The Style section of the Sunday New York Times usually has two pages of thumbnail wedding announcements (complete with tiny, charming photos), and one larger box entitled “Vows,” in which one lucky couple’s union is featured. This past Sunday, the Vows column created a firestorm. The featured couple – Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla – proudly described how their romance began when they were both married to other people, and how they met in a pre-kindergarten classroom at the school attended by their children (each has two children from a first marriage). Although they assert that they kept it platonic for a long while, they eventually declared their love for each other, divorced their first spouses, and celebrated their marriage in the recent ceremony featured in the Times. They described their life together as full of love, although they concede that they have hurt their former spouses and children, and they profess regret for having done so.
Certainly Riddell and Partilla aren’t the first unfaithful spouses to end up together, and they won’t be the last. What is surprising is the frenzy of overwhelmingly negative reader comments to the Times. “Why does the Times glorify home-wrecking?” queried David from NY. A commenter identifying himself as Dr. Dubs from NYC was outraged: “So you’re telling me, as long as I’m happy, who cares what happens to my legally wedded spouse and kids?” he stormed. “This story reeks of selfishness.” Funny valentine from New Jersey commented that the Vows column “was absolutely the saddest story in the NYT, save the obits.”
Why the uproar in this era of no-fault divorce, not to mention in a society with a divorce rate of around 50 percent?
The whole idea of no-fault divorce is that marriages typically fail for a host of reasons, and there is plenty of blame to go around. Rarely is there a good guy and a bad guy: people may grow apart, or they may be mutually hurtful and rejecting of each other over a period of time. Forcing couples into a legal proceeding meant to establish who was guilty and who was innocent led to a lot of mudslinging, which was harmful to the divorcing spouses and especially toxic to their children.
And yet . . . unrepented infidelity seems to touch a particular nerve with people. Perhaps it was the perceived glorification of the new relationship, or perhaps it was a sense of identification with the former spouses. Comment after comment expressed sympathy for the unknown spurned ex-spouses, and comment after comment noted the negative effects of divorce on children. Indeed, many studies have found negative effects of divorce on children, although the level and duration of harm may vary with factors such as levels of conflict between the divorcing parents. It seems here that the concern for the children was a reflection of the fact that most readers assumed that the children would naturally suffer if their parents acted in a way that those readers viewed as selfish and self-glorifying.
One problem with no-fault divorce is thought to be that many divorcing couples will feel the need to justify themselves, and may move accusations of fault to other parts of the proceeding, leading to more ferocious custody or property disputes. There is no evidence that this is the case: divorce has always produced conflicts over money and children, but there does not seem to be a trend towards more contentious settlement now that the actual divorce is assured. Some social commentators have opined that we have become blasé about divorce. Judging by the reactions to the Times column, though, many of us are not blasé about either marriage or divorce.
I agree with your comment that the responses to the article tended to show that perhaps we’re not as blase about marriage and divorce as people may think, something I am glad to see. With a divorce rate now above 50%, many children are the children of divorced parents, and many people comprise the group of spurned ex-spouses. These are the individuals whose responses were triggered by the Times’ story glorifying the end of two marriages and two sets of married parents as a love story. While all the facts surrounding their prior marriages are not laid out, and perhaps would reveal that the divorce and subseqent remarraige was better for all involved, the issue is the fact that the Times felt that this was appropriately characterized as a love story. Growing up, my love stories and fairytales always ended with the hero and heroine living “happily ever after.” Here, though one happy ending may have been accomplished, it was at the expense of two marriages, and therein lies the problem: the story represents the media’s deconstruction of what “true love” is supposed to look like–one man, one woman, joined in matrimony “until death do them part.” I personally feel that the Times made an unfortunate mistake in glorifying a love story which many would not want emulated and I applaud those willing to speak up. As a society we need to move toward viewing marriage as a commitment that is not so easily ended, becasue the easier that divorce is to obtain, the more that marriage loses its meaning.
So much emotion is involved when trying to separate two people who have loved each other and built their lives around each other.
Things end up getting very messy. I can see why a lot of people wrote negative comments because a lot of people have been cheated on.
The institution of marriage is a big money-maker for a lot of churches, jewelery stores, etc. Advertising has caused this as well.
I practice law in a no-fault state and can’t imagine having to prove “fault” in addition to the emotional mess of a custody battle.
Anthony
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