Apparently that's what's messing everything up, at least according to an interesting ("challenging," "radical") hypothesis by a scholar of marriage and divorce.
In a 2007 paper called "The Origins of Modern Divorce" (Family Process, vol. 46, no.1), Stephanie Coontz writes:
"Contrary to conventional wisdom, the frequency of divorce in modern American society is not entirely unprecedented. Anthropologists report rates of separation and remarriage among many hunting and gathering societies, and in several horticultural groups as well, that are just as high as in modern industrial societies. Malaysia and Indonesia had the highest rates ever recorded in the first half of the 20th century, surpassing the United States' record rates of 1981.
"Nor has divorce always been an arduous process. Among the Shoshone Indians, a wife who wanted a divorce would simply place her husband's possessions outside the dwelling, which belonged to her. Among the Cewa of East Africa, the husband takes his hoe, axe, and sleeping mat when he leaves his wife's village and the divorce is complete.
"...Contrary to later practice, the early Christian church in medieval Europe allowed divorce for several reasons. Some local Church councils even had the equivalent of no-fault divorce, in which a couple was allowed to part after swearing that "communal life has become impossible between us" or that "there is no charity according to God" in the marriage.
"...The origins of our modern divorce patterns lie in the invention of the same values that eventually elevated the marital relationship above all other personal and familial commitments: the concentration of emotion, passion, personal identity, and self-validation in the couple relationship and the attenuation of emotional attachments and obligations beyond the conjugal unit.
"For any particular couple today, the immediate causes of divorce may range from factors as diverse as the personal psychological characteristics of one or both spouses to the stresses of economic hardship and community disintegration.
"But in a larger perspective, both the role of divorce in modern societies and its relatively high occurrence flow from the same development that made good marriages so much more central to people's happiness than through most of the past, and deterioration of a marital relationship so much more traumatic: the very nontraditional idea that marriage should be the most powerful commitment in people's lives."
