Reply to Pinsof:
Introduction: by Carol Anderson, Ph.D., Editor

Is it true, as Dr. Pinsof implies in Marriage in the Twentieth Century, that marriages were never meant to last as long as is dictated by our current ever-extending life span? Since ‘till death do us part’ historically has meant a lot earlier than it does today, are we facing the fact that humans are not genetically or biologically programmed to tolerate a really long term monogamous commitment, causing marriages today to self-destruct long before we meet our mortality? Maybe the answer to our high divorce rate is altering our expectations to accept shorter term sequential unions rather than finding ways to keep marriages functioning and healthy over time. Or is the abandonment of marriage, as Pittman suggests, an all too accepted cultural exercise in narcissism for those afraid of adulthood who are looking to feel less guilty about their self-absorption? Is it dangerous to ourselves, our children, and society to consider divorce normal and expected? Or must we redefine and recommit to alternative views of marriage that will still protect our children, the frequent casualties of our ‘adult relationships’? These are important issues for our field. Join the debate.

Bill Pinsof has given us an articulate, beautifully documented examination of the emergency state of modern marriage. From down here in the trenches I can assure you it is as he describes it. Divorce, an emergency solution to desperate circumstances, used to be an extreme action, reserved for emergencies. Suddenly it has become the norm.
Pinsof’s solution seems to be to declare divorce normal, to make marriage therapists neutral about marriage, and to dedicate ourselves to removing the stigma from fathers (and theoretically mothers) who run away from home, children, and adulthood in their ever frantic search for the narcissistic fulfillment they consider happiness (which fatherless men, raised by single mothers, tend to see in terms of seduction and abandonment of every new women.)
Pinsof’s family of the future would involve single mothers, now declared ‘normal,’ and their fatherless children, also rechristened as ‘normal’, all enjoying the benefits of no longer needing men except as sperm donors, unless the guy wanted to hop on for a temporary gig. We all know that neighborhood, and the theory of a world without men (except every now and then) might set feminist hearts aflutter, but the reality is a disaster. Scandinavians may have built a social system around government supplementation of an increasingly fatherless world, but that hasn’t reduced their suicide rate. So far our social efforts in ‘government as father’ have not impressed.
Women may not need men anymore. Great. Children still do. But it may be even more pressing that men need families, and wives, and relationships (like marriage for instance) which are permanent, total and equal, and even, if people work at it over time, based on love. I realize that some people would feel safer if marriage were less total, less permanent, less equal, so they’d have an easier out. But the requirements of marriage are largely based on the needs of children rather than the wants of those afraid of adulthood.
Pinsof’s proposal of neutrality toward divorce, marriage, and what happens to the children, would, in my nightmare, leave a world of angry, overworked women, child-like disconnected men, and depressed children with no concept how to become grownups. This could not be much worse than what we have now, but it would surely further feminize poverty, redefine childraising as women’s work, and undo the freedom women have achieved in recent decades to raise children and pursue careers at the same time while expecting help from a man, who is not just passing through, but is committed to the children as well. Men aren’t what they could be, or even what they will be if we can train them better for marriage and childraising rather than just for war, sports, making money and putting on a macho show. But they are some help, and a lot safer to have around kids than the average stepfather or pass-through man of the night.
After 42 years of working with over 10,000 couples in various states of crisis, I can confirm that divorce has already become increasingly popular and is now considered not just normal but the expected and perhaps inevitable final chapter of marriage. Divorce is considered, by the media, by the TV and newspaper advice giving ‘experts,’ and even by many of the professional therapists, particularly the youngest and least experienced ones, to be the treatment of choice for mild depression (‘I’m just not happy,’) for unpleasantness (‘I felt verbally abused’) and for sexual attractions to passing strangers or casual friends (‘I must not be in love with my mate.’) All baby boomers are sure they deserve an ideal partner and when they discover they don’t have one they know they should be free at any moment to dump this imperfect one, put the kids in storage, and go back to the perfect partner collection for another try.
The situation is already outrageous and tragic enough without our trying to pretend this is normal. I can assure you that the least significant impact of divorce is social stigma. These children’s families and security are being ripped apart, and as nice as the concept of binuclear families cooperating swimmingly, it doesn’t happen much. Half the children of divorce haven’t seen their fathers in the last year and they suffer.
At various times in our history---death in childbirth, death from Plague or in the trenches of WWI, death from childhood infectious diseases or recently HIV, in some neighborhoods death or dismemberment from gunshot wounds, have all been so common as to be the normal course of life. Anything that causes this much unnecessary human suffering is not normal, however popular. We can change things when we refuse to give up and call it ‘normal’, ‘god’s will,’ ‘human nature’ or, here, ‘primate nature’. Witness the change in our attitude toward cigarette smoking.
Divorce is not a benign procedure. As the data has come in (Wallerstein and Hetherington measure different things, and put a different face on it, but they find much the same thing) the casualty rate, the percentage of kids who don’t achieve functional status is about 25%, several times higher than all other causes put together. Most children of divorce survive but do not recover. They get along well enough to function but not well enough to achieve success in relationships. We can’t raise kids this way. What of the adults? Half the divorced partners remain miserable, half have temporary relief. In general, though you would never know this from what’s on TV, married people are not just healthier and wealthier but happier than divorced ones (and they get a lot more and better sex.) Most divorced people remarry. The divorce rate for second marriages is higher than for first. Divorce clearly doesn’t teach them what they failed to learn the first time around.
I’ve heard many explanations for why these last two generations of people in Western society (the baby boomers, etc.) did such a lousy job with marriage in the wake of the sexual revolution and the celebration of escape from having to grow up. Just look at the movies from that era to understand how powerful the message that happiness would come from running away from home. Pinsof includes some of the better explanations, but surely the best is that society encouraged divorce as the shortcut to happiness and therapists became neutral about marriage, some of them actually believing the heartless and outrageous myth that ‘the kids are resilient, they’ll be just fine.’ Well, they won’t. The belief that kids don’t need parents is based on the idea that children are the real adults, sent by the devil (ROSEMARY’S BABY 1968, THE EXORCIST 1973, THE OMEN 1976) to keep grownups from running out to find and embrace happiness, while adults are delicate children who will surely be miserable if they don’t get their heart’s desire.
I’ve also heard various explanations of why the divorce orgy slowed down in 1980. That one is easy, anybody who looked up could see that divorce as the secret of happiness did not work for the grownups and sure didn’t work for the children.
Many forces have merged to destroy the human family. Just as patriarchal men have run away from home if they couldn’t be the boss, there has been a strong feminist push to declare men to be unnecessary, and potentially dangerous, in the lives of women and children. Actually, abuse and incest by fathers is fairly uncommon, while abuse and incest from stepfathers and passing boyfriends is alarmingly high. As Hamlet told us, the man who sleeps with the Queen is not, thereby, the King nor the father of the Prince. Fathers are not just interchangeable men in a child’s life. And unless the value of fathers is understood and appreciated, it is going to be hard to make the human family and human civilization much different from the family and civilization of our cousins the chimpanzees.
Rather than normalizing divorce, let us see this blip in the history of marriage as a warning of what happens when the world fails to support the family, or especially fails to understand the function of men in families and the function of families for men. Fathers certainly don’t have to be boss, but children need them on their parenting team.
We have to understand what divorce is about. Despite all the research about marriages failing if couples complain, criticize, stonewall or show contempt, I don’t know any couples who don’t do such things some (or most) of the time. But I have rarely seen an established first marriage end in divorce without someone being unfaithful. (Our researchers fail to ask about infidelity, since they tell me it is so nearly universal, it couldn’t possibly be relevant.) Affairs occur in good marriages and bad, and wreck either.
Helen Fisher, in ANATOMY OF LOVE, gives a fascinating neurochemical explanation of how infidelity causes divorce: infidelity is exciting, causing an excessive production (in men and women) of testosterone and amphetamine like neurotransmitters, at the expense of comfort seeking and nesting hormones like oxytocin or happiness and contentment producing hormones like serotonin. People in affairs are nuts, dependent, desperate, miserable and paranoid, unable to relax around their familiar mates. They are not necessarily unhappy with their marriage before the affair, but they are afterwards. Adulterers can’t reestablish intimacy as long as they harbor a secret or fear their partner’s anger and rage. (See the recent movie UNFAITHFUL for a picture of what a thoughtless, motiveless affair can do to a serene and cozy marriage.)
The skills, including fidelity and honesty, that make marriage work are easily teachable, just as the skills that make sex work are easily teachable. But no one will bother if therapists are busy being neutral and the media are touting the joys of divorce.
To me, looking up from my caseload of the betrayers and betrayed, the divorced and divorcing, the children of divorce and the survivors of the last generation of divorces, this is a societal emergency. Normalizing divorce, even further than it has already been normalized, is a cruelty joke.
Carol Anderon 2/4/2003

