A Selection of Books on Divorce
Dear Tony,
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StumbleUponWell, now I'm all fired up. You have fallen right into Wallerstein's trap! You have accepted the notion that, basically, where divorce is concerned, the interests of children and parents are necessarily, fundamentally opposed--that divorce, barring horrible abuse, is always bad for kids. I don't agree.
Sometimes it is bad, yes--and many parents in this situation realize this, and that's one reason there are so many unhappy couples who stay together. I am thinking of people I know--a mother who fell in love with another man but stayed with her husband, the most disagreeable man in the world (although to be fair she's no Princess Charming herself), until the kids finished high school because she didn't want to disrupt their lives at a delicate moment of adolescence. Now she is married to the new man, her former husband is married to a new woman, the kids are grand successes in their fields, and everyone is much nicer than before. To the anti-divorce people, this is a terrible story: There was infidelity! A sacred vow was broken! No one went to Marriage Savers! The children were only college students, barely out of diapers, when the marriage broke up! What about society?! But to me what they did was sensible and right, and the lover who waited patiently in his little studio apartment (it was several years) is a virtual Sir Lancelot of romance.
The point is, the interests of children are not an all-or-nothing thing. Sure, a 5-year-old may not care that Daddy, like Larry's daddy in Wallerstein's book, is a violent misogynist who tried his best to destroy his ex-wife's life--but you don't stay 5 forever. If Larry's parents had stayed together, do you think Larry would be thanking them at 30? What kind of father and husband would Larry be with Dad's example constantly in his face? And what about Larry's sister, whom the father treated with total contempt? Would she be glad her mother endured life with a brute? Little kids may see their parents "as a unit"--but in bad marriages the parents aren't a unit. The children are mistaken--and the older they get, the more they realize this.
The truth is, we make kids do a lot of painful things they don't understand for their own future good, like orthodontics. And we make them do a lot of things that are good for us but maybe not for them, even in the long run--like moving to take that new job, and moving again and again. What kids want when they are kids is not the last word on how their parents make most important decisions--it's one consideration among many. Why should divorce be different?
We hear a lot from people who regret their parents' divorce, but there are also plenty of people who regret their parents' staying together. And I don't just mean people who grew up in violent households, but people who grew up in families in which, for example, silence, contempt, depression, belittlement, anger, and blame (not to mention drinking and drugs and affairs) were the order of the day. You think grown-up women today are grateful their moms put up with awful marriages instead of throwing away the tranquilizers and getting a life? Thanks, Ma! Dad was banging his secretary for 20 years, I never heard you two say "I love you," and I always heard you fighting after you thought I was asleep--but you sure did stay together! Wallerstein proposes that people endure bad marriages "graciously" for the sake of the kids--I think this is beyond human capacity unless both parents are having affairs, on the European plan--but you'll notice structured infidelity is not part of the Wallerstein-Waite-Gallagher program!
Wallerstein (and maybe you too?) seems to think that people can just put up with being cold-shouldered and disrespected and undesired sexually for decades, and that this will have no cost--to themselves or to kids. But of course it does! "He admires me as a wonderful mother," says one woman quoted by Wallerstein as a positive example. "As a wife I bore him in every way possible. But our children are wonderful and that's what counts." Tony, I ask you--what do you think the chances are that those kids don't know that Dad thinks Mom is an idiot, and Mom has decided he's right? What do you think the chances are that Dad will still be with that major drag, his wife, in 10 years when the kids are surly pains-in-the-neck instead of adorable toddlers? And when he leaves, of course, the wife will be devastated and feel cheated, having accepted life as the butt of her husband's disdain as the price of marriage, and probably become very boring in the process!
I think people owe it to their children to divorce in a civilized way--to be generous with money and time, to treat their exes nicely (assuming the ex isn't like Larry's dad, that is), to pay attention to their children's feelings, to avoid bringing home a string of casual partners, and so on. And there are ways in which kids suffer from divorce that public policy can change--letting the custodial parent and the kids live in the family house until the youngest graduates from high school, for instance, instead of requiring an immediate sale, which often means the kids lose their school, neighborhood, and friends. But whether divorce or staying together is the more painful for kids (and for the adults they will become) is a case-by-case question---and Wallerstein's pseudoscience and blanket prescriptions don't help.
