
The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On (2014) - philangist
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is-over-but-the-myth-lives-on.html
======
PrimalDual
On the other side of the polyamory issue, I am not sure the weakening of
marriage is all that good. Single parenthood doesn’t seem to be that good for
the children and I also dont see how polyamory solves the issues of paternal
responsability. I would also argue for caution when messing with an
institution that has been established on every successful civilization.
Polyamory also seems to ignore certian aspects of human sexual competition
that aren’t really compatible with civilization. I am not saying marriage is a
panacea but it seems to be a reasonable compromise to channel human sexuality
for the good of society.

~~~
ashleyn
>I am not saying marriage is a panacea but it seems to be a reasonable
compromise to channel human sexuality for the good of society.

Or perhaps "society" shouldn't be so arrogantly entitled to intrude on the
consensual relationships I may choose to enter. With regards to _my_
sexuality, I owe "society" absolutely nothing.

~~~
rwcarlsen
That is an interesting way to think considering that you receive _huge_
benefits from society (in addition to some disbenefits). If everybody lived in
a local optimum, the world would probably be a pretty crappy place to live.
There is no way for everybody to have everything they want. We make
compromises that hopefully allow us to live in a more globally optimized
world.

~~~
ashleyn
>There is no way for everybody to have everything they want. We make
compromises that hopefully allow us to live in a more globally optimized
world.

Perhaps not but the best we can do is uphold individual liberty and empower
individuals to make their own choices (and deal with the consequences). This
entails not arrogantly projecting fallacious assumptions codified into law,
such as how women "need" men or that homosexuality is a choice.

~~~
rwcarlsen
Not discussing any of the particular subjects you bring up, but in general
most individual/personal things that people think don't affect others have an
unfortunate way of actually affecting others.

------
dalbasal
So... another example where the relationship between real trends and
statistics and the ones people hear/believe are basically estranged. Pun
intended, I sincerely apologize.

Beyond that.., i still have not heard a narrative that rang true to me. In
some nontrivial senses, I think the instinctive conservative explanations are
probably true. Society did unravel, as women's liberation and other big
cultural shifts happened. Some of this is very simple, financial independence
of both people changes what a marriage is and makes divorce possible.

A lot of this was probably down to feedbacks. Divorce became more common, more
normal than it had been This made it an option, where it hadn't been.

I suspect that the "people just got flakier" narrative is mostly _" kids
today_" BS, but who knows.

The way coupled get together has been totally rattled every generation for 4-5
generations now.

In any case, it's interesting that the trend is reversing. My general
instictive guess is quasi-femenist. The nature of gender relations & marriage
completely changed, starting in the 50s (or maybe the 20s). This basically
broke marriage, as an institution. Maybe we've been putting it back together
in our generation. This is pretty vague though.

I'm still waiting to stumble across a sociological narrative that tickles my
_" ah, that makes sense!_" nerve. It's an interesting question.

~~~
msla
One of the big specific changes was the fact marriage got redefined with the
end of coverture.

"Coverture" isn't even in Firefox's spell-check, which I suppose points to how
obscure it is these days. It used to be part of what marriage _was_ : It was
the fact that a married couple was a single legal person for many purposes,
that person being the husband. Wives couldn't own property in their own names,
couldn't have bank accounts in their own names, and, to a large extent,
couldn't _exist_ in their own names, but had to rely on their husband to
function as an adult.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture)

> Coverture (sometimes spelled couverture) was a legal doctrine whereby, upon
> marriage, a woman's legal rights and obligations were subsumed by those of
> her husband, in accordance with the wife's legal status of _feme covert_. An
> unmarried woman, a _feme sole_ , had the right to own property and make
> contracts in her own name. Coverture arises from the legal fiction that a
> husband and wife are one person.

[snip]

> After the rise of the women's rights movement in the mid-19th century,
> coverture came under increasing criticism as oppressive towards women,
> hindering them from exercising ordinary property rights and entering
> professions. Coverture was first substantially modified by late 19th century
> Married Women's Property Acts passed in various common-law legal
> jurisdictions, and was weakened and eventually eliminated by subsequent
> reforms. Certain aspects of coverture (mainly concerned with preventing a
> wife from unilaterally incurring major financial obligations for which her
> husband would be liable) survived as late as the 1960s in some states of the
> United States.

Quoting Blackstone:

> By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very
> being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or
> at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under
> whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is
> therefore called in our law-French a feme-covert; is said to be covert-
> baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or
> lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon
> this principle, of a union of person in husband and wife, depend almost all
> the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by
> the marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such
> as are merely personal. For this reason, a man cannot grant any thing to his
> wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her
> separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with
> himself: and therefore it is also generally true, that all compacts made
> between husband and wife, when single, are voided by the intermarriage.

Same-sex marriage wasn't a redefinition of marriage: Same-sex marriages are
exactly like all other modern marriages, by which I mean post-coverture
marriages, in terms of the rights and abilities of the married persons and how
they relate to each other legally. However, same-sex marriage is flatly
impossible in any system with coverture: There couldn't be two males in a
marriage, because there could only be _one_ legal person, and there couldn't
be two females in a marriage, because there had to _be_ a legal person. It was
as if the law was asking "Which one of you is the husband?" and expecting an
answer.

