Divorce Is Never Easy
Every few years, we can count on hearing social commentary on the alleged erosion of American values. Predictably, marriage is part of the discussion, and inevitably, the American divorce rate is cited as a cause for concern. The figure usually cited is that 50% of marriages in the U.S. end in divorce, although the true figure is somewhere between 40% and 50% overall, with higher rates among couples who married at younger ages and lower rates for couples who married at older ages.
The usual trajectory of this discussion is for someone to claim that we have made divorce “too easy,” that marriages are viewed as throwaway commodities, and that the whole mess started in the 1970s when American states began to adopt no fault statutes. Prior to that time, one spouse had to claim total innocence in the marital breakdown while proving “fault” by the other party in one of several designated categories – typically adultery, desertion, or physical or mental cruelty. This proof was a painful and distasteful process, and it could both lengthen the divorce process and make it more expensive.
The adoption of no fault provisions made it possible for one party to obtain a divorce by alleging a ground such as “irretrievable breakdown” of the marriage without specifically attributing the blame to either partner. Since U.S. divorce rates peaked in the early 1980s after the adoption of no-fault laws, social critics periodically argue that we should return to fault-based statutes to make divorce hard to obtain.