against divorce essay

Essays About Divorce: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Essays about divorce can be challenging to write; read on to see our top essay examples and writing prompts to help you get started.

Divorce is the legal termination of a marriage. It can be a messy affair, especially if it includes children. Dividing the couple’s assets also often causes chaos when divorce proceedings are in session. 

Divorce also touches and considers religion and tradition. Therefore, laws are formed depending on the country’s history, culture, and belief system.

To help you choose what you want to talk about regarding this topic, here are examples you can read to get an idea of what kind of essay you want to write.

1. Divorce Should Be Legalized in the Philippines by Ernestine Montgomery

2. to divorce or not to divorce by mark ghantous, 3. what if you mess up by manis friedman, 4. divorce: a life-changing experience by writer louie, 5. divorce’s effects on early adult relationships by percy massey, 1. the major reasons for divorce, 2. why i support divorce, 3. my divorce experience, 4. how to avoid divorce, 5. divorce and its effects on my family, 6. the consequences of divorce, 7. divorce laws around the world.

“What we need is a divorce law that defines clearly and unequivocally the grounds and terms for terminating a marriage… Divorce is a choice and we all should have the freedom to make choices… in cases where a union is more harmful than beneficial, a divorce can be benevolent and less hurtful way of severing ties with your partner.”

As the title suggests, Montgomery and his other colleagues discuss why the Philippines, a predominantly Catholic country, needs to allow divorce. Then, to strengthen his argument, he mentions that Spain, the root of Christianity, and Italy, where the Vatican City is, administer divorce. 

He also mentions bills, relevant figures, and statistics to make his case in favor of divorce more compelling. Montgomery adds that people who want a divorce don’t necessarily mean they want to marry again, citing other motives such as abuse and marital failure.

“Divorce, being the final step in a detrimental marriage, brings upon the gruesome decision as to whether a married couple wishes to end that once made commitment they had for each other. As opposed to the present, divorce was rare in ancient times…”

Ghantous starts his essay with what divorce means, as not only an end of a commitment but also the termination of legal duties and other obligations of the couple to each other. He then talks about divorce in ancient times, when men had superior control over women and their children. He also mentions Caroline Norton, who fought with English family law that was clearly against women.

“So even though G‑d has rules,… laws,… divine commandments, when you sin, He tells you: ‘You messed up? Try again.’ That’s exactly how you should be married — by treating your spouse the way G‑d treats you. With that much mercy and compassion, that much kindness and consideration.”

Friedman’s essay discusses how the Torah sees marriage and divorce and explains it by recounting a scene with his daughters where they couldn’t follow a recipe. He includes good treatment and forgiveness necessary in spouses. But he also explains that God understands and doesn’t want people in a failed marriage to continue hurting. You might also be interested in these essays about commitment .

“Depending on the reasons that led up to the divorce the effects can vary… I was fourteen years old and the one child that suffered the most emotional damage… My parents did not discuss their reasons for the divorce with me, they didn’t have to, and I knew the reasons.”

The author starts the essay by citing the famous marital promise: “For better or worse, for richer or poorer,” before going in-depth regarding the divorce rate among Americans. He further expounds on how common divorce is, including its legalities. Although divorce has established legal grounds, it doesn’t consider the emotional trauma it will cause, especially for children.

Louie recounts how his life changed when his dad moved out, listing why his parents divorced. He ends the essay by saying society is at fault for commercializing divorce as if it’s the only option.

“With divorce becoming more prevalent, many researchers have taken it upon themselves to explore many aspects of this topic such as evolving attitudes, what causes divorce, and how it effects the outcome of children’s lives.”

Massey examines the causes of divorce and how it impacts children’s well-being by citing many relevant research studies. Some of the things he mentions are the connection between the child’s mental health, behavioral issues, and future relationships. Another is the trauma a child can endure during the divorce proceedings.

He also mentions that some children who had a broken family put marriage on a pedestal. As a result, they do their best to create a better future family and treat their children better.

Top 7 Prompts on Essays About Divorce

After adding to your knowledge about the subject, you’re better prepared to write essays about divorce.

There are many causes of the dissolution of marriage, and many essays have already discussed these reasons. However, you can explain these reasons differently. For example, you can focus on domestic abuse, constant fighting, infidelity, financial issues, etc.

If you want to make your piece stand out, you can include your personal experience, but only if you’re comfortable sharing your story with others. 

If you believe divorce offers a better life for all parties involved, list these benefits and explain them. Then, you can focus on a specific pro of legalizing divorce, such as getting out of an abusive relationship. 

If you want to write an essay to argue against the negative effects of divorce, here’s an excellent guide on how to write an argumentative essay .

This prompt is not only for anyone who has no or sole guardian. If you want to write about the experiences of a child raised by other people or who lives with a single parent, you can interview a friend or anyone willing to talk about their struggles and triumphs even if they didn’t have a set of parents.

Aside from reasons for divorce, you can talk about what makes these reasons more probable. Then, analyze what steps couples can take to avoid it. Such as taking couples’ therapy, weekly family get-together, etc. To make your essay more valuable, weigh in on what makes these tips effective.

Divorce is diverse and has varying effects. There are many elements to its results, and no two sets of factors are precisely the same for two families. 

If you have an intimate experience of how your immediate and extended family dynamic had been affected by divorce, narrate those affairs. Include what it made you and the others around you feel. You might also be interested in these essays about conflict .

This is a broad prompt, but you can narrow it down by focusing on an experience you or a close friend had. You can also interview someone closely related to a divorce case, such as a lawyer, reporter, or researcher. 

If you don’t have any experience with divorce, do not know anyone who had to go through it, or is more interested in its legal aspects, compiles different divorce laws for each country. You can even add a brief history for each law to make the readers understand how they came about.

Are you looking for other topics to write on? Check out our general resource of essay writing topics .

Persuasive & Argumentative Essays about Divorce: Free Tips

A divorce is a life-changing experience that affects spouses and their children (if there are any). Since divorce rates are relatively high in modern society, more and more people face this problem nowadays.

When you are assigned to compose an argumentative essay about divorce, you should be as careful as possible. Remember that the split-up of marriage can be a painful experience for everyone involved.

The article will give you useful advice on how to write an outstanding paper on the topic. Learn the essential features of the following types:

• persuasive essay about divorce,
• for and against essay,
• causes and effects of divorce essay,

Check tips from Custom-writing.org below and write the best paper!

• 💍 How to Write It
• 📂 Essays by Type
• ✒ Causes and Effects

✍️ Divorce Essay Topics

💍 how to write a divorce essay.

The general structure of essays on divorce is quite common:

• introduction;
• conclusion.

Yet, there are some variations of what info to include in the body, depending on the essay type. The following structure is applicable for divorce argumentative essay. To learn about the features of other types, keep on reading our article.

Argumentative divorce essays are composed according to the standard structure:

1. Thesis Statement about Divorce

A divorce essay introduction isn’t anything extraordinary as you have to introduce your topic and position.

• You should always give broad information about the issue and state the main problems you will discuss in your writing.
• Make a general statement about the consequences of divorce or the common divorce effects on people.
• Then write your thesis statement on divorce. Clearly explain to the audience the topic you’re going to discuss and your position on that topic. In case you find this task difficult, try using a thesis generator for argumentative essay . This will save you some time.

That’s it! Now your divorce essay introduction is ready.

What’s next?

2. Main Body

This section presents all of your ideas and arguments related to the topic of divorce.

• Here you can write about the adverse effects of divorce on children or the most common reasons people divorce.
• Use compelling arguments and support your ideas with examples.

There are tons of surveys and statistics about divorce on the internet, so it won’t be too challenging to gather the information you need.

3. Conclusion

In the last paragraph, you have to sum up your paper and leave a final expression.

• Summarize every idea presented in your divorce essay.
• Restate your thesis statement on divorce, relying on your reasoning.
• Then list your concluding thoughts on this topic.

Make your sentences clear and easy to follow. Use synonyms to improve your writing style. Such an approach will help you convince the readers and express your thoughts better.

📂 Divorce Essays by Type

The content and reasoning of each paper on divorce depend primarily on the type of essay . See the following sections to understand how to write each of them.

Here are a few types you can consider:

Argumentative Essay about Divorce

When it comes to divorce, there are many disputable topics—for example, the reasons people separate or its impact on children. It’s easy to find support and statistics for both issues. And you’ll need them as facts are a crucial part of a divorce argumentative essay.

As a starting point:

Research your idea and choose a side to support. Make sure that among all argumentative essay topics about divorce, you selected the most interesting for yourself. In your thesis statement, concisely express your position, so the reader can quickly get it.

Then, start writing the entire essay. Regardless of what type of paper you are writing—anti or pro divorce argumentative essay—your writing should meet these requirements:

• Base your points on logic;
• Present both sides of the arguments, but support only one;
• Take into consideration counterclaims;
• Support all the arguments by valid evidence;
• Use a calm, informative tone.

Don’t forget to incorporate quotes and figures to convince your readers.

Persuasive Essay about Divorce

What is the goal of writing persuasive essays ? It’s to convince your reader that your position on a particular problem is true.

Therefore, writing this paper means that you should identify an individual problem related to the topic. In the introduction of your persuasive essay about divorce, you should choose your side and deliver it to the reader.

Crucial note:

Similarly to an argumentative essay, you have to provide credible facts to support your position. Yet here, you use them to back up your opinion and persuade your reader.

While composing your persuasive essay about the legalization of divorce, remember its distinctive features:

• Based on emotions;
• Presents only one side of the argument;
• Ignores counterclaims;
• The tone is dynamic, emotionally-charged, and aggressive to some extent.

Cause and Effect Essay on Divorce

Whether it concerns old parents or a young couple, divorce typically has the same causes and effects. You can often see them clearly, even in books or movies.

The essay outline for the causes and effects of divorce essay is quite common:

• Introduction.

In your divorce essay introduction, provide a general background and compose a clear thesis statement. For example, your thesis might look like this:

A divorce, caused by the spouses’ expectations mismatch, results in a lack of communication between children and one of the parents.

In this part of your essay, investigate the cause and effect of divorce, you stated before.

For the given thesis, the main points would be the following:

The primary cause of divorce is the mismatch in the spouses’ expectations from the marriage.

The divorce often results in a lack of children’s interactions with one of the parents.

• Conclusion.

Synthesize all of your arguments and give your audience a space for a further investigation of your issue.

Narrative Essay about Divorce

If your assignment is to write a family essay, you can choose from a wide range of topics. For this purpose, a marriage essay or a divorce essay would be perfect.

In a short paper about your family, it isn’t easy to cover many topics. So choose only one.

Look through some narrative essay topics and select the one you like:

• The story of my divorce: how did I decide to break up with my spouse?
• My life completely changed after my parents divorced.
• How my life looked like before the divorce with my wife/husband and how it looks now.
• The way divorce destroys healthy communication between children and parents in my family.

For and Against Divorce Essay

As you know, both the negative and positive effects of divorce are disputable, making them appealing to discuss. There are many recent studies and relevant statistical data on the topic to help you write such an essay.

This topic would also be great for a speech on divorce.

Wondering what are the for and against divorce arguments? Take a look at the following:

✒ Divorce: Causes and Effects

We have a pleasant bonus for you! Below, you can find useful arguments and insightful ideas that you can use in your papers on divorce. Apply our concepts in any type of essay, adjusting them to your topic.

Divorce essays can cover the following issues:

Generally Known Facts on Divorces

When covering this issue in your persuasive essay on divorce, you will have to cover the problem altogether. Include the common marriage problems that psychologists all over the world study. Use their statistical data on divorces when crafting your argument.

Divorce is quite a broad topic, and you may want to narrow it down. With so much information available, you could write a research paper on divorce without any difficulty.

Statistical Data on Divorces

Good divorce essays should include enough statistical data. It will add more scientific value and reveal your research abilities. Besides, facts and figures present many exciting topics to comment on.

For example:

You can do significant research concerning divorce causes and consequences. Draw a contrast between divorce in several countries, or examine the age and education of people who officially separate more often.

Reasons for Divorces

What does an essay on divorce mean without discussion of its reasons?

Find out different sociologists’ viewpoints on the reasons for divorces. Then underline the cause you consider to be the most truthful one.

You can also provide your own theory on the grounds for divorces in your persuasive essay on divorce. The key point is to prove the accuracy of your statement.

Divorce Prevention Ideas

If there is a problem, there must be some solution. So, think of the possible ways to make a marriage work.

Investigate divorce causes from a scientific point of view. Examine the primary studies that reveal why people actually break up. Also, discuss the precautions that can help married couples avoid significant conflicts.

