Louisiana, Arkansas and Arizona have introduced laws that could prevent divorce if it is not filed for one of three reasons, and Kansas is looking toward a similar bill. So-called “covenant marriage” is a legal option that couples can choose by signing an affidavit swearing they will stay married for the rest of their lives except in the case of infidelity, child or spousal abuse, or abandonment. These marriages must usually undergo a separation period of about two years before a divorce can become legal. The couple must also undergo marriage counseling prior to the wedding, as well as before divorce.
Along with more well-known issues such as gay marriage and abortion, this tidbit of recent history illustrates our country’s sharp move toward conservatism in societal dealings with relationships, sexuality and the family.
In the case of adultery, abuse or abandonment, a couple in a covenant marriage must still undergo up to two years of additional marriage and counseling. In any of these cases, but especially in those of abuse, it seems pointless, and possibly dangerous, to continue the marriage. Undergoing two years of close contact with an abuser would surely be traumatizing in and of itself, but for a legal document to encourage this contact, and to encourage the idea of marriage over an actual person’s happiness or safety, seems flawed.
Even though covenant marriage is still a choice, it seems likely that partners could easily egg unsure spouses into such an arrangement, and marriages could end up at an even worse place. Abused or
abandoned spouses would be forced to interact with an assailant because of legal terms they never wanted to buy into in the first place.
According to an Arkansas county newspaper, covenant marriage provides an opportunity for individual couples to combat divorce in a state with one of our nation’s highest divorce rates. Marriage may be a sacred institution, but simply making this institution harder to escape is not conserving anything except for outdated values of what a healthy relationship between two adults should be. Maybe marriage just isn’t it.
Although conservatives hail marriage as key to keeping families safe, perhaps these politicians should use their energy — now concentrated on promoting covenant marriages — to dealing with real problems, such as the fact that 34 percent of murdered women are murdered by their intimate partners, according to the National Women Abuse Prevention Project. Peggy Vaughan, author of “The Monogamy Myth”, estimates that approximately 80 percent of marriages experience at least one case of infidelity. Conservatism is hardly worthwhile if what we are conserving seems to be so imperfect in the first place.
In our society today, there looks to be a cultural understanding that traditional marriage makes less and less sense. For better or for worse, technology has offered devices through which we can engage in relatively safe sex without being in a relationship, and U.S. citizens have snapped up this offer. Likewise, with gender roles rapidly losing their holding power, men and women no longer need each other in the housewife versus breadwinner way that they used to. Technology has even given single parents the ability to reproduce their own genetic offspring.
These facts are scary to many, and for good reason. It is more than nerve-racking to see a system of stability, one that has been relied on for thousands of years, dissipating before our eyes. However, instead of fighting so relentlessly for the sacrament of the traditional, perhaps it would be easier, and eventually better for everyone involved, if our society instead accepted the sexual and familial movement of the future and figured out how to solve issues such as keeping children safe or preventing sexually transmitted diseases through a mechanism other than cementing unhappy marriages with legal documents.
It is important to remember that couples do not divorce because it
is easy; they divorce because they no longer wish to be married. Falsely constructed ideas of stability, built around one man and one woman and one perfectly manicured suburban life, will only make the impending crash of the past and the future of relationships that much harder
to reconcile. Conservatism is only
as good as that which is being
conserved.

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