Chris Okafor


FAILED MARRIAGES: ONE DIVORCE, TOO MANY. BY CHRIS OKAFOR

Marriage is an act of joining a man and a woman together in a holy matrimony as husband and a wife. It often calls for fun fares, weddings, celebrations and conviviality.

People spend a lot of money in planning for these big occasions and sometimes end it up cruising around the world on honeymoon. The couples had, without doubt, in church and in present of a Reverend Father, vowed to be faithful and to love one another until death do them apart. To most people who had partaken in this vow, it must be upheld with respect and dignity at all times. They sees marriage as a sacrament while to many, there is absolutely nothing wrong with saying “I do” today and within the next 4 months, it is all over.

This school of thoughts viewed the entire institution of marriage as “free-entry-free exit” kind of a contact. It doesn’t matter if their well publicised and celebrated marriage would come to a halt within months of its inception.

On the other hand, divorce or dissolution of marriage is the ending of marriage or marital vow before the death of either spouse. It can be contrasted with annulment, which is a declaration that marriage is void, though the effect maybe recognised in such unions such as spousal supports, child custody and distribution of property.

The problem of failed marriages and divorce around the world particularly Europe and America is so enormous and inexplicable especially when there is no basis to determine necessary or sufficient causation. It is, indeed, a social problem with a hereditary attachment of which many are completely ignorant of and never believe in existence of the following concept which I am going to outline here. When one decides to put an end to his/her marriage on a mere provocation and on issues that ought to be resolved amicably, you have no moral justification to tell your children in future that there is anything wrong with divorce or having children with different parents.

In Nigeria, for instance, there are some ethnic groups that advise their male children never to marry from a single parent or a broken home. The ironic reasons are palpable. They believed that marriage is all about tolerance and the woman being submissive to their chosen husband at all time and therefore no amount of disagreement between couples that would warrant a woman to abscond from home. In most cases, men reserve the exclusive right to send their wives out of their matrimonial home on the ground of infidelity and promiscuity.

Women are normally the victim and in contrast, because of male dominance, cultural and religious affiliations, it is customary for people in most African countries to come back home from their respective daily activities and announce to their wives that they are marrying the second or the third wife as the case may be without questioning. They have the sole right as well to have as many girlfriend(s) as it pleases them or go out and come back at will.

In fact, it is not only a taboo but it is also an abomination for average African woman to go out like their European or American counterparts, get drunk and have a one night stand that often lead to pregnancies. Such women would possibly be disgraced before their children and sent packing from home without compassion of any kind.

This is liken to ” if you cannot stand the heat get out of the kitchen” kind of marriage which have been viewed in some quarters as some kind of slavery. The truth of the matter is that some of these women knew what it meant to them for their children to be jointly raised and as such, they choose to stand the heat rather than getting out of the kitchen. The respect to their chosen husbands, no matter what he does or did is total and it is fundamentally important that they do not bring shame to their respective family no matter how wretched, poor or rich that family may be.

Recent research has shown that the evolution of marriage has taken place despite an increased life expectancy that has theoretically made a longer and healthier life together as a couple possible. Although in the past, the death of one of the two spouses was the typical end of marriage, divorce is now the most frequently observed cause.

In Switzerland, for example, the number of newly divorced residents actually exceeded the number of newly widowed residents in 1988 (OFS, 1990).

This is a relatively recent phenomenon, having existing for less than half a century and even less in some countries where it was forbidden or severely restricted until very recently (The mid 1970s in Portugal and Italy, 1981 in Spain, and not until 1997 in Ireland). Divorce is not only a legal instrument freeing a couple from wedlock, but an act that is at the heart of familial and social processes.

To understand the rise in the number of divorces in various countries, one must first understand the reasons causing couples to marry. France, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland are representative of the diversity of marital and familial situations existing in Europe.

What we see sometimes in American reality television is an eye saw. An unacceptable situation where one is married and within 3 months, the man is sleeping with his wife mother. There is no basis of comparison between African marriages and other people around the world because what they see as a way of life is completely forbidden in Africa. Again, most people see this as being totally primitive.

It is difficult for average women in Europe generally to stick to their marriage when they eventually realized that their husbands are cheating on them. That would invariably be the last straw and would be used as an affront to divorce in which they would be beneficiary to their husband’s stupendous wealth and without recourse to how such separation would affect their children.

