The Gazette 1979

GAZETTE

JULY-AUGUST

1979

in the changing nature of the institution of marriage. Marriage is perceived not as a set of given and immutable constants but as a growing and developing ideation exposed to and vulnerable to change. The second level identifies individualised factors which if present in a particular marriage may mitigate its viability. At the general level the greatest contribution is made by the increasingly complex nature of modern life itself. Our sophisticated, consumerised world creates its own tensions and pressures and all too often the home is used as a forum in which such tensions are relieved in an inarticulate and violent way. Simultaneously our expectations of life and marriage are changing radically in step with the social and economic emancipation of women, which while far from complete as yet, is nonetheless real in its consequences. There is a growing realisation among women that there exist alternatives to the traditional subservient door-mat style existence of former days and just as our prospects from life and marriage have widened and been enhanced, so too our tolerance and unacceptable behaviour inside marriage has dropped as a consequence. There have too been real changes in attitudes to contraception, to family planning, to working wives, to sex inside and outside marriage and each of these factors along with many others have almost imperceptibly affected and moulded the overweening attitude to marriage. Incidental to that there is the reality that for many of our young people the sole source of information about sex, love or marriage is gleaned from cheap magazines who traffic in the belief that sexual licence is the hallmark of freedom and that romance is a synonym for love. But where are the official attempts to controvert these fallacies which are more insidious to marriage than any amount of divorce laws. Where are the educational programmes designed to direct the young to mature and unselfish sexual responses, to an intellectual realisation of the need for loving, caring, forgiving and communicating as fundamentals in marriage. Our response instead of being open, confident and positive has on the whole been unerringly negative and our failure is highlighted in the illegitimacies, abortions and marital breakdowns which increasingly form a normal part of everyday life. It may very well be true that there is nowadays a growing tendency to take lightly the marriage vows and a reluctance to overcome problems in marriage but if it is then it is a fact of life which has to be tackled in a radical and realistic way just as it is a fact that marriages break up with or without a legal way out and that this too is a problem which needs an answer or better still a series of answers. At the level of individualised factors which put marriages at risk research 2 shows a number of recurring factors; e.g. Marriages between young partners or where the bride was pregnant at the time of marriage are over- represented in the statistics. Divorces occur twice as often in the age group who married between 20 and 24 and three times as often as those who married between 25 and 29. Hence factors which intuitive commonsense would tell us to beware of are highlighted by empirical evidence, immaturity, lack of preparation for the responsibility of marriage or parenthood, youthfulness, ignorance of family planning etc. There are two incidental factors which are no less important than immaturity. The young newly-weds also tend to be the most economically and financially vulnerable. Furthermore they also tend to

tically and levelled off. The clear implication is not that the new laws caused marriages to break up with remark- able speed, but that there existed a huge backlog of already broken marriages which were simply waiting for a way of obtaining legal recognition of that fact. The new law simply permitted regularisation of an extant situation. Plainly, however, since the new laws broadened the threshold for the bringing of petitions, the overall annual level of petitions was raised. Precisely the same situation arose with the introduction and extension of Legal Aid for divorce petitioners in 1949 and 1960 respectively. Once again there was an immediate rush to the courts immediately the new rules came into force and once again the swollen statistics were purely a temporary phenomenon. The new regulations were simply creating a situation in which the divorce figures were beginning to approximate more closely to the actual incidence of marriage breakdown. But in the context of the argument that divorce laws precipitate marital instability, the period of the 50s and 60s is perhaps of most interest for while precisely the same legislation operated in both decades, in the first period the divorce statistics fell markedly while in the second period they escalated. Apart from the wider availability of legal aid which obviously explains part of the discrepancy, the only other major differences between these periods were extraneous social factors and it is these which research increasingly show to be influential in affecting attitudes to marriage, expectations of marriage and continuing viability of marriage. Probably the clearest indicator of the immense role of social factors in marital instability is the booming divorce rate in the wake of the second World War. The why and wherefore lay not in the existence of divorce laws for the same law had been operative for al- most a decade, but rather in the existence of unusual social circumstances which greatly exacerbated the stresses under which marriages laboured. Many marriages contracted during the war years were rushed and illconsidered. Newly weds were often separated for long periods, wives left to cope alone, there was the nagging uncertainty as to whether absent spouses would survive the war after all. There was too the severe economic hardship of the war and post war years, lack of housing, lack of employment prospects and the more subtle problems caused by having to learn to live with someone who may have become a stranger during those years. Clearly it was a time when, for many, interpersonal relationships were under stress and not unnaturally some went to the wall. Only a fool would suggest that if there had been no divorce laws such marriages would have sur- vived, for from the outset may of these relationships were dangerously vulnerable and at risk. Perhaps the miracle is that so many survived for all that. Reasons for marriage breakdown But if then divorce legislation is not a cause of marital breakdown but instead an expression of already changed and changing attitudes to marriage what then are the effective causes of marital disharmony and eventual breakdown. The answer to this operates at two levels. One identifies general factors which have had the effect of subtly changing our traditional concept of marriage, of relationships inside and outside marriage, of male female roles in life and marriage etc. At this level our changing views and expectations are themselves the dynamic force

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