Marriage Myths: Divorce Is Their Fault

 

Marriage 27

          I confess I do not much want to write today's post. I fear it will be misunderstood. More than that, though, I am afraid it will hurt people, good people, who will take my words in a judgmental way I do not intend. Such is the case when you write about divorce. It is the third rail – electrified and dangerous to touch. But I must if I am to write a well-rounded series on marriage. More than that, I must if I am to convey to the never-married and currently married people in my readership what I believe they need to know. Or, at the least, consider.

          In 2024, 673,000 marriages ended. A small percentage initiate divorce because they want to marry someone else. This small group will admit that the divorce is mostly their fault, though they will often fault their partner for being unloving, thus driving them into the arms of another. However, the typical person who sues for divorce has a long list of grievances against the other party. Lack of commitment. Infidelity. Domestic abuse. Incompatibility. Conflict. Financial pressure. Substance abuse. Etc.

          That is a rather long list with some ugly things on it. Put another way round, generally people divorce because they feel their partner does not do _________, which they should, or that they do __________, which they should not. Alternatively, it involves not what they do but what they are, positively or negatively. Put bluntly, most people who divorce do not think it was their fault the marriage dissolved. Statistically speaking, 66% of men and 74% of women blame their partner primarily for the divorce. “Yes, I am sure this is partly my fault, but it is mostly their fault. If they would have/If they wouldn’t have (fill in the blank) we would probably still be married.”

          That viewpoint is a significant contributing factor to the possibility of divorce itself. If I tend to blame them while exonerating myself, I am already on the road that may well end in divorce court.

          “That’s not fair, Pastor Brennan. You don’t know my situation.”

          You are right; I do not. Nevertheless, while this blog post does not apply to every marital situation, it still applies to most of them. And here is why: in my marriage, Mandy does not cause me to be the way I am; she reveals the way I am.

          Allow me to illustrate what I mean. Yesterday, I set out to tackle an obscure corner of my patio that has become overgrown with ground cover in the past few years. I wanted to put a wood rack there, and it needed to be cleared out. In the process, while using a weed whacker, I inadvertently sent a tiny particle of sand spinning through the air. Somehow, it went around my glasses and lodged in my eye. The resulting irritation was literal, I assure you. Unresolved, eventually, that sand may well have produced an eye infection and potential blindness. Yet an oyster that ingests sand solves the resulting irritation by secreting a substance around it that eventually forms a pearl.

          Was the sand the primary cause of the results in the eye? No. If it were, the results in my eye and in the oyster would be the same. It is, after all, the same substance. But the external irritant was not the problem, really. The sand was the agent that revealed the inner properties of the eye and the oyster.

          This problem is as old as marriage itself. And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. (Genesis 3.12)  Certainly, Eve bears guilt, but Adam bears guilt also. He cannot simply blame her for the ensuing disaster. His bad reaction to her wrong was just as much the cause of their crisis as her initial wrong.

          Blame is as automatic as breathing. We like to blame others because it gets us off the hook. But divorce, though often justified by blame, is usually at least just as much about my bad reaction as it is about their bad actions.

          Marriage reveals who you are more clearly than any other human relationship. Many people do not like what they see. Not in the other party, in themselves. So, to avoid seeing themselves accurately in an unflattering way, they bail on the marriage, all the while blaming it on the other person. They cannot handle the revelation of their own shortcomings in reaction to their partner's flaws. Rather than deal with it they walk away.

          Some of you do not believe me yet. Let me give you one final illustration. Why do so many people avoid reading the Bible? James 1 likens the Word of God to a mirror. Those who do not want to see how bad their actual condition is avoid the mirror rather than working on the problem. Our flesh does not like to see itself for what it is – lustful, bitter, lazy, proud, vindictive, jealous, angry, deceitful, weak, petty, and a thousand other things. So, we avoid the Bible instinctively.

          It is that same innate avoidance of seeing ourselves as we really are that is so often at the heart of divorce. And if I am right, divorce is not usually about my partner’s flaws as much as it is about my own. And when I leave, I take my flaws with me, unchecked, unmitigated, and unmortified. No matter how much I mollify myself by blaming my partner.  

          Maybe, just maybe, divorce is not the answer you think it is.