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Comment by mgamache | Hacker News Reader

Trying not be acerbic but, an article on divorce that doesn't even mention children? Ridiculous and puerile. A divorce without children is a walk in the park. You can sign a few papers, say goodbye, and _never_ have to see that person again. The truth is that it's better for children if parents in a low-conflict marriage to stay together. It's not the right path for everyone, marriage is really complicated and some children are better off with divorced parents. But, that's not a pithy essay targeted at Millennials.

Also: "inconvenient" truth, is it really? Seems vary convenient that the article supports the idea of dumping the guilt you might feel in when dumping your spouse. This is giving comfort to the reader not introducing a truth that makes the reader reconsider the impact of their actions. An inconvenient truth might be that most people that stay married are happy they did.

http://yourdivorcequestions.org/will-divorce-make-me-happier...

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I suspect you've hit the nail on the head of why the social taboo against divorce exists in the first place.

Ceteris paribus, it's better for children if their parents stay together. Therefore we've raised the social cost of a divorce until it's only accessible to people who really need to get out.

Because of cultural changes, this doesn't work as well as it has in the past at keeping couples together. There's good points (fewer people trapped in bad or abusive marriages) and bad points (more families who have to deal with the many practical problems of single parenthood).

> Therefore we've raised the social cost of a divorce until it's only accessible to people who really need to get out

I don't know what the time frame for this statement is, but all over the western world, divorce has been made substantially easier both legally and socially, since the end of WWII.

> Because of cultural changes, this doesn't work as well as it has in the past at keeping couples together.

Obviously culture and law are bound up together, but the advent of no-fault divorce and the decreasing benefits for the married over the unmarried did far more to make divorce easy, common, and therefore more acceptable than easing the stigma ever did directly.

>The truth is that it's better for children if parents in a low-conflict marriage to stay together.

My siblings and I are all young adults in our twenties, but we've wanted our parents to divorce for years now. It's a toxic, abusive relationship that's only still existing because of the conservative Roman Catholic culture they were raised in.

I recently broke up with my girlfriend because I thought and still think she's a bad influence on me; I have no desire to hang out with her. I often wonder what happened when I see couples divorce due to "irreconcilable differences" or couples who remain civil or even friends after divorce.

As a child with parents in a high-conflict marriage, I'm not even clear why parents in a low-conflict marriage would want to get divorced.

It's not a walk in the park. Assets need to be divided. Stay at home moms need to be supported.

Asset division leans heavily towards women. If real sexism exists for males in this country it is especially evident during divorce.

They specifically said a divorce without children. No stay at home moms.

My mistake, I meant stay at home wives.

> The truth is that it's better for children if parents in a low-conflict marriage to stay together.

A low-conflict marriage where the conflict isn't resolved becomes a high-conflict marriage, inevitably.

No, divorce is better for children if there is unresolved conflict. You resolve conflict by the right kind of fighting or struggle (or some approximation thereof) or by splitting up.

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