The other day, we encountered Jillian Dunham, the 37-year-old who had her eggs frozen because she can’t find a husband.
Who is to blame for men’s unwillingness to become husbands and fathers? Could it be the phenomenon of “frivorce”? This portmanteau of “frivolous” and “divorce” was coined by Men’s Rights bloggers to describe situations in which a woman leaves a marriage that is not objectively bad, but which she perceives as failing to satisfy her emotional needs. The Douchebag Credo: “I gotta be me.”
One of the best books about the disastrous decline of the American family is Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s The Divorce Culture. To summarize briefly a very complex argument, marriages are falling apart because people have forgotten what marriage is about, replacing traditional beliefs with what Whitehead calls the “love family ideology.” The decline of marriage is also part of what Christopher Lasch analyzed in The Culture of Narcissism as “a society that has lost interest in the future.” How does this manifest itself in everyday life? At Jenny Chancey’s Ladies Against Feminism blog, a commenter named “David J.” explains:
Ladies, here’s one of the biggest reasons, if not THE biggest reason, that Christian young men are leery of marriage: the behavior of their mothers — your Christian sisters.
My wife and I were married at age 21, two days after graduating from a conservative Christian college. We have three sons, ages 23, 20, and 16. The oldest graduated from a Christian college last year and is a 6th grade teacher. He is tall, good-looking, brilliant, fun, heavily involved in a very good church, and has many friends of both genders. But he is not even dating, let alone looking for marriage. My second son is a junior at a Christian college and will be going into law enforcement. He is also tall, good-looking, smart, hard-working, and very popular. He is playing the field, not dating seriously. The youngest is obviously not of marrying age, but he is seriously estranged from his mother.
The reason? Their Christian mother filed for divorce, without biblical grounds and contrary to our pastor’s and Christian marriage counselor’s advice, 4.5 years ago, after 26 years of marriage. She later withdrew that filing but then re-filed two years later. The divorce was final a little over a year ago. She immediately began dating online, then met, “fell in love” with, and married a twice-divorced man who lives 400 miles away — all within a span of 13 months. She has now relocated, taking our 18-year old special needs daughter with her.
My sons are shell-shocked, both by the unbiblical divorce (commonly referred to in the “manosphere” as a frivolous divorce, or a “frivorce”) and by the rush into an unbiblical remarriage. They are asking themselves why they should even contemplate marriage when their primary example of Christian womanhood and wifehood has demonstrated that nothing protects them from a unilateral, frivolous divorce at any time — not the law, not the woman’s profession of faith, not the input of Christian counselors, not the church (which is afraid to step in or “take sides”), not the length of the marriage, not even the interests of the children. Perhaps most importantly for this audience, my sons also saw that other Christian women will do nothing to protect them from a frivolous divorce.
I’ve learned that mine is not at all an isolated situation. In fact, two-thirds of all divorces today are initiated by wives, and only rarely for non-frivolous/biblical reasons.
So, if you really want to raise the level of interest in marriage for Christian young men and/or increase the number of potential suitors for your daughters, (1) don’t divorce their fathers and (2) don’t sit silently by while your Christian sisters initiate frivolous divorces.
Parental behavior communicates a powerful message to children, and how parents treat each other is part of that message. Bail out after four kids and 26 years of marriage? Why? Do you really think you’ll be happier as someone else’s third wife? You think he’s Mister Perfect, but his first two wives just weren’t good enough for him?
Many people see remarriage as a fresh new chance at happiness with a partner whom they should have chosen in the first place. But the statistics reveal that second or later marriages are much more likely to end in divorce.
Not only does marital failure replicate in this way — people who have divorced once are more likely to divorce again — but it also replicates in the subsequent generations:
The National Opinion Research Council conducted a survey of adult children of divorce that spanned more than 20 years. Here’s what they found: In 1973, adult children of divorce were 172% more likely to get divorced than adult children from intact homes. In 1999, adult children of divorce were only 50% more likely to get divorced than adult children from intact homes . . . which sounds like good news.
However, the bad news is that the survey also found a 26% lower rate of marrying in the first place among adult children of divorced parents. . . .