Effects of Divorce on Children

Parents sometimes forget that their divorce isn’t only about them but also about their children. It causes psychological problems for kids, which you can classify in your paper. Don’t forget to add some statistical data on divorce to support your arguments.

Every child reacts differently to their parents’ breakup. It’s a rare case when divorce consequences are positive, making the effects on kids an urgent topic to discuss.

Positive Effects of Divorce

Sometimes divorce isn’t a catastrophe but rather the only way to heal wounds and begin a new life. Often, people don’t recognize that they need to change their lives for the better. This situation is primarily related to abusive marriages or those with regular cheating.

In these cases, the positive effects of divorce may seem easy to understand. However, psychologists have to make great efforts to persuade people to end their relationships. Write a paper making this same argument.

• Negative outcomes of divorce on children.
• Connection between divorce and antisocial behavior of children.
• Family crises and the issue it causes: divorce, remarriage, stepparents, adoption.
• Effect of divorce on teenagers’ academic performance.  
• Causes and consequences of divorce .
• What can be done to decrease divorce rates in America?  
• Does parental divorce affect the rates of juvenile delinquency ?
• The most widespread reasons for divorce.
• Analyze marital success factors and Gottman’s predictors of divorce.
• Impact of divorce on child’s mental health.
• Change of divorce law throughout history.
• Positive and negative changes in children’s behavior after divorce.
• Divorce : a disaster or a benefit?
• Is cheating one of the main reasons of divorce?
• Gender stratification impact on divorce trends.
• Effect of divorce on family relationship.
• Do divorced parents change their child-rearing styles?
• List of factors typically associated with higher divorce rates.
• The support required for all the members of divorced and single-parent families .
• Analyze the reasons for high divorce rates .
• Does divorce only impact adolescent in a bad way?
• Effect of poverty on divorce rates.
• Specifics of divorce in the UAE.
• Does divorce lead to depression?
• Family therapy and its role in decreasing divorce rates.
• The impact of divorce on children-parents relationship.
• Evaluation of child custody in divorce proceedings.
• How to manage the stress of divorce.
• Effect of divorce on children’s self-esteem.
• How to minimize the devastating consequences of divorce.
• Addiction as the reason for divorce.
• Effective communication in marriage and its role in preventing divorce.
• Divorce as the only way out of an abusive relationship.
• Financial issues of divorce and how to overcome them.
• Parental support is the best way to help children to go through divorce.
• How do adolescents adjust to parental divorce?
• Do boys and girls react to the parental divorce the same way?
• Social media can destroy relationship and lead to divorce.
• Can Christian counseling help couples to resolve their issues and avoid divorce?
• Poverty among divorced women.
• Young marriage has more chances to break-up.
• Respect is the best way to get marriage satisfaction and avoid divorce.
• Is interfaith marriage doomed to divorce?
• Why a successful marriage may end in divorce?
• Marriage contract will help to facilitate the legal side of divorce process.
• Reduction of the number of divorces.
• Personal development after divorce.
• How family relationships influence future marriage and divorce chances of children.
• Child support in case of marriage divorce.
• Will lack of family and work balance definitely result in divorce?

If you are stuck on writing, you can always ask us for help! Whether you need a persuasive essay on divorce or any other paper, we are here and ready to assist.

Thanks for reading the article! Share it with friends who may need our tips or assistance.

Further reading:

• Top Ideas for Argumentative or Persuasive Essay Topics
• Best Argumentative Research Paper Topics
• 197 Inspirational & Motivational Argumentative Essay Topics
• Gun Control Essay: How-to Guide + Argumentative Topics
• Proposal Essay Topics and Ideas – Easy and Interesting
• Free Exemplification Essay Examples

🔗 References

• Essay Introductions
• Transitional Words and Phrases
• Argumentative Paper Format
• The Writing Process
• Divorce Argument Essay: Bartleby
• Cause and Effect Essay: The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Roane State Community College and UNC at Chapel Hill Writing Center
• Counterargument: Gordon Harvey, the Writing Center at Harvard University
• Share to Facebook
• Share to LinkedIn
• Share to email

Corruption is an abuse of power that was entrusted to a person or group of people for personal gain. It can appear in various settings and affect different social classes, leading to unemployment and other economic issues. This is why writing an essay on corruption can become a challenge. One...

Do you have to write an essay for the first time? Or maybe you’ve only written essays with less than 1000 words? Someone might think that writing a 1000-word essay is a rather complicated and time-consuming assignment. Others have no idea how difficult thousand-word essays can be. Well, we have...

To write an engaging “If I Could Change the World” essay, you have to get a few crucial elements: Let us help you a bit and give recommendations for “If I Could Change the World” essays with examples. And bookmark our writing company website for excellent academic assistance and study...

Why do you want to be a pharmacist? An essay on this topic can be challenging, even when you know the answer. The most popular reasons to pursue this profession are the following:

How to write a film critique essay? To answer this question, you should clearly understand what a movie critique is. It can be easily confused with a movie review. Both paper types can become your school or college assignments. However, they are different. A movie review reveals a personal impression...

Are you getting ready to write your Language Proficiency Index Exam essay? Well, your mission is rather difficult, and you will have to work hard. One of the main secrets of successful LPI essays is perfect writing skills. So, if you practice writing, you have a chance to get the...

Dengue fever is a quite dangerous febrile disease that can even cause death. Nowadays, this disease can be found in the tropics and Africa. Brazil, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, and India are also vulnerable to this disease.

An outline is the main form of organization in academic writing. It implies listing all of the research ideas and components before the writing process starts. To many of you, an outline may seem like just another piece of extra work to do, but trust us, it will end up...

Even though a personal essay seems like something you might need to write only for your college application, people who graduated a while ago are asked to write it. Therefore, if you are a student, you might even want to save this article for later!

If you wish a skill that would be helpful not just for middle school or high school, but also for college and university, it would be the skill of a five-paragraph essay. Despite its simple format, many students struggle with such assignments.

Reading books is pleasurable and entertaining; writing about those books isn’t. Reading books is pleasurable, easy, and entertaining; writing about those books isn’t. However, learning how to write a book report is something that is commonly required in university. Fortunately, it isn’t as difficult as you might think. You’ll only...

A descriptive essay is an academic paper that challenges a school or college student to describe something. It can be a person, a place, an object, a situation—anything an individual can depict in writing. The task is to show your abilities to communicate an experience in an essay format using...

Wow! Thanks for this! This will help me on my speech topic a lot! Thank you Jack‼️

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love

By Lara Bazelon

Ms. Bazelon is a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and the author of the forthcoming book “Ambitious Like a Mother.”

I used to believe that divorce is a terrible thing, particularly when children are involved. Growing up, I absorbed cultural tropes about absent fathers in efficiency apartments, mothers struggling to support themselves, and awful stepparents and unwanted stepsiblings. To this day, divorce is portrayed as precarious and grim. Parents whose marriages break apart are made to feel they have failed catastrophically. Divorce is shameful, traumatic and Bad For The Kids .

But I’ve learned that divorce can also be an act of radical self-love that leaves the whole family better off. My divorce nearly seven years ago freed me from a relationship that was crushing my spirit. It freed my children, then 5 and 3, from growing up in a profoundly unhealthy environment.

There was no emotional or physical abuse in our home. There was no absence of love. I was in love with my husband when we got divorced. Part of me is in love with him still. I suspect that will always be the case. Even now, after everything, when he walks into the room my stomach drops the same way it does before the roller coaster comes down. I divorced my husband not because I didn’t love him. I divorced him because I loved myself more.

There are many reasons we did not make it. But the main one is that we had incompatible visions of our roles as partners and parents. Having children did not transform me. In fact, it didn’t change me much at all. I love our children beyond reason. I know I am lucky to have them.

But after I became a mother, I was still the same striving, work-obsessed, domestically challenged person I had always been. I made choice after choice to prioritize my career because I believed fervently in the importance of the work I was doing, providing legal representation to wrongfully convicted men and women . It gave me an identity, a purpose and the comfort of knowing I could support myself.

My ex-husband was not unreasonable in wanting me to change — not to give up working, but to stop chasing after bigger, harder projects. He works hard but not when he is at home. He rarely travels and actively engages with nearly every aspect of our children’s lives, no matter how mundane. I fell short of his standards. “You are not present” was a phrase I heard a lot. Sometimes it was literal: For years, I traveled frequently for work. Sometimes it was metaphorical: My mind consumed by a case or a piece of writing, I would retreat to an inner world that made it hard to focus on the people right in front of me.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

By providing an email address. I agree to the Terms of Use and acknowledge that I have read the Privacy Policy .

Divorce should be an option

The House of Representatives committee on population and family relations approved the absolute divorce bill which allows it to proceed to plenary for debate. This is the closest we have come to finally allow people to have full freedom to decide on the course of their relationships. As a predominantly Catholic nation, this understandably will cause fierce arguments and culturally entrenched righteous indignation. However, as someone who works with families, let me offer some points on this issue.

If you as a couple do not want to consider divorce in your marriage, you don’t have to. Legalizing divorce does not threaten harmonious families. People who are happy and content within their marriages will not suddenly rush to get one just because it is available. If you worry that your spouse will divorce you the moment it becomes legal, then you have much more important things to worry about in your relationship. It can, however, save the lives of many victims of domestic violence (mostly women) and allow people to determine their own lives.

Not allowing divorce as a legal option is like not allowing emergency exits in a building. Imagine there’s a fire but the building owner didn’t put in emergency exits because he “does not believe in it” and that you were expected to keep managing the fire, not escape it. Imagine still a building infested with toxic mold but that you were not permitted to evacuate because others couldn’t fathom why you don’t have the willpower to tough it out. Most people hopefully will not need to use emergency exits in their lifetime. And you’ll be glad it’s there when you need it.

Divorce can also be a protective tool against domestic violence, which is the strongest reason why it should exist. In other countries, they found a significant reduction of spousal conflict and extreme partner violence once divorce was an accessible option. When you know that your spouse has legal rights to leave, you are disabused of the notion of your spouse as property and less likely to mistreat them. Domestic violence also takes up a significant portion of reasons for divorce, around 25-50 percent in other countries. By refusing to provide this option, you are condemning victims of domestic violence to a lifetime of hell. Not having access to options can also turn into desperation—leading some individuals to consider a lethal option.

Even without the threat of domestic violence, we should consider the natural course of intimate relationships. You can only realistically commit to a set of behaviors, not a set of feelings. You cannot genuinely promise to make someone happy. You can, however, promise to not have sex with anyone else (you can still break this promise, of course, but it is more than possible to keep). Feelings, by nature, are temporary. They can be lost and regained. They can strengthen and fade.

Love is both a feeling and an act. Love, as a feeling, can change. I do not know which Hallmark writer decided that love should be forever. The act of loving, however, is within your control and something you can choose to commit to. By accepting the nature of feelings, we must accept the possibility that we might lose the feeling of love for our spouse despite our best intentions. The act that follows this loss—whether it be active efforts to rekindle the lost feeling, redefining the marriage as platonic mutual respect, or acknowledging that the marriage is over—can still be done in a loving way. The best way to shield children from the harmful effects of separation or divorce is for both parents to commit to respecting each other and to still care for each other as co-parents. Ironically, couples who do acknowledge the wax and wane of romantic feeling are much more likely to stay together because they do not take each other for granted and make repeated intentions to stay. They also tend to be more generous and less calculative during separation and genuinely wishing each other happiness.

Divorce is not the killer of happy marriages. It is simply a life raft for people drowning in a marriage that’s already long dead. If you want to ensure the success of a marriage, we should be providing couples with resources and support to help them better adapt and not simply mandate them to stay together. If you love someone, you don’t chain them to you; them choosing to stay is a greater sense of emotional security than locking them in a divorce-less marriage.

[email protected]

Subscribe to our daily newsletter

Fearless views on the news

Disclaimer: Comments do not represent the views of INQUIRER.net. We reserve the right to exclude comments which are inconsistent with our editorial standards. FULL DISCLAIMER

© copyright 1997-2024 inquirer.net | all rights reserved.

We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. By continuing, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. To find out more, please click this link.

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission

The Lure of Divorce

Seven years into my marriage, i hit a breaking point — and had to decide whether life would be better without my husband in it..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

In the summer of 2022, I lost my mind. At first, it seemed I was simply overwhelmed because life had become very difficult, and I needed to — had every right to — blow off some steam. Our family was losing its apartment and had to find another one, fast, in a rental market gone so wild that people were offering over the asking price on rent. My husband, Keith, was preparing to publish a book, Raising Raffi, about our son, a book he’d written with my support and permission but that, as publication loomed, I began to have mixed feelings about. To cope with the stress, I asked my psychiatrist to increase the dosage of the antidepressant I’d been on for years. Sometime around then, I started talking too fast and drinking a lot.

