by Sotiris Rex

The divorce rate is not an indicator of a degenerate society. It is a sign of freedom. A low divorce rate does not necessarily mean happy marriages; it means people are unable to escape the hellish ones. Take cultures with forced marriages and an insanely difficult — if not impossible — avenue toward divorce, and tell me how their low divorce rate is an indicator of a “healthy” society.

Access to divorce

Imagine punishing a man or a woman for wanting to escape a marriage they were forced into by authoritarian regimes or families. Or imagine punishing someone for changing their mind after having grown beyond their bad decision-making.

Yes, we are all responsible for our bad choices, because someone has to pay the price, but no arbitrary government should get to decide that punishment for you. A bad choice in a romantic partner is not a crime since both are responsible. Wrong choices and your personal consequences are punishment enough. And what about the children who are innocent in this arrangement? Keep reading further.

Meaning

The ease of divorce makes marriage all the more meaningful. The only relationships that matter are the ones you can exit without consequence, and yet you still choose to stay.

You don’t want a society where it’s difficult to get a divorce. You want a world where divorce is without punishment, yet couples still choose to stay together.

You want a romantic partner who can leave you anytime with ease, and even be rewarded by one-sided family law, but they still choose to stay with you. Otherwise, you’re interested in a slave, someone bound to you out of desperate need and lack of options, not a loving partner.

Honest expression

When divorce is punished and difficult to get, then we’re forcing the people who loathe each other to stay together, and worse of all, we’re condemning their children to take the burden of such a hellish arrangement, since children are the passive receivers of the parents’ frustrations.

Every single divorce had good reasons to happen, unlike many marriages that can occur under exploitation, deceit, embarrassment, social stigma, fear of loneliness, fear of breaking up, backward religions, or the need for alliances with neighbouring kingdoms. No one can force you or deceive you into getting a divorce.

Even if your partner wants a divorce, and not you, it’s still a divorce that needs to happen.

Many marriages have been the product of a lack of awareness. Divorce comes after situational and self-awareness have been expanded.

When divorce is easy, you know people’s true intentions towards you. You wouldn’t want a romantic partner who couldn’t express whether they wanted to be with you or not. You’d be wondering whether they organically wanted to be with you or if they were simply faking it to get by in a forced arrangement, a mistake from which they can’t escape.

Objection

“But if it’s easy to divorce, then couples won’t try to patch things up.”

This objection doesn’t make any sense. Nothing will be fixed if it has to be forced. At best, it will be a resentful compromise. If couples have problems, they can freely choose to solve them together or break up. If one of the two, or both, believes that severing the relationship is preferable to trying to mend broken glass, then there is no point in forcing them to “fix” anything.

If they can’t fix it voluntarily, then it’s either unfixable, or the fix isn’t worth it for both or one of them.

If it’s fixable or if there is a mutual intent to fix an issue in the relationship, then there is no need to force it. If it isn’t fixable, or there is no mutual intent to fix it, then forcing it is a bad idea.

Force doesn’t fix; it festers. If anything, the ease of divorce tends to bring problems to the surface rather than keep them bottled up until they build up and erupt.

In any interaction, if you have the option to leave, you are more empowered and more valued. And when you are valued, you can value others more, too.

The children

“And what about the children?”

Exactly. Would children want to grow up in a deception of supposedly loving parents?

I resent this narrative that, supposedly, parents decide to “sacrifice” themselves, and stick together “for the children”. Give me a fucking break. This is a lie to cover for their fear of loneliness and the stigma of the divorcee, the line, the narrative they keep spinning to cover their cowardice, even if it means burdening their children with blame. Not only is this selfish, but it also burdens the children with guilt and existential trauma.

Children would rather see their parents together, yes, but not if ‘together’ means hating each other, fighting, accusing, screaming, threatening, and creating an unsafe environment for the children to grow up in. This only conditions children to be insecure and afraid by default, projecting those feelings onto their daily interactions, which basically cripples them for life, no matter how much therapy they do.