Children of divorce often experience expectations of failure, fear of loss or abandonment and fear of conflict throughout their lives. These anxieties are reflected in their romantic relationships by poor partner or behavior choices, giving up too quickly when problems arise or avoidance of any perceived level of commitment.
People see statistics like that and say to themselves, “Well, my choices won’t follow the trend,” but exactly where the hell do you think trends come from? Trends don’t cause human behavior, human behavior causes trends. Your choices, your decisions, your actions inevitably have far-reaching ripple effects on others, and yet narrow-minded selfishness causes people to think they can live according to the Douchebag Credo — “I gotta be me!” — without consequences. These are the same people, of course, who blame “society” for their problems without pausing to look in the mirror and realize they are part of “society,” too.
You can’t outsource personal responsibility. And failure replicates.
[…] Robert Stacy McCain The other day, we encountered Jillian Dunham, the 37-year-old who had her eggs frozen because she […]
I’ve been to many weddings… I’ve never attended anyone’s second “wedding”, ever!
People are stunned when I tell them that in our state, it used to be that merely wanting “out” of a marriage was insufficient to obtain a divorce. There had to be misconduct, and then only the innocent party could obtain a divorce. S/he usually got most of the stuff, the kids and alimony to boot. All that disappeared with “no fault” and I’ve listened to countless versions of the story told by “David J.” The willful, callous destruction of a family and children’s lives counts for nothing when compared to a spouses desire to be “self-actualized.”
Then they wonder why their kids are effed-up.
Many of them wonder in passing or in an academic sort of way.
From the link referred to in the blog post to which David J’s comment appears:
. . . we must retract the message Boomers sent young women about female empowerment. Indeed, it isn’t a coincidence that marriage rates have plummeted alongside America’s fascination with the feminist movement. Empowerment for women, as defined by feminists, neither liberates women nor brings couples together. It separates them. It focuses on women as perpetual victims of the Big Bad Male. Why would any man want to get married when he’s been branded a sexist pig at “hello”? In the span of just a few decades, women have managed to demote men from respected providers and protectors to being unnecessary, irrelevant, and downright expendable.
The whole thing is worth reading.
Yeah. They certainly don’t care. In my 25 years of experience I would estimate 75 percent of women in divorce who obtain custody seek it solely for the money that comes with it. Certainly, the vast majority of objections to split custody or 50/50 arrangements have to do with the cash and not anything wrong with the father.
So, instead of spending time with Dad, the kids play XBox while Mom seeks Dad’s replacement.
I better stop now, or I’ll write a book.
When I married my second (and last) husband I just went to country clerk. There was no big wedding.
Oh I’ve seen that kid raised sitting in front of the ‘puter waiting for mom to come home
Indeed. Even the Men’s Human Rights Movement is generally against no-fault divorce; I say “even” because the MHRM leans heavily on fairness arguments for practical reasons. It is plain from history that we value men’s lives less than women’s, and then the same unsurprisingly holds true down the line for everything else: their trauma, their happiness, whatever.
So, what is the fairness argument against no-fault divorce? Simply that it falsifies the vows. Any contract where one side has no enforceable obligations, and can unconditionally void it at great penalty to the counterparty, is so absurd on the face of it that it should be unenforceable.
So, logically, either there should be real penalties for breaking marriage vows — no chance at custody, no chance at alimony — or else marriage should be a plain, ordinary contract, enforced by ordinary civil courts in the ordinary manner. Either way, our current family laws are insane.
I have no sympathy for conservatives decrying gay marriage. You destroyed straight marriage first, with no-fault divorce. There is nothing left to defend, and you have no one to blame but yourselves for folding like cheap suits whenever women demand something.
Ouch! I’m humbled—humiliated if I’ve been impertinent in making such a lofty and self-righteous declaration, particularly since I present myself as such a pitiful excuse of an arbiter of morality! (You know I greatly admire you, JV… and I regret it if I’ve touched a nerve!)
RSM, remember when the fight over marriage and blended families in the 80s was about multiple divorced parents and half siblings? Yea was that fun? Wanna bet that the current generation of marriage fighting tactics had been honed in those early battles of the no-fault divorce and who gets the kids. Just look back and compare the language tween then and now. It’s a little more crude but similar in that real families have two mom’s or two dad’s and mixed siblings and stillover each other.
