Why not? Sometimes things just don’t work out. It’s obviously worse than staying together and being happy about it, but it’s a sunk cost fallacy to think you should always repair your marriage instead of finding a new partner.
There are two ways to think about this.
The first is that once your car gets too broken to repair, you should just ditch it and get a new one.
The other is that once your arm/ankle/hip/liver has problems, you should just transplant a new one instead of doing physical therapy/exercise/eating healthier/drinking less.
In my experience, marriage is much closer to the latter situation than the former.
If you're curious what those "fixes" are for the latter, see https://www.gottman.com/product/the-seven-principles-for-mak....
This is unhelpfully extending the metaphor into a straw man. It's simple enough to see the point.
In your example, your ankle is under your control - if you want to exercise it, you can. Your ankle doesn't actively sabotage your body (or if it does spread infection/etc, amputation is often used).
A marriage depends on two people working together to build a life together. If one person is not willing to put in that effort, the marriage fails.
There are, of course, many situations where divorce is not the right answer for that situation, just like there are many situations for which a hip replacement is not the right answer. But it is within the set of potential right answers across all situations. There's no sense in trying to replace what is easily repairable, and there's also no sense in spending your life trying to repair what needs to be replaced.
And it's totally possible to go through life where neither you nor anyone you know ought to get a divorce - just like it's totally possible to go through life knowing nobody who needs a hip replacement, but that is hardly evidence that the procedure is the wrong answer for everyone!
That's also the generation of people who don't go to the hospital because anything hurts. They go to the hospital 5 years later for something unrelated, when it's discovered it's 4 years too late to do anything about it.
I guess if you discount the "for better and for worse" part of the vows you take to one another....
Because marriage is intended as an act of lifetime committent to what is seen as a positive relationship, and so failing this original intent can never be a measure of success.. Preferable to 'failing' in the sense of staying in a 'failed marriage' (where the 'positive relationship' is no more positive) perhaps, but both of these are 'failures'.
For most of history marriage was property transfer, let's not pretend it's something more romantic than it is.
Failing to see how this debunks either 'lifetime committment' or 'positive relationship' which are the only logical assertions I made - I did not attempt to qualify how to ascertain 'positive'; financial benefit can also be construed as 'positive'.
Bad people don't tend to go around being bad unless they think they can get away with it. Once someone has pinky swore to dedicate their life to them, no matter what they might do, the true colors come out. I've seen it too many times, the idea does more harm than good.
Life-long good marriages exists, I hope to achieve one myself, but the silly oath doesn't help them in any way, and it makes the bad ones worse.
> Life-long good marriages exists
I'm sure you have this reconciled somehow, but it sounds contradictory to me.
Maybe if the oaths contained an "unless you become an asshole" clause, they'd be more valuable.
"Preferable to 'failing' in the sense of staying in a 'failed marriage' (where the 'positive relationship' is no more positive) perhaps, but both of these are 'failures'. "
sigh.
If you're married to someone you don't want to be married to, sure sometimes things just don't work out.
If you're a kid and your parents failed marriage is destroying your life, I don't think "sometimes things just don't work out" is the answer.