On Divorce
Mar19
This is one American thing that I’ve found tends to floor a lot of furriners. This conversation is mildly based on a convo I had ten years ago with a Jamaican co-worker, who Joe is lightly based upon.
We scream about the sanctity of marriage and that’s why gays can’t get hitched, but America has one of the highest divorce rates in the world. That’s not even counting annulments.
I didn’t make this comic to argue the politics of gay marriage tho. This one is setup for a later strip that I completely forgot to do a month ago.
Have some gun porn!
And we have the highest divorce rate in the world because people fool themselves into thinking they’re marrying for love, when in truth it’s for financial stability. I’d like some sociologist to do a study in ~10 years time on the impact of Obamacare on the divorce rate, because you’d be floored how often people married for medical coverage because their only way into an insurance policy was as someone’s spouse.
Most states/municipalities allow people to register as domestic partners (let’s not get into the gay marriage debate here though, I’m just talking technicalities). Most insurance policies will allow domestic partners to be covered, at least as far as I’ve ever heard. It’s sort of a halfway point between married and unmarried but at least it’s something; I spent a couple of years that way myself before el esposo… uh… proposed in the shower. Sort of. Anyway. I guess what I’m saying is you’re right, people do rush in for insurance, but they don’t necessarily HAVE to…
Huh. Where are y’all getting your statistics?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_demography
You realize that page lists us as #10 globally for divorce?
Is #10 the same as “the highest…in the world”?
” has one of the highest “
It says one of the.
It’s the same as “you need glasses.”
Destruya’s post. Top of the page. “The highest”.
It’s not always all about you. 😛
this might never have happened if you used the “reply” option on his comment instead of writing a new one.
…right below his. 😛
As soon as someone else DID use the reply comment (which Ro has), your comment is no longer right below his. Since it wasn’t an independent comment but a reply, you can see why treating it as an independent comment has caused such heartburn?
Nope. Ro didn’t make any statistical claims. There’s only one post to which my answer could logically be inferred as addressing. JL’s commentary didn’t make the claim I questioned.
Y’all are going to great lenngths to defend your own conclusion-jumping.
It’s not *my* conclusion jumping, and Ro’s topic is a red herring, since he could have commented about, well, red herring, and it would have caused exactly the same physical separating of your two respective comments.
Clearly there’s more than one PERSON who you could have logically been addressing, and if you were interested in clearing that up in a “logical” way, perhaps you should have avoided the use of “y’all” to clarify. That’s one thing it’s not particularly good at. You did’t even address a comment: you addressed the article. Once more, if you wished to address the first COMMENT, you had a really handy, perfectly logical, confusion exterminating “reply” button that it was highly recommended for you to use.
Kaiser did a study and 7% of adults listed their marriage was for health care purposes. That’s 7% who would admit to it.
Your comment contains the implication that a substantial portion of respondants are lying. Have you evidence of this?
Marriage is the process of finding out what kind of man your wife would have preferred.
I am beginning to think that there should be a “starter marriage license” that expires after one or two years. After the initial time period is up, THEN the partners may renew it with “lifetime” vows. When the starter marriage expires, there’s no alimony, no 50% split except, perhaps, for what is earned during the course of the starter – each person takes out what they brought to the marriage. There could even be a pre-nup defining what such a split would be if they let the marriage end after two years.
There’d be a huge outcry by the “marriage is sacred” crowd but if it’s optional to use the “starter” option, their objections are nullified. If you want to take the big jump all at once, that’s your right.
Sure wish I’D had that option when I got married.
Actually that’s kind of what my wife and I did. Our first “marriage” was a wiccan handfasting. After a year we did the paperwork and did the big party that sends you into debt for the following year
LOL. My current husband and I got married for under a hundred bucks. You don’t HAVE to go into debt or spend all your savings to marry.
Ours was at a biker rally, married by a friend with a ministers’ license. We both wore our formal black jeans & vests; he donned a black linen shirt, my blouse was white linen with some glass beadwork and embroidery.
Oh yeah, and I clipped a little pouf of white tulle into my hair.
Including buying him the shirt, the gas to travel there and back and the white chocolate truffles I made instead of a cake (fits in a saddlebag), the whole thing cost us about eighty bucks.
In the old ways, before the church got involved with marriage, marriage was a contract. Originally, a year and a day (engagement) was used to see if the union was fertile and compatible. If it wasn’t, no marriage. If it was, ya got hitched! Then the church got involved and insisted everyone had to stay together no matter what, unless THEY deemed it was void and you got annulled. sigh….I wanna go back to those days.
That hits on a pet peeve of mine. The Roman Catholic Church says they don’t believe in divorces, but they will grant annulments. They’ll grant them years later, and with the flimsiest of justifications. There’s a term for that; it’s called a divorce. Either stay stuck in the 15th Century or don’t.