Except when the kids are used as pawns in the parents fights and the siblings hate the new kid because they are younger/older or cutier/troubled than the originals and take up more time. Not that social philosophy groups haven’t studied any of this nor have they chosen to show that broken homes begot broken homes. Even if it’s studied it is not published to the same fan fare as one saying that a single mom (notice that culture never cheers single dads) is the most awesome because hormones.
Kudos for relating a story involving some of our own. It’s all to easy to ascribe these moral failures as being peculiar to the loons on the left. What it does demonstrate is that despite protests from our favorite leftists, the slippery slope of no fault divorce and total moral meltdown has an remarkable impact across all facets of society.
I think one of the the first things we have to do is stop discussing divorce in neutral terms. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of divorces ARE the fault of one person. There is a massive effort to paint it as “oh, well, the marriage was broken and both parties bear the blame, blah, blah blah” when 90%+ of the time only one of them chooses to bail.
Unfortunately, the very usage of the word “divorce” and “divorced” too often clouds the issue of who did what to who. Mixing tense and object/subject willy nilly, the usage allows a lazy moral and causal equivalence to reign. Likewise “divorcee”, which is does double duty as both “the individual who DOES the divorce” and “a wife who has been through a divorce.”
There’s much more to be said about this, but I’ll just leave it at that for now.
All that disappeared with “no fault” If only. The pre no-fault paradigm of “she usually go most of the stuff, the kids, and alimony to boot” didn’t disappear.
Some of my best friends are people who got divorced, and then maybe even got married again. I separate my likings for them as people from my deep personal revulsion to oathbreaking, because if I couldn’t get along with people that I disagree with, then my circle of friends might be limited to getting a dog.
No, RS said “S/he” and that is right. It was often the case before that women who abandoned their families got nothing. It was not universal — the courts have always been gynocentric, because our culture is — but it was not unexpected.
What? It’s been 3 hours! Is no one willing to defend the conservative record on no-fault divorce? I’m shocked, shocked that nobody wants to try to claim that zero out of 50 states are conservative, or that Ronald Reagan’s signing pen wasn’t “really” conservative. Oh wait, I just spotted a fake endtag: /sarc
Actually, the courts have not “always been gynocentic.” During the 19th century, before the rise of the “mother cult”, aka the “tender years doctrine”, fathers would get the children unless they refused them. And I realize that RS said “S/he”. It’s not right. Tender years doctrine meant that unless the mother actually abandoned her entire family, she would almost invariably get the kids. Yes, even if she took up with the pool boy. She might not get the house and the alimony, but she would get the kids.
Fair enough, I’m not as familiar with the 19th century, and may have conflated some pre- and post- “tender years” anecdotes.
Our society is producing people without discipline, without any sense of responsibility — spoiled brats — and it is impossible for people like that to live the kinds of lives compatible with marriage.
“I have no sympathy for conservatives decrying gay marriage. You destroyed straight marriage first, with no-fault divorce.”
Who is this “you”? I have been married for nearly 26 years. The “no fault divorce” legal revolution occurred in the 1960s and ’70s, when I was growing up. It wasn’t on my radar. Besides, I was a Democrat at the time. Trying to blame “conservatives” for this is a waste of mental energy, even if it is not entirely wrong, and does nothing to solve the problems we find ourselves facing now.
You did the right thing. Public celebrations of re-marriage are tasteless. In fact, I disapprove of the “big wedding” generally. It’s an extravagance, a luxury, that only an affluent minority of people can actually afford. Middle-class couples who insist on emulating the rich by spending money they don’t have on such lavish status displays — the word for this is “foolish.”
You’ll note, I referred to “my state.” I’ve perused enough of those those files of pre no fault divorces to know whereof I speak. Judges in rural areas did not give kids to parents, male or female, whose immoral behavior led to the divorce.
Oh don’t worry. I general I agree with you. My marriage failed because my ex (the pagan occultist) forced me into an abortion. It became a defining moment of my life and plunged me into a horrible depression.
