The Myth of No-Fault Divorce

W hen the former British health secretary’s extramarital affair came to light last year, the press was much more interested in the fact that he’d breached his own social-distancing rules than that he committed adultery. Perhaps (as one writer friend suggested to me) so few commentators are willing to invoke traditional standards lest they too be measured by them. After all, in our post-Christian society, adultery is not necessarily wrong. There is also a widespread acceptance of “no fault divorce,” the idea that marriage, like a car, sometimes spontaneously breaks down, becoming more hassle than it’s worth.

One proponent of this philosophy is Adele, the megastar pop singer, whose latest album 30 takes her divorce from her husband (and the father of her son) as its theme. Adele told Oprah Winfrey that she had been “obsessed” with the idea of a “nuclear family” from a young age, after her father abandoned her at age three. She said that, for a time, she derived a great sense of stability and purpose from her husband and son. But this didn’t last. Soon, she realized she was “ignoring” her own happiness. In the interview, she describes her dissatisfaction so vaguely that it’s difficult to pin down. What it seems to have boiled down to is boredom.

It’s not just her. Writing in The Atlantic, Honor Jones, a mother of three, describes going through a similar set of emotions in an essay titled, “How I demolished my life.” Jones writes, “I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself” (her emphasis). When her husband asked her why she was leaving him, causing so much upheaval and heartbreak, she silently reassured herself: “So I could put my face in the wind. So I could see the sun’s glare” (her emphasis). In other words, so she could reclaim the freedoms of single life.

Curiously, despite their respective choices to initiate divorce, both Adele and Honor Jones were insecure about their decisions. “I’m still not fully over it — of me choosing to dismantle my child’s life for my own. It makes me very uncomfortable,” Adele told Oprah. “By breaking up our family,” writes Jones, “I’d taken something from my kids that they were never going to get back. Naturally, I thought about this a lot.” Still, Adele consoled herself with the thought that her son, Angelo, as an adult, “would be livid” with her for not putting her own happiness before his. Jones also looks for a silver lining: “There was nothing I could give them” — her children – “to make up for it, except, maybe, a way of being in the world: of being open to it, and open in it.”

Not every divorcée is so optimistic. Rod Liddle, a columnist for The Spectator, writes that the consequence of normalizing divorce is that we have much more of it, “with all the anguish, bitterness and economic deprivation which almost always follows, not to mention the huge damage inflicted on the children.” This damage is proven by longitudinal social studies, which demonstrate much poorer outcomes for children raised by single parents.

If we lived in an earlier age, we might have called divorce due to boredom selfishness, and we might have suggested that selfishness has never paved the way for true happiness. We might also have wondered whether those citing general discontent might have unrealistic expectations — not just for marriage but for life in general. Moreover, we might worry that normalizing family break-up might have huge social costs. As it is, our own age is much too confused and apathetic to care.

Part of the trouble is that marriage, too, has lost its meaning. The majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges stated, “The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.” But what happens when these “other freedoms” are not found? In his dissent, the late Justice Antonin Scalia summarized the flaws of this thinking:

Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality (whatever that means) were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie. Expression, sure enough, is a freedom, but anyone in a long-lasting marriage will attest that that happy state constricts, rather than expands, what one can prudently say.

Adele says that what matters most to her in life is loving and being loved. But as any happily married person can tell you, love in action is more a choice than a feeling. The stubborn fact remains that kids do best with a mum and a dad who are willing to tough out the hard times, the dissatisfaction, the low-level friction — and who are buoyed by a shared understanding that happiness is not found in the whims of the ego, but in purposeful living.