Divorce: a case where liberalism doth make cowards of us all
PAUL JOHNSON
0 nc of the nastiest problems in Britain today, entirely politician-made, is the increase in quantity, cost and bitterness of divorce litigation. This is the direct result of what is erroneously called liberalisation of the law — that is, making divorce easier and quicker. It may make the fact of divorce easier for some, even many, couples, but for a growing number it is turning the attempt to separate and, as it were, divide the spoils, into a legal nightmare which, far from being quick, stretches over months, even years. It involves endless legal skirmishing, frequent court appearances and, for even once-comfortable middle-class couples, is the highroad to bankruptcy on both sides. It is also, as a result of the rise of divorce among the poor, putting an intolerable strain on the legal aid budget. The amount of human misery involved — as the legal machine grinds on hatred between the spouses deepens, and the most monstrous allegations, some true, some half-true, some simply invented, fly back and forth between the litigants — is staggering. I now try to avoid the subject when with someone going through this purgatory, not because I do not sympathise — I do, intensely — but because I cannot bear to listen to the painful tales of what they see as wickedness. Easier divorce was supposed to reduce the sum total of human unhappiness. It is now adding to it, steadily. One woman I know, who had been thoroughly ground by the legal millstones, said to me, 'I wish to God we had never got divorced. Looking back on it all, I think we could have lived together perfectly well. Now I am scarred for life, and poor.'
It has always been my contention that marriage, though an 'honourable estate' as the Prayer Book says, is also a difficult one by its very nature. I often quote Dr Johnson's wise remarks which, coming from a man who did not believe in divorce at all, are worth pondering: 'Sir, it is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.' Needless to say, the Doctor was not criticising marriage as an institution, which he thought essential to society, but saying it was difficult and needed to be worked at. I sometimes think that what we need is not more sex education but more marriage education. Couples need to realise that when they emerge from the church or registry office, they are at the beginning of a huge work of construction, involving massive human masonry and taking years of careful craftsmanship, in which subsidence and falls are inevitable and require regular repairs. Indeed all marriages are exercises in social maintenance, demanding constant attention and hard work. What you get out of marriage is ultimately what you put into it, and you ought to try to put into it everything you can, for the results are worth it.
Now I do not deny that some marriages prove impossible and should be nullified in some way. But they are few. In my view the vast majority of marriages that end in divorce are salvageable and ought to continue. Young couples in particular should be taught the lesson of the ages: that marital rows, however dramatic, would always be curable if divorce did not provide an easy way out. Indeed it is amazing how quickly couples get over these crises when they have no alternative: in a year or two they may remember the row or they may not, but they have usually forgotten what it was all about. That, I think, pace Dr Johnson, is nature at work, just as it makes a woman forget the pains of childbirth. I think virtually every long-married couple will confirm the justice of these remarks.
Hence, though opposed to the principle of divorce, as a Catholic, but willing to admit, as a historian, that society has to accommodate itself to impossible marriages. I also argue that divorce should be made hard, not easy, and should not be available to those who want to cop out of a transient difficulty. I want a society in which divorce is again regarded with horror, as the last possible remedy. I also argue that the law should distinguish fundamentally between marriages that have produced children, and those that have not. Needless to say, the increase in bitterly contested divorces is largely due to disputes, legally envenomed, over children. Husbands are now far more likely to challenge the wife's request for custody and seem to believe themselves in some way unmanned and emasculated if they do not fight. It is a curious development, leading to human disasters, of which the children are naturally the victims. Sir Francis Bacon shrewdly observed that to have children is to 'give
hostages to fortune'. That is true — I often think how true it is — and, God knows, many adverse strokes of fortune cannot be avoided. But one of the worst, and entirely avoidable, is to turn these innocents into human properties, and fight for them, no holds barred, in the courts. Children sometimes survive these blows unscarred, even in cases where the dispute prolongs itself into permanent hatred between their parents. But then, they have no choice but to survive, do they? One never knows how deep, if invisible, the scars may be. It is significant that the appetite for combat brought about by 'easier' divorce has a tendency to spread, particularly to property and assets, and even to family pets, which are now the subject of growing numbers of fiercely contested actions. Litigation is a dangerous drug: man or woman can easily become addicted — that is the important lesson Dickens tried to give in his finest novel, Bleak House.
Ideally, divorce should be made impossible in law until or unless all children of the marriage are 16 or over. The only exception I would make to this veto is where it can be clearly demonstrated that the life of a spouse or one or more of the children is at risk, and even in these cases a remedy less drastic than divorce might be the right solution. It should be made plain to every couple that in embarking on marriage they are taking a decision of the highest seriousness, involving many exacting obligations on both sides, and demanding skills that they should be at pains to acquire. But it should be made even more clear that by conceiving a child they will be embarking on a union that will be legally indissoluble for at least 16 years. Would this undermine still further the willingness of young people to get married? Would it increase the already alarming number of illegitimate children? I doubt it. Who can say? Popper's Law of Unintended Effect applies more to relations between the sexes than to any other aspect of human conduct. I would say that liberal divorce laws are probably the biggest single cause of avoidable misery, especially among the young and innocent, in Britain today. We all know this in our hearts, because all of us know of cases of children who have suffered grievously in consequence, along with their parents. Then why don't we dare to say so? Liberalism doth make cowards of us all.
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