~~~
Terr_
I imagine the was a rather small silver-lining: If the husband -- an extra-
loaded term in this context -- ran afoul of the law or king, wouldn't the wife
be considered innocent or "just following orders"?

------
pimmen
I think later marriages is a big contributor to stabilizing divorce rates.

I got married at age 24 and after a very tumultuous time for us with economic
hardships, a more hectic schedule (she was working two jobs at a time while I
was doing my masters and working), death in the family, extended medical leave
because of clinical depression aggravated by the death in the family,
returning to school after her medical leave we grew into different people
after just six years together. We decided to split.

Now that I have a stable job and I've experienced more of life, I know myself
more. I know more about the type of person I would love to spend my life with
and what type of person makes me miserable. And, of course, what makes me a
difficult person to be with and what I can change about that. I believe there
is no such thing as a dream person cut out for everyone of us. I believe
successful marriage is about honesty, expectations and compromises but I also
believe that if we know ourselves better and are less shallow when we decide
to commit to relationships they have a much higher probability of success.

------
carbocation
Contrary to the title, the chart at the top of the page pretty convincingly
shows that the divorce rate is constant across decadal marriage cohorts.

~~~
ModernMech
This chart shows that for example, someone married for 10 years in the 2000s
experiences a ~15% rate of divorce compared to those in the 70s and 80s who
faced a ~20% rate of divorce at the 10 year mark. The trend I see looking at
the 10 year mark is that the 60s had the lowest. The 70s and 80s were the
highest, the 90s subsided, and the 00s are lower still, heading back to 60s
levels. That seems like a surge that is over to me, no?

------
jpeg_hero
>“Two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women,” said William Doherty, a
marriage therapist and professor of family social science at University of
Minnesota, “so when you’re talking about changes in divorce rates, in many
ways you’re talking about changes in women’s expectations.”

~~~
ovulator
I think this statistic doesn't say a whole lot. It means that they were the
legal petitioner asking for the divorce. It doesn't mean they were the one who
wanted out of the marriage.

My ex-wife had an affair and said she wasn't happy in our marriage. I was the
one who did the legal paper work even though I didn't want the divorce, or
initiate it in the relationship, but I was the one who initiated it legally.

~~~
influx
So you “think” it doesn’t say a lot, but the only evidence you offer against a
statistic is anecdotal.

What do you “think” it says then?

~~~
vilmosi
Actually, that's a good point. The initiator of the divorce shouldn't be
assumed to be the cause.

------
curo
Why is the first cohort from the 1960s? Is that a good baseline for
determining whether the divorce surge is over?

------
sli
Article is from 2014, that should probably be in the title.

~~~
sctb
Updated, thanks!

------
magduf
It's not a myth. The article even points out what's really going on, but they
only dedicate at most a paragraph to it: people aren't getting married as
much. The overall marriage rate has fallen, and people are waiting longer than
ever to get married, if they even do. The percentage of the population that's
single is higher than ever.

So sure, the divorce rate has fallen, but if your goal is a society where
people are in stable marriages, we're farther from that goal than ever.
Traditional marriage is slowly dying as an institution.

Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we adopted open and
polyamorous relationships in a large way. They're better for resource-sharing
and avoid the problem with thinking that your partner has to satisfy you in
every way.

