Opinion: Al and Tipper and the 'Good Divorce' Myth
AOL News (June 15) -- The separation of Al and Tipper Gore after 40 years as husband and wife produced a flood of commentary concerning what's purportedly impossible, and possible, in modern marriage.
According to rapidly calcifying conventional wisdom, the Gore breakup shows it's impossible to uphold the old ideal of "til death do us part," while their dignity and discretion demonstrate the real possibility of a "good divorce."
Actually, both conclusions contradict reality.
Statistics show that loving, lifetime marriage isn't just possible, it's prevalent. And common sense and sad experience expose the notion of the good divorce as a destructive myth, since the end of every marriage brings pain, problems and damage to society.
Concerning assumptions that marriages all go stale or sour over time, The New York Times recently reported a major study by neuroscientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who monitored brain function in long-term couples to check survivability of romantic love. To their surprise, a full 40 percent of these veteran partners showed intensely romantic neural reactions to each other, resembling the excitement of newly formed relationships. The other 60 percent displayed less spark and heat, but most of them still expressed satisfaction with their spouses, reflecting frequent surveys showing 75 percent of couples registering high contentment levels.
Why, then, do 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce?
The simple answer is, they don't. The 50 percent divorce rate is a pernicious myth that's never been true and grossly misstates the current situation. The divorce rate (measured as number of divorces per population) peaked in 1981 and has gone down dramatically ever since.
Rates of marital failure remain notoriously hard to gauge since no one knows which current marriages will last and which will fail. But the Census Bureau still provides the most authoritative information, listing in the latest available data (2004) the percentage of American adults who've ever married (72 percent) and the percentage ever divorced (22 percent). This means that 70 percent of those who ever married remain with their first spouse, or stayed in that first marriage until the spouse died.
While loving, lasting marriages are, in fact, common, "good divorces" are not. There's an elusive ideal of the amiable, painless dissolution of a dysfunctional relationship that every separating couple says they want but very few actually achieve.
Al and Tipper, for example, may display no public signs of strife, but their broken relationship is already connected to real-world damage: Shortly after they announced their separation, their daughter, Karenna Gore Schiff, announced her own breakup from her husband of 13 years. Failed marriages produce children themselves more likely to divorce, and though causation may be arguable, correlation is not.
My own family exemplifies that reality: My late parents split after 28 years of marriage, and three of their four sons (including me) have also experienced marital breakup.
In my case, I worked closely with my ex-wife to make our divorce as painless as possible. We had no children, and our assets were modest enough to avoid big fights over money. Still, our separation brought discomfort and sadness to everyone we knew, and we failed in our determination to maintain a long-term "friendship."
I've been married to my wife, Diane (the mother of our three children), for 25 years now, and I've had no contact at all with my ex (who's also remarried) for at least 15 years --- other than the wistful exchange of condolence notes at the death of our respective fathers.
Not every divorce must become a nightmare, but they all bring some sense of failure and they all cost money. Aside from legal bills, there's the added expense of setting up two separate households to replace one, plus unavoidable awkwardness at holidays, birthdays or other family occasions.
No one has written better about the "ruinous ripples" of divorce than my wife, Dr. Diane Medved, in her 1990 best seller, "The Case Against Divorce." Those closest to the couple feel the impact most -- particularly children and parents, who often see the abrupt end of relationships they once valued. The negativity spreads from there, affecting friends (perplexed by conflicted loyalties), communities (divorces can devastate a church, for instance) and society at large, with costs in lost savings, stability and even health.
The problem with platitudes about the good divorce is that they inevitably encourage marital breakup, just as the myth that most marriages are bound to fail discourages wedlock.
If we kept the situation in honest perspective, high-profile separations like Al and Tipper's shouldn't reassure potentially divorcing couples, or in any way alarm the American majority who strive to sustain their long-term marriages.
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