I felt invincibly alive, powerful, and self-assured, troubled only by impatience with how slowly everyone around me was moving and thinking. Drinking felt necessary because it slightly calmed my racing brain. Some days, I’d have drinks with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which I ate at restaurants so the drink order didn’t seem too unusual. Who doesn’t have an Aperol spritz on the way home from the gym in the morning? The restaurant meals cost money, as did the gym, as did all the other random things I bought, spending money we didn’t really have on ill-fitting lingerie from Instagram and workout clothes and lots of planters from Etsy. I grew distant and impatient with Keith as the book’s publication approached, even as I planned a giant party to celebrate its launch. At the party, everyone got COVID. I handed out cigarettes from a giant salad bowl — I had gone from smoking once or twice a day to chain-smoking whenever I could get away with it. When well-meaning friends tried to point out what was going on, I screamed at them and pointed out everything that was wrong in their lives. And most crucially, I became convinced that my marriage was over and had been over for years.

Spring Fashion Issue

We want moore.

I built a case against my husband in my mind. This book of his was simply the culmination of a pattern: He had always put his career before mine; while I had tended to our children during the pandemic, he had written a book about parenting. I tried to balance writing my own novel with drop-offs, pickups, sick days, and planning meals and shopping and cooking, most of which had always been my primary responsibility since I was a freelancer and Keith had a full-time job teaching journalism. We were incompatible in every way, except that we could talk to each other as we could to no one else, but that seemed beside the point. More relevant: I spent money like it was water, never budgeting, leaving Keith to make sure we made rent every month. Every few months, we’d have a fight about this and I’d vow to change; some system would be put in place, but it never stuck. We were headed for disaster, and finally it came.

Our last fight happened after a long day spent at a wedding upstate. I’d been drinking, first spiked lemonade at lunch alone and then boxed wine during the wedding reception, where I couldn’t eat any of the food — it all contained wheat, and I have celiac disease. When we got back, late, to the house where we were staying, I ordered takeout and demanded he go pick it up for me. Calling from the restaurant, he was incensed. Did I know how much my takeout order had cost? I hadn’t paid attention as I checked boxes in the app, nor had I realized that our bank account was perilously low — I never looked at receipts or opened statements. Not knowing this, I felt like he was actually denying me food, basic sustenance. It was the last straw. I packed a bag as the kids played happily with their cousins downstairs, then waited by the side of the road for a friend who lived nearby to come pick me up, even as Keith stood there begging me to stay. But his words washed over me; I was made of stone. I said it was over — really over. This was it, the definitive moment I’d been waiting for. I had a concrete reason to leave.

A few days later, still upstate at my friend’s house, I had a Zoom call with my therapist and my psychiatrist, who both urged me in no uncertain terms to check myself into a psychiatric hospital. Even I couldn’t ignore a message that clear. My friend drove me to the city, stopping for burgers along the way — I should have relished the burger more, as it was some of the last noninstitutional food I would eat for a long time — and helped me check into NYU Langone. My bags were searched, and anything that could be used as a weapon was removed, including my mascara. I spent my first night there in a gown in a cold holding room with no phone, nothing but my thoughts. Eventually, a bed upstairs became free and I was brought to the psych ward, where I was introduced to a roommate, had blood drawn, and was given the first of many pills that would help me stop feeling so irrepressibly energetic and angry. They started me on lithium right away. In a meeting with a team of psychiatrists, they broke the news: I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; they weren’t sure which kind yet. They gave me a nicotine patch every few hours plus Klonopin and Seroquel and lithium.

I wasn’t being held involuntarily, which meant I could write letters on an official form explaining why I ought to be released, which the psychiatrists then had three days to consider. I attached extra notebook pages to the letters explaining that I was divorcing my husband and was terrified I would never be able to see my kids again if I was declared unfit because I was insane. These letters did not result in my release; if anything, they prolonged my stay. I got my phone back — it would soon be revoked again, wisely — but in that brief interim, I sent out a newsletter to my hundreds of subscribers declaring that I was getting a divorce and asking them to Venmo me money for the custody battle I foresaw. In this newsletter, I also referenced Shakespeare. The drugs clearly had not kicked in yet. I cycled through three different roommates, all of whom were lovely, though I preferred the depressed one to the borderline ones. We amused ourselves during the day by going to art therapy, music therapy, and meetings with our psychiatrists. I made a lot of beaded bracelets.

In the meetings with the shrinks, I steadfastly maintained that I was sane and that my main problem was the ending of my marriage. I put Keith, and my mother, on a list of people who weren’t allowed to visit me. Undaunted, Keith brought me gluten-free egg sandwiches in the morning, which I grudgingly ate — anything for a break from the hospital food. My parents came up from D.C. and helped Keith take care of our children. I was in the hospital for a little more than three weeks, almost the entire month of October, longer than I’d ever been away from my kids before in their lives. I celebrated my 41st birthday in the hospital and received a lot of very creative cards that my fellow crazies had decorated during art therapy. Eventually, the drugs began to work: I could tell they were working because instead of feeling energetic, I suddenly couldn’t stop crying. The tears came involuntarily, like vomit. I cried continuously for hours and had to be given gabapentin in order to sleep.

On the day I was released, I didn’t let anyone pick me up. I expected the superhuman strength I’d felt for months to carry me, but it was gone, lithiumed away. Instead, I felt almost paralyzed as I carried my bags to a cab. When I arrived at my apartment, I couldn’t figure out where I should sleep. It didn’t feel like my home anymore. We couldn’t afford to live separately, even temporarily, but the one thing that our somewhat decrepit, inconveniently located new apartment had in its favor was two small attic bedrooms and one larger bedroom downstairs. I claimed this downstairs room for myself and began to live there alone, coming into contact with Keith only when we had to be together with our children.

You might assume that my fixation on divorce would have subsided now that my mental health had stabilized and I was on strong antipsychotic medication. But I still did not want to stay in my marriage. If anything, I felt a newfound clarity: Keith and I had fundamentally incompatible selves. Our marriage had been built on a flaw. My husband was older, more established and successful in his career. These were the facts, so it had to be my job to do more of the work at home. Unless, of course, I decided to take myself and my work as seriously as he took his. But that was unappealing; I had managed to publish three books before turning 40, but I didn’t want to work all the time, like he does.

I wondered if my marriage would always feel like a competition and if the only way to call the competition a draw would be to end it.

We picked the kids up from school and dropped them off, or really mostly Keith did. I appeared at meals and tried to act normal. I was at a loss for what to do much of the time. I attended AA meetings and the DBT meetings required by the hospital outpatient program, and I read. I read books about insanity: Darkness Visible, The Bell Jar, An Unquiet Mind, Postcards From the Edge. I tried to understand what was happening to me, but nothing seemed to resonate until I began to read books about divorce. I felt I was preparing myself for what was coming. The first book I read was Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, which has become the go-to literary divorce bible since its 2012 publication. In it, Cusk describes the way her life shattered and recomposed after the dissolution of her marriage, when her daughters were still very young. She makes the case for the untenability of her relationship by explaining that men and women are fundamentally unequal. She posits that men and women who marry and have children are perpetually fighting separate battles, lost to each other: “The baby can seem like something her husband has given her as a substitute for himself, a kind of transitional object, like a doll, for her to hold so that he can return to the world. And he does, he leaves her, returning to work, setting sail for Troy. He is free, for in the baby the romance of man and woman has been concluded: each can now do without the other.”

At our relationship’s lowest moments, this metaphor had barely been a metaphor. I remembered, the previous winter, Keith going off on a reporting trip to Ukraine at the very beginning of the war, leaving me and the kids with very little assurance of his safety. I had felt okay for the first couple of days until I heard on the news of bombing very close to where he was staying. After that, I went and bummed a cigarette from a neighbor, leaving the kids sleeping in their beds in order to do so. It was my first cigarette in 15 years. Though that had been the winter before my mania began, I believe the first seeds of it were sown then: leaving the children, smoking the cigarette, resenting Keith for putting himself in harm’s way and going out into the greater world while I tended to lunches, homework, and laundry as though everything were normal.

In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, as in Aftermath, I found an airtight case for divorce. The husband was the villain and the wife the wronged party, and the inevitable result was splitting up. I felt an echo of this later on when I read Lyz Lenz’s polemic This American Ex-Wife, out this month, marketed as “a deeply validating manifesto on the gender politics of marriage (bad) and divorce (actually pretty good!).” The book begins by detailing how Lenz’s husband rarely did household chores and hid belongings of hers that he didn’t like — e.g., a mug that said WRITE LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER — in a box in the basement. “I didn’t want to waste my one wild and precious life telling a grown man where to find the ketchup,” Lenz writes. “What was compelling about my marriage wasn’t its evils or its villains, but its commonplace horror.”

This was not quite the way I felt. Even though I could not stand to see my husband’s face or hear his voice, even though I still felt the same simmering resentment I had since I entered the hospital, I also found myself feeling pangs of sympathy for him. After all, he was going through this too. When we were inevitably together, at mealtimes that were silent unless the children spoke, I could see how wounded he was, how he was barely keeping it together. His clothes hung off his gaunt frame. And at night, when we passed in the kitchen making cups of tea that we would take to our respective rooms, he sometimes asked me for a hug, just a hug. One time I gave in and felt his ribs through his T-shirt. He must have lost at least 15 pounds.

It began to seem like I only ever talked to friends who had been through divorces or were contemplating them. One friend who didn’t know whether to split up with her husband thought opening their marriage might be the answer. Another friend described the ease of sharing custody of his young daughter, then admitted that he and his ex-wife still had sex most weekends. In my chronically undecided state, I admired both of these friends who had found, or might have found, a way to split the difference. Maybe it was possible to break up and remain friends with an ex, something that had never happened to me before in my entire life. Maybe it was possible to be married and not married at the same time. Then I went a little further in my imagination, and the idea of someone else having sex with my husband made me want to gag with jealousy. Maybe that meant something. I was so confused, and the confusion seemed to have no end.

I read more books about divorce. I received an early copy of Sarah Manguso’s Liars, marketed as “a searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all.” In it, John, a creative dilettante, and Jane, a writer, meet and soon decide to marry. Liars describes their marriage from beginning to end, a span of almost 15 years, and is narrated by Jane. The beginning of their relationship is delirious: “I tried to explain that first ferocious hunger and couldn’t. It came from somewhere beyond reason.” But the opening of that book also contains a warning. “Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.” I felt perversely reassured that I was merely adding another story to the 10 billion. It made it seem less like it was my fault.

The beginning of my relationship with my husband wasn’t that dramatic or definitive. I thought I was getting into something casual with someone I didn’t even know if I particularly liked, much less loved, but was still oddly fascinated by. I wanted to see the way he lived, to see if I could emulate it and become more like him. He lived with roommates in his 30s — well, that was the price you paid if you wanted to do nothing but write. I wanted what he had, his seriousness about his work. We went on dates where we both sat with our laptops in a café, writing, and this was somehow the most romantic thing I’d ever experienced. On our third date, we went to his father’s home on Cape Cod to dog-sit for a weekend, and it was awkward in the car until we realized we were both thinking about the same Mary Gaitskill story, “A Romantic Weekend,” in which a couple with dramatically mismatched needs learn the truth about each other through painful trial and error. Our weekend was awkward, too, but not nearly as awkward as the one in the story. On the way home, I remember admiring Keith’s driving, effortless yet masterful. I trusted him in the car completely. A whisper of a thought: He would make a good father.

In Liars, cracks begin to form almost immediately, even before John and Jane get engaged; she is accepted to a prestigious fellowship and he isn’t, and he is forthright about his fear that she will become more successful than he is: “A moment later he said he didn’t want to be the unsuccessful partner of the successful person. Then he apologized and said that he’d just wanted to be honest. I said, It was brave and considerate to tell me. ”

Through the next few years, so gradually that it’s almost imperceptible, John makes it impossible for Jane to succeed. He launches tech companies that require cross-country moves, forcing Jane to bounce between adjunct-teaching gigs. And then, of course, they have a baby. The problem with the baby is that Jane wants everything to be perfect for him and throws herself into creating a tidy home and an ideal child-development scenario, whereas John works more and more, moving the family again as one start-up fails and another flourishes. Jane begins to wonder whether she has created a prison for herself but pacifies herself with the thought that her situation is normal: “No married woman I knew was better off, so I determined to carry on. After all, I was a control freak, a neat freak, a crazy person.” The story John tells her about herself becomes her own story for a while. For a while, it’s impossible to know whose story is the truth.

