Thoughts on marriage and divorce

My wife and I are separating – slowly and fitfully, but the plan is clear.  We have been married 28 years at this point, and have two sons in high school.  But in many ways the marriage has been very difficult for most of that time.  So I find I have been thinking about divorce more and more during the past few years.  And over that time my thinking has changed.

Back when I was young and things looked simple, I was dead set against divorce.  It looked simple: if you promise that you are going to stay with someone until death, then if your word is any good you honor it.  End of discussion.  If you had asked me to explain myself – why should it matter if you honor your word? – I would have had some trouble to answer.  When I was a kid, I took that as an absolute.

After I had been married for several years, I could have said a little more.  By then I would have said that marriage can be very difficult, but that it’s good for you to be able to endure hardships.  So to make the bond of marriage inviolable means that you can’t just quit when the going gets tough, that you have to come back and work harder and ever harder at it.  But I would have added that in the end it is worth it.  I really believed that.

But is it true?

In passing, I should note that the idea isn’t exactly crazy, or at any rate that others have had it before me.  That hardships build character is a commonplace; when I tell one of my boys that he’s not getting something he wants, he rolls his eyes and says, “I know, I know, it builds character.”  And the story is that Socrates married Xanthippe (proverbially a shrew) for much the same reason:

It is the example of the rider who wishes to become an expert horseman: "None of your soft-mouthed, docile animals for me," he says; "the horse for me to own must show some spirit" in the belief, no doubt, if he can manage such an animal, it will be easy enough to deal with every other horse besides. And that is just my case. I wish to deal with human beings, to associate with man in general; hence my choice of wife. I know full well, if I can tolerate her spirit, I can with ease attach myself to every human being else.

But to say that it is always worth hanging in there is to say that there is something of supreme value in marriage itself.  Is there?  What is the point – the meaning, the value – of marriage?

There’s not a lot said about marriage in classical philosophy, or at least not that I have found yet, outside of purely pragmatic discussions of marriage as just one more of a series of social institutions to be governed by the political order.  I am reasonably sure that Plato never discusses marriage as such outside the Republic and the Laws, although he allows Xanthippe a minor speaking role in the Phaedo.  I’m less confident of the other classical philosophers, but am willing to hazard a guess that marriage didn’t figure very large in their minds.  Certainly the centuries that separate us from them have also changed the institution of marriage in significant ways, so that we come to it with a whole different set of ideals and expectations (among them romantic love and fidelity for the husband).  In the Republic Plato famously abolishes marriage altogether, allowing his citizens to sleep with whomever they like so long as they restrict childbearing.  (He has far more rules about childbearing than about sex.)  In the Laws he reinstates marriage as a practical necessity; but while he gives rules for how marriages shall be conducted, he mentions divorce only once, in Book 6 at 784b:

Let the begetting of children and the supervision of those who are begetting them continue ten years and no longer, during the time when marriage is fruitful. But if any continue without children up to this time, let them take counsel with their kindred and with the women holding the office of overseer and be divorced for their mutual benefit. If, however, any dispute arises about what is proper and for the interest of either party, they shall choose ten of the guardians of the law and abide by their permission and appointment.

Considering the length at which Plato treats other topics in the Laws – think, for example, of the elaborate and lengthy discussion of drinking parties – such a brief mention suggests this really is not a point of interest for him.

But what can we figure out on our own?

I think that in its essence, marriage is about two different things, that it has two different points – leaving aside all the pragmatic considerations that two can live more cheaply together than apart, and that it is convenient to have a guaranteed Friday-night date. 

1. The first is that, as above, marriage is a school for character. 
2. The second is that marriage is an environment for raising children. 

 It’s possible to imagine other effective ways to handle both of these goals; but here in the modern West, none of these other ways is nearly as feasible or effective.  Compared to the available options, marriage really is the best practical way available today to achieve both these ends.*

What do I mean?

When I call marriage a school for character, I’m not being sarcastic.  Every last one of us is born selfish and self-centered.  It is only through interactions with others that we learn to be better than that.  Of course we learn a lot of the basic social skills growing up as children, or going to school.  We learn other skills in the workplace.  But our interactions in the workplace are highly specific, they are filtered to allow only certain kinds of activity.  What’s more, they end at 5:00, or whenever it is that you personally knock off to go home.  The personality you have to display at work can be a kind of role, a mask that you put on in the morning and take off at night.  It is a set of learned behaviors designed to get you what you want (such as not being fired).  As long as you can set it down when you leave work, it’s not really you.

But marriage changes all that.  Now you have to be social and civilized – kind, caring, and unselfish – at home, too.  And it’s not just while doing this one kind of task over and over, or while attending that kind of meeting.  It’s always, and it’s in all circumstances.  Even if your kindness and civility start off as a mask, it’s a mask you can never set down and after a while it becomes a part of you.  You really do have to adapt and change yourself – for the better – in order to live with this other person, and in order to handle all the unpredictable things life will throw at you.  Sometimes your spouse (even the best spouse, to say nothing of a Xanthippe) will make you want to tear your hair out.  But as long as you hang in there you have the opportunity to learn to become better.

