Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook; Mr. and Mrs. A-Rod — apparently, divorce is in. Between 1998 and 2000, there were nearly a million divorces annually, launching two million adults back into the single life each year, compared to about half as many between 1950 and 1970. How did "till death do us part" become so negotiable?
If you had told the Founding Fathers that "irreconcilable differences" would one day be a valid reason for ending a marriage, they would have laughed in your face. Back then, marriage was about economics and dynastic politics, not personal happiness. Henry VIII ended the medieval church's ban on divorce only because because he needed a male heir. In a world where marriage was an economic institution, the divorce rate was relatively low.
This doesn't mean divorce never happened, however. The "wife sales" made famous in Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge were, in reality, English rural-folk divorces in which the participants knew one another, and the wife being "sold" was often already sleeping with her "buyer." The "better sort," on the other hand, didn't get divorced — they just downed another bottle of claret or went off to the bordello.
The situation in America, where a man could lose himself on the vast frontier, had a different twist. Divorce was a woman's weapon, argues Norma Basch in Framing American Divorce.
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That said, there's no doubt that the divorce rate, which began creeping upward during the Civil War, spiked dramatically in the 1970s. There were several reasons for this. First, while divorce laws had traditionally been more lenient in western states — due to an overpopulation of single men who had left wives and families back East — California's 1969 Family Law Act changed everything by creating "no-fault" divorce. Instead of treating marriage as an institution that should be preserved at all costs, no-fault divorce viewed it as a voluntary union between two equals that could be dissolved at will. A spouse who wanted a divorce no longer had to prove wrongdoing in an adversarial setting; the separation could be amicable, and mutual incompatibility — "irreconcilable differences" — was enough to begin proceedings. Other states quickly followed California's lead; today, some form of no-fault divorce is available in all fifty states.
A second reason was social. By the early '70s, older adults, many of whom had married young in the domesticity-oriented postwar era, were slowly beginning to accept the tenets of the sexual revolution. While some began swinging or hanging out at places like Plato's Retreat, for the vast majority of couples, the solution to an unhappy situation was rejecting the "until death do us part" clause.
According to the Census Bureau, some 2.2 percent of the male population aged fifteen years and older was divorced and not remarried in 1970; that number more than doubled to 4.8 percent by 1980. Amongst women, the numbers were 3.5 percent in 1970 and 6.6 percent in 1980. As a March 12, 1973 Newsweek article noted, "Books on how to initiate and survive divorce are crowding sex manuals in the bookstores. Divorce insurance is being promoted by some feminists, lawyers, and legislators. Divorce greeting cards toast the uncoupling. Organizations like Parents Without Partners are springing up everywhere to offer counsel and companionship to the divorced . . ."
It wasn't that marriages had become worse in the mid-twentieth century, but rather that the "mystique" of the unbreakable marriage had faded. "Do your own thing" had been taken to its ultimate conclusion — only instead of the children, it was now the parents who were rebelling.
Furthermore, what people expected from marriage had changed. Rather than the symbiosis-for-survival of our ancestors, companionship and sexual satisfaction were now highest on the list of reasons to marry. Divorcing for "incompatibility" is the obvious flip side of marrying for love. If we hold the first up as an unimpeachable truth, we have to recognize that the other goes with it. As marrying for personal happiness has grown into a secular commandment, so too has divorcing for unhappiness.
"It won't do here simply to say that traditional marriage is crumbling, because marriage in the West seems to have been crumbling undeviatingly, generation by generation, since the time of Jeremiah. (Read Seneca. Read Dante. Read Billy Graham, who will quote you Jeremiah, thereby putting everything in perspective)," commented Newsweek general editor Richard Boeth, himself twice divorced, in the 1973 divorce issue. "It is novel and bizarre of us latter-day Westernoids to imagine that we can make something tolerable of marriage."
But if those dour, divorce-forbidding nineteenth-century judges recognized something we didn't, it was that the social fallout of divorce lands well outside the initial blast radius. To begin with, the rise in divorce spawned a new category of singles — older adults set loose in the new and bewildering post-sexual-revolution world. Many men were delighted by a world of free and easy sex, where the fantasies of their adolescence seemed to have come true, while others, having gone directly from their mothers' cooking to their wives', were quick to remarry.
Many women — often burdened with the dual responsibilities of childcare and breadwinning, and flustered by men who wanted to pursue women half their age — had a more difficult time. In 1970, the Presidential Economic Report that Nixon sent to Congress revealed that women, with few exceptions, overwhelmingly remained in traditionally female jobs, such as nurses, secretaries, and telephone operators. Moreover, they only earned eighty percent of what men did, even when number of hours worked, education, and experience were equal. Thus, while some divorcˇes, like Betty Dodson, were delighted by the opportunity for sexual exploration, for many, the net result of divorce was a loss of socioeconomic status.
Another legacy of the divorce trend is that it birthed a generation of children accustomed to seeing roughly one out of every two marriages end up before a judge. Thus, many of us who came of age since the 1970s have become uniquely cynical about committed relationships, no matter how necessary they may seem in the age of AIDS. In a culture where marriage is no longer forever, serial monogamy has become the new model, and the knowledge that we can always get a new partner lets us make poor relationship decisions. Furthermore, since the original rationale for marriage has been rendered moot by modern economics and the ideals of feminism, there seems little wisdom in making long-term plans. We've become marriage-shy short-term thinkers.
So while conservatives might point to the fact that the per-capita divorce rate has dropped 5% since 1980, the fact is, the marriage rate has also dropped 50% since 1970. Divorce rates have fallen simply because less of us are getting married. In some ways, we've come full-circle, from the old pragmatic duty-model of marriage, to marriage for love, and back to a new sort of pragmatism. n°