I thought about Keith’s side of the story when I read Liars. Maybe it was the lack of alcohol’s blur that enabled me to see this clearly for the first time — I began to see how burdened he had been, had always been, with a partner who refused to plan for the future and who took on, without being asked, household chores that could just as easily have been distributed evenly. Our situation had never been as clear-cut as it was for Lyz Lenz; Keith had never refused to take out the trash or hidden my favorite mug. But he worked more and later hours, and my intermittent book advances and freelance income could not be counted on to pay our rent. As soon as we’d had a child, he had been shunted into the role of breadwinner without choosing it or claiming it. At first, I did all the cooking because I liked cooking and then, when I stopped liking cooking, I did it anyway out of habit. For our marriage to change, we would have needed to consciously decide to change it, insofar as our essential natures and our financial situation would allow. But when were we supposed to have found the time to do that? It was maddening that the root of our fracture was so commonplace and clichéd — and that even though the problem was ordinary, I still couldn’t think my way out of it.

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison , is in some ways the successor to Aftermath — the latest divorce book by a literary superstar. It is mostly an account of Jamison’s passionate marriage to a fellow writer, C., and the way that marriage fell apart after her career accelerated and they had a child together. It then details her first months of life as a single mother and her forays into dating. In it, she is strenuously fair to C., taking much of the blame for the dissolution of their marriage. But she can’t avoid describing his anger that her book merits an extensive tour, while his novel — based on his relationship with his first wife, who had died of leukemia — fails commercially. “It didn’t get the reception he had hoped for,” Jamison writes, and now, “I could feel him struggling. He wanted to support me, but there was a thorn in every interview.” C. grows distant, refusing to publicly perform the charming self that Jamison fell in love with. “I wished there was a way to say, Your work matters, that didn’t involve muting my own,” Jamison writes.

For all my marriage’s faults, we never fought in public. Friends encouraged us to reconcile, saying, “You always seemed so good together.” (As if there were another way to seem! Standing next to each other at a party, it had always been easy to relax because we couldn’t fight.) And we never did anything but praise each other’s work. Until this last book of my husband’s, that is. I had read Raising Raffi for the first time six months before it was published, while I was out of town for the weekend. I had, at that time, enjoyed reading it — it was refreshing, in a way, to see someone else’s perspective on a part of my own life. I even felt a certain relief that my child’s early years, in all their specificity and cuteness, had been recorded. This work had been accomplished, and I hadn’t had to do it! There had been only a slight pang in the background of that feeling that I hadn’t been the one to do it. But as publication drew nearer, the pang turned into outright anger . The opening chapter described my giving birth to our first son, and I didn’t realize how violated I felt by that until it was vetted by The New Yorker ’s fact-checker after that section was selected as an excerpt for its website. Had a geyser of blood shot out of my vagina? I didn’t actually know. I had been busy at the time. I hung up on the fact-checker who called me, asking her to please call my husband instead. (In case you’re wondering, Keith has read this essay and suggested minimal changes.)

I related to the writers in Splinters trying to love each other despite the underlying thrum of competing ambitions. But most of all, Jamison’s book made me even more terrified about sharing custody. “There was only one time I got on my knees and begged. It happened in our living room, where I knelt beside the wooden coffee table and pleaded not to be away from her for two nights each week,” she writes. Envisioning a future in which we shared custody of our children made me cringe with horror. It seemed like absolute hell. At the time we separated, our younger son was only 4 years old and required stories and cuddles to get to bed. Missing a night of those stories seemed like a punishment neither of us deserved, and yet we would have to sacrifice time with our kids if we were going to escape each other, which seemed like the only possible solution to our problem. Thanksgiving rolled around, and I cooked a festive meal that we ate without looking at each other. Whenever I looked at Keith, I started to cry.

We decided to enter divorce mediation at the beginning of December. On Sixth Avenue, heading to the therapist’s office, we passed the hospital where I’d once been rushed for an emergency fetal EKG when I was pregnant with our first son. His heart had turned out to be fine. But as we passed that spot, I sensed correctly that we were both thinking of that moment, of a time when we had felt so connected in our panic and desperate hope, and now the invisible cord that had bound us had been, if not severed, shredded and torn. For a moment on the sidewalk there, we allowed ourselves to hold hands, remembering.

The therapist was a small older woman with short curly reddish hair. She seemed wise, like she’d seen it all and seen worse. I was the one who talked the most in that session, blaming Keith for making me go crazy, even though I knew this wasn’t technically true or possible: I had gone crazy from a combination of sky-high stress and a too-high SSRI prescription and a latent crazy that had been in me, part of me, since long before Keith married me, since I was born. Still, I blamed his job, his book, his ambition and workaholism, which always surpassed my own efforts. I cried throughout the session; I think we both did. I confessed that I was not the primary wronged person in these negotiations, and to be fair I have to talk about why. Sometime post–Last Fight and pre-hospitalization, I had managed to cheat on my husband. I had been so sure we were basically already divorced that I justified the act to myself; I couldn’t have done it any other way. I had thought I might panic at the last minute or even throw up or faint, but I had gone through with it thanks to the delusional state I was in. There aren’t many more details anyone needs to know. It was just one time, and it was like a drug I used to keep myself from feeling sad about what was really happening. Anyway, there’s a yoga retreat center I’ll never be able to go to again in my life.

At the end of the session, we decided to continue with the therapist but in couples therapy instead of divorce mediation. It was a service she also provided, and as a bonus, it was $100 cheaper per session. She didn’t say why she made this recommendation, but maybe it was our palpable shared grief that convinced her that our marriage was salvageable. Or maybe it was that, despite everything I had told her in that session, she could see that, even in my profound sadness and anger, I looked toward Keith to complete my sentences when I was searching for the right word and that he did the same thing with me. As broken as we were, we were still pieces of one once-whole thing.

My husband would have to forgive me for cheating and wasting our money. I would have to forgive him for treading on my literary territory: our family’s life, my own life. My husband would have to forgive me for having a mental breakdown, leaving him to take care of our family on his own for a month, costing us thousands of uninsured dollars in hospital bills. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted, for years, that I would be available on a sick day or to do an early pickup or to watch the baby while he wrote about our elder son. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted that there would always be dinner on the table without his having to think about how it got there. He would have to forgive me for never taking out the recycling and never learning how to drive so that I could move the car during alternate-side parking. I would have to forgive him for usurping the time and energy and brain space with which I might have written a better book than his. Could the therapist help us overcome what I knew to be true: that we’d gone into marriage already aware that we were destined for constant conflict just because of who we are? The therapist couldn’t help me ask him to do more if I didn’t feel like I deserved it, if I couldn’t bring myself to ask him myself. I had to learn how to ask.

No one asked anything or forgave anything that day in the couples therapist’s office. After what felt like months but was probably only a few days, I was watching Ramy on my laptop in my downstairs-bedroom cave after the kids’ bedtime when some moment struck me as something Keith would love. Acting purely on impulse, I left my room and found him sitting on the couch, drinking tea. I told him I’d been watching this show I thought was funny and that he would really like it. Soon, we were sitting side by side on the couch, watching Ramy together. We went back to our respective rooms afterward, but still, we’d made progress.

After a few more weeks and a season’s worth of shared episodes of Ramy, I ventured for the first time upstairs to Keith’s attic room. It smelled alien to me, and I recognized that this was the pure smell of Keith, not the shared smell of the bedrooms in every apartment we’d lived in together. I lay down next to him in the mess of his bed. He made room for me. We didn’t touch, not yet. But we slept, that night, together. The next night, we went back to sleeping alone.

Pickups and drop-offs became evenly divided among me and Keith and a sitter. Keith learned to make spaghetti with meat sauce. He could even improvise other dishes, with somewhat less success, but he was improving. I made a conscious effort not to tidy the house after the children left for school. I made myself focus on my work even when there was chaos around me. Slowly, I began to be able to make eye contact with Keith again. At couples therapy, we still clutched tissue boxes in our hands, but we used them less. Our separate chairs inched closer together in the room.

That Christmas, we rented a tiny Airbnb near his dad’s house in Falmouth. It had only two bedrooms, one with bunk beds for the kids and one with a king-size bed that took up almost the entirety of the small room. We would have to share a bed for the duration of the trip. The decision I made to reach across the giant bed toward Keith on one of the last nights of the trip felt, again, impulsive. But there were years of information and habit guiding my impulse. Sex felt, paradoxically, completely comfortable and completely new, like losing my virginity. It felt like sleeping with a different person and also like sleeping with the same person, which made sense, in a way. We had become different people while somehow staying the same people we’d always been.

Slowly, over the course of the next months, I moved most of my things upstairs to his room, now our room. We still see the therapist twice a month. We talk about how to make things more equal in our marriage, how not to revert to old patterns. I have, for instance, mostly given up on making dinner, doing it only when it makes more sense in the schedule of our shared day or when I actually want to cook. It turns out that pretty much anyone can throw some spaghetti sauce on some pasta; it also turns out that the kids won’t eat dinner no matter who cooks it, and now we get to experience that frustration equally. Keith’s work is still more stable and prestigious than mine, but we conspire to pretend that this isn’t the case, making sure to leave space for my potential and my leisure. We check in to make sure we’re not bowing to the overwhelming pressure to cede our whole lives to the physical and financial demands, not to mention the fervently expressed wants, of our children. It’s the work that we’d never found time to do before, and it is work. The difference is that we now understand what can happen when we don’t do it. I’m always surprised by how much I initially don’t want to go to therapy and then by how much lighter I feel afterward. For now, those sessions are a convenient container for our marriage’s intractable defects so that we get to spend the rest of our time together focusing on what’s not wrong with us.

The downstairs bedroom is now dormant, a place for occasional guests to stay or for our elder son to lie in bed as he plays video games. Some of my clothes from a year earlier still fill the drawers, but none of it seems like mine. I never go into that room if I can help it. It was the room of my exile from my marriage, from my family. If I could magically disappear it from our apartment, I would do it in a heartbeat. And in the attic bedroom, we are together, not as we were before but as we are now.

More From the spring 2024 fashion issue

• Bring Back These ’00s Trends
• Packing for Paris With Alex Consani
• Where New York City Tweens Actually Like to Shop  
• remove interruptions
• newsletter pick
• hard paywall
• spring 2024 fashion issue
• best of the cut
• new york magazine
• audio article
• spring fashion
• one great story
• first person

The Cut Shop

Most viewed stories.

• Fans Are Not Impressed With Blake Lively’s Press Tour
• What It’s Like Being a Billionaire’s Personal Assistant
• Doctors Do Not Recommend ‘Raw-Dogging’ Your Next Flight
• Rob Schneider Asks for Elle King’s Forgiveness After She Calls Him ‘Toxic’
• Molly-Mae Hague and Tommy Fury Are Breaking Up
• This Mercury Retrograde Is Turning Up the Heat in August
• What’s Going On With Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni?

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Divorce — Divorce, Its Causes, Effects, and Solutions

Divorce, Its Causes, Effects, and Solutions

• Categories: Divorce Divorce Rate

About this sample

Words: 1209 |

Published: Dec 3, 2020

Words: 1209 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr Jacklynne

Verified writer

• Expert in: Life Sociology

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

4 pages / 1661 words

3 pages / 1413 words

1 pages / 316 words

4 pages / 1801 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Divorce

The purpose of this essay is to elaborate on the major causes of divorce, psychological effects and how to cope with it. An increase in amount of U.S. couples divorcing is growing. Statistics stated in the essay is proof. The [...]

There are many perspectives which will be discussed further in my research divorce i.e. global perspective, national perspective and religious perspective. The issues of divorce are financial problems, forced marriages, child [...]

The concept of divorce mediation is deeply explore in the following essay as well as base improvment of National Mediator Standards Board (NMAS) in the US. The National Mediator Standards Board aims to encourage quality, [...]

A law that affected families and households was the divorce reform act in 1969, this made divorce for couples easier, cheaper and quicker and allowed couples to divorce o the reason of irreconcilable differences, this led to a [...]

All of us, at one time or another, have felt unsure of ourselves, feared rejection, and have felt disconnected from everything, including ourselves. However, adopted persons are faced with an even tougher problem that sets them [...]

“I would write a different Sons and Lovers now; my mother was wrong, and I thought she was absolutely right.” (Jeffers 296) This line betrays D. H. Lawrence’s eventual realization about his maternal fixation. As a corollary, [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Against Divorce: David Hume Defends Traditional Marriage

• April 27, 2011

While often hostile to the Calvinist Christianity in which he was reared, David Hume’s essay “Of Polygamy and Divorces” offers a vigorous and well-argued defense of marriage arrangements as they existed in England and many other parts of Europe from the early Middle Ages through most of the 18 th century. His arguments have great relevance for us today as we struggle to cope with unprecedented rates of divorce and unprecedented ease of both entering into and exiting marriages and other intimate procreative relationships. His arguments against polygamy are also important as that practice seems to be undergoing something of a resurgence in parts of the southwest, with renewed interest in the popular culture.