The ratio is 1 out of every hundred and we have seen this ratio at work sometime ago when a footballer wife defiantly resisted their former assistant shameless confession in order to thwart her marriage. She chooses to stand firmly by her husband throughout the trying period. In United States, during Bill Clinton era, a similar newspaper unconfirmed report between Bill and a Monica Lewinski almost ruin the marriage between the then president and his wife. Again, the latter choose to remain with the husband rather than divorce.

This is just one in a million and like a reoccurring decimal, one hardly turns the pages of newspapers these days without reading about ones divorce or the other. There are countless number of lawyers placing adverts on newspapers and magazines for cheap divorce rates.

Today, one of the primary reasons why most celebrities cannot marry is that they are not ready to let what they have laboured all their entire life to be given to a nitwit in the name of divorce settlement .It is quite obvious that people go into marriage for number of reasons while some people, most especially women, go into marriage for the financial gains not really because they needed a family.

According to Jenny Burley and Francis Regan, the Irish story of family law reform in the post-second world war era is quite different from the experience of other countries. One of the main reasons why the story is different is that from 1937 divorce was banned under the Irish constitution. Divorce law reform therefore required a referendum to change the constitution. Even though there were thousand of separated people in Ireland in early 1980s, the proposal to introduce divorce was vociferously opposed in referenda in 1986 and 1995.

The opposition to constitutional change was fuelled by anti-divorce campaigns which used fear tactics, related to money, children, property and inheritance to argue that divorce would tear apart the very fabric of Irish society. The campaign also claimed that divorce would open floodgates to marriage breakdown. The availability of this divorce in Ireland since 1997 has not, however, borne out of dire predictions of the anti-divorce campaigners.

Successful and failed marriages have its origin and background from family circles and some people has argued that it would take a divine intervention for the products of broken homes to triumph where their parents have failed. This is simple. Children learn a great deal from the good and the bad we do at home.

What are responsible for most ignominious exit in most marriages particularly from most women are sheer greed, drink and drugs, insatiable lust and lack of tolerance, which unavoidably, is contributing immensely to the drastic decadence in family and societal values.

The devastating effects of divorce on children and families are enormous. Research made by Dr.Todd.E Linaman on families noted the following:

Future effects of divorce

• Children deal with the effects of divorce not only as children, but into adulthood. The effects of divorce will impact the next generation of children as well.

• The child’s suffering from the effects of divorce does not reach its peak at the time of the divorce and then level off. Rather, the emotional effects of divorce can be played and replayed throughout a child’s life.

Academic effects of divorce

• Children from divorced families drop out of school at twice the rate of children from intact families, and they have lower rates of graduation from high school and college.

• Children from divorced homes performed more poorly in reading, spelling, and math and repeated a grade more frequently than did children not facing the effects of divorce.

Social effects of divorce

• Children of divorced parents are significantly more likely to become delinquent by age 15, regardless of when the divorce took place, than are children not dealing with the effects of divorce.

• The single best predictor of teen suicide is parental divorce and living in a single-parent household.

• Comparing all family structures, drug use in children is lowest among children not facing the effects of divorce.

Emotional effects of divorce

• Divorce has been found to be associated with a higher incidence of depression; withdrawal from friends and family; aggressive, impulsive, or hyperactive behavior; and either withdrawing from participation in the classroom or becoming disruptive.

• Adult children of divorced parents experience mental health problems significantly more often than do the adult children who didn’t witness the effects of divorce as children.

Relational effects of divorce

• After divorce, children tend to become more emotionally distant from both parents.

• As adults, children of divorced parents are half as likely to be close to their parents as are children not dealing with the effects of divorce.

• In their own marriages, children of divorced parents are more likely to be unhappy, to escalate conflicts, and to reduce communication with their spouses.

• Some studies concerning the probability of divorce for children of divorced parents have found the risk to be more than twice the risk for children who haven’t personally experienced the effects of divorce.

This is just one of the numerous factors affecting divorce on families and the list is endless. One thing about people that I have met in my life is that they do not realize the impact of the mistake they must have made in terms of making a decision that would ultimately shape their life until such mistake begin to hit them. It is, however important amidst these factors that we should think very carefully before considering divorce.

Chris Okafor

Galway Ireland: chrisokafor@myself.com

Kalman Heller


This past year my wife and I celebrated our 25th anniversary. It is the second marriage for both of us and the relationship has only grown stronger over the years, teaching me more about love and trust and dependence then I ever imagined. Reaching this special “silver moment” spurred me to look around and think about the number of friends we have who also have great second marriages and led me to question the alleged statistic that 60+% of second marriages end in divorce. I also thought about how many friends we have who are still in their original marriages and appear to be very happy. Thus, I decided it was time to do some research on divorce rates.

