When should a couple get divorced?

[Maybell]

I never intended to get divorced and I think divorce can be avoided when you are working with two committed people, but if one person is committed and the other isn't, then it's torture for the committed person. If the uncommitted person is going to walk anyway, why not give the committed person the opportunity to be happy?

Divorce being illegal doesn't make marriages happy. It can make them dangerous. Alabama has a kind of "supermarriage" and they have one of the highest divorce rates. It's a form of marriage that was intended for people who don't believe in divorce, like you. But they don't have any better of a success rate than any other kind of marriage, because people are in them. Maybe arranged marriages do all right, but only because they're generally entered into by people who already respect tradition.

You seem to think there's a communal solution to divorce. The truth is, individuals have been acting up in their marriages since there was such a thing as marriage. The reason women fought for it to be easier to get one was to protect the women whose husbands walked out on them or beat them. The Bible itself says that infidelity is a just cause for divorce -- there aren't many people on this board who haven't enjoyed that pleasure.

Historically, you find a lot of instances where unfaithful husbands transmitted STDs to their wives (in the times before there were effective treatments for such things) who then transmitted it to their children. Congenital syphilis is a thing because the difficulty of obtaining divorce prevented women (primarily) from leaving their unfaithful husbands without, literally, an act of Parliament.

At the end of the day, I don't think I accept your premise that people are less committed than they used to be. I think they are exactly as committed as they used to be. Also abusive and unfaithful. Just now they have more options for what to be about the consequences of those uncommitted people who are abusing committed people.

I hate to make this conversation personal, Zues, but I know you're really angry with your ex and I wonder if you aren't universalizing your experience. That because YOU didn't want to be divorced, and you feel like it was avoidable if something could have kept your ex-wife chained to you, that NOBODY should get divorced.

Most of us on these boards have had the infidelity experience. If the Bible says that's a good reason to get divorced -- in fact, it's the Bible's ONLY exception to "till death do us part" -- then why should we second guess that?

Nobody here wanted to be divorced. Most of us feel like we led reasonably happy lives with our spouses, and that they gave us reason to think they felt the same. None of us could do anything about the divorces that we were party to, so why should we think that any act we might endorse would change human nature? Walkaways are going to walk one way or another. It's possible to leave even without a divorce (I think there are some people around who suffered that as well). We can all say people should be raised to be committed, and I assure you, my former in-laws assumed they did raise their son to be committed... So then what????