Hume begins the substantive part of his inquiry with a brief description of the great variety of marriage practices and customs that have existed throughout the world, noting that “as circumstances vary and the laws propose different advantages, we find that, in different times and places, they impose different conditions” on the marriage contract. Custom and law in different times and places have permitted polygamous marriages (one man with several wives); confined one man to one woman (sometimes allowing for divorce and remarriage and other times not); permitted one man to have two wives but no more than two; assigned multiple men to one wife; permitted group marriages between numerous men and numerous women; and even, as in the case of Tonkin (Vietnam), permitted foreign sailors “when the ships come into harbor” to engage in temporary marriages with local women that lasted only for a season.

But Hume is no cultural relativist and rejects the view that all marriage customs are equally good at producing desirable results. Much of his essay is devoted to showing the many harms and disadvantages of two of the most common types of marriage arrangements outside the Christian West: polygamy in which men have multiple wives, and monogamous marriages in which the spouses are permitted to dissolve their marriage and marry someone else.

Hume begins his critique of polygamy with the challenge of a hypothetical defender. Having multiple wives, says the polygamy defender, is “the only effectual remedy for the disorder of love and the only expedient for freeing men from that slavery to the females which the natural violence of our passion has imposed upon us.” It is by multiple partners alone—partners who can be used at will and played off one against the other—that “[we men] regain our right of sovereignty, and sating our appetite, reestablish the authority of reason in our minds, and, of consequence, our own authority in our families.”

Start your day with Public Discourse

Hume’s answer to the polygamy defender continues in the tradition of Locke’s famous attack on patriarchy and does so in a manner that strongly resonates with contemporary liberal sensibilities. The sovereignty of the male in a polygamous marriage, says Hume, “is a real usurpation and destroys that nearness of rank, not to say equality, which nature has established between the sexes. We are, by nature, their lovers, their friends, their patrons: Would we willingly exchange such endearing appellations for the barbarous title of master and tyrant?”

The calamities brought on by polygamous marriage do not stop with the adults in the arrangement, according to Hume. Children brought up under such a marriage learn only the lifestyle of masters and slaves and never come to understand the importance of human equality. The huge number of offspring produced by such an arrangement also deprives each child of substantial fatherly guidance, since a polygamous father will have little time to spend with each of his numerous progeny. “Those who pass the early part of life among slaves,” says Hume, “are only qualified to be themselves slaves and tyrants, and in every future intercourse either with their inferiors or superiors are apt to forget the natural equality of mankind. What attention, too, can it be supposed a parent, whose seraglio affords him fifty sons, will give to instilling principles of morality or science into a progeny with whom he himself is scarcely acquainted…?”

Having dispensed with polygamous marriage, and “matched one man with one woman” as a more desirable marital arrangement, Hume turns his sights to the “duration we shall assign to their [monogamous] union” and to “whether we shall admit of those voluntary divorces which were customary among the Greeks and Romans.” The arguments of the defenders of divorce seem strong: “Let us separate hearts which were not made to associate together,” they say, so that divorcing spouses “[may each] find another for which it is better fitted.” “Nothing can be more cruel,” they continue, “than to preserve by violence an union which, at first, was made by mutual love, and is now, in effect, dissolved by mutual hatred.”

Hume responds to these arguments on two fronts: the welfare of children and the happiness of spouses. His arguments closely parallel those of the critics of our contemporary “no fault” divorce culture. “What must become of the children upon the separation of the parents?” he asks. “Must they be committed to the care of a stepmother, and instead of the fond attention and concern of a parent, feel all the indifference or hatred of a stranger or an enemy? … And shall we seek to multiply those inconveniencies by multiplying divorces and putting it in the power of parents, upon every caprice, to render their posterity miserable?”

Hume clearly believed, as did almost all the English of his day (and almost all Americans until quite recently), that children generally thrive best when brought up in a two-parent, husband-wife household, where the children are the biological offspring of both parents. Both reason and common experience justified such a judgment. Divorce and the breakup of the marital household were viewed as harmful to children, since, even if the divorced parents remarry, step-parents usually don’t have the same warmth or commitment in rearing other people’s children as in rearing their own. This for Hume—and most of his contemporaries—was a simple fact of everyday experience that needed no proof. Stereotypes of wicked or cold stepmothers existed precisely because the stereotypes contained a good deal of easily observable statistical truth.

What Hume has to say about divorce and the happiness of spouses contains his most profound insight into human relationships and the difficulties of sustaining marital happiness. Contrary to what some romantics may think, marital happiness and conjugal human love cannot be sustained by amorous or infatuating passions, Hume says, since they are by nature unstable and fleeting. “Amorous love,” he says, “is a restless and impatient passion, full of caprices and variations—arising in a moment from a feature, from an air, from nothing, and suddenly extinguishing after the same manner.” Whatever its value may be, no marriage can be sustained by it.

Hume proposed as his alternative the companionate friendship that is fostered by and preserves marriage. This, Hume says, is an affection “calm and sedate … conducted by reason and cemented by habit, springing from long acquaintance and mutual obligations, without jealousies or fears, and without those feverish fits of heat and cold, which cause such an agreeable torment in the amorous passion.” Abiding friendship and the sharing of life’s experiences and tasks, says Hume, are what render the married state both endurable and happy.

Does the presence of an option for “voluntary divorce” within a marriage negatively affect the cultivation of friendship between the marital partners and hence their conjugal happiness? It does, says Hume, and it does so in a powerful way. If spouses know they can divorce at will and seek their marital bliss with another partner, the relationship dynamics within marriage, he believed, would be radically altered and in such a manner that diminishes marital stability and marital happiness. With no sense of obligation to stick together through thick and thin, they would be less inclined to work together to iron out their differences and keep their conjugal friendship alive.

There is a paradox here, Hume acknowledges, in that “the heart of man naturally delights in liberty,” and the liberty to marry the person of one’s affection is acknowledged as an important ingredient in marital happiness. But once married, the liberty of easy divorce has the opposite effect on a couple’s happiness, Hume says, and he gives as an historical example the decline in marital happiness that followed Rome’s abandonment of its ancient proscription of divorce. Under the older dispensation, says Hume (citing the Roman historian and orator Dionysius Halicarnassus), marriages were generally harmonious and satisfying, as couples “considered the inevitable necessity by which they were linked together and abandoned all prospect of any other choice or establishment.” “The heart of man naturally submits to necessity,” Hume explains, and it will soon lose “an inclination when there appears an absolute impossibility of gratifying it.” The secret to happy marriages thus involves principles of both freedom and constraint, principles Hume readily acknowledges that seem to contradict one another. “But what is man,” he muses, “but a heap of contradictions!”

Hume would no doubt agree with the claim of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his prison “Wedding Sermon”: “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.” The no-divorce-option marriage, for Hume, is an institution that binds spouses together through strong social and legal obligations, and gives them permanent incentives to sustain and deepen their mutual friendship and love.

Looked at from our current perspective with more than three decades of experience behind us of divorce-on-demand laws—and a cultural value system paralleling them—Hume’s critique seems uncannily prescient. Sociologists specializing in family issues, including Sara McLanahan, Paul Amato, and David Popenoe, have documented the substantially greater risk to the children of divorce with regard to virtually every “social bad” that social scientists can measure—e.g., drug and alcohol addiction, teen pregnancy, child abuse, depression and mental illness, poor school performance, juvenile delinquency, and increased risk of injury from accidents. This greater risk holds true whether the children of divorced parents wind up in single-parent, step-parent, mother-and-grandmother, mother-and-boyfriend, or father-and-girlfriend households. Growing up with two biological parents, in an intact, husband-wife family, with the parents committed to lifelong monogamy and working together as a team, has been shown to benefit children in countless ways.

And just as Hume would have predicted, recent research suggests that our easy divorce laws may have contributed to the well-documented decline in overall marital happiness over the past four decades, a decline seen even among couples who do not divorce. Summing up the results of recent studies, Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher note that “even as divorce [in the 1980s] became an easier, more common, and more acceptable outlet for marital unhappiness, marriages became unhappier.” In surveys since the 1970s, couples increasingly rate their marriages as unsatisfactory, even those who remain married and do not follow the divorce route of so many other Americans.

Waite and Gallagher conclude with a quotation from two other marriage researchers that could stand as a fitting epigraph to Hume’s much-neglected and prescient essay: “Ironically, by adopting attitudes that provide greater freedom to leave unsatisfying marriages, people may be increasing the likelihood that their marriage will become unsatisfying.” And one could add: “unsatisfying and unhappy to all concerned—the spouses, their children, their relatives, their friends, their fellow church members, and the surrounding social order more generally.” With his keen insight into people—and his uncommon degree of common sense—David Hume would have understood America’s current marriage crisis only too well.

Related Posts

The Supreme Court was more right than it knew during the past two centuries as…

A new proposal for reducing unnecessary divorce gets to the heart of the problem: the…

An article by sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox raises the question of how divorce hurts and…

Latest Articles

The Michigan Conversion Therapy Ban Violates Human Nature and Religious Freedom

The Pronatalism of Silicon Valley

Social Conservatives, Populism, and Confused Republicans

Tried for a Tweet

Pro-Life Peril and Hope

Propriety without Principle: The Cautionary Tale of Robert E. Lee

• Privacy Policy

© 2024 The Public Discourse

Privacy Overview

Subscribe to Public Discourse

• Daily Emails
• Weekly Emails
• First Name *
• Last Name *

Organize your car, cords and more with these expert-picked solutions — starting at $5

• Share this —

• Watch Full Episodes
• Read With Jenna
• Inspirational
• Relationships
• TODAY Table
• Newsletters
• Start TODAY
• Shop TODAY Awards
• Citi Concert Series
• Listen All Day

Follow today

More Brands

• On The Show
• TODAY Plaza

10 tips for preventing divorce

After numerous years of collecting stories about the best and worst ways to handle marriage, separation, and divorce, the editors at Divorce Magazine have decided to offer some of their best tips about divorce prevention. These 10 suggestions might help you get to the point where you want to work things out with your current spouse, or they will help you in your next relationship. Either way, this advice is worth the read. 1 : Make time to connect lovingly with your spouse every day. A couple can significantly improve their chances of marital success by devoting as little as 15 minutes a day exclusively to each other. For instance, you could wake up a little earlier, and spend the extra time in bed cuddling, making love, and reaffirming your love for each other. Take time every day to have meaningful conversations with each other; to listen with the same intensity as when you were dating; to touch, hug, and show affection; to tell each other how you feel about your marriage; and to talk about your goals for the marriage and your lives. 2 :  Compliment your spouse regularly—both in private and in front of others. Even if your partner seems embarrassed or shrugs it off at first, the glow from sincere praise lasts a long time.

3 : Love your spouse in the way he/she wants to be loved. We often make the mistake of assuming that the things that touch our hearts the most deeply will affect our partner in the same way. For instance, you may think red roses are the perfect gift, but to your spouse, they represent a waste of money and an allergy attack. If you don't already know, find out what your spouse yearns for, and then deliver it with love—and no comments about how "stupid" it is to want a cordless drill/a picnic on the living room floor/a tuna casserole. Remember: the best gift is something your spouse wants—not merely something you want him/her to have.

4 :  Take care of your appearance. Look your best for your spouse. Lose the ratty sweat pants or frayed sweater he/she hates so much; you can find other comfortable clothes that aren't a complete turn-off for your partner. This also means taking care of your health—including eating properly and exercising regularly.

5 : Remain faithful. Dr. Finnegan Alford-Cooper studied 576 couples who had been married for 50 years or more; in 1998, she released her findings in the book For Keeps: Marriages that Last a Lifetime . In her study, she found that 95 percent of the spouses agreed that fidelity was essential to a successful marriage, and 94 percent agreed or strongly agreed that marriage is a long-term commitment to one person. And these "lifers" weren't making the best of a bad lot: a whopping 90 percent of the couples she surveyed said that they were happily married after 50-plus years. 6 : Do things together. Another common factor of long-term happy marriages is that the spouses regularly do things together that they find fun and exciting. Whether that's ballroom dancing, bowling, playing cards, SCUBA diving, or skiing, participate in at least one activity that you both enjoy every week. If you have kids, make sure at least half of these activities are for you and your spouse only. 7 : Spend time apart. You take a pottery course while your spouse plays hockey; you play bridge and your partner collects stamps. You don't have to love everything your partner loves, but you do have to allow him/her the freedom to pursue cherished hobbies. An added bonus is that separate interests can generate interest between you. 8 : Be friends with your partner. John Gottman—a psychology professor who claims his research will predict with 91 percent accuracy whether a couple will stay together—says the key to marital happiness and success is friendship. Some of the most important aspects of this type of friendship are knowing each other intimately, demonstrating affection and respect for each other on a daily basis, and genuinely enjoying each other's company. Gottman based his findings on 25 years of marital research, which he presented in his book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work .

