Deadly Divorce

ONE day a middle-aged married male relative of mine paid an unexpected mid-week visit to the family matriarch, my old Italian grandmother. He had nervously come to beg her blessings on his decision to divorce his wife of many years, the mother of his several children. Instead of blessings, he got the back of her hand and some folksy but stern advice delivered in the mother tongue. Translated, she warned him that to divorce was “against God, against children, against health.” He protested that he had found a “new life and, besides, he fully intended to pay alimony and child support. “Hard head,” my grandmother scolded him, “you stay married, you stay well!” As the cautionary family tale goes, he got his divorce, but in time he also got a heart attack, got deeply into debt, got depressed, contracted a deadly disease, and lost not only his “new life” but life itself.

I had always understood and respected my grandmother’s views on divorce as morally Catholic and traditionally Italian, but hardly scientific. But according to Dr. David B. Larson, both Dan Quayle and my grandmother were right. An impressive mass of scientific evidence assembled by Larson and others indicates that getting married and staying married “for better or for worse” substantially raises one’s chances, and one’s children’s chances, of doing better and avoiding the worst throughout life.

ONE day a middle-aged married male relative of mine paid an unexpected mid-week visit to the family matriarch, my old Italian grandmother. He had nervously come to beg her blessings on his decision to divorce his wife of many years, the mother of his several children. Instead of blessings, he got the back of her hand and some folksy but stern advice delivered in the mother tongue. Translated, she warned him that to divorce was “against God, against children, against health.” He protested that he had found a “new life and, besides, he fully intended to pay alimony and child support. “Hard head,” my grandmother scolded him, “you stay married, you stay well!” As the cautionary family tale goes, he got his divorce, but in time he also got a heart attack, got deeply into debt, got depressed, contracted a deadly disease, and lost not only his “new life” but life itself.

I had always understood and respected my grandmother’s views on divorce as morally Catholic and traditionally Italian, but hardly scientific. But according to Dr. David B. Larson, both Dan Quayle and my grandmother were right. An impressive mass of scientific evidence assembled by Larson and others indicates that getting married and staying married “for better or for worse” substantially raises one’s chances, and one’s children’s chances, of doing better and avoiding the worst throughout life.