So "normalize divorce" is pretty backward when what we should be doing is normalizing making sure you're marrying the right person.
Normalize divorce and stop stigmatizing it by calling it bad or evil.
>Making sure you are marrying the right person is normalized.
Absolutely not.
I live in the southern US and we have the culmination of "Young people should get married" coupled with "divorce is bad/evil" and the disincentivization of actually learning about human behaviors/complications before going through something that could be traumatic.
There are a lot of relationships that from an outside and balanced perspective give all the signs they will not work out and will be potentially dangerous for one or both partners in the relationship.
This is good for you, but many people do come out of their marriages much worse off in various ways
> Normalize divorce and stop stigmatizing it by calling it bad or evil
It's not bad or evil, but let's also not pretend that it isn't damaging
The alternative to divorce isn't perfect marriages, it is failed marriages that are inescapable.
I'm sure this has nothing to do with you, but by your comments in this thread, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a friend on a bus one day. We were talking about the unfortunate tendency, in daytoday, of people to shuffle their elderly parents off to nursing homes, rather than to support said parents in some sort of independent living. A nearby passenger jumped into our conversation to argue that there are situations in which the nursing home situation is for the best. Although we agreed with him, he seemed to dislike the fundamental idea of caring for one's elderly parents at all, and subsequently became quite heated.
It's not a false dichotomy between either a jurisdiction must allow instant no-fault divorce for everyone who petitions for it, or none at all.
> Usually one or both parties know the consequences of the divorce and prefer them to the state of the marriage, because the damages are less than if divorce wasn't an option.
Sometimes both parties are reasonably rational and honest and non-adversarial, then again sometimes one or both aren't, and it only takes one party (or their relatives) to make things adversarial. If you as a member of the public want to see it in action, in general you can sit in and observe proceedings in your local courthouse in person, or view the docket of that day's cases, or view the local court calendar online. Often the judge and counsel strongly affect the outcome too, much more than the facts at issue.
> Claiming divorce is some kind of undesirable 'damaged' state is just as stigmatizing as claiming it is 'bad' or 'evil'.
It is not necessarily the end-state of being divorced that is objectively quantifiably the most damaging to both parties' finances, wellness, children, and society at large, it's the expensive non-transparent ordeal of family court itself that can cause damage, as much as (or sometimes more than) the end-state of ending up divorced. Or both. Or neither.
> The alternative to divorce is...
...a less broken set of divorce laws, for which there are multiple viable candidates. Or indeed, marriage(/cohabitation/relationships) continuing to fall out of favor. Other than measuring crude divorce rates and comparing their ratio to crude marriage rates (assuming same jurisdiction, correcting for offset by the (estimated) average length of marriage, and assuming zero internal migration), as marriage becomes less and less common, we're losing the ability to form a quantified picture of human behavior viz. when partnerships/relationships start or end; many countries' censuses no longer track this or being pressued to stop tracking it [1]; it could be inferred from e.g. bank, insurance, household bill arrangements, credit information, public records, but obviously privacy needs to be respected.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_law_by_country
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/05/11/census-bu...
It's pretty easy to create strawmen arguments and argue against those instead of what people actually say, but it makes for at best boring and at worst confusing reading.
It’s not any more damaging than getting married in some cases, or staying married.
Marriage is not some sacred thing to be treasured. It CAN be, but it isn’t inherently good. Inherently, marriage is a legal thing, and that’s about it; being married changes how taxes, confidential medical information, and death are handled, and that’s about it. Every meaning or significance beyond those legal things is up to the happy couple, including how, if, and when, to end the marriage.
The comparison can't be to an imaginary world where everyone always picks the best partner. It has to be to the real world where people don't always pick the best partner and the absence of divorce means they're stuck with them.
NYT Gift Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-wi...
Thanks for sharing the link.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EvvPZFdjyk 22 minutes
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuKV2DI9-Jg 4 minutess
Is it not still good to be exposed to the experiences of others, even if one cannot experience these things themself?
Marriage should be made less artificially blown up with meaning and divorce should not be stigmatized. Instead, if done with a healthy frequency, people divorcing when they notice it is not working, should be applauded, for looking out for their own health.
At the same time people also should learn how to make relationships in general work.
> At the same time people also should learn how to make relationships in general work.
And most importantly, knowing when to do the one or the other.
I think this thought that divorce is bad comes from religion which would end up having to care for abandoned kids (especially when contraception didn't exist so having kids wasn't as much of a choice)
I don't really hear it so much here in Europe except from very religious people. Most people are totally ok with divorce, many aren't even married (I myself never married and I had a gf for 12 years from a Catholic family who also didn't mind at all) and a lot of them are even polyamorous :) I have a feeling that would not go down so well in rural America.