by smcin | 2025-04-30 21:19:40+00:00
There are lots of proven viable alternatives to quick no-fault divorce, the most obvious being waiting periods or separation periods ranging from months to years. [0]. Parental alienation can be gamed, and frequently is. Psychologist evals can be gamed or biased. Expert witness reports can be gamed. Move-away scenarios (by the custodial parent) can be gamed. Making false or perjurous allegations can be gamed, sometimes without consequence. Jurisdiction-shopping can be gamed. It seems pretty obvious that if there are huge incentives (or penalties) for certain modes of behavior, some types of people will exploit those. Community property/separate property can be gamed. The timing of all these things can be gamed wrt dicslosures, health events, insurance coverage/eligibility, job change/start/end, stock vesting, SS eligibity, tax filings etc. Divorce settlements can be gamed too by one party BK'ing out of a settlement/division of debts. At-fault divorce also exists (in many US states), and obviously can be gamed.

It's not a false dichotomy between either a jurisdiction must allow instant no-fault divorce for everyone who petitions for it, or none at all.

> Usually one or both parties know the consequences of the divorce and prefer them to the state of the marriage, because the damages are less than if divorce wasn't an option.

Sometimes both parties are reasonably rational and honest and non-adversarial, then again sometimes one or both aren't, and it only takes one party (or their relatives) to make things adversarial. If you as a member of the public want to see it in action, in general you can sit in and observe proceedings in your local courthouse in person, or view the docket of that day's cases, or view the local court calendar online. Often the judge and counsel strongly affect the outcome too, much more than the facts at issue.

> Claiming divorce is some kind of undesirable 'damaged' state is just as stigmatizing as claiming it is 'bad' or 'evil'.

It is not necessarily the end-state of being divorced that is objectively quantifiably the most damaging to both parties' finances, wellness, children, and society at large, it's the expensive non-transparent ordeal of family court itself that can cause damage, as much as (or sometimes more than) the end-state of ending up divorced. Or both. Or neither.

> The alternative to divorce is...

...a less broken set of divorce laws, for which there are multiple viable candidates. Or indeed, marriage(/cohabitation/relationships) continuing to fall out of favor. Other than measuring crude divorce rates and comparing their ratio to crude marriage rates (assuming same jurisdiction, correcting for offset by the (estimated) average length of marriage, and assuming zero internal migration), as marriage becomes less and less common, we're losing the ability to form a quantified picture of human behavior viz. when partnerships/relationships start or end; many countries' censuses no longer track this or being pressued to stop tracking it [1]; it could be inferred from e.g. bank, insurance, household bill arrangements, credit information, public records, but obviously privacy needs to be respected.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_law_by_country

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/05/11/census-bu...