In the process of preparing for this article, I learned what I had long suspected. The commonly quoted numbers are overstated myths, the more accurate numbers reflect complex factors, and that our society really has two very separate divorce rates, a lower rate (by half) for college-educated women who marry after the age of 25 and a much higher rate for poor, primarily minority women who marry before the age of 25 and do not have a college degree (most of the research focused on women; the little I read about men suggested similar outcomes).

The Statistics:

A false conclusion in the 1970s that half of all first marriages ended in divorce was based on the simple but completely wrong analysis of the marriage and divorce rates per 1000 people in the U.S. A similar abuse of statistical analysis led to the conclusion that 60% of all second marriages ended in divorce. These errors have had a profound impact on attitudes about marriage in our society and it is a terrible injustice that there wasn’t more of an effort to get accurate data (essentially only obtainable by following a significant number of couples over time and measure the outcomes) or that newer, more accurate and optimistic data isn’t being heavily reported in the media.

It is now clear that the divorce rate in first marriages probably peaked at about 40% for first marriages around 1980 and has been declining since to about 30% in the early 2000s. This is a dramatic difference. Rather than view marriage as a 50-50 shot in the dark it can be viewed as a having 70% likelihood of succeeding. But even to use that kind of generalization, i.e., one simple statistic for all marriages, grossly distorts what is actually going on.

The key is that the research shows that starting in the 1980s education, specifically a college degree for women, began to create a substantial divergence in marital outcomes, with the divorce rate for college-educated women dropping to about 20%, half the rate for non-college-educated women. Even this is more complex, since the non-college educated women marry younger and are poorer than their college grad peers. These two factors, age at marriage and income level, have strong relationships to divorce rates; the older the partners and the higher the income, the more likely the couple stays married. Obviously, getting a college degree is reflected in both these factors.

Thus, we reach an even more dramatic conclusion: That for college educated women who marry after the age of 25 and have established an independent source of income, the divorce rate is only 20%!

Of course, this has its flip side, that the women who marry younger and divorce more frequently are predominately Black and Hispanic women from poorer environments. The highest divorce rate, exceeding 50%, is for Black women in high poverty areas. These women clearly face extraordinary challenges and society would do well to find ways to reduce not just teen pregnancies but early marriages among the poor and develop programs that train and educate the poor, which will not only delay marriage but provide the educational and financial foundation that is required to increase the probability of a marriage being successful. Early marriage, early pregnancy, early divorce is a cycle of broken families that contributes significantly to maintaining poverty. The cost to our society is enormous.

Here is some additional data about divorce in first marriages before moving on to the limited data available about second marriages. Divorce rates are cumulative statistics, i.e., they don’t occur at a single moment in time but add up over the years of marriage and do so at different rates. After reviewing numerous sources, it appears that about 10% of all marriages end in divorce during the first five years and another 10% by the tenth year. Thus, half of all divorces are within the first ten years. (Keep in mind this is mixing the disparate college-non-college group rates.) The 30% divorce rate is not reached until the 18th year of marriage and the 40% rate is not reached until the 50th year of marriage! Thus, not only is the rate of divorce much lower than previously thought but at least half of all divorces occur within the first ten years and then the rate of divorce slows dramatically. Since the divorce rate for women married by 18 is 48% in the first ten years and that group, once again, is primarily poor, minority women, the rate for educated couples is much less during those first ten years.

No wonder the divorce rate in Massachusetts is the lowest in the country. We have the highest percentage of college graduates. That explains why I have so many first marriage friends!

Finding meaningful data about the divorce rates for second marriages was difficult. But knowing that the rate for first marriages has been grossly overstated and poorly understood for decades suggested a likely similar outcome for the data on second marriages. One report indicated that the divorce rate for remarried, white women is 15% after three years and 25% after five years. This ongoing study indicated a definite slowing of the rate over time but did not have enough years measured to draw more long-term conclusions. However, it did indicate that the same factors with first divorces were at play here. Age, education, and income levels were also highly correlated with the outcomes of second marriages. For example, women who remarried before the age of 25 had a very high divorce rate of 47%, while women who remarried over the age of 25 only had a divorce rate of 34%. The latter is actually about the same for first marriages and likely also would prove to be an average of different rates based socioeconomic factors. Thus, my take on this limited amount of data is that divorce rates for second marriages may not be very different than those for first marriages. So my small sample of friends, who remarried older, had college degrees, and joint incomes, is probably not a distorted view of the success rate of second marriages.