9 : The Terms of Endearment. Top Los Angeles divorce attorney Stacy D. Phillips says flowers, candy, cards, and gifts are all wonderful tokens of love, but if you really want your romance to last, you must practice some marriage-saving steps. She advises couples to spell out the basics of their relationship in a yearly contract—or at least to clarify them. "Most disputes that break up marriages are over sex and money," she says. "Don't let surprises lead to trouble. Marriage is like any other contract: its terms and conditions must be reviewed and updated."

10 : Say "I love you" every day. This is especially important when you're not feeling the sensation of love; at these times, you have to actively generate it. Saying those three little words, and performing loving gestures, will warm both your and your spouse's hearts.

A version of this story originally appeared on iVillage.

Meteorologist suffers panic attack on live TV. Watch how he handled it

Mind & body.

Is that red flag real or just in your head? A sex therapist shares how to tell the difference

The No. 1 habit sabotaging relationships, according to Dr. Orna Guralnik of ‘Couples Therapy’

What is a ‘functioning alcoholic’? Taylor Swift's lyrics create buzz

Women's health.

Why am I always cold? 9 possible medical reasons and when to see a doctor

Psychotherapist Esther Perel reveals the No. 1 skill couples need to survive in the future

Here's why younger guys fall for older women

5 emotional signs your partner may be unfaithful

5 simple ways to meet new people, according to relationship experts

How often should couples have sex? A sex educator shares 5 healthy habits in a relationship

• Skip to main content
• Skip to primary sidebar
• Skip to footer

Divorce Magazine

Since 1996 Divorce Magazine has been the Internet's leading website on divorce and separation. We provide advice about divorce law, divorce lawyers, family law, custody, support and other divorce related issues along with a directory of divorce professionals.

4 Arguments Against Divorce to Consider Before Calling It Quits

While divorce may seem the easiest way to deal with an unhappy marriage, it can result in tremendous loss and pain. before you decide to call it quits, consider these four arguments against divorce..

By Tonda R. Bian Updated: July 11, 2018 Categories: Considering Divorce

Anna was divorced in the early 2000s. After 15 years of marriage, her husband discovered her infidelity and came to her with what she saw at the time was his firm decision. He wanted a divorce. There was no discussion. There was no counseling. There was just the attorney who prepared the papers and a cursory division of property. Her guilt let him take control, and years later she wished they had learned to talk during their marriage and especially before it all ended. At first, she thought divorce was freeing, but in the end, it was a personal, social, and financial disaster.

Joan had another situation. She and her husband had been deeply in love, at least at the beginning, but passion gradually diminished over the years and their interests in each other and their interests in what they did as a couple became nonexistent. They always knew divorce was an option and it seemed the best choice at the time. So they divorced – and neither one seems to be any happier now.

Arguments Against Divorce: Consider Your Future as well as Your Present

In her book,  The Case Against Divorce  (Ivy Books, 1990), which is still relevant today, clinical psychologist Diane Medved, Ph.D., takes a bold stance on the outcome of divorce and outlines some of the major arguments against divorce. Her take is that anyone considering divorce needs to think it through and not just consider what seems right for now, but what life could and will likely be down the road.

Divorce should not be an easy decision. It is life changing personally, socially, financially, even professionally, and if there is any hope, anything to hold on to that can be rebuilt, a real effort should be made even if “getting out and moving on” seems more appealing than the vows you took and the life you now have.

4 Arguments Against Divorce

Dr. Medved offers the following major arguments against divorce – which are also reasons to stay together:

1. Divorce hurts you

Some of the consequences include the frequent anger and resentment that may linger for years and deeply affect your life including emotional scars that may never go away. Then, there is the likelihood you will experience a lower standard of living, diminished social interaction and issues with self-esteem following separation and divorce that can be very hard to restore.

2. Divorce hurts those around you

Divorce hurts your children, and your family and friends, who are often forced to take sides.

3. Being single again isn’t necessarily going to be the good life

Finding that ideal partner might likely turn into an impossibility or yet another failed relationship.

4. Staying married and working on your marital issues could be your best choice

You may want to work on your marriage instead of disrupting your life and starting all over. Unless there are issues that are points of no return such as abuse and neglect, there is likely something to hold on to and build on.

Yet, how can there be hope for a marriage where there are issues that might include poor communication, loss of love, no mutual interests, constant arguing or fighting, even infidelity?

A starting point is to go back to the beginning and ask yourself what it was that first attracted you to your spouse and how you felt in the beginning. Make a list of your spouse’s good qualities and why you admire these. Also, make a list of the good aspects of your marriage in the past and present. (Your partner should do the same.)  It just might be that by remembering the good in the past and what still is good, you have something to build on. Start thinking of your marriage in positive terms rather than negative.

Share Your Feelings and Dreams with Your Spouse – and Listen with Real Interest to Their Thoughts

When was the last time you talked (or argued) about anything other than the kids, bills, or household chores?  Make it a point to talk about more meaningful topics – feelings, interests, concerns, dreams. Tell your spouse that you would like to have a good talk and find a time and place (without distractions) to do so. Then repeat. Show and take a real interest in your partner’s thoughts as your partner hopefully will in yours. It won’t be easy, but, it’s worth the effort.

Start doing things together like a dinner date with each other, a nightly walk, church or a shared project. Even volunteer together. Get involved with each other’s hobbies and activities. Surprise each other with notes or a small gift. Create a bucket list together. Be creative.

Think about other ways you can connect with each other. The reason you have drifted apart is likely because you gradually forgot what is important in a healthy relationship – showing and receiving love, respect, admiration, and having a vision for the future together.

If divorce is a real possibility, counseling with a licensed therapist, a trusted pastor, or a divorce coach could be of help. An objective third party (other than family and friends) is always beneficial whether you choose to seek their advice individually or as a couple.

Arguments Against Divorce: No One Leaves a Marriage Unscathed

Remember that no one leaves a marriage unscathed – there are always scars and consequences in divorce. If there is anything you think of that you can hold on to, then you need to try to make your marriage work. Give it everything you can. You and your spouse have an opportunity to rebuild, restore, and even make your marriage more than it has ever been, and if that happens, you will have accomplished something major — you made it work even when it seemed an impossibility.

Related Content

• Is Divorce the Right Choice for You?
• Can You Rescue Your Relationship?
• Emotional Rescue: Following the Path to Emotional Recovery

Reader Interactions

Add a comment cancel reply, helpful divorce article categories:.

• Alimony and Spousal Support
• Child Custody
• Child Support
• Children and Divorce
• Divorce and Annulment
• Divorce News and Statistics
• Financial Issues
• Legal Issues
• Relationships and Dating
• DivorceFAQs
• Divorce Podcasts
• Divorce Blogs

Visit Our Websites:

• Divorce Marketing Group
• Divorced Moms
• The Divorce School

Argument for and Against Divorce

4 minutes  • 822 words, arguments for divorce, arguments against divorce.

How long should monogamous marriages last? Should we allow voluntary divorces, which were customary among the Greeks and Romans?

• Loveless marriages just increase hate and pain

Disgust and aversion often arises after marriage from:

• the most trivial accidents, or
• incompatibility

Time can add new quarrels and reproaches which makes their mutual wounds fester more every day instead of curing them. Let us separate hearts which were not made to associate together. Each of them may, perhaps, find another for which it is better fitted.

At least, nothing can be more cruel than to preserve, by violence, an union, which, at first, was made by mutual love, and is now, in effect, dissolved by mutual hatred.

• Divorces are natural

The heart of man delights in liberty. The very image of constraint is grievous to it.

When you would confine it by violence, to what would otherwise have been its choice, the desire is turned into aversion.

If polygamy is not allowed, at least, do not deprive us of that liberty .

I had my choice of who I would marry, my prison. But this is but a small comfort, since it is still a prison.

• What will happen to the children upon the separation of the parents?

Must they be committed to the care of a step-mother; and instead of the fond attention and concern of a parent, feel all the indifference or hatred of a stranger or an enemy?

These inconveniencies are sufficiently felt, where nature has made the divorce by the doom° inevitable to all mortals: And shall we seek to multiply those inconveniencies, by multiplying divorces, and putting it in the power of parents, upon every caprice, to render their posterity miserable?

• If the heart of man naturally delights in liberty, and hates every thing to which it is confined, then that heart naturally submits to necessity, and soon loses an inclination, when there appears an absolute impossibility of gratifying it.

These principles are contradictory. But what is man but a heap of contradictions!

It is remarkable that, where principles are contrary in their operation. But they do not always destroy each other. The one or the other may predominate as circumstances are more or less favourable to it.

For instance, love is a restless and impatient passion, full of caprices and variations. It arises in a moment from a feature, from an air, from nothing, and suddenly extinguishing after the same way.

Such a passion requires liberty above all things. Therefore in order to preserve this passion, Eloisa refused to marry her beloved Abelard.

How oft, when prest to marriage, have I said, Curse on all laws but those which love has made:

Love, free as air, at sight of human ties, Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.

But friendship:

• is a calm and sedate affection, conducted by reason and cemented by habit
• springs from long acquaintance and mutual obligations
• is without jealousies or fears, and
• is without those feverish fits of heat and cold which cause such an agreeable torment in the amorous passion.

Friendship rather thrives under constraint. It never rises to such a height, as when any strong interest or necessity binds two persons together and gives them some common object of pursuit.

Therefore, we should not be afraid of drawing the marriage-knot, which chiefly subsists by the closest friendship.

The solid and sincere amity between the persons will rather gain by marriage. Where it is wavering and uncertain, this is the best expedient for fixing it.

Prudent people can forget the many frivolous quarrels and disgusts when they are under a necessity to live together. But such quarrels can soon be inflamed into the most deadly hatred if there were a prospect of an easy separation.

• Nothing is more dangerous than to unite two persons so closely in all their interests and concerns, as man and wife, without rendering the union entire and total.

The least possibility of a separate interest must be the source of endless quarrels and suspicions. The wife, not secure of her establishment, will still be driving some separate end or project;h and the husband’s selfishness, being accompanied with more power, may be still more dangerous.

Should these reasons against voluntary divorces be insufficient, I hope nobody will refuse experience.

When divorces were most frequent among the Romans, marriages were most rare. Augustus was obliged, by penal laws, to force men of fashion into marriage. This never happened anywhere else.

The more ancient laws of Rome prohibited divorces. They are extremely praised by Dionysius Halycarnassæus.8 He said that “Wonderful was the harmony which this inseparable union of interests produced between married persons; while each of them considered the inevitable necessity by which they were linked together, and abandoned all prospect of any other choice or establishment.”

The exclusion of polygamy and divorces sufficiently recommends our present European practice with regard to marriage.

Any Comments? Post them below!

We're building a new science and new systems for a better reality. Please support us by buying our books below

Try adjusting your search query

3 Signs of Going Through an "Emotional Divorce"

Signing legal papers isn't the only way to feel the effects of a divorce..

Posted August 15, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• The Challenges of Divorce
• Take our Relationship Satisfaction Test
• Find a therapist to heal from a divorce
• Emotional divorce is when a couple, still legally married, experiences a significant emotional separation.
• In an emotional divorce, a couple can experience fear, relief, sadness, anger, hope, or even personal growth.
• Lack of communication creates an emotional chasm, making a couple more like roommates than life partners.

An “emotional divorce” refers to when a couple, although still legally married, experiences a significant emotional separation. This situation often precedes a legal divorce but can also occur independently.

In an emotional divorce, partners become increasingly emotionally disconnected from one another, leading to a lack of intimacy , communication, or mutual support. Couples may live together but lead separate lives, with little to no shared activities, goals , or interests.

In the process of an emotional divorce, research shows that a couple can experience fear , relief, sadness, anger , hope, or even personal growth in varying degrees, often based on who initiates the separation.

A 2023 study found that emotional divorces can also be associated with alexithymia—a difficulty in identifying and connecting with one’s emotions—and possibly depression . These mental health impacts on both individuals and their marriages highlight the importance of catching the signs early and addressing them before they escalate.

