ability to make technical adjustments. The popularity of the term "marital breakdown" is an obvious indication of this. Like other contempory neo-logisms, this term aims to evacuate all moral implications from the fact of divorce. The prevailing currents of popular psychology (flowing deep within the churches, among other places) hold that it is wrong and destructive to make, or even to imply, moral judgments about human actions. Instead of condemnation, the argument runs, people should be enabled to understand their problems and then "cope" with them, with moral judgment treated as at best an unproductive luxury, at worst a grim survival of a barbarian past. However laudable such an attitude may be from the standpoint of sparing people's feelings, it is itself destructive insofar as it encourages people to think that what happens to them is beyond their control, that they are simply part of a process to which they must adjust, and that their salvation (if a traditional theological term may be used) will come as a result of advances in what might be called the technology of human relationships. (The "human potential" industry is constantly offering new techniques guaranteed more effective than the old ones in teaching people how to "relate.")

If the term "breakdown," as applied to a marriage, is a mechanistic metaphor, the term "death" is only a limited improvement, for although it recognizes that marriage is a living thing, it also implies something both inevitable and essentially beyond anyone's control. (The term "growth," similarly invoked in matrimonial situations, obviously tends to the same point—although growth can be a freely willed process, it can also be regarded as merely another of nature's marvels, which mysteriously occurs in some cases and not in others.) What many people now seek from marriage is nothing less than an approximation of perfect happiness, as they understand happiness. They seek an almost mystical union with another person which at the same time does not require even the smallest surrender of themselves. They are products of a culture which for years has encouraged people to think that all things are possible and that what one desires can be had at little cost, which above all does not acknowledge that certain things in life (for example, a faithful marital relationship) can usually be bought only at the expense of certain others (constantly new stimulation). This is not a spontaneously achieved attitude. It is relentlessly inculcated into people by the principal agencies of their culture—the mass media, peers, sometimes the schools and the churches.

The more stable period before 1960 helped prepare the way for this by its over-romanticization of marriage. It is appalling to notice, for example, how films of the post-war period presented marriage as the denouement of every situation, the resolution of every difficulty, all problems subsumed into the final kiss. A generation of young people were propagandized to the belief that marriage constituted a permanent plateau of untroubled happiness. One of the serious flaws in the philosophy of "self-fulfillment" is the absence of any even approximately precise idea of what such fulfillment might be like. In practice it seems often to involve nothing less than a rejection of the entire human condition, a demand to be liberated from all natural limitations.

Since marriage is by far the most intense of human relationships, it is a crucial test of the proclaimed humanism and personalism of modern man, a test many people now fail. Ironically, the expectation of full and complete human fulfillment, based on a supposedly high regard for human dignity, leads almost inevitably to a repudiation of that relationship. It is also a crucial test of the responsible use of freedom, also frequently failed, in that prevalent notions of freedom seem to prevent people from making the necessary concessions to the freedom of others which would render such relationships possible. As Joseph Epstein, the author of perhaps the most penetrating study of divorce, has written,

Patriarchy is dead, replaced not by matriarchy, the rule of women, but by a variety of psychic Marxism in marriage, which holds that to each is accorded his own emotional needs—provided, of course, that these needs do not conflict with the emotional needs of the marriage partner. If the emotional needs do conflict—which they cannot help but do, in many cases frequently and irreconcilably—well, that is what divorce courts are for. . . .

What the loss of a sense of community involves is the loss of the ability to imagine that one's actions have any consequence outside one's own life; the accompanying inability to imagine anything more important than one's own happiness.³

Most modern people would probably admit that self-sacrifice does have a legitimate place in love and marriage. However, this is affirmed merely as an abstract reality, one which in practice is systematically evaded by people whose tolerance for the idea is quite low. Traditionally love has been thought of as self-fulfilling through self-giving; contemporary culture seeks to reverse this process, often with the effect of achieving neither. Here lies another of the central ironies of modern culture. For, as people assert their freedom with increasing tenacity, and as they refuse to accept conditions they see as imposed on them by society, they simultaneously refuse to take full personal responsibility for what happens in their lives, including marriage. Indeed, the principal aim of much of modern culture is to "free" people from their own freedom, that is, to divest them of any sense of personal responsibility for their actions. Instead they are encouraged to think of their lives as shaped by forces over which they have little control and to which they should prudently surrender.

In terms of what were previously described as "hard" and "soft" reasons for divorce, it is worth noting that the latter also influence the former. If, as is claimed, unemployment and other economic troubles tend to have deleterious effects on marriage, it is surely worth recalling that the classical idea of marriage holds that adversity should if anything strengthen the couple's loyalty to one another. Ill health and financial reversal often seem now merely to expose the already fragile nature of the commitment, which was sustainable only on a basis of concurrent self-satisfaction. Even where pathologies like alcoholism and mental illness exist, the history of marriage provides numerous instances of healthy spouses who, through genuine fidelity and deep caring, have helped their troubled spouses recover. Now popular wisdom seems to hold that a spouse caught in such a situation has no particular obligation to his or her partner, since one's own happiness is the highest good. (When Henry Fonda died, obituaries recalled that one of his wives had been institutionalized for insanity. Eventually she was released, ostensibly cured. He then told her that he wished to marry another woman, whereupon she killed herself. No one who recalled this story seemed to draw any particular moral lesson from it. It was treated as merely another of those tragedies which modern man seems fated to experience.)