Children blame themselves for the suffering of their parents, especially if the parents whine about “staying together because of the kids”. Really? You burden your innocent children with your bad choices, especially when “staying for them” is a lie? You’re not staying together because of the kids; you’re doing it for yourself. It’s your fear of staying alone, unwanted and stigmatised that makes you choose to stay in an unhappy marriage. And then you have the gall to claim that you “love your children” enough to sacrifice for them? Really? You throw your children under the bus to mask your denialism, sell their lives out to mitigate your shame and fear of loneliness.

The child ponders: “My parents are miserable together, but they stay together because of me. I have condemned them, and I keep condemning them in this horrible life. It would have been better had I never been born”.

I grew up in a household where I would beg my parents to divorce. The non-stop screaming, intimidation, and abuse made it a hell to grow up in. Yet, my enmeshing mother would instead burden us with the guilt of her having to endure an abusive husband, supposedly “for us”. They were both afraid to be alone and stigmatised as “divorcees”. That was all they cared about, not the well-being of their children. If they really cared about their children, then they’d either control themselves or just split. I mean, they could control themselves in front of other people, just not their children, the ones they claimed to love. But I’ve said it before: for the vast majority of parents, parenting is self-serving and narcissistic.

No, nobody stays in a horrible marriage “for the children”. Instead, they stay out of selfishness. The true sacrifice is divorce: divorce for the children.

Children would do anything to see their parents happy. Children are biologically programmed to believe that their entire existence is to make their parents happy. If the parents are unhappy, then the children conclude that they themselves are deficient, useless, or bad. They blame themselves for everything.

But this is not the worst part of the story…

Parents who are unhappy with each other — yet still stay together while blaming the children for it — will eventually believe their own lies and resent those children who aren’t to blame at all. They will blame their children for their own bad choices. And they will act on that resentment in physical and psychological abuse, neglect, passive aggression, and (perhaps the worst of them all) identity-denying enmeshment.

Let’s be honest: unhappy parents stick together because they want to keep their human pets. The pleasure that children give to parents is what any mindless dog gives to its owners. Dogs worship their owner, no matter how shitty the owners are to everyone, including the dogs. Of course, people love pets, animal or human alike; pets, especially the worshipping kind like dogs and human children, feed your ego and condition you to feel entitled to acceptance without having to earn it.

Narcissists need their validating Tamagotchis: either pets, children, or submissive spouses.

Takeaway

Many have married for the wrong reasons; no one has divorced for the wrong reasons. A high divorce rate is not an indication of social disease, but of healing.

Peace doesn’t always come with compromise. If anything, reluctant compromise builds up resentment and increases the likelihood of conflict.

Oftentimes, peace comes from a healthy distance. Good fences make good neighbours, and personal boundaries promote respectful love rather than mutual exploitation or inevitable settling.

Either on a personal level or a societal one, incompatible people should maintain a healthy distance if they are to be peaceful. You can be friendly with most people if you stay apart most of the time. If you’re forced to live together, I guarantee you’ll become enemies with most.

Shotgun weddings and marriages under pressure serve no one, not even the ones holding the shotgun.

This is why I promote the notion that forced “unity” is a recipe for destruction. Empires lead to war because they force incompatible cultures to live together. Forcing them to live together is a mistake. Want peace in the Middle East? Give each tiny region its independence. Israel-Palestine should be split into 10 independent states. Yugoslavia saw peace when it was split; Germany saw disastrous wars right after its states were unified. The “republics” of the Soviet Union saw monstrous authoritarianism as the only way to keep disparate people together. No matter how bad things are for them still, they’re not even nearly as bad as they were then. Lebanon will see peace when it is dissected into independent mini-states. The same goes for Europe; Europeans will see freedom when the EU dissolves, and when Europe splits into thousands of little Lichtensteins. The UK will return to order when each kingdom gets back its sovereignty, and then each country becomes an independent state. And the USA will finally escape the imperialist contract with the devil it has enslaved itself with, once its states start succeeding.

Last thought

The ease of divorce makes marriage all the more meaningful. If you can leave at any point, no questions asked, and you still choose to stay, then that’s a place worth being. This applies to every other relationship, too, especially in negotiation.

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