Some Things Are Just Unsustainable
>The concept of being married for life is no longer a valid expectation,
>divorce must be normalized . . . as society evolves.

We've been trying to normalize divorce, and adapt our social structures to deal with it, for thirty years now! It's not working! Maybe it's one of those things you just can't adapt to long-term, like the all-you-can-eat cheescake diet or a cocaine habit. As a divorce lawyer I've been part of many efforts to adapt and improve divorce, and I think we've reached a dead end.

Also, looking at mean average lifespans in the past is misleading -- they are skewed by infant mortality. Jesus said that a man has 70 years -- but 400+ years earlier, Confucius said 100 years is a long life, 60 is short, 80 is average.
John 2/4/2003

What About the Death of the Soul?
"Till death do us part" is not only converted into statute, but it is a reflection of the initial fantasy of lovers based on both commitment and apprehension. However, couples have altered marriage vows for decades. The standard alteration is to dump the
"obey" segment, a reflection of a deeply rewarding social change. Prenuptial agreements place a qualification on "until death do us part", a way of crossing the fingers when ennunciating the vows. I grew up Presbyterian, so I am most familiar with the Christian wedding ceremony. I have long wondered why the man's mother is not required to publicly give her son away in the
way the bride's father publicly gives her away. I say this because it is
fascinating to me how many men enter a matricentric orbit, i.e., go back to mother after the marriage comes apart. The meaning of death in the context
of marriage has changed as well. What is most explicitly implied in the vow is physical death, but emotional, erotic and relational deaths are reasons
for divorce. In this vein, I take Nietzche's warning to heart, "Of all the things to fear in life, fear most that the soul dies before the body." That, for me, is the main indication for divorce.
David 2/4/2003

Hooray for Frank Pittman
As a family therapist and a wife and mother of 30 years, I applaud your description of normalizing divorce as "a cruel joke." Does everything have to be so easy? Thank you for your thoughtful response and your enlightened articles over the years.
Deborah 2/4/2003

I like the way Bill Pinsof has given us an articulate, beautifully documented examination of the emergency state of modern marriage. From down here in the trenches I can assure you it is as he describes it. Divorce, an emergency solution to desperate circumstances, used to be an extreme action, reserved for emergencies. Suddenly it has become the norm.
Pinsof’s solution seems to be to declare divorce normal, to make marriage therapists neutral about marriage, and to dedicate ourselves to removing the stigma from fathers (and theoretically mothers) who run away from home, children, and adulthood in their ever frantic search for the narcissistic fulfillment they consider happiness (which fatherless men, raised by single mothers, tend to see in terms of seduction and abandonment of every new women.)

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