Divorce and Remarriage

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12.5: The Politics of Divorce Objective: Explain the consequences of divorce on individuals and society

There is an ongoing, contentious debate among scholars, religious leaders, marriage counselors, and others over divorce and its consequences for individuals and society. The two positions are summarized by Paul Amato:

[The family] is the setting in which adults achieve a sense of meaning, stability, and security and the setting in which children develop into healthy, competent, and productive citizens. According to this view, the spread of single-parent families contributes to many social problems, including poverty, crime, substance abuse, declining academic standards, and the erosion of neighborhoods and communities. . . . In contrast, [others] argue that adults find fulfillment, and children develop successfully, in a variety of family structures. According to this view, divorce, although temporarily stressful, represents a second chance for happiness for adults and an escape from a dysfunctional home environment for children. Poverty, abuse, neglect, poorly funded schools, and a lack of governmental services represent more serious threats to the well-being of adults and children than does marital instability. (Amato, 2001:1270; see also (Amato et al., 2007:4– 8)

For arguments supporting the conservative position, see (Glenn, 1996; (Popenoe, 2005; and (Wallerstein et al., 2000; for the liberal position, see (Coontz, 1992; and (Stacey, 1996. (See Emergent Family Trends: Stronger Marriages or Serial Marriages?.)

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Emergent Family Trends Stronger Marriages or Serial Marriages?

The marriage failure rate has hovered between 40 and 50 percent over the last two

decades. Not only are almost half of contemporary marriages ending in divorce but

many of the marriages that stay intact are not necessarily happy unions.

Stronger Marriages or Serial Marriages? Divorces now are occurring progressively earlier in marriage with most occurring around 7 years.

One response to this impermanence of marriage has been the organized attempt to

make marriages and divorces more difficult to obtain.

Several state legislatures (Oklahoma, Arizona, Maryland, Florida, and Wisconsin) have started programs to cut the divorce rate. Oklahoma, for example, ties receipt of monthly

welfare benefits to the recipients’ attendance at marriage workshops (Tyre, 2002). 

At the federal level, President Bush set aside $100 million in welfare funds for state-run

programs that support marriage. In the religious sector, “Marriage Savers,” for example, has organized clergy in 146 cities to promote Community Marriage Policies and

Covenants, which require engaged couples to take 4 months of religious marriage-

preparation counseling. Evangelical Christians also campaign for state laws permitting

“covenant marriage.” Louisiana and Arkansas have such laws that allow couples to sign

restrictive marriage contracts that make divorce almost impossible (Stacey, 2001). 

Secular groups such as the Institute for American Values, the Council on Families in

America, the Communitarian Network, the National Marriage Project, Focus on the

Family, and Smart Marriages work to promote promarriage and antidivorce policies.

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Will these efforts bring about a lifetime marriage renaissance or will divorce rates

remain high? 

Pamela Paul in her book, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony (2002),

argues that there is a conflict between our traditional concept of marriage, which has

not changed, and the society surrounding it, which has changed. There are several

social trends and norms that make contemporary marriages shorter and less stable.

Among these are the following:

People are living to an increasing old age, twice as long as 100

years ago

 Active parenting takes up about 20 years, leaving couples with 45

years or so as a couple; 

 Typically, people entering the workforce will have five or six careers over a span of 50 years or so

 Young marrieds today are the children of the 1970s and 1980s

divorce generation

 Both spouses are now in the workforce, freeing women from the

confines of the home and providing them with the possibility of

economic independence as well as fulfilling nonfamilial roles.

In the light of these trends is it realistic to assume that spouses chosen in their twenties will be appropriate for other stages in life?

Traditionalists argue that we need high-commitment relationships that keep spouses

together regardless of the changes in their lives. At the other extreme are those who

foresee a series of “temporary marriages” (a phenomenon called “serial monogamy”),

one for each stage in life, or there might be renewable marriages, which get evaluated every 5 years or so (Ehrenreich, 2000b).

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Is there value in a marriage contract that asks partners to regularly assess their

commitment, perhaps at a regular interval (5 years? 20 years? Or surrounding life

events such as when to have children, changes in job or occupation, or when the children leave home?) (Stephanie Coontz, cited in Richtel, 2012). Whatever the future,

couples will continue to marry. The question is how permanent will that marital bond

be?

Amato’s review of the accumulated scholarship on the consequences of divorce leads him to conclude that both of these views are one-sided accentuations of reality.

The increase in marital instability has not brought society to the brink of chaos, but neither has it led to a golden age of freedom and self- actualization. Divorce benefits some individuals, leads others to experience temporary decrements in well-being that improve over time, and forces others on a downward cycle from which they might never fully recover. (Amato, 2001:1282)

As for the effects on children, “the fact of the matter is that most kids from divorced families do manage to overcome their problems and do have good lives” (Amato, quoted in (Kirn, 2000:78).

The leading conservative treatise on the negative impacts of divorce on children is by Judith Wallerstein and her associates (2000). They argue that the children of divorce suffer greatly from this trauma, with only a minority managing to construct successful personal lives. Consequently, the authors

conclude that parents in unhappy, loveless, but low-conflict marriages should

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stay together for the sake of their children. Family scholar Andrew Cherlin, in his review and critique of this book, questions the research and conclusions of Wallerstein and her colleagues. His conclusion, as did Amato’s, takes the middle ground in the political debate over divorce.

What divorce does to children is to raise the risk of serious long-term problems, such as severe anxiety or depression, having a child as a teenager or failing to graduate from high school. But the risk is still low enough that most children in divorced families don’t have these problems. . . . Wallerstein encourages readers to believe that most of their commitment problems stem from their parents’ divorces. But parental divorce isn’t that powerful, and its effects aren’t that pervasive. To be sure, it raises the chances that children will run into problems in adulthood, but most of them don’t. (Cherlin, 2000:68; see also (Amato, 2004)