On one level modern culture has taught people to be articulate in ways they never were before, and this is particularly true in terms of popular psychology, where there is available a vocabulary sufficient for rationalizing practically any human action. Where marriage is concerned, it is remarkable, for example, how the simple fact of infidelity—both in the narrow sense of adultery and the broader sense of broken commitments—is so often ignored. Common sense and daily experience argue that many marriages break up mainly because one or both partners simply want to be married to someone else (and to someone else's spouse). They do not feel bound to any commitment they may have made to their own spouses. Often the innocent party in such an affair is devastated by the discovery of the infidelity, which is the crassest kind of callous betrayal. Yet such occurrences are rarely discussed in frank terms but are papered over by the kind of rhetoric which, as noted, seems to treat marriage as a mechanism which from time to time gives way under impersonal pressures for which human beings have no ultimate responsibility. In a society which seems obsessed with considerations of justice, justice is rarely accorded to the victims of unfaithful spouses, even in so elementary a way as by acknowledging the moral wrong of the infidelity.

The removal of the social stigma from divorce involves more than merely a laudable resolve not to inflict unnecessary pain on people who have already suffered a great deal. Taken far enough, it involves a refusal to make any moral judgment about a relationship which involves the full range of human moral actions in a way few other relationships do. If society refuses to decide whether certain people have been bad husbands or wives, in effect it refuses to admit human responsibility for the successful maintenance of marriages. The point is not that divorced people should be ostracized but that divorce should not be treated as merely one more unavoidable social malfunction.

The revolutionary change of attitudes is nowhere more dramatic than in the Catholic Church, which still officially disallows divorce but increasingly finds it possible to annul marriages which previously were considered binding. The merits of the "new norms" for annulments are not at issue here. What is at issue are the attitudes expressed by the clerical leaders of what can be called the Catholic revisionist movement, who seem able to confront divorce with remarkable insouciance. One priest blandly asks, for example, ". . . . how can we talk about the indissolubility of marriage in a world where everything dissolves?; the only constant is change." He goes on to ridicule what he calls the "finger-in-the-dike" approach to marriage, whereby the Church upholds an ideal which is no longer widely accepted: "I think we Roman Catholics should take our fingers out of the dike and learn to swim in this new human era."⁴ In another context he has argued that it is a sign of hope that so many divorced people get remarried, since it shows their commitment to the institution,⁵ a logic whereby it could be argued that, the more divorces, the better, since each divorce provides the divorcee with the opportunity to marry yet again. The point, once again, is not that church officials should seek to ostracize divorced people but that misplaced understanding of "compassion" has brought about a situation in which even religious authorities find it impossible to support the ideal marital fidelity. Their moral energies are mainly directed at easing the Church's acceptance of the divorced, not in attempting to persuade people that commitments are meant to be honored. (As G.K. Chesterton observed, "I take it . . . that advocates of divorce do not mean that marriage is to remain an ideal only in the sense of being almost impossible. They do not mean that a faithful husband is only to be admired as a fanatic.")⁶

Part of the distortion of personality which has occurred in recent times is the assumption that all human decisions are made as a result of mature, deliberate, conscientious communing with the self, and such a decision manifests that self's responsible and courageous freedom. (One Catholic theologian somehow links the growing divorce rate with the increasing "maturity" of today's youth.)⁷ In fact, however, most people make decisions in accordance with the signals they receive from their culture. In earlier times those signals were overwhelmingly unfavorable to divorce. Today the reverse is more nearly the case, and it is not surprising that people do not work harder to overcome their marital difficulties when many even of their religious leaders seem to be telling them that the effort is misplaced. From an excessive harshness by which divorcees were made to feel rejected and despised, the social pendulum has swung to an easy acceptance in which few moral leaders bother to uphold marital permanence even as an ideal. (It is noteworthy that the logic of the present situation seems to dictate not only the permissibility of divorce but almost its desirability, since it can be assumed that few people find with one partner the total fulfilment they seek, and to remain faithful to that partner is thus to settle for a needlessly stunted existence.)

It is extraordinary how few leaders of society, including religious leaders, bother to defend the binding nature of marital vows, except in the most formal and perfunctory way. Contemporary Americans have seemingly settled for a view of life in which no obligation can be binding which interferes with the individual's own quest for fulfillment. (Thus for some years the media have been dealing very sympathetically with parents, usually mothers, who in effect abandon their children in order to "find themselves.") Among both religious leaders and secular professionals, the new conventional wisdom about marriage is that its problems will mainly be solved by the great liberal panacea of more and better education. For example, priests who do not find it possible to accept the permanency of marriage with any conviction are enthusiastic about new requirements that candidates for matrimony take lengthy courses of instruction and refrain from making hasty commitments.

