Divorce Is Tearing Up Families--and America

Imagine a world without divorce. Or at least one in which it would be more difficult to obtain and would be held in more disdain than it is today.

It sounds good to those who are justifiably worried about today’s children--half of whom can expect their parents to divorce before they leave home.

The Council on Families in America, a nonpartisan group of scholars and analysts, last week called on legislators, therapists, the media and others to actively promote stable, two-parent married families as a way to stem the tide of troubled children.

In the report “Marriage in America,” they stated: “The most important causal factor of declining child well-being is the remarkable collapse of marriage, leading to growing family instability and decreasing parental investment in children.” They asked for a reconsideration of “no fault” divorce and legal supports for spouses who want to save the marriage.

So what are we to make of those people who swear that splitting up, despite the pain, was the best thing they ever did? To them, the stable two-parent family remains a noble ideal, but “Till death us do part” is a price too high to pay.

If she had been unable to get her divorce 10 years ago, one 47-year-old Los Angeles area woman said, “We would have ended up abusing each other physically. He would have beaten me, or I would have killed him. I don’t know which would have come first.

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“He wouldn’t stay home, he wasn’t parenting. He called me names. There was screaming and yelling. I felt stifled.”

When she left after 15 years, she recalled, her parents said, “We wondered what took you so long.”

Even now she sometimes dreams that she sees her ex-husband lying in the street after having been run over by a truck. “Then I drive over him. I say, ‘Hmm, was that him? Yeah, I guess it was.’ Then I drive over him again and go about my business.”

She went on to have the life she wanted: started a career, bought a $250,000 house, traveled the world. Her ex-husband remained a remote father.

Their son, now 20, has emerged scarred but hopeful. “At first, he couldn’t even say the word divorce . He used to refer to it as the ‘D-word’ until he was 13 or 14.” Now, she said, “He wants to marry and have lots of children and be a father to his children.”

If he had not been able to divorce his third wife, a 54-year-old Orange County man said, “our children would have suffered greatly from being in a house of constant turmoil.”

Because of his past two divorces, he said, he wanted “a strong woman who knew what she wanted. I didn’t understand she was a totally controlling woman. I would go home at night and get within a half dozen blocks and my heart would start pounding. I knew within minutes there would be a confrontation over something.”

He said his daughter, now 13, benefited from the three years he had custody. “That was a very special time for us. I was there with the fevers. When the bad dreams happened. I took cookies to the class parties. I served the Kool-Aid. I learned to comb and brush hair. I took her to manners classes.”

On the other hand, when his second wife left him for another man, he said she took their 2-year-old daughter on a “gypsy” existence around the country. Now 23, the daughter “lost her childhood,” he said, and suffers in her adult relationships.

Researchers don’t understand why our original benign notions of divorce with civilized co-parenting went awry. But they do know that what happens to children is more complicated than marriage equals good, divorce equals bad. Family historian Stephanie Coontz said that studies comparing troubled couples who divorce with equally troubled couples who stay married show that the bad impact of divorce comes mostly from financial loss, school and home relocation, prior parental conflict or prior dysfunction.

One recent study found that adolescents who feel the worst about themselves are those in intact families where fathers are indifferent or withdrawn, she said.

No doubt everyone could use some lessons in common decency, common courtesy and common sense. Rather than stigmatize those who divorce and create self-fulfilling prophecies of doom, Coontz said, “What we have to teach people today is how to strengthen good marriages and how to allow people to exit bad marriages without leaving devastation in their wake.”

Many years ago, the Orange County father said, he had a conversation with a friend whose grandfather had just died, leaving his wife of 50 years. “It impressed me. I said, ‘Your grandmother must be brokenhearted.’ He said, ‘She’s glad the S.O.B. is out of her life.’ What kind of a life is that? Fifty years of hating somebody.

“We’d have a perfect world if everybody would just behave. Unfortunately, everyone doesn’t behave.”

It took a fourth failed marriage, he said, before he realized that some people are cut out for marriage and he’s not one of them. “I don’t think I’m going to do this again.”