Divorce as completion, not failure
· 11 min read
Where the failure frame comes from
The failure frame is not natural or eternal. It comes from a specific historical moment when marriage shifted from being primarily an economic and reproductive institution to being primarily a personal-fulfillment institution. Coontz traces this shift to roughly the eighteenth century in the West, accelerating dramatically in the twentieth. When marriage was economic, it ended when one of you died, and the question of whether it had been fulfilling was beside the point. When marriage became fulfillment-based, fulfillment became the measure, and endings short of death became evidence of unmet expectations. The failure frame is the residue of this historical shift, treating the recent expectation as if it were a timeless standard.Length as a poor proxy for quality
The failure frame uses length as the operative measure. A long marriage is a successful marriage. This is obviously inadequate as soon as you state it plainly. A long marriage in which both partners are miserable, in which contempt and silence have replaced affection, is not a successful marriage. A shorter marriage in which two people grew significantly, raised functional children, and parted in mutual respect is not a failure. Length tells you about duration, not about quality. The failure frame's reliance on length is partly because length is easy to measure and quality is not. But ease of measurement is not a good reason to use a bad metric.What completion actually means
Completion is not a feeling. It is a structural property of the relationship. A relationship has completed when the coordination problems it was solving no longer need to be solved by this particular pairing. Sometimes the coordination problem is raising children. Sometimes it is mutual financial survival during a precarious decade. Sometimes it is mutual identity formation in young adulthood. When the underlying coordination problem dissolves, the structure that solved it can dissolve too without anyone having failed. Recognizing the underlying coordination problem requires honest examination of what the relationship was actually for, not what you were told it was for.The myth of the soulmate
The failure frame is reinforced by the soulmate ideology, which holds that there is one correct person for each of us, and that finding them produces a lifelong partnership by definition. If your marriage ends, you must not have found your soulmate, which means either you settled or you missed them. This ideology has no empirical support. It is a Romantic-era invention, popularized in the nineteenth century and intensified by twentieth-century cinema. The available evidence suggests that compatible partners are common, that most people could be happy with many different people, and that the work of staying happy in a long partnership is more about the work than about the cosmic correctness of the match.Children and the completion question
The hardest case for the completion frame is when there are children, because the children did not consent to the relationship ending. Mavis Hetherington's longitudinal work on divorced families is useful here. Her finding, often misquoted in both directions, is that most children of divorce are functionally fine within a few years, but that this depends heavily on how the parents handle the divorce. The completion frame does not absolve parents of the obligation to handle the ending well. It just changes the moral weight from the existence of the ending to the conduct around it. A divorce conducted well is not a failure for the children. A marriage maintained badly is not a success.The economic asymmetry
One reason the failure frame persists is that divorce is genuinely worse, materially, for one party more than the other, usually the woman, especially if she has reduced her earning capacity to raise children. The failure frame attaches to whoever feels the material loss. This is not an argument against the completion frame. It is an argument for taking the economic settlement seriously as part of what completion looks like. A relationship has not actually completed if one partner walks away whole and the other walks away broken. Sharon Sassler's work on cohabitation and economic outcomes is relevant. Completion has economic dimensions, not just emotional ones.Religious and cultural inheritances
The failure frame is reinforced by religious traditions in which marriage is sacramental and divorce is sin, or culturally in which divorce produces social stigma. For people raised in these traditions, the completion frame can feel like betrayal of the inheritance. The work is not to deny the inheritance but to examine whether its specific teachings on divorce are load-bearing in the tradition or accidental to it. Many religious traditions have, on closer examination, more flexible accounts of marriage's end than the popular versions suggest. The inheritance is worth interrogating rather than either submitting to or discarding wholesale.The friend test
A useful test for the failure frame is to apply it to a friend's divorce rather than your own. When a close friend ends a marriage that was clearly not working, you do not generally think of them as a failure. You think they did something difficult and probably correct. The frame you apply to others is rarely the frame you apply to yourself. Noticing this asymmetry is data about how arbitrary the failure frame is. If you would not call your friend's divorce a failure, you might consider not calling your own one either. The frame is not tracking anything real about your particular situation. It is just the default.When it really is failure
The completion frame can be misused, and it is worth naming when. A marriage that ended because one partner committed sustained cruelty, or refused to do the basic work of partnership, or violated foundational agreements through deception, is more accurately described as a relationship that failed because of someone's behavior. Not all endings are completions. Some are collapses. The honest version of the reframe is willing to distinguish between the two. Calling a collapse a completion is a way of letting yourself or your partner off a hook you should not be let off. The completion frame is for endings that were on time, not for endings that should not have been necessary.The reframe as revision, not denial
Law 5 is revision, not erasure. The completion frame does not say the marriage was always going to end on this date, or that the ending was painless, or that you should not grieve. It says: now that the ending has happened, what is the most accurate story about what the relationship was? Often the most accurate story is not the failure story. The most accurate story is more complicated, with real accomplishments and real damage and a real arc that ended when it ended. Telling the more complicated story is the revision. The grief continues. The story changes.What you owe the person who left, or who you left
If you left, the completion frame can be a way of avoiding the specific obligations you have to the person you left. You still owe them honesty about why, you still owe them the practical work of disentangling, you still owe them not telling a version of the story that makes them the villain. The completion frame does not erase these obligations. If you were left, the completion frame can be a way of finding ground that does not depend on hating them. You can acknowledge what was real, what was good, what was completed, while also acknowledging the damage their leaving caused. Both partners can use the frame, but neither can use it to escape the work.The longer story
Most people who divorce eventually look back, twenty years later, and tell a story about the marriage that is neither the failure story they told the year after it ended nor the bitter story they told the year during it. The longer story has more texture, more credit given to what was good, more accuracy about what went wrong, more recognition that they were both younger and doing their best with what they had. The completion frame is an attempt to access that longer story earlier, while it can still affect how you live now rather than just how you remember later. It is the long view, applied early, used as a tool.Citations
1. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 2. Cherlin, Andrew J. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. 3. Ahrons, Constance R. The Good Divorce: Keeping Your Family Together When Your Marriage Comes Apart. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. 4. Hetherington, E. Mavis, and John Kelly. For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. 5. Thomas, Katherine Woodward. Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After. New York: Harmony Books, 2015. 6. Fisher, Bruce, and Robert Alberti. Rebuilding: When Your Relationship Ends. 4th ed. Atascadero, CA: Impact Publishers, 2016. 7. Emery, Robert E. Marriage, Divorce, and Children's Adjustment. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999. 8. Kelly, Joan B. "Children's Living Arrangements Following Separation and Divorce: Insights from Empirical and Clinical Research." Family Process 46, no. 1 (March 2007): 35-52. 9. Anderson, Susan. The Journey from Abandonment to Healing. New York: Berkley Books, 2000. 10. Sassler, Sharon, and Amanda Miller. Cohabitation Nation: Gender, Class, and the Remaking of Relationships. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. 11. Kayser, Karen. When Love Dies: The Process of Marital Disaffection. New York: Guilford Press, 1993. 12. Marquardt, Elizabeth. Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. New York: Crown Publishers, 2005.
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