Following are three signs of an emotional divorce:

1. A Lack of Communication

A study published in March on late-life divorces found that emotional divorces often set in long before formal ones. Based on the participants’ experiences of growing apart while still married, a lack of communication is one of the most telling signs of an emotional divorce.

Partners may stop sharing their thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and daily experiences with each other. Conversations become superficial and cold, limited to necessary topics such as household chores, their children’s well-being, or finances.

The warmth and affection that once characterized their interactions are replaced by detachment and indifference. Nonverbal cues such as eye contact, touch, and attentive body language that signify connection and affection can also noticeably diminish.

“At some point it was even cold between us. A distance began to form. We no longer had the usual topics of conversation. I focused on my pleasures, she on her work and our relationship was through the children. The divorce was essentially a final stop in a process that had started years before,” says Dan, a 69-year-old participant from the study, recalling the emotional divorce that took place with his ex long before legal proceedings began.

A lack of communication creates an emotional chasm between partners, making them operate more like roommates than life partners. This can create feelings of anxiety and loneliness , even when physically together.

2. A Loss of Intimacy

In strained marriages, physical affection and sexual activity can significantly decline or cease entirely. Emotionally divorced couples also tend to experience very low levels of emotional intimacy, often due to underlying emotional disconnection, incompatibility, a lack of attraction , or unresolved conflicts.

A 2021 study found that when we perceive our partners as caring and responsive to our needs, we experience greater intimacy, which can enhance relationship satisfaction. However, emotional divorces can involve the loss of a deep connection, closeness, trust, mutual understanding, emotional availability, and responsiveness between partners.

After facing multiple relationship challenges without successful resolutions, spouses may become indifferent to each other’s needs, feelings, and well-being and stop putting effort into maintaining the relationship. This can further fuel feelings of neglect and perpetuate negative cycles of being emotionally dismissive of each other.

3. Heightened Levels of Destructive Conflict

Emotional divorces often involve heightened levels of conflict, with couples unable to resolve them or giving up after multiple failed attempts. Over time, these unresolved conflicts foster resentment and hostility. Partners may begin to avoid each other to prevent any further friction, creating further emotional distance.

“We were dragged into endless arguments about who is right, what word was said, in what tone it was said, and what it means, and what punishment is due for it. It was exhausting to the point that in the last eight or nine years, I tried as much as possible not to talk, be in a separate room and live my life,” explains Ruth, another participant from the 2024 late-life divorce study.

According to Gottman’s theory of “the four horsemen” of divorce, four destructive behaviors in a conflict can signal the end of a marriage : criticism or attacking a partner’s character; contempt, which involves a lack of respect and sarcasm; defensiveness, which entails refusing to take responsibility for one’s behavior; and stonewalling, which involves withdrawing and refusing to communicate.

Without open communication, misunderstandings and assumptions become more frequent. Partners may begin to doubt each other’s intentions, leading to suspicion and insecurity. Over time, the emotional toll of constant conflicts and unmet needs can also lead to emotional exhaustion, leaving little room for positive interactions.

A 2018 study found that when both spouses take their problems seriously, it reduces the risk of separation. However, in emotional divorces, they may feel too worn out to do so, making reconciliation increasingly difficult.

Additionally, research shows that spouses often stay together, locked in a long period of emotional divorce because their relationships have both positive and negative elements, making it difficult to end them or to continue in the face of struggles.

Realizing that you’re in an emotional divorce is not a death sentence for your relationship but an opportunity to reflect on what you, your partner, and your children, if any, would truly benefit from.

No one wins if even one partner is unhappy in a marriage. While emotional divorces can be challenging and painful, addressing the dissatisfaction is the first step toward preparing oneself to move on from an unfulfilling relationship or healing and rebuilding a stronger, more connected bond with your partner.

A version of this post also appears on Forbes.com.

Mark Travers, Ph.D., is an American psychologist with degrees from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

The Causes of Divorce Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Inequality in spending or earning money.

Divorces are socially significant actions that often have negative implications for both former families involved and society as a whole. The causes behind this social phenomenon can vary significantly, but for the sake of a deeper understanding, there is a necessity to explore some of them in-depth. One of the main causes of divorces is betrayal; another is unequal spending and earning. Exploring these causes could provide an insight into how to avoid them.

Betrayal or infidelity is one of the most common causes for a husband and wife to split. Infidelity for each particular person can mean a multitude of things. Some people, arguably most, define betrayal in marriage as having sex with another person. This is deeply connected with the nature and tradition of the intimate relationship between men and women. Letting another person into one’s personal space to the point of having intercourse is already an issue of deep-felt trust and having utter conviction in the other party’s genuine feelings. If a marriage partner reveals that they have had that same kind of intimacy and affection with someone else, it will definitely insult the other partner. No wonder, then, that after such an incident, the victim of infidelity would want to sever the relationship as trust is violated. At first glance, it seems understandable and logical.

There is also another explanation for such a reaction. Religious people consider the marital vow of loving and honoring each other for as long as they both live sacred; sacred as something that is witnessed, blessed, and sealed by the higher power. Such an alliance is forbidden to break by divine law. If a person decides to violate this vow, it means not only that they betrayed their partner but also that they went against God. Such an action for a deeply religious person is much more than a violation of trust. Therefore, there are not many choices left other than to drift apart.

There can also be other understandings of betrayal. Some people have more conservative views on marital fidelity and may consider even holding hands with a person of the opposite sex for a second too long to be a friendly handshake. It may not lead directly to divorce but may give grounds for monitoring each action of an allegedly cheating wife or husband. This is often considered a norm in middle-eastern countries where women are not allowed to even look at a person of the opposite sex in the eyes for too long. This is a deeply religious and cultural tradition that may not be acceptable to others. Interestingly, in some Islamic practices, men are allowed to have up to four wives, and this is not considered to be infidelity.

Additionally, people often vary in degrees of tolerance towards infidelity. Some consider it a violation of trust but not to the point of needing to end the relationship, especially if it didn’t last that long. Many people would consider writing a one-off or short-term event as a mistake, provided the circumstances did not imply serious consideration of deliberate and heartless assault on their partner’s feelings. Some people even forgive betrayal more than once or do so systematically for a number of psychological reasons. Some are very tolerant in their views on marital relationships and may even let the other party have sex with other people while not feeling betrayed at all. People in this category, with somewhat progressive or, as some may say, open-minded views are quite rare according to the author’s personal observations.

After staying in the relationship after a betrayal, most people cannot maintain the same level of emotional affection for longer than a few years. People may stay together because they have grown comfortable with each other and they are afraid of being alone again. Others demonstrate the opposite reaction and start slowly drifting towards other people in search of those sharp and intense feelings that they long for but cannot experience with the person they loved a few years back. Whatever the reasons for betrayal, be it lack of love or sexual attraction, a divorce requires the verbal or non-verbal consent of the two spousal parties.

Money can also become a reason to end a marriage and go separate ways. In this case, people have not necessarily entered a relationship seeking material benefit. At least, the financial well-being of a partner was not a defining characteristic. If love was the prime reason for getting married, then money could be just an excuse and a valid reason for not verbalizing the absence of feelings. People often tend to avoid upsetting their loved ones or the people they care about by not telling them the hard truth. However, divorce can often be accompanied by a long period of mutual accusations and even legal actions against one another in an attempt to retain a larger part of the matrimonial property. After seeing this happen, it can be hard to believe that these people ever loved each other.

There are also cases when people who were committed to building a career and have remained single into their thirties or even forties. Such people can be inexperienced in building a long-lasting relationship and are accustomed to a standard of living. Entering marriage late for such people may mean a rapid shift from a relatively calm and steady lifestyle into a costly endeavor as the needs of two people differ from just having to consider themselves. Frequently, divorce happens when people marry hastily, not having lived together long enough to grow accustomed to each other’s lifestyles. Another reason for money-based divorces could be one-sided love. An aged man or a woman with a considerable fortune could fall in love with a younger person who has deceitful intentions of waiting for their elder partner to die and pretend to be caring and loving enough to be mentioned in their will. An end to such relationships is often brought about by ‘failed’ acting or the elder partner following the advice from a close friend.

There are also situations when people end relationships because they do not consider themselves equal partners. For some people, marriage is not only about love and affection but also financial equality. Men often feel uneasy to earn less than their wives. Although this may not be discussed between the two, marriages sometimes become a topic of external discussion and gossip can make a proud man feel miserable in his relationship to the point he cannot see any positive side. The situation is often aggravated by the fact that men do not like to bring up such deep topics for discussion, and prefer to let things build up. This unhealthy pride, with gossip as a stimulating factor, could sever a marriage that otherwise could be happy.

Another side of this issue could entail a wife being dissatisfied with her husband earning low wages or a husband discontented with his wife’s excessive spending. These are clichés that are often seen on TV and read in books; the roles can be opposite too. Nonetheless, the disparity in earnings and spending between partners can become an issue that threatens a relationship. Marriage can be viewed as a union where each side is equal in everything. It would be safe to assume that each partner should contribute to keeping the flame within the family hearth either ‘by labor or by coin’ but in equal amount nonetheless. When contributions cannot be measured and compared in dollar equivalent, there may arise a question of equality that quickly becomes a fight over money and contribution.

There is a myriad of reasons for divorce. They may be well-established and evidenced with facts of infidelity or bank statements. However, a divorce still remains an act between two people who united for some reason in the past, who now wish to go their separate ways. For one party, it may seem a relief, for the other it is misfortune. Having analyzed two possible causes of divorce, it occurred to me that the underlying reason for divorce is a change in one of the partners or both of them. If marriage is a union of two people who found something that unites them, makes them similar, then it is some drastic difference that draws them apart. Thus, marriage depends on the ability to settle differences through conversation or frequent contemplation on the things that unite two people.

• Definition of the People According to Their Groups
• How Does Kamasutra Teach to Become a Better Woman?
• Three Main Causes of Divorce
• Divorce Prevalence in England and Wales
• Probabilistic Reasoning in Infidelity
• Comparing and Contrasting Expectations in a Relationship Engagement
• "Trauma and Recovery" by Lewis Herman
• Definition of Love and Types of Love
• Interpersonal Relations Importance
• Storytelling: Term Definition
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, January 19). The Causes of Divorce. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-causes-of-divorce/

"The Causes of Divorce." IvyPanda , 19 Jan. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-causes-of-divorce/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'The Causes of Divorce'. 19 January.

IvyPanda . 2022. "The Causes of Divorce." January 19, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-causes-of-divorce/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Causes of Divorce." January 19, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-causes-of-divorce/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Causes of Divorce." January 19, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-causes-of-divorce/.

Sample details

• Experience,
• Words: 1151

Related Topics

• Appreciation
• Family Tradition
• Difficulties
• Documentation
• Jurisprudence
• Legislation
• Nuclear family
• Extended family

Understanding “The Case against Divorce”

            Back in the early days of the 1950’s and the 1960’s, the divorce in the society occurs in rare circumstances. Though there are several married couples who consider this as an option to end the marriage, it is never regarded as the main answer of solving family problems back in the earlier days. It is not until the modern days when this social point of view against divorce has been altered, which sets a more liberal way of embracing such notion of legal separation. In the society, nowadays, there are more and more married couples who are seriously considering the act of divorce as their best resort to resolve their marital problems and permanently end their difficulties in their married life. In this regard, the book entitled “The Case Against Divorce” serves as a credible reading material for the people, more especially for those married couple who are in the verge of giving up their marriage vows and in the stage of filing a divorce.

It is written by a great American author and a clinical psychologist named Diane Medved. Fundamentally, this book of Diane Medved tells about the reality about divorce and its adverse and long term effect in the lives of people involved in the overall process of such marital separation. Thus, this essay concentrates on studying and analyzing the facts and information presented by the author, Diane Medved, about divorce such as its negative implications and the ways resoling marital problems without filing a divorce.

ready to help you now

Without paying upfront

            In a brief summary of the book, Diane Medved’s “The Case Against Divorce” is an informative, comprehensive and credible reading material that is specifically written for the readers who are experiencing marital problems with their partners as this book enlightens the facts against divorce. It also lays out the pros and cons of committing a legal long term marital separation. In the book, the author has provided clear details in highlighting the negative and unlikely impacts of divorce in the lives of the couples, more especially among the children who are absorbing the adversities that is incorporated in the entire process of divorce. The book also highlights the list of major factors and reasons that adds more fuel to the fire which unconsciously encourages divorce and renders misleading notions about the advantages of being single.

