Quote:
Originally Posted by Interpol76
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Preliminarily, I would note that while the United States is
seventh on that list (with a 45.8% rate), Belarus -- a prime exporter of mail-order brides -- is
second. Belarus, where women are supposedly still women, who dream of nothing except get married and stay married to any man, any time and do his bidding at the drop of a hat, has a whopping 52.9% divorce rate. Estonia has beat the United States as well, with the rate of 46.7%. Russia and Ukraine -- two other well-known havens of "traditional femininity" -- are below the US, but insignificantly, at 43.3% and 40%, respectively.
With that in mind, here are some of the reasons for high divorce rates in the US and some of the other countries at the top of that list:
Long life expectancy. I mean, duh. Divorces were once rare, true, but so were silver wedding anniversaries. At the same time, young widows and widowers were once much more common than today. Read some medieval and Renaissance literature on the subject, and you'll be surprised how casually people looked forward to death (their own or their partner's) to set them free from the bonds of matrimony. When life expectancies were low and sudden death from disease was rampant, it was quite reasonable to wait out on an odious marriage. This is no longer an option. If you are 25 when you get married and you expect yourself and your partner to live around 50 years longer, instead of 10 or 15, the odd are that much greater that you will divorce.
High marriage rates. Another duh. The more freely people enter into marriage, the higher will be the numbers of marriages that turn out to have been improvident. The US may be seventh on the divorce list, but it
leads the marriage list. See,
NationMaster - Marriage rate (most recent) by country. Of course, the divorce statistics are expressed as percentages of marriages, while the marriages statistics are expressed as percentages of populations, so it's not exactly the same thing. However, the trend is clearly there -- more marriages leads to more divorces.
Economic prosperity. Compare the countries at the top of the list with those at the bottom of the list. Notice anything? Sure, Belarus may not be that rich a country, but it sure beats the hell out of Guatemala. In poor countries, marriage is primarily an economic transaction, and neither party can afford to quit. In rich countries, people have tremendous emotional expectations of marriage, and can afford to walk out if those expectations are not satisfied. (But --
within a rich country with a high standard of living, the trend usually reverses itself, with the most affluent people having the lowest divorce rates and the poorest people having the highest.)
Women are economically and legally self-sufficient. Give the historically disadvantaged group an opportunity to walk out of a marriage -- and many of its members just will.
Lack of social acceptance of alternatives to divorce. When I say "alternatives", I mean, of course, infidelity and/or informal separation. Despite the liberalism of the American society, infidelity carries a lot more opprobrium here than in many other liberal societies, and so does married couples indefinitely living apart.
High expectations of marriage. We are lucky to live in a time when we don't have to worry about popping out an heir and a spare before cholera gets us or being tied to an incompatible stranger just to have a roof over our heads. The downside is that we want the world; the expectations that people have of their partners and relationships are both great and nebulous -- mainly of the emotional kind.