You just described what wife and I did — a Pagan handfasting.
“We scream about the sanctity of marriage and that’s why gays can’t get hitched, but America has one of the highest divorce rates in the world.”
Word. If we can’t treat marriage any better, we can’t cry that “teh gays” are going to mess it up. An Oklahoma politician got pinged on this very point recently.
The reason people are against gay marriage is that it’ll lead to three things (you know, other than a gaping maw to Hell opening up and Satan kicking off the Apocalypse):
1. Marriage leads to bigger housing and tax benefits, which means gays will be able to leave their fix-er-ups and condos and move into the ‘burbs in the Heartland.
2. Because of that, parents will have to see “Caden’s Two Dads” at Back to School Night.
3. If they can get married, that means they’ll be ‘people’ they’ll have to interact with instead of act all ~squiggy~ around.
Americans claim to do monogamy. BS, what we REALLY do is serial polygamy-
Time for Gov’t. to butt out of specifying what is or isn’t a marriage.
Contracts, signed by the parties involved & enforced in the same way as any OTHER civil contract. It will never fly , but I can dream-
Oh wait, doing marriage like that would increase the demand for lawyers?! Coming to a neighborhood near you soon!!!
I’ve heard “serial monogamy” before, but serial polygamy sounds like multiple wives at once, on a rotating basis.
Grats on the ten year Two lumps Series! (Headache does not permit good english today -.-)
I have always thought that the “sanctity of marriage” argument died when Elvis could marry you in the drive through.
The problem with America is the “No fault divorce” created by lawyers. And people get married for all the wrong reasons
btw I am married, and never planning on leaving my wife
Yeah, yeah, “50% divorce rate” and all that. Here’s my question to you:
What do the other 50% end in? 🙂
Death. Duh.
Exactly! Now, which would you prefer to be, divorced or dead?
Wait, if you get divorced, you’re immortal?
Gotta let folks know about THAT little secret! 😉
It’s also a rather odd stat. One Omar can get divorced for 9 others to live happily ever after.
That is, in fact, a lot of what happens. Most divorces are repeat offenders / frequent flyers.
This raises a point: how come no one bitches about the sanctity of marriage when the couple involved goes to a swinger’s club and swaps partners?
Because that doesn’t offer them anything to wrap their homophobia around.
28th wedding anniversary coming up in a couple of weeks. My wife and I must be weird…
19 years here, third time’s the charm for both of us. Love at first sight at an AA meeting for crying out loud.
I was having coffee with a gal, and saw her One Day at a Time keychain.
Yeah, we have one of the highest divorce rates. Number one, according to this page:
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/People/Divorce-rate
By stats on the same site, we are flat out leading the world in marriages per capita.
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/People/Marriage-rate
So the fact is, ‘merkins get married the way other people shack up. Maybe the problem isn’t to fix the divorce rate- it’s to fix people’s silly notion that they *must* *get* *married* in the first place.
Coming up on my tenth non-a-versary shortly…
Yep. The stats vary according to which source you use.
The incidence of marriage is also an important modifier. Which is why in some respects the divorce-to-marriage ratio is a better indicator than the simple divorce rate.
Personally I am fine with monogamy and faithfulness, but I just don’t believe in the marriage business.
4th panel word bubble, is it confusing because the top line is misattributed?
Hah. Plenty in the Catholic Commentariat have already pointed out that gay marriage is a mop-up battle in a war that destroyed marriage long ago. Us faithful Catholics know darned well that easy, no-fault divorce is a terrible, horrible, very bad no good thing for society. About the only thing you can do to a kid that is worse than taking Dad away is sexual molestation by mom’s live in boyfriend.
I think the blame goes first to contraception, which lowers the foremost risk of infidelity without lowering any of the others. It also strikes at the most basic social benefit of marriage and sexual virtue, which is to ensure that kids grow up in what is normally the best of all possible environments: the stable home founded on the lifelong, permanent bond between their biological parents.
Then blame goes to subsidy payments to mothers who drive their childrens’ fathers out of their lives, which destroyed Black families when no racially discriminating law ever could, and third to easy, no-fault divorce (driven in part by the previous two), which allows women to breach covenants and get cash and prizes for it, often destroying the standard of living for both her AND her husband.
@Vyk: You’re not the only one. I’ve seen Catholic commentators make the exact same complaint about marriage tribunals in the US being way too lax in issuing decrees of nullity. However, the theology for marriage annulment is sound, when you understand the theology of sacraments in general, and look at how far too many in America regard marriage.
I’m a bit confused: Shouldn’t that “That’s cuz we got freedom, Bub.” be attributed to Mick? That way their exchange in the last panel would make more sense.