I left him returned Christ and it was two decades before I remarried.
The Orthodox church allow divorce and remarriage for economy sake, realizing we are mere morals and err. But there must be repentance and refection before a second marriage.
I agree, Rush’s last marriage was an fine example of that kind excess.
Not to mention my little marriage at the country clerk was quite lovely a lot nicer than the big one I had decades before.
There is a grain of truth to what you say, though I would substitute “Christians” for “conservatives.” Everyone sat around while “no-fault” divorce made its way through the country like the plague, and objections were few. Part of the problem was that the change took place in state legislatures outside the few of the public generally, and divorce was so much rarer in the 1950’s and 1960’s that people didn’t think things would be that different. Of course, they were wrong. Alas, the causal relationship between our current state and no-fault divorce availability is only clear in hindsight for most people.
That has to be the biggest understatement ever. Even today’s Christians are a wimpy lot.
Maybe by “you,” he means normal heterosexuals of both parties, and no parties, Good conservative Newt Gingrich has been divorced how many times? Rush Limbaugh?
Even the conservatives who had nothing to do with the creation of no fault divorce have surely taken blatant advantage of it.
I’ve seen a lot of “in house” divorces. The couple still live in the same house and are legally married, but a house is about all they share. I’m in one myself.
There’s precious little I can do about it, other than make it legal as well. I know why it has happened, but I didn’t know the questions to ask, or the answers I needed to get back in ’74.
The first “no fault divorce” law was signed by Saint Ronnie of Raygun as Kalifornia Governor. He had gone through a very nasty divorce with his first and didn’t want anyone else to have to endure it.
I’m not sure he would have signed it, if he had known where it would lead. I’m sure there are a bunch of marriages that would still be at least legally intact without it. But, if you were willing to lie and demonize the person you married, divorce was still within reach. I’m sure the states would have been glad to increase the number of judges to take care of the increased band width demand.
Your ex forced you into an abomination. I’d say a divorce from a such a man was in order, and if there was no repentance on his part, then it was justified scripturally as well.
He still feels justified, he had some brief remorse when our only child was killed by a drunk driver.
My second husband is a Godly Christian man and I’m very blessed.
I’ll be the [insert slang term for the rectum here] and ask: why couldn’t David J. hold on to his wife?
His lovely wife filed for divorce once, then backed off to give the marriage another try, and he still couldn’t keep her; what was he doing, or failing to do, that led her to leave?
They had been married for 28 years; after 28 years, a married couple’s individual lives are so interwoven that the notion of “frivorce” is frivolous in itself; all of the property is joint property, all of the finances are interwoven, and it’s like trying to separate the yolk from the white after you’ve already scrambled the egg!
Mr J described his wife’s reasons as “unbiblical” and “frivolous,” but I very much doubt the frivolous part. “Unbiblical” almost certainly means anything other than adultery on the part of her husband, but in some way, Mr J was not doing what he needed to do to be a good husband. The now ex-Mrs J he described as dating online, and later meeting, another man, which I read as her not having left him for a particular other man, but just to find some other man.
I’ll be very blunt here: from what our host quoted, Mr J failed! I do not know exactly how he failed, but he failed nevertheless.
California might have been the first, but had St Ronald vetoed it, some other state would have passed something similar anyway.
In the way-back, when I was compelled to do divorces because of my insufficient time in grade, I noted that most domestic relations trends originated in California. It normally takes 10-15 years for the trend to work it’s way throughout the country. From California, a trend will jump to the East Coast (New York to Washington D.C.) and then spread from West and East into Middle America. My state was one of the last to move to a quasi-no fault system, though it remains nominally possible for an innocent spouse to contest the actual dissolution of a marriage. Unfortunately, judges don’t care to follow the law, because divorces are so much easier to deal with for the judiciary.
Mrs. B. and I had a party, but we focused it on the people we invited. Good simple food, good booze, good music, no pretensions. Didn’t cost us much, but everyone had a great time. It was more like a block party or cookout.
And they’re constantly portrayed as stupid fools.
My wife and I spent our own money and invited a limited number of people to the church ceremony and sit-down dinner afterward. It was lovely and caused us minimal stress. We’ll be celebrating 28 years together in short order.
