What's the optimal rate of divorce?
I don't know, but definitely not 0%
People sometimes talk as if the optimal divorce rate is zero, but I think it’s actually quite difficult to determine what the “right” level of divorce would be. Saying there are “too many divorces” implies some combination of the following claims:
We need to encourage people to stay together through greater hardship and not to give up on marriage too easily.
We should provide people with more training, tools and support around how to be a good spouse and how to work through difficulties.
We should try to improve the matching and filtering process such that more people who would end up divorced avoid marrying in the first place.
The intention when people get married is to stay together for life and divorce implies that they failed to succeed at that. But not achieving the initial goal of a project doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't worth embarking on, even if the best thing you can do now is to end it. And a 0% divorce rate would be a sign that people are being far too cautious about getting married.
When someone decides to start a business they might hope to run it successfully for the rest of their working life, but if five years in they’re missing projections and running out of funding folding might be the best option available. If we had a 0% (or near 0%) rate of business failure we’d know something was wrong, because that would imply that many, many people who could’ve had a successful business never started it. And similarly with marriage, a 0% divorce rate would imply that the average confidence level couples needed before they took the risk of getting married was unreasonably high and that many missed out on entering good marriages as a result. Even so, it could be true that in many cases people give up too easily (although I think this is uncommon), don’t have enough support or should never have gotten married, but the divorce rate on its own doesn’t tell us if we have appropriate marriage norms.
Unless you place some religious or spiritual value on marriage itself, an argument for more marriage and less divorce is really just an argument for more and better relationships and families. So rather than asking “how can we decrease the divorce rate?” we should be asking “how can we get more relational satisfaction and more healthy family structures across our society?” Increasing the percentage of people in satisfying relationships at any given time seems like a better target outcome than lowering the divorce rate. Why should it matter whether they’re satisfied in their second marriage or their first? Concern around children growing up in single parent households seems reasonable, and I think couples should (and generally do) have a higher bar for breaking up while they have young kids, but divorce among childless couples seems fine to me. And when childless couples divorce, even the claim that “they should never have gotten married” isn’t obvious.
An important function of marriage is to make financial goal sharing less risky by guaranteeing that assets will be split equally in the event of a breakup (assuming a standard marriage contract). Secular marriage can therefore be a good thing even when it ends in divorce in that it provides a framework within which both parties know they have legal rights to 50% of assets gained during the marriage. I focus on the financial aspect because I feel that the unromantic part of marriage, the financial joining of interests, is incredibly important for a functional partnership. Even when couples end up divorcing I think this legal structure fulfills an important role in that it makes it more possible to at least attempt to fully invest in the partnership. The sorts of couples that keep their finances fully separate, in my opinion, misunderstand even the much weaker and less sacred secular version of marriage. They can certainly keep things separate if they want, but I do feel that they’re missing the point.
I find that defenders of divorce often point to the most extreme negative outcomes that can result when people are forced to stay married, but divorce can be a good thing even in cases where the relationship seems “fine” to outsiders. A marriage doesn’t have to be abusive or even really dysfunctional for a divorce to be the right choice. From my perspective, as a libertarian and utilitarian leaning atheist, divorce is a good thing whenever being divorced would be better for both parties than being married (again, in light of concern for the impact on kids when relevant). And I think this is true almost all of the times that people get divorced even when the decision is made by one party.
Divorce is hard. There’s a massive amount of status quo bias as well as fear of social embarrassment that stacks the deck in favor of staying. So, as I argued in another post, outsiders should generally assume that a couple that wants to get divorced should. And, because I think the standard marriage contract is a pretty good one, I think many relationships that end in divorce wouldn’t have been improved by the couple never marrying. This isn’t to say that I don’t think we could improve norms in a way which would lead to happier, longer and more fulfilling relationships, just that I don’t think the divorce rate is a particularly good way to judge our success.
Feel like you've identified Goodhart's law in a domain it's usually not talked about. If a policymaker just thought lowering divorce rates is what they ought to do, they could do this in a couple of ways:
1. Make it harder for people to get divorced. If the barrier is already high then doing so would either have no impact or keep people in awful marriages. If the barrier to divorce were low, this might actually work but we know that's generally speaking, untrue.
2. Improve the mapping process - This would actually make sure people enter into higher quality marriages on average.
Notice 1 is infinitely easier and more conducive to central planning than 2. If i'm policymaker, i'm so much more likely to add a bureacuucratic burden to the divorce process than try to build and open source an AI driven dating platform.
I think we can safely say that it's more likely than not that social engineering here will produce worse outcomes in expectation.
I agree that whether a couple wants a divorce is probably a pretty good indicator that they should get a divorce (under a utilitarian criterion) - but I'm less convinced of how perfect an indicator it will be.
Whilst status quo bias keeps people in marriages, grass is greener sentiments can conceivably have people jumping ship prematurely. And there is reason that people may have a grass is greener attitude, i.e., be overly optimistic of the situation outside of marriage - namely that the last time people were in the dating pool, they were younger.
Further, liberal cultural attitudes to divorce are likely to give people excessively optimistic ideas of their prospects out of their marriage.
Lastly, although people greatly care for their children, they tend not to be perfect altruists to them - so there is still a problem of externalities here. Some divorces will be for the best for the children - which conservatives often forget. And it probably isn't just abusive relationships where divorce is better for the children - I can't imagine growing up in a non-abusive but incredibly acrimonous home is in the welfare-interests of many people. At the same time, I think we can agree that there will be many divorces, instigated more by a vague discontentment, that will be very costly to the children and/or one of the partners.
So, I think that it's reasonable to suggest that at present, with many leaving marriages because of an apparent lack of spark and in the absence of particularly strong problems, the divorce rate is above optimum for the utilitarian.
At the same time, if we did take the pivot of conservative feminists - increasing negative social attitudes to divorce and making it harder - then the grass is greener sentiment would be lower, and the lower divorce rate would probably be below the utilitarian's optimum, e.g., with many staying in acrimonious marriages under the misconception of it being for the best.
So, whilst I'm not convinced that the divorce rate at present is a good indicator of the optimum divorce rate, I wouldn't suppose that this means that the conservative takes are correct either here.
I wonder if a move in a better direction that would have wide appeal would be that people have to sit down and work out exactly what their expectations are. In the secular age, people often get into marriages with varying degrees of seriousness about the commitments they are making and varying beliefs about what the commitments look like in practice. We don't rely as much on common religious teachings to give us details of what it should look like. If irreligious and less devout people took the time to agree a more detailed picture, there would probably be a better idea of the agreement, and therefore - I posit - a lower chance of it being suboptimally terminated.