The Shrinking Universe
The ‘D’ word
VIJAY NAGASWAMI
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Divorce is a reality today and we need to come to terms with this.
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At a recent seminar on marriage, one participant asked me whether scientists would ever be able to isolate the ‘divorce gene’. She was convinced that divorce ran in families and gave me an impressively long list of friends, relatives and
acquaintances to substantiate her theory. Her fear was that, coming from a divorced home, she was ‘hardwired’ to end up in a similar state herself, as a result of which she did not want to have children who, she felt, would inevitably end up recycling her ‘inherited’ pattern.
At the same seminar, a young gentleman got up and wanted to know whether divorce was indeed a legitimate option, given that our culture lays such strong emphasis on family values and treats plodding on through thick and thin as a virtue to be emulated. He was, in fact, all for taking divorce out of the statutes, since he felt that for as long as the option was available, more and more young people would exercise it, as they were tending to in recent times, for even the slightest of provocations.
Marriage templates
While I know that divorce is not a genetically determined phenomenon, I could relate to the lady’s fears and concerns. More divorces tend to happen, although there is little hard data to corroborate this, when the parents of either or both partners in a marriage are themselves divorced — legally or emotionally. This, of course, does not mean that all such marriages end in divorce, nor does it mean that any such marriage has to.
All couples need a template around which they can build their own marriage. Since the only marriage they are inevitably exposed first-hand to is that of their parents (sometimes that of an older sibling or an uncle and aunt or grandparents), this serves as their marriage model and is, therefore, the template they usually adopt for themselves.
If the model marriage was a stable one, we tend to incorporate that stability into our own repertoires. If it was a highly role-differentiated marriage (for instance, the father unambiguously being the provider and the mother the home maker), then this is the pattern they are most comfortable with for their own relationships. If the marriage was an open one, they are inclined to be more liberal in their approach to marriage and so on. Even if the model marriage ended in divorce, one can still manage a non-divorce template provided the divorce was amicable and did not cause unfathomable schisms in the whole family.
However, if our parents had a mercurial relationship or an unstable one or a now-on-now-off sort of equation or their marriage ended in a bitter and acrimonious divorce, we tread a thorny path.
Some of us tend to experience what can be called the ‘legitimisation compulsion’. We have a need to legitimise our parents’ maladaptive behaviours in order that we have a more agreeable image of them and their marriage. And what better way of legitimising their behaviour than by incorporating it into our own repertoire?
This is why we see people whose parents may have had a bitter divorce, taking their marriages in that direction, and not because they are genetically hard-wired to do so. But, parental patterns need not be self-perpetuating if their offspring recognise that their model templates are flawed and consciously work on redefining a new template that works for them and their partners. This process can be best undertaken with the help of a couples’ therapist, whose primary role it is, to help the couple define what doesn’t work for them and what could.
Difficult decision
Divorce, however uncomfortable we may feel about it, is a contemporary reality and we do need to come to terms with this. Sometimes, divorce is the only legitimate option in some unworkable marriages. The decision to divorce is a very difficult one and both partners need to work through their emotions with sensitivity and grace if the impact of their divorce on the children is to be manageable. And to say that it goes against culture is neither here nor there. There are many aspects of life today that are not strictly in accord with the dictates of Indian culture.
In fact, today the term ‘Indian culture’ has become a catch-all phrase, articulated by almost everybody to refer to their own respective perceptions of what they think should constitute Indian culture. Defining what precisely ‘Indian culture’ is in the context of social life is an extremely difficult thing to do, and using this as a reason to illegitimise divorce is hardly acceptable.
However, I do understand where this concern comes from. Over the last few years, there has been an increasing incidence of ‘quick-gun divorces’. By this term I refer to young urban couples getting divorced too soon after they get married (sometimes as early as within three months of their wedding) for reasons that seem to suggest that they have not made the effort required to make their marriage work.
Work it through
While I do agree that the recent empowerment of young people has made them sometimes engage in rash and impulsive behaviours, I still feel that the vast majority of urban youngsters today are still willing to give their marriages a good workout before they take their calls.
Honestly, I don’t believe that unless one has tried for at least a couple of years to get things right, one should even contemplate a divorce unless phenomena like domestic violence, premarital deceptions (issues of major consequence concealed from the partner before the wedding), dowry harassment, untreatable sexual dysfunctions and so on confound the marriage. Even in these situations, seeing a couple’s therapist before taking a decision would be a better way of handling the situation.
Aside of these situations, there are thousands of couples who have tried their best and exhausted all options before concluding that try as they might, they simply cannot live with each other or respond positively to each others’ legitimate emotional needs, whatever the reasons for this may be.
Rather than denying these couples the opportunity to aspire for future fulfilment by advancing the ‘against-Indian-culture thesis’ (and believe me, the reason why thousands of couples stay stuck in unhappy marriages is that ‘society will never accept me as a divorced person’),
I think it is important that ‘society’ recognise and legitimise the right of couples to pursue their respective goals independently in an amicable manner, if they so please. The law has already done it. It’s our turn now.
The writer is a psychiatrist and author of The 24x7 Marriage. E-mail vijay.nagaswami@gmail.com
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