Now, to your devil's advocacy on behalf of the conservative view that European-style social benefits fray human bonds. Well, where's the evidence? Europe has a lower divorce rate than we do, fewer people in prison, fewer poor and unhealthy kids; people move less and kill each other less. In Italy and Spain and Central Europe (don't know about the other countries), young people live with their parents much later than here, and generations of families eat together more. Two-thirds of U.S. kids have TVs in their rooms--how's that for fraying a human bond? They may not make a big sentimental fuss about it, but the "bonds of place and kinship" are stronger in welfare-state Western Europe than in shift-for-yourself America. Religion is not--I grant you that, although in my book that's another point in Europe's favor. Interestingly, many European countries have stricter divorce laws than we do--so even on Gallagher-style "morality," the social democratic state wins.
Truth is, the conservatives talk out of both sides of their mouths--they're all for unbridled capitalism, but then they don't like what unbridled capitalism brings: fast food, violent entertainment, drugs, resentful poor people, teen-agers who can pay for their own Eminem CDs and condoms, liberal divorce laws, working moms, daycare. "All that is solid melts into air"--they can't say Marx didn't warn them! You're a bit unfair, though, when you suggest I accuse conservatives of having "a cynical desire to make people unhappy and boss them around." I didn't say anything like that. I don't even think it.
The interesting fact is that divorce is highest exactly where conservative ideology would say it should be lowest--and I don't even mean in the ranks of Republican legislators. The most fundamentalist-Christian states have the highest divorce rates--Oklahoma is way up there--while liberal, secular-minded states like New York (!) have the lowest rates. This is very embarrassing for the Christian right. Fundamentalist pastors have even been quoted wondering if their communities, by making cohabitation unacceptable, cause people to marry too young and too hastily. It could be!
Well, I have really enjoyed this, Tony, but I suppose we have toseparate now as a "Book Club" pair, if not divorce forever. I won't tell Maggie Gallagher if you don't.
Cheers,
Katha
This week, our Book Clubbers examine three books about divorce: Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher's The Case for Marriage and Judith Wallerstein's The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, which argue that even troubled marriages are worth preserving for the kids' sake, and Ann Pearlman's Infidelity, a memoir by a relationship guru who discovered that her husband had been cheating on her. Click here to learn more about the critics and here, here, and here to buy the respective books. 
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How Many Times Can Someone Fire a Pistol in Seven Minutes?
Reader Comments from The Fray:
Reply from co-author, The Case for Marriage:
Katha Pollitt dismisses The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better-Off Financially as a "clip job." Your readers should know that Katha Pollitt, a committed anti-anti-divorce warrior, has already repeatedly publicly condemned me, the Institute for American Values, and more importantly anyone else who thinks we should try to do something about high rates of family fragmentation. Assigning the book to her, balanced by a film critic who doesn't know much about the issue, was not likely to produce a fair, lively, informative exchange on an important public topic, and, surprise, it surely did not.
Readers who are interested in actually following the current marriage debate might like to know: The Case for Marriage synthesizes the latest and best scientific research on marriage, much of it the original work of my co-author, University of Chicago Prof. Linda J. Waite, a leading family sociologist. Here's the new case in a nutshell: marriage changes men and women's lives in very important, life-enhancing ways that other sorts of relationships, such as cohabitation, cannot. Marriage is not just another lifestyle or an emotional relationship, but a powerful, productive, wealth-creating institution that (like education) builds human and social capital and (like education) therefore deserves public support. If we continue to privatize marriage, only the already highly advantaged will receive the benefits of lasting marriage. This is one reason Linda Waite and I call for new public and community strategies to support marriage, and reduce divorce and family fragmentation.
If your readers would like to know "what's new" about the Case for Marriage, I offer these as just three examples: new scientific evidence that 1) explodes the idea that marriage benefits men at women's expense; 2) shows how marriage actually likely reduces the risk of domestic violence, at least compared to cohabitation and 3) demonstrates for the very first time what happens to bad marriages that don't divorce, using a large nationally representative sample. What are your odds of turning a bad marriage around? The Case for Marriage gives you a ringside seat on the latest scientific evidence about marriage that both family scholars and ordinary people are hotly debating.
