In Praise of Divorce

It is impossible to read Lyz Lenz’s screed for divorce without recalling Hamlet’s line: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Also, she would have made a better impression if she had not used a misspelled affected version of her first name. 

If you were asked to guess how to pronounce Lyz, you would probably propose something like: Lies.

According to Lenz, in a decidedly unoriginal thought, marriage is a plot concocted by men, designed to keep women enslaved in domestic work, the better to prevent them from having fulfilling careers.

For those of a more historical bent, the very same thought originated with one Friedrich Engels, the number two communist roader, more than a century ago. If you want the original form read his book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. 

Dare we note that this meme was designed to undermine social order, by undermining women’s roles as wives, the better to make them into members of a revolutionary vanguard. It was never about women’s happiness. It was always about overthrowing capitalism and bringing more misery to the world. 

Now, for having divorced her husband, Lenz has a career as a writer. Two cheers for Lyz. Her husband, she notes in passing at the end of the essay, has remarried and has fathered another child.

Lenz does not give very much consideration to her husband’s well-being. Nor does she seem to care about how divorce will impact her two children. Her reference is Me-first and only Me.

The problem is the division of household labor. Lenz was an aspiring writer who one day attracted a publisher’s attention. So she set about to write a book, even at the expense of caring for her children and keeping up her home. 

She imagined, naturally enough, that her husband would contribute to household tasks, even though he had never done so. The marital contract and the division of household labor had had it that she had taken responsibility for homemaking.

A simple minded soul might have suggested that the unhappy couple find someone to assist here at home, an au pair or a housekeeper. One does not know whether her new career path provides enough income to hire household help.

Apparently, the thought of household help never crosses her mind. At the least, it does not cross her Washington Post screed.  Lenz takes more time off to write her magnum opus and that her husband must take up the slack. 

One notices that writing in your home office does not necessarily make it impossible to make a home. It is not the same as being a physician on call or a corporate lawyer arguing a case in court. Nevertheless, Lenz knows perfectly well, because she is a good feminist, that her husband will not contribute his fair share. So she berates him and aggravates the situation.

If you see the world and your personal experience through an ideological lens, you are more likely to turn complex situations into a mess. Considering that Lenz and her husband had worked out a division of household labor before she imagined that she could become a great writer, she ought to have found a way to persuade him to change some of his habits, without berating him for being a male chauvinist pig.

Apparently, it all involves the division of household labor. When Lenz decided to abandon many of her household duties and to complain about the rest, she was violating an organizational principle that she and her husband had been observing. 

In this case, dare we say, her expectations came true. It leads one to imagine that perhaps her bad attitude and unilateral withdrawal contributed to the chaos.

And we must notice that this unhappy couple was doing therapy. I do not wish to keep beating on a dead horse, but couples counseling has notoriously been shown to be ineffective. Such was the case for Lenz and her husband.

Lenz has managed to take the most self-serving position. Divorce is good, especially for women. It allows them to become good feminists. 

So, thanks to Lenz’s ambition, her marriage collapsed. She does not explain why she now has more time to write while doing all the housework and childrearing herself. She does not tell us the impact her divorce had on her children.

And she does not mention that the institution of marriage is a universal constant in human relations. It organizes society and produces the best conditions for bringing up children. Reducing it to a conspiracy designed to prevent women from becoming great writers is simple minded, at the least. 

A recent study put the kibosh on the notion that being liberated from the marital bond produces better emotional health. In the case of divorce later in life, it does just the opposite.

This, from Psypost:

A new study analyzing panel data collected over two decades has revealed that individuals who divorce after the age of 50 tend to exhibit more severe symptoms of depression. This condition worsens if the individual loses contact with at least one adult child following the divorce. However, depressive symptoms showed a brief improvement after the individual found a new partner. The research was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Obviously, this concerns late-life divorce. One quotes it to provide a useful counterpoint to Lenz’s cheerleading for divorce. In most cases divorce hurts people. It hurts men, women and children. See Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin for the data.

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