We went to Denny’s with some friends OMG I had so much fun!
I ascribe it to the spread of Leftist Thinking to every nook and cranny of our Society. We all, to some degree, now think Leftist.
I went to a Robby Burns night many yeas ago. The night’s affair was almost ruin by a woman speaker who made one stupid man joke after another.
Yes it is the default these days
Mrs. B. deserves all the credit for putting it together. After we agreed on the general approach, she handled all the arrangements, instructing me to, ‘show up on time, be sober, and look pretty’.
Did they pipe in the haggis?
Truth be told, I’ve never had to duck more than a few second weddings…
I kinda, sorta attended my own little sister’s second wedding—that didn’t last either, btw, but I didn’t go inside the house of worship! I stayed outside and stomped and stewed until it was over, and skipped the reception too! Friends and family saw me that day and assumed I was actually really there, even my sister!
At the time, I was only dating the future and current Mrs Z—I just couldn’t grasp the logic of a second marriage while I was seriously plotting my own lifetime commitment! Still can’t…
Just a couple of footnotes to the man’s complaint:
1. If the survey research I’ve seen is true, roughly a third of the women who file divorce suits do have what my mother’s contemporaries would have considered grounds (e.g. a husband who has issues with liquor, street drugs, other women, or a volcanic temper). Atypical, but not ‘rare’.
2. To file for divorce after 26 years of marriage is exceedingly unusual. The median lapse of time between marriage and separation (for divorcing couples) is about 4.5 years, with another 1.7 years to formal dissolution.
3. The manosphere makes much of ‘frivorce’, and divorce suits for discretionary expressive reasons are an important social problem, but such suits by wives are the end of perhaps 15% or 20% of all marriages. What’s more disconcerting is that women who do not engage in such behavior generally defend and countenance it.
4. There are wives who are left high and dry by no-fault divorce as well. They are a modest minority (and, if they’re not strung out, do not lose their kids in the process), but they are out there.
It’s tempting to blame the male, but I’ve seen numerous similar situations, where the husband tries everything, yet the wife still leaves. As our host has demonstrated throughout his Sex Trouble series, modern feminism’s goal is to cause women to believe that men are irrelevant and certainly not a component of a woman’s contentment. N.B., I used the world “contentment” as opposed to “happiness,” which has supplanted the former as the be-all and end-all of one’s existence. When a woman is being told, both by her friends or acquaintances, not to mention Cosmopolitan magazine that there is some “perfect” husband archetype out there just waiting for her to come into his sights, it becomes easier to magnify perceived faults, than to try to work things out.
I could tell a legion of stories, but as an example, I recall a situation where the wife wanted out because, “He works too much. He’s never at home for us.” That was true, except, the reason for the double shifts was her new car, her annual change of wardrobes, and redecorating every room in the house. I suppose, you could blame him for not putting his foot down about spending, but he was trying to make his wife “happy.”
The fact of the matter is, feminism’s “you can have it all, baby” was and remains a lie. Too many women believe it though, and with no fault divorces, they think that they will finally be able to get everything they want.
You need to get out more. The editor David Mills offered this some years ago: “Men ruin their lives in search of sexual thrills; women do so in search of emotional ones”. And they often do it at just that awkward point in middle age.
Some years ago, NPR had a poignant feature by a contributor recalling the day, twenty-seven years earlier, when his father had moved out of the house. It was interspersed brief clips of his mother and his father recalling that day. The father’s coda: ‘you think life is going to be so new and different. Then the dust settles and life’s pretty much the same’. (Something my mother and father understood without having to learn it the hard way).
I admit my knowledge is based solely on 25 years of anecdotal evidence, but I disagree with point 3 with respect to the 15-20%. It’s substantially higher in my experience. I do agree with your last sentence in point 3, however.
As to point 4, generally both parties are substantially worse off economically than before the divorce, but the “high and dry” model for wives, is exceedingly rare, unless the husband is also in the same state. Usually, that’s where there is horrific marital debt which absorbs whatever assets exist. In those cases, both parties usually wound up filing for bankruptcy.