Thus, this discusses the detrimental traditions of divorce such as notions like “a new beginning” and “meeting new lovers in an easy way.” Nonetheless, in general, this book of Diane Medved “The Case Against Divorce” is primarily written to discuss definite reasons and credible information for the people who are experiencing marital problems and in the brink of divorce to stay together and save their marriage despite experiencing domestic turmoil and differences as she made a clear standpoint that divorce is not the answer to resolve marital differences. Rather, Diane Medved asserts that the process and aftermath of divorce is all about suffering that it is persistently devastating to the body, mind, and spirit of the entire family.

            In a sense, it can be said that most of the information and ideas which Diane Medved has presented in her book about the adversities incorporated to divorce are relatively credible and factual as these are accordingly supported by a thorough research and her personal long term experience as a practicing psychologist. For instance, her standpoint that the process and aftermath of divorce entails negative effects in the physical and mental aspects of the people is no doubt a valuable statement as the effects and occurrence of divorce in the family are not new to her and that she has a reputable record in handling such cases in her career as a psychologist. Hence, the strategy which the author, Diane Medved, has utilized to gather factual and valuable information about the negative effects and difficulties which divorce entails is definitely one of the strengths of this book. With the fact that Diane Medved interviewed 200 people and/or couples who have been through the actual negative experiences of divorce, the author has done a great approach in gathering data and presenting credible ideas as the majority of information that she presented in the book are statements from people who experienced divorce and/or based on through research and valuable experiences she has in the past.

Nonetheless, the author’s notion that it is better to save and stay with the marriage despite of all the turmoil and differences rather than to commit a divorce is a strong statement to support her renewed standpoint that divorce is not the definite and long-term answer to marital problems. According to her, saving the marriage and spending time resolving immense marital problem is more precious and significant to protect the growth of family and care for the physical and emotional feelings of the major stakeholders involve in the entire process divorce and that couples who stays together in facing and solving marital problems are often rewarded with a sense of happiness and peace in their heart and in their family. Nonetheless, the author, Diane Medved, also showcases significance in her observation on the influence of society and people to the growing problem about divorce. Through her words, once that the outside forces enter the marital problems of the couple, the option of divorce is more likely encouraged as this forces are seen to be influential to the decision making of one person. Thus, friends, society and the present liberal standpoint about marriage are of the great factors that could encourage and further aggravate the issue about divorce. However, though there are evident strengths that could be cited for this book, there are weaknesses that could be highlighted in analyzing the overall work of the author. This includes the fact that the author has somewhat employed her own assumptions and personal beliefs in presenting ideas in some of the major information she has presented in the book, more specifically in assuming that all of the people suffering from a marital problems are all determined to get out of such situation. Though, this is a good assumption it is still better and advantageous to present this with evidences and well researched data. Moreover, the author failed to provide a significant number of respondents for it to become general for the population. Likewise, there are cultural considerations that have to be considered when reading the book because of the attachment of marriage to the culture of the person. It affects the separation of the couple because of the important role that culture plays when it comes to the relationship of couples.

            In its entirety, the book is considered as a good reading for the couples in order for them to avoid the common pitfalls of marriage. The concepts presented by the author and the different facts said of marriage shows that the book is applicable.

Medved, Diane. The Case Against Divorce. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.

Cite this page

https://graduateway.com/understanding-the-case-against-divorce/

You can get a custom paper by one of our expert writers

• Strengths And Weaknesses
• Jim Crow laws
• Understanding
• Conversation
• Criminal Law
• Constitutional Law

Check more samples on your topics

Elizabethan marriage and divorce.

As Lyndon Baines Johnson says, “The family is the corner stone of our society. More than any other force it shapes the attitude, the hopes, the ambitions, and the values of the child. And when the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale the community

The Effects of Divorce on Children

Each year, over 1 million American children experience the divorce of their parents. Currently in the United States, about 40% of first marriages end in divorce. In addition more than half of all divorces involve children under the age of eighteen. Substantial evidence in social science research and journals demonstrates that these children are affected mentally,

Research paper Divorce Bill

INTRODUCTION Divorce or the dissolution of marriage is the final termination of a marital union, cancelling the legal duties and responsibilities of marriage and dissolving the bonds of matrimony between the parties unlike annulment, which declares the marriage null and void. Divorce laws vary considerably around the world, but in most countries it requires the sanction

Father custody in divorce

            The topic of divorce is never one that has been taken lightly.  After all, there is no reason to consider divorce as something that is beneficial to society much less beneficial to its most basic structure which is the family.  A divorce, while technically and legally speaking, only separates the bond between husband and

The Impact of Divorce on Children

Divorce introduces a massive change into the life of a boy or girl no matter what the age. Witnessing loss of love between parents, having parents break their marriage commitment, adjusting to going back and forth between two different households, and the daily absence of one parent while living with the other, all significantly affect

Divorce & the Psychological Theories of Development

The Effects of Divorce on Children Based on the Application of the Psychological Developmental Theories Abstract This paper looks at the effects of divorce on children based on the application of various psychological developmental theories. More specifically, children within the age groups of 4 to 6 and 7 to 11 will be taken into account. The theories

Definition and Law of Marriage and Divorce

Marriage and divorce Introduction Marriage is an institution admitting a man and woman to family life; it is to living in the intimate personal relations of husband and wife for the primary purpose of begetting and rearing children. Marriage consist of the formal prescriptions which define the rights, duties, and privileges of husband and wife with respect

Sociological imagination approach of child abuse and divorce

Child Abuse

Describe how you thinks sociologist would approach studying the topics of child abuse and divorce. Use your "sociological Imagination" to construct your answer Sociologist's theories understand child abuse and divorce as a societal phenomenon having, a largely cultural, social, and economic origin or ties. Sociologists may prefer to focus on the societal conditions that result

Effects of Divorce on Children Essay

Divorce has a significant impact on children. It is increasingly chosen by couples who are unhappy in their marriage and is now the most frequent occurrence in the United States. In fact, about one million children experience divorce each year in the US, which accounts for approximately one-third of all children (Amato 21). The consequences

Hi, my name is Amy 👋

In case you can't find a relevant example, our professional writers are ready to help you write a unique paper. Just talk to our smart assistant Amy and she'll connect you with the best match.

• Search Please fill out this field.
• Manage Your Subscription
• Give a Gift Subscription
• Newsletters
• Sweepstakes
• Entertainment

Welcome to Plathville : Ethan Writes Olivia a Letter 'Letting Her Go' Before Finally Signing Divorce Papers

"I wish her the best and I love her and if there's anything that she ever needs, I'll help her as best I can," Ethan Plath said of ex Olivia Plath

Ethan and Olivia Plath are saying goodbye for the final time.

On the Aug. 13 episode of Welcome to Plathville , the former couple met to finish sorting out the last of their things before leaving their shared Minnesota apartment for good. When Ethan realized that Olivia didn't want to keep many sentimental items, such as their photos together, he asked her why she wasn’t struggling more to move on.

“There's stuff that she threw away that I was like, ‘Why'd you throw that away?'” he told the cameras. “I mean, but she's always been like that. Like when she cuts something out of her life, it's gone and she never looks back. And I know if she can do that with her own family, I don't stand a chance.”

He then said to her, “I feel like you don't care and it infuriates me. I feel stuck and for the life of me I can't seem to do anything about it, but you don't have that problem.”

She explained that she does care, but they had been separated for nine months and she had been grieving the loss of their relationship long before that.

“It's been a few years worth of watching the relationship die and fighting to save it and not being able to, and then just finally accepting it and moving on,” she said. “So I was just hoping he was going to work through things on his own and he hasn't.”

Instagram/oliviamarieplath

Ethan confessed that he never thought their breakup would be permanent, even reflecting back on their biggest fight where he said he “couldn’t stand [it] anymore.”

“I really thought that we would fight about it for like a week and then we would start working on it,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you kind of did that a lot,” she replied. “It was not a healthy relationship.”

Although Ethan said he believed they could have made things better, Olivia maintained that she disagreed.

“I think the way that things are playing out between Ethan and I is a direct picture of what happened in our marriage, of me saying, ‘This doesn't work, this needs to happen, this needs to be fixed,’ and him putting his head in the sand or under the hood of a car,” she said in her confessional. “And then when things fall apart, saying, ‘I just don't understand what happened.’”

At that point, Ethan decided it would be best to leave, and he acknowledged that “it’s just denial” that was holding him back from signing the divorce papers.

Later, Olivia went through old photos from the beginning of their marriage, and realized that they were just “two kids who did not know what they were doing.”

“It's hard to see Ethan in this much pain and struggling this much with everything, but I spent years logged down in stress and being on the other side of things,” she said. “I've realized that I felt more alone when I was in a relationship than I do being by myself.”

Olivia admitted that she still has love for Ethan, but she also felt like she wasn’t “good enough” for him and never would be. She went on to say she wasn't going to make it her "job" to fix him.

“We didn't mesh and we weren't compatible in a lot of ways,” she said.

Back at his place, Ethan sat down to write a letter for Olivia, which she asked him to do instead of sharing with her in person.

“I basically wrote in my note that I was sorry for all the ways that I fell short in our relationship that brought us to this point and I hope that she finds what I couldn't or didn't give her,” he revealed. “I wish her the best and I love her and if there's anything that she ever needs, I'll help her as best I can.”

He noted that the letter was “my way of letting her go,” even though he didn’t want to.

“I definitely think that I have more happy memories with her than bad memories, but the happy memories are just as painful as what you would consider a bad memory,” he said. “I definitely do feel like me and Olivia grew up together. We stepped out in the world together on our own. We gave it a good run, but not everything works.”

Never miss a story — sign up for  PEOPLE's free daily newsletter  to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Welcome to Plathville  airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on TLC.

Related Articles

trending now in US News

Crowd leaves joint Biden-Harris event early after VP hands off...

Fla. pol opens up after years-old footage of MAGA swimsuit goes...

Wild doorbell camera footage captures Florida couple being...

Hulking Florida teen who severely beat teacher's aide over...

Cheerleader, 12, dies after parents tried to treat...

Scott Peterson admits 'terrible mistake' as he breaks his...

Squeegee men have returned to Midtown West — and they're...

Mom of three gunned down while making TikTok — allegedly by ex...

Breaking news, georgia da fani willis had affair with prosecutor on trump case: lawsuit.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had an “improper” and “clandestine” relationship with the married special prosecutor who assisted in securing the Georgia grand jury indictment against former President Donald Trump, a co-defendant in the election interference case alleged Monday. 

The bombshell court filing made by former Trump 2020 campaign official Michael Roman argues that Willis should be disqualified from the case and the charges against him dropped because “the district attorney chose to appoint her romantic partner, who at all times relevant to this prosecution has been a married man,” to the case. 

Roman contends that Nathan Wade, a private attorney with the Atlanta-based Wade & Campbell Firm, used some of the nearly $654,000 in legal fees that he’s been paid by the Fulton County DA’s Office for his work on the Trump case to take Willis on lavish vacations to “Napa Valley, California, Florida and the Caribbean.” 

“Mr. Roman … moves the Court for an order disqualifying the district attorney, her office, and the special prosecutor from further prosecuting the instant matter on the grounds that the district attorney and the special prosecutor have been engaged in an improper, clandestine personal relationship during the pendency of this case, which has resulted in the special prosecutor, and, in turn, the district attorney, profiting significantly from this prosecution at the expense of the taxpayers,” the 127-page filing states. 

“Accordingly, the district attorney and the special prosecutor have violated laws regulating the use of public monies, suffer from irreparable conflicts of interest, and have violated their oaths of office under the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct and should be disqualified from prosecuting this matter,” it continues.

Roman’s filing claims that “sources close to both the special prosecutor and the district attorney” have confirmed that Willis and Wade had an ongoing fling, and that Wade filed for divorce in Cobb County, Ga., “a day after his first contract with Willis commenced” in November 2021. 

“In addition, the district attorney and the special prosecutor have been seen in private together (in a personal relationship capacity) in and about the Atlanta area and believed to have co-habited in some form or fashion at a location that neither of them owned,” the filing alleges. 

The motion argues that Willis’ failure to disclose her alleged relationship with Wade while paying him for his work on the Trump case with funds that he allegedly used to vacation with the DA could amount to honest services fraud as well as “a predicate act which could result in a RICO charge against both the district attorney and the special prosecutor.” 

Trump, 77, and Roman were both hit with racketeering charges in Willis’ case against them and 17 other co-defendants under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

Roman served as the Trump re-election campaign’s director of Election Day operations in 2020. 

In the wake of the former president’s 2020 loss, Roman allegedly joined an effort to put forward slates of pro-Trump “fake electors” to reject President-elect Joe Biden’s victories in key swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.

He was charged with seven felony counts last August by the Georgia grand jury convened by Willis. 

Wade and the Fulton County DA’s Office did not immediately respond to The Post’s requests for comment. 

Advertisement