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divorce-lawyer-for-menAnthony Esolen:

Why should we care?

I might at this point hurl the question back. How can we not care?

Visit a prison someday, and ask the men there about their sexual history and that of their parents. Find out how many of them grew up without a father in the home. Find out how many have themselves fathered children out of wedlock, whom they do not now see.

Sociologists rely upon numbers to show the dreadful harm wrought by all forms of divorce, both that which dissolves a marriage recognized by the State, and those which dissolve liaisons that are from their inception in a state of disorder. They can discourse all day long on rates—dropping out of school, depression, drug use, crime, teenage pregnancy, second-generation divorce, and so forth.

One must have a heart of iron to pretend that all is fine, when children must suffer so badly for the selfishness of their parents; when children must be “grown up,” so that their parents can persist in behaving like self-willed children.

The real harm, however, cannot be captured by numbers. No human thing can ever really be. What the divorce regime has done is to infect with transience what ought to be the most intimate and enduring of human bonds. It has eradicated from our minds the very idea of a complete and irrevocable self-donation.

Most of us will never be called upon to brave the cannons of an enemy on the battlefield, or to rush into a burning building to save a child. Our calls to heroism must be of a less dramatic sort, but no less real, demanding more patience and self-sacrifice, and productive of more human good.

It is easy to stand your ground when the enemy is far away. It is hard to do it when you are face-to-face.

It is easy to balance your checkbook and avoid arguments about money when you are rich. It is hard to do it when every dollar counts, or when the electric bill has to wait a month while you scramble together the funds to pay the heating bill.

It is easy to be loyal when loyalty costs you nothing. But when the hard times come, as come they must; when conversation is strained, and even the bed brings no real pleasure; when the future seems but an interminable stretch of cloud and rain; then only the vow stands between marriage and divorce, and then it is that married couples most need the moral suasion and support of a genuine culture about them.

To say, “We will not hold you to your vow” is to say, in effect, “You cannot really make a vow to begin with.”

But it is essential to our humanity to promise ourselves; we can only find happiness by giving away our pursuit of it; we know joy when we open ourselves up to its free arrival; it is better to be chosen than to choose. Many men and women in difficult marriages would learn these things eventually, if we did our duty by them and held them to their vows when they were weak.

– from Defending Marriage: 12 Arguments for Sanity

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