The recession and economic turmoil is creating a new class of casualties: Married couples who can’t afford to get divorced. In these tough times many people are finding it’s cheaper to stay together, even when they can’t stand each other.
“The reason that the economy has such an enormous impact on divorce is that most people in the middle-income brackets are getting by on whatever income they have. They’re just getting by,” said Bonnie Booden, a family law and divorce attorney in Phoenix.
A major factor in the divorce downturn, Booden said, is divorced couples have to establish two separate households with current funds — a prohibitive factor when you’re looking at divorce in tough economic times.
I am seeing this with a number of acquaintances and it is not pretty. Their marriages are a legal fiction–they no longer like or respect each other–and in order to keep functioning they self-medicate with food, alcohol, prescription meds, or some combination thereof.
I’m sorry to hear that the poor finances don’t mend fences. You would think that the couples might make an extra effort to get along with each other, since they have to live together.
Helen (#2), in my own case, we found the atmosphere of “have to” was very unconducive to growth. We struggled for many years in that environment, pushing the problems back because they could not be allowed to surface. The relationship “had to” continue.
It was only after a lengthy separation, followed by divorce, that God could begin to heal either and both of us. Later, when we could meet again with no compulsion to protect the relationship -either one free to walk away at any point, you can’t loose what you don’t have, -God could bring a new healing openness to us, and begin to heal a relationship only after it had been given up for dead. We thought much of a sermon preached by my former pastor on Ezekiel’s dry bones, and especially [url=http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jer 33:2-11;&version=47;]Jeremiah 33:2-11[/url] used at our wedding.
In that experience I came to see much of the Bible in a parallel track, Courtship and betrothal; betrayal, pain and broken relationship through the OT, followed my renewal in the NT, culminating with the marriage of the Lamb in the Rev.21:2ff, with the refrain from the whole of Scripture, that “they will be his people, and He will be their God” finally fulfilled at the last. As powerful as the Father/child metaphor is throughout the Bible, I believe the Groom/bride aspect is even more central.
Sorry to spout off so long off topic, but this is a subject very dear to my heart. I keep meaning to write a full treatment, if I ever feel I can do it any justice.
[url=http://www.rericsawyer.wordpress.com]R. Eric Sawyer[/url]
BTW, we have just celebrated our 2nd 1st anniversary, and our 1st 28th.
My grandson explained to me that in Kansas the waiting period beteen filing for divorce and getting one is 6 months and that most people who have to go through that long a waiting time eventually solve their differences. So, he and his wife decided to spend their “divorce lawyer budget” on counciling. Worked out very well.
Perhaps couples can use this time to remember WHY they were married in the first place? And perhaps seek out counselling?
Most divorces seem to have only one reason behind them: selfishness. Of course there are exceptions where lives are at stake: spouse/child abuse, alcoholism, etc. But these are the exceptions.
Here, I’d like to post a quote Kendall+ posted earlier:
[blockquote]Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God’s holy ordinance, through which he wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of time. In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God causes to come and to pass away to his glory, and calls into his kingdom.
In your love, you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal—it is a status, an office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man.
As high as God is above man, so high are the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of marriage above the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.
–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “A Wedding Sermon from Prison”[/blockquote]
Peace in Him
Jim Elliott (married 24 years, 5 months)
Florida
Nearly twenty-five years ago my wife and I had the most colossal crisis in our marriage so that for a time divorce looked the only way out. Certainly, we found it difficult to live under the same roof for a while, and we even made initial inquiries about how to terminate what seemed to be our failing marriage, while at the same time undertaking a huge amount of counseling. Last summer we celebrated our 40th anniversary and have discovered that there is nothing more wonderful than being able to grow old together.
Given our experience, we have concluded that far too many people rush for the door rather than working issues through. True, there are some marriages that may never be healed and, perhaps, require decent Christian burial, but for many more anything that slows down the process to dissolution gives time for second, third, fourth thoughts, and a willingness to work at a relationship that hurts but is not necessarily dead. Perhaps for the folks who are the focus of this story the economic woes of our time will turn out to be a cloud with a silver lining