NEW YORK belatedly became the 50th state in the country to enact no-fault divorce recently, making it possible for one spouse to unilaterally end a marriage without proving wrongdoing. Even without the new law, it was fairly easy for one spouse to terminate a marriage against the wishes of the other.

Gov. David A. Paterson said, “These bills fix a broken process that produced extended and contentious litigation, poisoned feelings between the parties and harmed the interests of those persons — too often women — who did not have sufficient financial wherewithal to protect their legal rights. I commend the sponsors on providing a real and effective legislative solution to a problem that has for too long bedeviled ordinary New Yorkers.” Notice how Paterson doesn’t even pretend the bill will reduce divorce.

As women initiate the majority of divorces, men are the primary victims of no-fault divorce, but  many women find themselves involuntarily ending their marriages too. Here is one woman’s account of trying to prevent her divorce in New York before the bill went into effect. One judge asked her: “Doesn’t your husband have the right to move on with his life?”

No-fault divorce undeniably led to the divorce epidemic, which was also set in motion many years ago by the end to the tradition of paternal custody. 

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Jesse Powell writes:

From 1969 to 1977, 33 out of the 50 states passed no-fault divorce laws. This same time period, from 1969 to 1977, are the years during which the divorce rate skyrocketed in the United States. In the three-year time period, 1966 to 1968, averaging those three years, the divorce rate was 27.4 percent. Nine years later, in the period 1975 to 1977, the divorce rate had shot up to 49.7 percent. Though the divorce rate steadily increased in America from 1921-3 up until 1966-8, doubling in that 45 year time period, the sudden increase of 80 percent in the already elevated divorce rate of the late 1960s in a mere 9 years time was totally unprecedented in the history of American divorce. It seems quite clear that the advent of no-fault divorce and the sudden rise in the divorce rate was no coincidence. Quantifying the rate of increase in the divorce rate over time, assuming the rise in divorce follows an exponential function, similar to out-of-wedlock births, the annualized rate of change in the divorce rate from 1921-3 to 1966-8, before the divorce revolution had begun, was 2.0 percent. The growth rate of the divorce rate during the following nine years, during the introduction of widespread no-fault divorce, was 11.3 percent. If the divorce rate had grown at its earlier steady rate of 2.0 percent a year, as it had done from 1921-3 to 1966-8, it would have taken until 2016-8 to reach the 50% mark.

After the sudden surge in the divorce rate from 1969 to 1977, hitting 50 percent at the end of that period, the divorce rate then remained absolutely stable and flat all the way up to the current day. The divorce rate hasn’t changed at all during the past 35 years.

In 1975, the American divorce rate was much higher than the divorce rates in Western Europe. America had embraced divorce while Western Europe kept its head and did not succumb to self-destructive romanticism.  Now, all of the major countries of Western Europe have higher divorce rates than the United States. With regard to marital stability and fertility, Western Europe is more dysfunctional than the U.S.  However, by my prediction, in about five years time, America will be at risk of a rising divorce rate once again,when the underlying deterioration of American society should have caught up with the elevated divorce rate that has prevailed during the past 35 years. 

Below is a table of the historical divorce rates in the United States, from 1921-3 to 2007-9.  The divorce rates are calculated for 3 year groupings so that yearly fluctuations can be averaged out, providing more reliable divorce rates.  1921-3 represents the average of the three years 1921, 1922, and 1923. 

Historical Divorce Rates for the United States  

Peter S. writes:

A close friend, a resident of New York State who married for the first time a year ago, woke up on his first wedding anniversary to discover that, as a perverse gift from the State, the terms of his marriage contract had been changed.  The marriage he was suddenly in was no longer the marriage he had entered into, the alteration of terms having been done without notification, consultation or vote.  Having already made his commitment, he has no choice but to carry on, the Sword of Damocles hanging that much nearer his head.  His general situation is one no doubt repeated many, many times both in New York and the nation as a whole.  No-fault divorce, which fatally undermines the permanency inherent to the institution of marriage, can quite legitimately be termed the abolition of marriage, as per Maggie Gallagher’s book of that title, reviewed in First Things here.

Laura writes:

This is what is never discussed regarding changes in marriage laws. How can the government retroactively revise the terms of millions of contracts already initiated? The same is true with same-sex marriage. Those who have already entered into marital contracts entered an agreement that was defined as heterosexual.

Brendan writes:

It’s true that New York was late to come to the party, as it were, for no-fault divorce, but it has not been hard to obtain a divorce in New York State for quite some time. The family law judges pretty routinely interpreted the existing law in a very relaxed way so as to permit divorces to take place rather quickly and easily most of the time, even over the objections of an uncooperative spouse. So while this will make it easier and cheaper, I believe that the divorce rate in New York State has been very similar to the rest of the country over the past few decades, because the courts were interpreting the existing law in a “de facto” no fault way in terms of liberally granting divorces.

I think the other story that doesn’t get reported as much when discussing the impact of no-fault is that marriage rates have been steadily falling throughout the past few decades, even long after divorce rates stabilized. The crisis of marriage in the U.S. is not only a no-fault divorce issue, but also an issue of the failure to form families and marriages to begin with. Marriage is becoming almost rare in the working class and the lower middle class is close behind. The middle class still marries, but divorces with gusto. And then the upper middle has the highest marriage rates and the lowest divorce rates, for various reasons. The current version of marriage doesn’t work very well outside the upper middle class, really — as a result of no-fault, economic independence of women, relative economic decline of men, and so on. All of these factors are combining to kill off marriage.

I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if in a few years the overall rate of marriage among lesbians (let’s leave out the gay men, as I discussed before) is higher than the overall rate of marriage among heterosexual men and women alike. Marriage is dying.

Laura writes:

If marriage is dying, civilization is dying.

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