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Since most of the people know that I am dating this beautiful girl; however, at the time when I approaching her with a date question, I understood that this is not just a dating question but a marriage question. So, since then, marriage and family is something that I have been thinking about. Lately I read an article “The Divorce Generation” by Susan Gregory Thomas on the divorce and how her divorce is different then her parents. Miss Thomas in the article explains how divorce has an negative affect on children, writing her own experience (when her parents decided to separate), and the children that were around her. She describes how children's life are shaped negatively when parents make a wrong decision, decision in getting divorce. Couple of my thoughts on this article:The Article
When the couple is talking about divorce, the subject of their conversation is “them,” how other side was unfaithful, or what ever it causes them to move towards the divorce. But, most of the time, children are being ignored because their parent are hurt in their relationship forgetting to see how the decision they will take will affect their children. Miss Thomas writes, “The divorced parents of a boy I knew in high school installed him in his own apartment because neither of them wanted him at home. . . My brother, a sweet, goofy boy, grew into a sad, glowering giant, barricaded in his room with dark graphic novels and computer games. . . I spent the rest of middle and high school getting into trouble in suburban Philadelphia: chain-smoking, doing drugs, getting kicked out of schools, spending a good part of my senior year in a psychiatric ward. Whenever I saw my father, which was rarely, he grew more and more to embody Darth Vader: a brutal machine encasing raw human guts.”
Miss Thomas writes about a boy she knew from school, who was unwanted by his parents: “The divorced parents of a boy I knew in high school installed him in his own apartment because neither of them wanted him at home. Naturally, we all descended on his place after school—sometimes during school—to drink and do drugs. He was always wasted, no matter what time we arrived. A few years ago, a friend told me that she had learned that he had drunk himself to death by age 30.”
The statistics Miss Thomas brings to the article are interesting. “The average marrying age in 1950 was 23 for men and 20 for women; in 2009, it was 28 for men and 26 for women. . . According to the U.S. government's 2002 National Survey of Fertility Growth, 34% of couples who move in together have announced publicly that marriage is in the future; 36% felt ‘almost certain’ that they'd get hitched, while 46% said there was ‘a pretty good chance" or "a 50-50 chance.’”
What makes the difference between now and the past?
What I mean is: are families in worst condition today then they were in the past? “In 1962, half of all adult women believed that parents in bad marriages should stay together for the children's sake; by 1980, only one in five felt that way. ‘Four-fifths of [those] divorced adults profess to being happier afterward,’ the authors write, ‘but a majority of their children feel otherwise.’" In other words, there was a family, but a family of hate. Thomas later concludes, “To allow our own marriages to end in divorce is to live out our worst childhood fears. . . More horrifying, it is to inflict the unthinkable on what we most love and want to protect: our children. It is like slashing open our own wounds and turning the knife on our babies. To consider it is unbearable.”
What really surprised me about this article is what Thomas had to say bout adultery: “Adultery is far more devastating for us than it was for our parents or grandparents. . . Increasingly, men and women develop serious emotional attachments with their would-be lovers long before they commit adultery. As a result, she found, infidelity today is much more likely to lead to divorce.” In other words, people are closer then they need to before marriage today (adultery), that has a higher chance for them to divorce.
No matter what she saw in her life, how divorcee could bring a negative effect on children, Miss Thomas had a divorce herself: “But then, one evening, I found myself where I vowed I'd never be: miserable, in tears, telling my husband that we were like siblings who couldn't stand each other rather than a couple, and listening as my husband said he felt as though we had never really been a couple and regretted that we hadn't split up a decade earlier. ‘I'm done,’ he said. It was as if a cosmic force had been unleashed; the awful finality of it roared in like an enormous black cloud blotting out the sky, over every inch of the world. It was done.”
She later says, “I had married the kindest, most stable person I'd ever known to ensure that our children would never know anything of the void of my own childhood. I nursed, loved, read to and lolled about with my babies—restructured and re-imagined my career—so that they would be secure, happy, attended to. My husband and I made the happiest, most comfy nest possible. We worked as a team; we loved our kids; we did everything right, better than right. And yet divorce came. In spite of everything.” How ironic is that, first it is so perfect family where you could not even predict for divorce, but later it is like they were never were friends.
However, this article in not focused on her parents or her divorce, but on children and how they are impacted. Miss Thomas brings in the research to support that when dads are involved in parenting, even after the divorce, they have a positive affect on children. “A 2009 study published in the journal Child Development found, for example, that teenagers with involved fathers are less likely to engage in risky sexual activities.” She continue saying, “I have yet to meet the divorced mother or father who feels like a good parent, who professes to being happier with how their children are now being raised. Many of us have ended up inflicting pain on our children, which we did everything to avoid. . . Divorce is divorce no matter what you say,” Ms Thomas says.
But why do people have divorce in the first place?
The Bible
The bible says it is the heart problem. Jesus answers this question so clearly when Pharisees approached him with a divorce question:
“And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.” (Matthew 19:3-0)
Couple things we could notice here:
I. If we look carefully, Jesus does not supports or defends the idea of having a divorce. But restates how man and woman were created: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female. . .‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’? From the beginning God had plan, and in His plan, two people (man, and woman) were to be one flesh till they die.
II. The reason for the divorce is because of the condition of their heart. “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (8). What leads a person to make to get a decision to get a divorce is his the circumstances that he or she is at, but because of the heart condition, it is heard. Apostle Paul write about the hard heart, “But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed” (Romans 2:5). In other words, the person who is enforcing a divorce in their marriage, is enforcing because of their hard heart—but on the judgement day, God’s wrath will be pored on that heart.
“And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold” (24:12).
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