Are young couples today divorcing too quickly? A look at what’s fueling these divorces

Expert’s Take

Marriage on the Line

Adina Lover

Word on the street is that more young couples than ever are getting divorced. Is this accurate? Family First sat down with experts involved in the tragedy of today’s divorces to verify this.

Due to the nature of the conversation, our interviewees preferred to remain anonymous — but their insights are grounded, thoughtful, and informed by experience.

“We’re always hearing about the ‘skyrocketing divorce rate.’ Are there more divorces than ever right now?” I ask, in the most politically incorrect way possible. “Or is that a myth? And if they are on the rise, was there a sudden jump, or have they been steadily increasing?”

“Compared to thirty-plus years ago,” Rabbi Schwartz* says, “there has been a definite rise in the incidence of divorce.” But he also has a very judicious approach to assessing the percentage of divorced couples in our community. “Our birthrate has also skyrocketed. Look at the number of graduates we produce each year. There are more divorced couples than ever, but there are also more married couples.”

In the end, we don’t have the actual stats to calculate the percentage of marriages that end in divorce. But there is something to be said about the fact that back in the day, divorce was spoken about in whispers. Today, everyone knows a handful of couples whose marriages did not live out the year. Divorce has been destigmatized.

“Why is that?” I ask. “Are we no longer willing to live with things that we would have been willing to live with thirty years ago, or are people less mature and marriageable?”

“Yes and yes,” Rena Cohen* maintains. “Also, bear in mind that marriage for love is a new concept, originating in the early twentieth century; before that, couples used to marry for economic or practical reasons.”

Rabbi Schwartz identifies a number of factors he’s seen driving “young divorce,” couples who divorce within the first year of marriage. On the top of the list, he says, is the disposable generation we live in. “Individually, we’re less resilient, less likely to work hard,” Rabbi Schwartz explains. “We’re not as understanding of the work we need to put in to build a strong marriage, whether that includes gender differences, personal differences, middos work, or a general understanding that true love and happiness in a marriage are not instantaneous.”

Combine our lack of resilience with several other factors, including the “single culture” of the secular world (we are not immune to outside societal influence, much as we’d like to think we are); the unrealistic influence of the Internet; and social contagion, and it’s not a surprise that people are divorcing younger.

Okay, stop right there. I know several young (and older) divorcées myself, and in the vast majority of cases, the women were in truly untenable marriages — there was abuse, severe mental illness, or a spouse who had left frumkeit. Is it fair to paint this dismal picture of society?

“There are two types of divorce,” Rena asserts. “One is the type you describe, the type the parshah of Gittin was created for: those in insupportable marriages. But too often, we see marriages that needed some work, but that could have worked. These people didn’t need to get divorced, but they did, and the factors mentioned earlier — poor resilience, our disposable generation, social contagion — often contribute.”

Too Young?

With the concerns that this generation is getting divorced too quickly, many people have wondered whether we’re pushing our children to get married too young.

“There’s so much shidduchim pressure today that parents are afraid to say, ‘Call me back in six months,’ ” Rena says. “It feels like too much time, all the good boys are being snatched up. But we need to put HaKadosh Baruch Hu back in the picture. I think that even though we use His name, we’ve effectively taken Him out of a lot of areas. This is a question of emunah. You have to believe that Hashem is the mezaveg zivugim, and if it’s not yet the right time for your child to get married, they’re not going to miss their zivug because you were a good parent and gave them some more time and resources to help them develop.

“If you have a child who’s the right age but doesn’t know themselves at all and can’t articulate what’s important to them or what they want, or you see that they’re missing some skills or communication ability that would be very important in a marriage — you as a parent have a responsibility to try to help that child acquire those tools prior to putting them into the system,” Rena says. “I heard Rebbetzin Feige Twerski from Milwaukee say this many, many years ago. She said, marriage is an institution, but it’s not a rehabilitation institution. So even though there is growth in marriage, that comes out of two people being healthy and skilled enough to actually engage in the relationship.”