Cohabitation:

In the course of gathering information about divorce rates, I came across a few articles describing the growing frequency of couples choosing cohabitation over marriage. I don’t have any figures that I consider accurate enough to report on the percentage of cohabitating couples but a July 24, 2007 Boston Globe article on cohabitating parents sheds some light and raises some serious concerns about this trend.

I must admit a bias here. From my professional experience, I believe cohabitating couples are afraid of the commitment that marriage requires. Certainly a piece of this is what I stated at the beginning of this article, that the myth of the divorce rate has placed a dark cloud over the institution of marriage. The reason for my concern is the following data reported in the Globe article. There is a marked increase in births to cohabitating couples, up from 29% in the early 1980s to 53% in the late 1990s. When you compare what has happened to those relationships when the child is two years old, 30% of the cohabitating couples are no longer together while only 6% of the married couples are divorced. This is another serious societal problem as it contributes to the U.S. having the lowest rate of all Western countries, 63%, of children being raised by both biological parents.

In addition, the general data suggests that cohabitating couples break up at twice the rate of married couples. Of course, this kind of simple statistic hides many complex factors with regard to who actually constitutes the population of cohabitating couples and the likelihood that many choose to live together with no real intention of permanence. However, my main point here is the concern that many couples may be choosing cohabitation over marriage because they actually believe that the institution of marriage is unhealthy and too risky, a conclusion that my review of divorce rates strongly disputes.

Conclusion:

The historical belief that 50% of all marriages end in divorce and that over 60% of all second marriages end in divorce appears to be grossly overstated myths. Not only is the general divorce rate most likely to have never exceeded 40% but the current rate is probably closer to 30%. A closer look at even these lower rates indicate that there are really two separate groups with very different rates: a woman who is over 25, has a college degree, and an independent income have only a 20% probability of her marriage ending in divorce; a woman who marries younger than 25, without a college degree and lacking an independent income has a 40% probability of her marriage ending in divorce.

Thus, factors of age, education, and income appear to play a significant role in influencing the outcome of marriages and that for the older, more educated woman, getting married is not a crap shoot but, in fact, it is highly likely to produce a stable, lifelong relationship.

IC


What is the definition of child custody in this state? Who is entitled to that custody? Which state has jurisdiction and can children be moved out of that state? What can the party do if a spouse or ex. is in danger of removing the child from the court ordered environment.

Custody, in Florida means being responsible for the needs of a person under the age of 18; this can be further defined by the physical care and supervision of the child. The custodian has a court order for the right of physical custody along with the duty to rear, keep safe and discipline their charge. Medical, food, shelter, education and other material needs are to be provided.

Both parents are entitled to custody. There is joint custody; so ordered by a court. The public policy assures frequent and continuing contact with both parents. If there are extenuating conditions then a child can be put into home with an extended family member by a petition; temporarily. If there is “probable cause” such as abuse, neglect, or abandonment then that child can be “taken into custody” by a police officer or an authorized person and placed with a non relative.

In joint custody the court will order both parents to share responsibility, they will both retain their parental rights, and jointly make decisions in the interest of their child. If the child is able and has the intellect, the court may consider their participation in the decision. The court can consider both the parents’ desires, or may give one parent the ultimate responsibility for certain aspects of a child’s interests or share the responsibilities.

You will need to provide as much information as possible to the court for evaluation in the welfare and interests of the child. This should include information about you and the other party’s behavior and finances. A lawyer is recommended but not required. They are helpful in gathering, presenting, and convincing the judge.

Florida has the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act. The custody order will be issued in the state that can determine in the best interests of the child. Usually you file in the “home state” where the child has lived with a parent or person for (6) months immediately before the child custody proceeding started. There are exceptions to the “home state” rule such as: when there is “competent substantial evidence” of a risk that a party could violate a court order by removing a child from the state or country without the notarized written permission of both parents. However, providing this information may be difficult. There may be more and complicated steps where an attorney may be needed.

In summary, in Florida, child custody is being responsible for the best interests of a child to include shelter, food, education and other needs for the minor less than 18 years of age. Both parents are entitled to joint or shared custody so ordered by a court. The custody order will be issued in the state that can determine in the best interests of the child; usually the “home state” where the child has lived for (6) months immediately before the child custody proceeding started. When there is “competent substantial evidence” of a risk that a party could violate the court order by removing the child from the state or country a notarized written permission signed by both parents can be submitted.