[sailaway21]

The reason I think that we ought to re-examine the no fault divorce laws is not to compel abusive relationships to continue, but to return a degree of seriuosness to the subject. And that get's me around to tdw's angle on things. How can we make it harder to get married? I think you do that by making it harder to get out of, giving pause before jumping in.

My personal feelings, and I do not hold them up as suitable for public policy, are that I do not much care what a couple does as long as there are no children. The dirty little secret in America is that a great number, if not most, children are being irrepairably harmed by divorce and it's consequences. Many second marriages are worse than the first-little wonder that children, especially boys (tomorrows fathers), are lonely and lost. They feel abandoned. And abandoned they are, when the law grants a divorce and then allows the custodial parent to move a half a continent away. I strongly suspect that those boys are having the sins of their father's revisited upon them in their own adulthood. I hear too much, at least too much for one from a divorced house-hold, of. "children are resilient, they adapt." Last I heard, children aren't supposed to have to be resilient or adapt-that's what parents are for.

I don't want to get into "war stories", and everyone has been good at avoiding that so far-thanks, but the best divorce decree I ever heard of was by a judge in Detroit, over twenty years ago. It went something like this: The husband and wife both wanted a divorce and neither would abandon the home, on advise of attorneys. Upstairs Dad/downstairs Mom. Two sons aged 14 and 16. The judge held that his duty was to protect the children, and since the parents were in such obvious disagreement on resolving the issues of custody and property, he held that the house was to be allocated to the children. The husband would be entitled to live their for six months, after which he would vacate for the wife's six months, until such time as they were able to reach an agreement on joint custody which better suited the children's needs, and met with his approval. A Solomonic decision in my opinion.