What about children?  There has been a lot of research on what children need growing up, and I don’t pretend to be an expert.  But my sense is that much of it bears out what might be considered a reasonable common sense intuition: first, that children need consistency and stability, that they need to know the adults in their lives can be relied upon, that they need multiple adults in their lives so that they have the possibility to stand apart from any single one of them to observe and criticize; but also second, that children are pretty adaptable to any specific configuration of those adults in their lives, so long as all of them are sane, reliable, ethical, and so on.  The first point should be obvious, because how else are children supposed to learn if not by repeated experience?  And without sane, stable adults in their lives that they can trust, children cannot have any repeatable experience from which to learn ethical or moral structures for their lives.  The second point should be obvious because different peoples around the globe have structured family life in different ways, and their children have thrived.  It’s not that this or that structure is the only right one; but some family structure is necessary and no one parent can do it all alone.

So what about divorce?

In general, I’m still against it – or rather, more exactly, I would still urge caution.  Divorce as a way to avoid the inconvenience of other people still strikes me as too cheap and easy; as long as there is a chance for you to grow into a better, wholer human being, you should consider sticking in there and working harder.  Much as I hate to admit it, I learned a huge amount in the almost three decades that I have been married to my wife.  It has been a very rocky road; but I was so much less mature back when we got married that it is embarrassing for me now to think about it.  And what matured me more than anything else in that time was the struggle of my marriage.  If I had stayed single (a fantasy I sometimes indulge in), I would still be the same childish prat now at 50 that I was at 22.

The difference is that I don’t see myself growing any more, except possibly in the wrong direction.  For years my marriage made me more patient, more considerate, less selfish.  But now I am watching the trend reverse: I have finally gotten so fed up with my wife’s multiple crazinesses that I have thrown in the towel, and I am growing ever less patient, less considerate, and more selfish.  This is progress in the wrong direction.  I can’t guarantee that divorce will halt my moral deterioration, but I’m pretty sure that staying married is no longer going to help anything.

What about the children?  That’s still a concern.  It’s probably my biggest worry.  I have tried to cushion the blow.  In the first place, I waited till they were both in high school; and for both of them that has meant boarding school, so they are out of the house.  Until that time, I really did choose, quite consciously, to “stay together for the sake of the children.”  In the second place, … well, we still have to work out custody arrangements, and our state is famous for being unfriendly to fathers.  But they are boys (which should help my odds of spending time with them) and they are old enough for the courts to listen to their opinions.  I hope therefore that we can work out something reasonable.  Naturally if they choose not to spend time with me, there won’t be much I can do about it.  But I don’t really expect that and am hoping for better.

If you take seriously the two goals for marriage that I identify, one unexpected consequence is that there is at least one circumstance in which (I think) divorce should be mandatory.  Well, two. 

The easy and obvious case that everybody recognizes is when there is a risk of physical injury inside the family: if one parent is genuinely at risk of harming the other (or the children), then of course the second parent and the children have to get out.  (For the moment I deliberately bypass the question whether there has been a genuine risk of harm in all cases where there was an allegation of such risk. But if the risk is real, go.)  Sorry, that was a digression.

But the other time when divorce should be mandatory is if you come to realize that the two of you cannot agree on fundamental ethical principles and have not had children yet.  Since children require a stable environment with adults they can trust, the two of you have got to agree on the basics.  That doesn’t mean agreeing on everything – I like mushrooms and my wife hates them, but that’s not why we are divorcing.  But my wife and I disagree about far more basic things, like whether or when it is OK to bend the truth or outright lie, and this means that we don’t have much respect for each other.  (Elsewhere I have written a lot about her lying and how I think she harms herself with it, and some day I might re-post some of that here.)  Of course the boys have detected this lack of mutual respect, and it has been a problem.  The thing is, I saw these disagreements long ago.  If I had had any sense back then, I would have seen that this particular incompatibility (unlike so many others) was not simply a challenge to be overcome with enough love and work but a show-stopper.  But hindsight is often clearer than foresight, especially when the latter is befogged with love and hope.

Note the qualifier, "and have not had children yet."  Once you have them, of course, the whole calculation becomes more complicated because now you owe them something in the way of a stable environment to grow up in.  This is why I call it mandatory to get out before they are born -- or rather, before they are conceived; because afterwards you may no longer have the luxury of divorce, or at any rate not easily or right away.  It becomes a far more difficult calculation.  In my case, as you can tell, I stuck it out for quite a few years.  I tried to model better behavior than my wife did, but it has to be up to some Outside Observer to tell me how well I did.

I guess nothing valuable is easy....

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* When I say there are alternatives, I think for example of other societies around the world that have successfully organized family life in other ways.  I also think of the fantasy of communal life with Plato describes in the Republic, particularly because I don’t think it is so fanciful as many seem to believe.  But that, too, is a topic for another day.  In any event, none of these alternatives is very practical in the modern West.