As argued previously, such requirements are at best likely to have a modest effect, since the problem for most people is not a faulty understanding of marriage and its responsibilities, nor even necessarily that they have chosen the "wrong" partner, but unwillingness to make the kind of commitment which marriage requires. Psychotherapy has triumphed even in the churches in its insistence that it does no good to approach human problems in terms of moral exhortations to do better. Yet it seems precisely the right kind of will which is today lacking in so many human relationships, and if moralizing is deemed ineffective, no other remedies for faulty wills have yet been discovered. (Even if moral exhortations do not significantly affect particular individuals, their expression at least signals that a culture is serious about certain subjects. Their absence is likely to be interpreted in the contrary sense.)

Like all social pathologies, divorce is self-reinforcing. Today there is scarcely a family in the United States which does not have some experience of it—if not in the immediate family, then among aunts and uncles, cousins, or in-laws. As a result, it has become in a sense a taboo subject—no one can afford to be in the position of seeming to disapprove of it, even in an abstract way, lest this be felt as a moral condemnation of particular individuals. There is a virtual conspiracy to treat divorce almost as a normal occurrence, lest anyone be offended by signs that it is not. Once again the clergy play a central role—many of them have proven unable, in practice, to separate a stance of compassion and concern towards the divorced from a stance of moral approval of the act itself. The latter stance is often deemed the quickest way to achieve the former, (There are no more heroic or lonely people in America today than divorced Catholics trying to live in accordance with the Church's teaching in the face of priests who in effect tell them they are being foolishly scrupulous.) As part of this conspiracy, it has been necessary to underestimate the effects of divorce on the fabric of society itself. Until a mere decade ago, conventional wisdom, in the social sciences and the "helping professions" attributed all kinds of social pathologies to the effects of "broken homes." Suddenly, as if on cue, the same professions began producing studies purporting to show that having two parents is not necessarily more beneficial than having one and that children do not suffer unduly from the trauma of divorce. Once again, both common sense and available evidence suggest that this is not true. Like the fervent hope that better education will strengthen people's commitments to one another, new beliefs about the effects of divorce mainly reflect the common American hope that things can be bought without cost, that one is never required to make difficult choices in life.

The emphasis on better preparation for marriage has had the virtue of focusing attention on what might be called the objective criteria for marrying—communality of interests, realistic assessment of financial capabilities, etc. But it is arguable that the gravest deficiency in choosing a partner is still for most people insufficient attention to their objective suitability for one another. The culture encourages an approach to marriage which stresses primarily its personal emotional satisfactions. Rarely is it even suggested to young people that they consider marriage in terms of their objective complementarity to one another. This is puzzling. The rise of militant feminism has obviously placed great strain on many marriages and has undoubtedly contributed to many divorces. However, in self-consciously advanced circles virtually everyone is a feminist. When the wife makes that commitment, her husband usually makes it too, and it is common to hear testimony from such people about how their shared feminist perspective has actually strengthened their bond. (The husband does half the house work and takes responsibility for the children as the wife pursues a career.) Yet no one is surprised when such marriages break up, as they seem to with some regularity. Indeed, it seems to be precisely among people who have a shared social and political ideology that fragility of personal relationships is most obvious, possibly because these very ideologies tend to undermine the sense of commitment which is essential for marriage. The same development which leads the couple to embrace militant feminism also deprives them of any real basis for treating marriage as sacred. (Conversely, there is considerable evidence that a deeply shared religious commitment does support marital stability.)

The moral and social crisis reflected in divorce statistics is obviously not a passing thing, nor is it likely to be resolved by any of the quasi-technical solutions which proclaimed "experts" now favor. In times past marriage was primarily thought of as a network of rights and responsibilities, to which the partners committed themselves. For at least two centuries it has been understood in increasingly personalistic terms, to the point where its meaning today is commonly expressed only in those terms. It seems appropriate to ask whether the crisis of marriage, which is merely one manifestation of a deeper crisis of families, does not show personalism at the end of its rope, turned back upon itself and in danger of devouring the very values which it is supposed to promote. What may be required to save both the institution of marriage and civilization is a revolution in attitudes at least as radical as that which ushered in the modern era of marriage.

Endnotes

1 See Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York, 1964).

2 For a discussion of this see Hitchcock, The New Enthusiasts (Chicago, 1982), chs. 3 and 4.

3 Divorce in America (New York, 1974), pp. 88, 94-95.

4 James J. Young, C.S.P., "Misimpressions about Marriage," Commonweal, Nov. 22, 1974, 187-88.

5 Young, "Stabilizing Marriage by Permitting Divorce," National Catholic Reporter, Feb. 1, 1974, 12.

6 The Superstition of Divorce (New York, 1920), p. 134.

7 Bernard Haering, C.Ss.R., in Divorce and Remarriage in the Catholic Church, ed. Lawrence Wrenn (New York, 1973), p. 22. For similar remarks see Msgr. Stephen J. Kelleher, Divorce and Remarriage for Catholics, (Garden City, N.Y. 1973), p. 96.

© Thought: A Review of Culture and Idea, published by Fordham University.

This item 1088 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org