Divorce can break a village

This has been the year of divorce, but few are grappling with collateral consequeces

Julie Roberts in Eat Pray Love

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Halfway through 2024, it looks like this might be remembered as the year of divorce. Or at least, of the divorce manifesto.

I wrote about divorce a few months ago, and the gist is that there has been a deluge of articles and books exploring the idea of broken marriages. One of the most prominent is the memoir This American Ex-Wife, whose author said she was “anti the legal structure of marriage.” The comment struck me as notable, and as characteristic of this current wave of writing about divorce. Since that book came out, what I’ll call “divorce discourse” has only intensified thanks to new books, pop albums and of course news articles. This Free Press post includes a useful summary of some prominent examples.

I want to be clear here that while I’m in favor of marriage — among other things, I’m persuaded by the research on the benefits of marriage¹ — I’m also not necessarily anti-divorce. There are divorced people in my life, and universally they decided to end their marriages after much soul-searching. Divorce is hard and I think as a society we could have a better conversation about the best ways to make that hardship less frequent. But also, the individual divorced people I personally know tended to make the right decision.

Instead of making an anti-divorce argument, what I instead want to argue today is that the way we think about divorce is overly individualistic. I started this post by mentioning “divorce discourse” because the common thread in that discourse is a focus on individual fulfilment. It’s marriage versus divorce as a means of self-actualization. The author of This American Ex-Wife, for example, framed her pro-divorce argument around the idea of “a woman who chooses herself” (emphasis added). Following the publication of a new novel by filmmaker Miranda July, All Fours, the Atlantic framed the book as one of two recent texts exploring the “awful ferocity of midlife desire.”

Obviously divorce is technically the decision of one or two people. But this laser focus only on the individual consequences — or, apparent benefits — of divorce misses a huge amount of context. When a marriage breaks up, a fissure often opens across an entire social sphere. A village potentially breaks apart. Sometimes that’s what needs to happen. I’m not passing judgement on any person. But I am passing judgement on the way we collectively talk about divorce. And it’s baffling that the concept is being framed as an antidote to boring old middle age ennui without really any attempt to wrestle with the fact that ending a marriage has cascading effects on many other relationships.

I’ll use my own marriage as a thought experiment. My wife and I are not getting divorced, but let’s imagine that we were. As I wrote last year, my wife is one of my family’s primary “kin keepers,” which means she’s one of the people who holds the extended group together. She plans big family dinners, organizes family vacations, keeps abreast of everyone’s goings on, and is a diplomat in conflicts. She has even managed to stitch parts of her family and my family into a single cohesive group.

So what happens if we break up? All of the normal divorce things, sure. But what happens to all the relationships between our siblings and parents and friends? Eventually, I suspect it all falls apart. Everyone in our sphere is more isolated, both because they have fewer people in their lives, and — critically — because a person who served as a vital link is gone. Removing my wife from the Dalrymple family doesn’t just remove a person, it yanks a foundation stone out from beneath the entire structure².

My wife is not the only person who acts as a kin keeper in my family, so hopefully in this hypothetical scenario the Dalrymple family village would survive as a cohesive group. But maybe not. A building that loses a single major foundation stone is at risk of collapse.

I have an unusually large family, which I’m using here to keep things somewhat abstract. But the same concepts apply whether your social circle is made mostly of kin or kith; if most of my village is made of friends my wife and I share, what happens to those friends when we split up? Indeed, this is the question that I wondered over and over again while reading about this year’s many divorce memoirs. Some people do manage to juggle all their relationships in a post-divorce life, but anecdotally at least it seems like most friends and family end up drifting to one side or another of a former couple.

So far, I’ve mostly been referencing writing from the cultural left because that’s where most³ of the “choose yourself” discourse currently originates. But the village-breaking impacts of divorce are also not getting much attention on the right. Take for instance this recent piece in The Spectator, which explores divorce from the perspective of now-adult children whose parents split up. That perspective naturally gives the piece some nuance because it highlights the impacts of divorce on more than just the separating couple. And the piece alludes to a broader family village when it mentions aunts, cousins, and grandparents. Overall, I think it’s a worth-reading response to a lot of this year’s commentary.

But it still doesn’t get into the costs of divorce for the entire village. How did aunts and cousins feel as their relationships suffered? What kinds of relationships, if any, do all these extended family members have now? What happened to friends as family members bounced around and became less and less stable? The author describes some destructive youthful behavior; who else was hurt by that behavior?

I don’t ask these questions to put down the piece. It’s a thoughtful exploration of the topic.

Instead, I ask those questions to point out that there is still more to say. The headline is “How divorce never ends.” That’s true — and truest — for the children of divorce, of course, but it’s also true for a whole bunch of other people as well. And even writing that is pro-marriage or divorce-skeptical rarely explores what it means to be pro-village.

Like I said above, sometimes marriages need to end. I would never suggest that anyone stay in an abusive marriage, to bring up just one example. But that’s not really what this year’s divorce discourse is about.

Instead, it’s about prescribing divorce as way to deal with drudgery, or middle aged sexual desire, or abstract ideological ideas. And look, I get that those are real things. I may understand this more than many people because I grew up very religious. I spent my early adulthood serving a religious mission then abstaining for sex while searching for a wife. I understand the feeling of perhaps having missed out on some youthful adventures and realizing that the time to have those adventures is slipping away. But would it not be just a teensy bit selfish of me to blow up the relationship of a few dozen people just because I was bored or longing for excitement?

To be clear, I love my wife. But also, I choose to continue loving my wife because — among innumerable other reasons — we are part of a community that depends on us. It’s a community that, like all communities, can only exist if everyone thinks about people other than themselves. Community cannot exist if everyone always chooses her or himself.

In this context I think there are two things that ought to happen. The first is simply that discussions about divorce ought to be more nuanced. I mentioned above that The Spectator piece was good in that it explored divorce from the perspective of people other than the central couple. I’d love to see more such stories. Some of those stories will probably be happy stories; a family that loses an abuser, for instance, will surely be better off, and I’d love to hear that story from more perspectives. But also, I suspect there are some people who have lost relationships in what we might call second-hand divorce. If everyone needs a village, we need more stories about villages.

The second thing that we might take away from all of this recent discussion of divorce is that perhaps we should think more deeply about the way we vet potential marriage partners. The message from most of pop culture is that all you need is love. Many stories — Romeo and Juliet is the archetypal example — are about people who decide to couple up against the wishes of everyone around them.

It’s a romantic idea, but it ignores the fact that couples exist within a broader community. They’re one piece of a village. And so perhaps the question preceding marriage isn’t just, “do I love this person?” Perhaps the question should also be, “can this person commit to my community, and together can we choose more than ourselves?”

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1. This is a huge topic that I’ve written about before on this blog. But to save myself time, I’m just going to share a few IFS links here to make the point that marriage conveys benefits on its practitioners: So here are links, links, links and more links. I suspect if you’re reading this blog you probably don’t need persuading on this point. But if you do disagree, let me know. I love debate and am very often proven wrong.

2. I wouldn’t presume to describe my own importance in my wife’s family, but I do have great relationships with them and so I assume they’d also feel my absence if we got divorced.

3. The left, however, doesn’t have a monopoly on pro-divorce voices though. There are right-leaning influencers that take a kind of hyper-masculine, anti-marriage stance. I think the cultural influence of these people is relatively limited though, so I don’t generally get into it much.