Some Short Thoughts About Divorce

It is probably safe to assume that people have been looking for ways to dissolve marriages ever since the concept was introduced. The trappings and particular requirements may have changed many times over the course of history, but the ability to divorce one’s spouse remains a fundamental aspect of human partnerships. The ability to extricate oneself from what may be in retrospect a bad decision to have made is as important to personal liberty as the power to select one’s own mate in the first place.

The right to marry and, if desired, break that marriage was one of the central freedoms enjoyed by citizens of the Roman Empire. Appearing before a magistrate, a Roman man and his wife would simply express their desire to part ways and the decision would be recorded. Even though the breaking of marital bonds was a comparatively trivial thing to do, it was not a trivial action itself. Social pressures would demand a measure of circumspection before declaring the intent to separate.

During Europe’s Medieval Era, the pervasive power of the Catholic church and other religious institutions removed the authority to pronounce and end marriages from the civil sphere. Marriage ceremonies soon became religious affairs, with a man and a woman bonded together by the authority of the priest and under the auspices of God. Civil courts no longer had jurisdiction over matrimony.

It was during this time that extreme stigma began to be associated with those who had terminated their wedlock. With the church claiming the state of wedlock as part of their purview, the obvious implication was that those who exit such a blessed arrangement have either lied before God or had taken a serious matter very lightly.

Hundreds of years later this sentiment remains, in varying degrees and with different manifestations, in many modern cultures. This may be due to remaining religious antipathy towards the concept of this kind of dissociation, or simply that the culture does not tolerate it very well in general. For whatever reasons, there are many husbands and wives in the world who no longer want to be married to their spouse but do not have the opportunity to easily end the relationship.

The earliest and possibly best known defiance of the Catholic church’s domination of matrimonial proceedings came from the English king Henry VIII. Unable to secure an annulment from the papal authority and increasingly unhappy with his wife Catherine’s inability to sire a male heir, the king took matters into his own hands and broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534.

Since that time the restrictions upon and requirements for ending a marriage have become more liberal in much of the western world. It should be understood that even though many countries still have misgivings which stem from religious opinions about marital separation, there is now a different and peculiarly modern factor to consider. The modern, secular world tends to view matrimony as essentially a civil contract between two persons, and because of this there are now many legal ramifications which much be anticipated in the even to either or both of the parties wishing to terminate their agreement.

If the state of matrimony is to be truly free and unconstrained, some argument claims that the ability to undo this joining must be similarly without difficulty. While it may be true that divorce rates, particularly in the United States, sometimes rival the rate with which people take spouses, this may be seen as the exercise of a freedom rather than the opposition to ethical social conduct.

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