~~~
a2tech
Have you ever met someone in a true polyamorous relationship? Like, not just
on the Internet, but in real life? And known them well enough to be a close
confidant?

Because I have. And I'll tell you right now that I've never seen one work.
Someone is always unhappy deep down (and usually everyone is). They'll tell
people its great and that they're just squares for not joining in, but if you
know the parties involved you'll see they're unhappy with their partner and
looking for something elsewhere (but the source unhappiness persists) or
they're doing it because they're afraid of losing someone (in which case
they're secretly jealous and afraid). Not things that make for a happy
relationship.

Now, I don't have a horse in this race. I've always been a 1 person kind of
guy, and my interest in this has always been as an outsider that just wants my
friends to be happy (and if that was an open/many sided relationship that is
100% not an issue). If these relationships had solved their problems or even
made them one iota happier than they had been I'd be as encouraging as anyone.

~~~
montagg
I normally don’t post on HN, but I wanted to to add some clarity to this. My
wife and I are poly. We’ve been poly for about a decade, we were in a triad
for two years (all three partners in relationships with one another), and have
had many committed relationships over that time.

It’s absolutely not for everyone, and anyone who says folks are “too square”
are needlessly self-righteous. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about
polyamory. It’s frankly playing relationships on hard, and you need to be
extra committed to working things out early and often. With the right
personalities, it can force better relationship health because of the high
risk, high reward nature of the lifestyle. I credit poly with giving me and my
wife the skills to have hard conversations early and work through problems in
good faith, and we do our best to conduct ourselves the same way in all our
relationships in order to practice polyamory ethically.

I also take issue with you saying it can “never” work. It absolutely can, but
as I said, it’s not for everyone. It also doesn’t mean every relationship
lasts forever. Looking at any relationship in isolation, it’s just dating;
people fall in and out of love naturally, and there’s very normal feelings of
pain and loss sometimes. Those same feelings don’t stop monogamous folks from
dating, and it’s the same in poly. But when that fallout does occur, there’s a
wider safety net of people who are close to you and care about you and have
more intimate understanding of you than having them as a friends alone, so
there are definitely advantages if you put in the effort.

Because it does involve very different configurations of relationships when
there’s more than one, poly requires rethinking what relationships mean
generally, and it allows for a wider variety of relationship types, and I
don’t just mean a linear friends with benefits to committed marriage. I mean
accepting a broader range of human interactions and expectations as part of a
valid relationship.

The result, if you’re willing to do the work and if it’s something you WANT to
do, is a very rich set of experiences and deep relationships you might not
have if you were monogamous.

So in short: it can work, it’s not for everyone and requires way more work
than monogamy, and it is also inherently no better or worse than monogamy.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Without touching on the ethics of polyamory, "requires way more work than
monogamy" is one way of being worse than monogamy.

It is my perception that a large fraction of marriages that end in divorce, do
so because one or both people aren't willing to put in the work that is needed
to maintain the relationship. Requiring _more_ work... at least for the large
majority of people, that's a fatal flaw.

~~~
donutte
For what it’s worth, I’m poly and I disagree with that characterization.
Polyamorous relationships are held to a different standard.

A monogamous relationship where everyone isn’t having their needs met can
continue in perpetuity, for one reason or another. Such a polyamorous
relationship is more unstable and likely to end more swiftly and decisively.
It’s possible to see that as a good thing.

(If you buy this reading, “open relationships hurt marriages” isn’t a story
about failing poly relationships, it’s a story about monogomous relationships
that already failed without anyone noticing.)

~~~
montagg
I guess one could say both are a lot of work, you’re just doing different
work.

In my experience, poly relationships fail faster, when one doesn’t do the
work, than monogamous relationships, which can linger longer with dysfunction
that doesn’t get addressed. But I think it’s also important to acknowledge
that these aren’t ever hard and fast characterizations—these have been my
views from first- or second-hand experiences with poly, but human
relationships vary considerably, and my experiences (and insights) certainly
won’t match everyone’s.

~~~
magduf
>In my experience, poly relationships fail faster, when one doesn’t do the
work, than monogamous relationships, which can linger longer with dysfunction
that doesn’t get addressed.

Well it kinda makes sense. If you have other options, or even already have
another intimate partner, that makes it a lot easier to just bail out of a
relationship that isn't working out, instead of sticking around hoping things
change.

