SCHOLAR ISLAND
Divorce
"Divorce is the sword of Damocles hanging over conjugal love: its presence generates uncertainty, fear, suspicion."
Pope John Paul I Time,Sept 11,1978
"Love is what determines marriage....when Love fades, the marriage is over."
Victoria Woodhull
"There is no other human slavery that knows such depths of degradations as a wife chained to a man whom she neither loves nor respects."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"However often marriage is dissolved, it remains indissoluble. Real divorce, the divorce of heart and nerve and fiber, does not exist, since there is no divorce from memory."
-Virgilia Peterson
"A wife lasts only for the length of the marriage, but an ex-wife is there for the rest of your life."
-Jim Samuels
"When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn�t a sign that they "don�t understand" one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to."
Helen Rowland
A guide to men, "Divorces" 1922
"Divorce is one of the loneliest of modern rituals. Before, during, and after the actual culmination of the legal process it is an ordeal that rips people away from their roots, their important relationships, and a part of themselves. There is really nothing like it-except perhaps war."
Suzanne Gordon
Lonely in America 1976
"The happiest time in anyone's life is just after the first divorce."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population."
Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
"I believe in divorce because again and again we must have in marriage, as in every other experience of life, a decent corrective of mistake and tragedy."
John Haynes Holmes
"Men and women, unhappily mated, live together in a condition of contention, strife, jealousy, hate, and bring children into the world. These children are heirs, in degree, to the misery, unrest and quarrelsome moods of their unfortunate parents. Such children are terribly handicapped for the game of life."
Elbert Hubbard Oct, 1913
"Divorce. A resumption of diplomatic relations and rectification of boundaries."
Ambrose Bierce
Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, 1967
"When a couple decide to divorce, they should inform both sets of parents before having a party and telling all their friends. This is not only courteous but practical. Parents may be very willing to pitch in with comments, criticism and malicious gossip of their own to help the divorce along."
P.J. O'Rourke
"Divorce is not the enemy of marriage, it is its ally."
Dr. Joseph Collins
"No marriages ever really end-not even the marriages of those who think they do. We simply go on adding more relationships to our already cluttered lives. We do not chuck one wife or husband for another, any more than we get rid of children in favor of stepchildren."
Robert Farrar Capon
The Romance of the Word &A Second Day
"There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship-only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier."
-Erica Jong
How to Save Your Own Life
"The desire for divorce is the only important factor, the reasons do not matter."
Heywood Hale Brown
"Many divorces are not really the result of irreparable injury but involve, instead, a desire on the part of the man or woman to shatter the setup, start out from scratch alone, and make life work for them all over again. They want the risk of disaster, want to touch bottom, see where bottom is, and coming up, to breathe the air with relief and relish again."
Edward Hoagland
"There are four stages to a marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce."
Norman Mailer
Nova, magazine, 1969
"Modern divorce is little more than a functionable substitute for death. The decline of the adult mortality rate after the 17th Century, by prolonging the expected duration of marriage to unprecedented lengths, eventually forced Western society to adopt the institutional escape hatch of divorce."
Lawrence Stone
The Family, Sex and Marriage 1500-1800
"Multiplication of divorces means that there is something rotten in the community, that there is some principle of evil at work which must be counteracted and overcome or widespread disaster will follow. In the same way, if the man preaches and practices a different code of morality for himself than that which he demands that his wife shall practice, then no profession on his part of devotion to civic ideals will in the least avail to alter the fact that he is fundamentally a bad citizen. I do not believe in weakness. I believe in a man's being a man; and for that very reason I abhor the creature who uses the express that "a man must be a man" in order to excuse his being a vile and vicious man."
Theodore Roosevelt
The Americanism of Theodore Roosevelt
"The thing which is lawful, but disliked by God, is divorce."
Muhammed (Sayings of Muhammed)
"Shall I not point out to you the best of virtues? It is your doing good to your daughter when she is returned to you having been divorced by her husband."
Muhammed (Sayings of Muhammed 429)
"I discovered in my research that the process and aftermath of divorce is so pervasively disastrous-to the mind, body and spirit-that in overwhelming number of cases, the 'cure' that it brings is surely worse than the marriage's disease."
Diane Medved
The Case Against Divorce
"Divorce is the psychological equivalent of a triple coronary by-pass. After such a monumental assault on the heart, it takes years to amend all the habits and attitudes that led up to it."
Mary Kay Blakely (Quoted in Parade, July 12,1987
"More than any other single factor, divorce is responsible for the feminization of poverty in the past 20 years. In 1983 ,54 percent of single-parent, mostly female-headed, households were below the poverty line.
Sociologist Lenore Weitzman discloses that a woman's standard of living will decline 73 percent within a year of divorce. Of the divorced women she surveyed, 70 percent report constant anxiety about "making ends meet" or "not being able to pay bills."
If a woman over forty divorces, her chances of remarriage are comparable to those of being killed by a terrorist. Even younger women with children often are doomed to decades of near poverty, loneliness, and the frustration of solo parenting.
But the financial consequences of divorce are small change compared to the psychic impact. In Judith Wallerstein's study of divorced women over forty, half were clinically depressed, all moderately to severely lonely, notwithstanding that a majority had initiated the process. Divorced men who don't remarry are far more susceptible to mental illness, suicide, and physical ailments than their married counterparts.
Only in the movies does the belligerence end when the couple parts company. According to another survey, even ten years after divorce, one-third of the men and half of the women are still "intensely angry with their ex-spouse." There's more that kernel of truth in the lyrics of the popular country-Western ditty: "All my exes live in Texas. That's why Tennessee's my home."
Don Feder
A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America
Book: "Against Love: A Polemic" by Laura Kipnis
Book: "Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce" by Barbara Fisher
Books: "The unofficial Guide to Divorce " by Sharon Naylor
"The Smart Divorce: A practical guide to the 200 things you must know" by Susan T. Goldstein & Valerie H. Colb
"Using Divorce Mediation" by Katherine E. Stoner
Book: "Road to Divorce" by Lawrence Stone
Book: "Untying the Knot: Ex-Husbands, Ex-Wives and Other Experts on the Passage of Divorce" ed by Deborah Brodie
� 2001
ABOUT SCHOLAR ISLAND