It's The Divorce That Does Ya In

If, in Canada, one million marriages per generation end in divorce, that's as many Canadians as entered World War II; that's more Canadians than had post-traumatic stress syndrome after World War I; that's one million usually productive people who become unproductive for - what -two years, maybe? It raises one really important question - how detrimental is it for a society to have one million women per generation go through this? (After all, that's one million women multiplied by 2080 work hours per year times 2 or so years lost.)

Given all the emotional carnage, one more important question must be raised - do we make it easy enough to have children without getting married?

I suspect that making it easier would require giving explicit permission to young women to become unmarried mothers; and that means acculturating, educating and empowering them to decide with confidence whether or not they need to be married before they have a child. And, making them feel that it's a perfectly acceptable alternative to raising a child with a husband. The flip-side, of course, is to continue to have them engage in marriage while completely rethinking the institution, the success rate of which can be seen in the census statistics on divorce.

Happily married people please take note: this is not an indictment. It's just a call to remember that there are still so many unrealistic images and expectations of married life coming at us from advertising images, and depicted in some movies and TV shows, that people who should not or do not want to be married but still want children are made to feel like outsiders. And that's not fair.

You have only to look at studies cited here comparing stress levels of married mothers to never-married mothers, or, check out the stack of studies cited in books like Susan Faludi's Backlash (Doubleday; New York; 1991), to bust the myth that single women are more miserable than married ones. Indeed, I think it is very important to make young women understand that single mothers do not limp through their lives and that it's divorce that messes with your head, not single motherhood.

How long will it be before we realize that getting over a divorce not only represents a huge personal loss for individual women, but also a huge loss for society as a whole? Perhaps it's about time that someone with some kind of power and influence took notice. I can't possibly presume to have the answers, only a strong feeling that there should be more of a genuine dialogue taking place.