Spinoff: Should Divorce Be Easy To Obtain?

[patteeu]

This is one of the question's in Rain Man's "Pick A Fight" thread. It started to generate some discussion and rather than hijacking that thread I thought I'd move it here:

Originally Posted by el borracho

Why wouldn't people want divorces to be easy to obtain? What is the advantage in having unhappy unions?

Originally Posted by tk13

I think the thought process being that if it's hard to obtain a divorce, people won't be so quick to jump into marriage before they're ready...

Originally Posted by morphius

My understanding is that it is good that it is difficult so that people may work harder to keep a marriage going instead of giving up just because things get a little rough.

Originally Posted by morphius

And thats probably a better point.

ugh.

Originally Posted by tk13

I was about to say the same thing about your post....

Originally Posted by patteeu

Every union is unhappy at times. If there isn't an easy way out when the chips are down, many of those marriages would be salvageable.

Originally Posted by J Diddy

That, in my humble opinion, is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. What say you about domestic abuse or other odd situations. Buck up, you can't be done with this asshole, however take comfort in knowing that you have a better chance of being with him/her until the end because no other option presents itself.

It's a myth that fault-based divorce prevents abused spouses from getting out of marriage. As far as I know, abuse has always been a ground for divorce so your concern on this point is largely unwarranted. Even in cases where the abuser is so crafty that he/she can perpetrate the abuse without leaving any evidence, the abused spouse has always had the option to leave the situation with or without a legal divorce. The abuse argument for easy divorce is a canard IMO.

Back in the day, the economics of single income families was more likely to keep an abused spouse in a marriage than the administrative/judicial hurdles to divorce. Nowadays, we don't have nearly as many single income (two parent) families. Women are liberated and are welcome in the workplace.

Making divorce harder to get (i.e. going back to a fault-based system) would keep individuals who have grown bored with their marriage or who have gotten frustrated with the way their spouse loads the toilet paper upside down from walking away in search of a more perfect union.

Do we really not have enough broken homes today that we need to keep whimsical divorces cheap (not counting the support payments, loss of custody, and division of property of course), legal, and relatively common?

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by J Diddy

Because a life in a home where two adults battle each other every day is a healthy environment. I ain't buyin that.

The only thing that I would say that might be in partial agreement with what your saying is that I think there should be some sort of mandatory counseling involved before petitioning for a divorce.

I don't know how many different ways I can say that your abuse/war-of-the-roses scenario isn't the problem in EVERY divorce. For extreme cases like the ones you are fixated on, divorce would be available even under a fault-based system. For the LESS extreme cases, the ones that you seem to ignore, a less permissive divorce law would keep people from splitting at the drop of a hat because the party who wanted to leave would have to bear the economic cost and loss-of-custody cost of the breakup unless they were leaving for a good reason (e.g. abuse, infidelity, etc).

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by Boozer

I'd say that sounds about right. I'm really appalled at the extent some Planet members want the state to interfere with personal relationships.

My political ideology is basically libertarian (although I'm not a utopian). For me this isn't an issue of increased state interference in personal relationships. The state is already up to it's elbows in marriage/divorce. In a divorce, absent mutual agreement by the parties, the state dictates property division, child custody, and future support payments. You can't get much more involved than that.