To pretend that everybody already knows these things and that there is no marriage debate in America is just silly. (Especially silly, come to think of it, a few weeks after Time magazine put "Who Needs a Husband?" on its cover). Pollitt does more damage to her own reputation than ours by trying to pull it off.
To charge Linda Waite and I with animus against women is also silly. Of course people are free to disagree with us and with what we recommend, as good or bad for women or other Americans. But to lapse into ad hominem attacks on our basic good faith is a sign that you've run out of arguments. Linda Waite is a liberal feminist, as well as one the nation's top family scholars. I am a political conservative who has made the well-being of women (yes, and children) the centerpiece of my own heterodox writing career. As someone who was an unwed mother for ten years, I know whereof I speak from personal, as well as professional experience, and the charge that my real goal is to hurt such women is to me, absurd.
If marriage really is powerfully better for women, men, children and society than the alternatives, we aren't doing anyone any favors by pretending that all family forms are equally good, and should be embraced equally.
--Maggie Gallagher
[Director of the Marriage Program Institute for American Values]
(To reply, click here.)
(10/9)
The defensiveness of some of these posts is transparent. In general, divorce hurts children. Moving around is not like divorce. To even hint there might be a similarity is absurd. When you move, the entire universe, which is to say parents and siblings, moves with you. The outside stuff is irrelevant. There is no betrayal, no custody-induced moving on weekends or in the summer. Get real. To say that there are some marriages which ought to end in divorce and soon is not addressing the question of whether it hurts the children. That's the point. Nobody has addressed it. With the exception of a few folks who don't count since their views are inconvenient and so they are demonized as right-wing interfering old fools. Thus, whatever they have to say is meaningless, even if true. That there are marriages which are so bad that children ought to be out of them is also true, but the question is whether that applies to all families in which parents are feeling like getting a divorce. That a number of intelligent, well-read people can so obviously duck the question written in neon is the clearest indication imaginable that kids don't count.
--Richard Aubrey
(To reply, click here.)
Like many people, you seem to have a distaste for generalizations about complex human behavior. You may have a point, but the point is more appropriately placed in your own work against social science, not in a review against a given social science text. If you don't like sociology, or social science, as you imply with that cute poem, you should not read or review this book. Since you readily admit bias against social science, your readers are hard put to take you seriously as a reviewer of social science literature of any kind. The business of sociology is to make generalizations about human behavior. In order to critique sociological arguments, you need to take this as a given.
Arguments stemming from tables of statistics are not necessarily dry or void of emotional content to the reader. Many sports fans don't seem to have trouble incorporating multitudinous tables of stats within their interest in games born out of the passionate support of their local team. Some people are simply not turned off by correlations and regressions that represent patterns in human behavior. If the reviewer finds himself so ill at ease, he should abstain from reviewing such books.
--Jacob Felson
(To reply, click here.)
BT writes in The Fray: "Marriage is not for everyone, and should not be forced down one's throat like cod liver oil."
The point is not to "force" marriage on anyone. In fact, sometimes I think it should be more difficult to get married, based on the casual way some people seem to get married and divorced on a whim. But in this world of rich old men who discard their wives for younger models, of children shuttled back and forth between divorced (and sometimes battling) ex-spouses, of people passing fatal diseases to each other through casual sex, don't you think that more people might benefit from acting on something other than what makes me feel good at the moment? When people stay married for many, many years, it's not necessarily because they never get mad at each other and never desire another partner. Maybe there are a lot of negative reasons for their sticking with it, but I like to think that at least part of it is that they take commitment seriously, and are willing to put up with some unhappiness in exchange for long-term rewards.
--Michael Ladenson
(To reply, click here.)
[This post was part on a longer discussion between Mr Ladenson and BT.]
Notes from the Fray Editor: Everyone is either married or not married, so everyone has an opinion. And a status. And a life story. And advice. Check out Robert K, who says being married is like having a favorite book or food (and no, the conclusion is not romantic: "having sex outside of marriage is as natural as eating more than your favorite food") and then read the thread about Beverley and her marriage plans: that'll teach you to get cynical in The Fray, Robert.
There were plenty of personal experiences, and there was Amanda's jaunty list of ways to stay married. Ray Joseph Boudreaux Jr also offers some rather charming advice. And in an interesting post Dan Perreten says "social norms can favor life-long commitment without making pariahs out of those who need to end their marriage for reasons of abuse."
(9/26)