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High rates of marital dissolution and easy access to divorce are not unprecedented, historically or cross-culturally. But contemporary divorce in North America and Western Europe has different origins and features than divorce in previous cultures. The origins of modern divorce patterns date back more than 200 years, to the invention of the historically unprecedented idea that marriage should be based on love and mutual affection. Ironically, then, the fragility of modern marriage stems from the same values that have elevated the marital relationship above all other personal and familial commitments: the concentration of emotion, passion, personal identity, and self-validation in the couple relationship and the attenuation of emotional attachments and obligations beyond the conjugal unit. The immediate causes of divorce may range from factors as diverse as the personal psychological characteristics of one or both spouses to the stresses of economic hardship and community disintegration. But in a larger perspective, the role of divorce in modern societies and its relatively high occurrence both flow from the same complex of factors that have made good marriages so much more central to people's happiness than through most of the past, and deterioration of a marital relationship so much more traumatic.
Keywords: Marriage; Divorce; Family; History of Marriage
Fam Proc 46:7-16, 2007
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the frequency of divorce in modern American society is not entirely unprecedented. Anthropologists report rates of separation and remarriage among many hunting and gathering societies, and in several horticultural groups as well, that are just as high as in modern industrial societies. Malaysia and Indonesia had the highest rates ever recorded in the first half of the 20th century, surpassing the United States' record rates of 1981.
Nor has divorce always been an arduous process. Among the Shoshone Indians, a wife who wanted a divorce would simply place her husband's possessions outside the dwelling, which belonged to her. Among the Cewa of East Africa, the husband takes his hoe, axe, and sleeping mat when he leaves his wife's village and the divorce is complete. In traditional Japanese society, a letter of 3 1/2 lines was all a man needed to divorce his wife. Women, however, had to put in two years of service at a special temple before they could get...