Andrea Mrozek is a Senior Fellow at Cardus Family.“I wanted to tell you,” my friend said, “because you are the marriage and family lady.” These words preceded the news that she was separating from her husband.I can assure you I never planned for this, but I suppose I am “the marriage and family lady.” My book, co-authored with Peter Jon Mitchell, is called I…Do? Why Marriage Still Matters. This reflects my strongly held conviction that, well, how to put this succinctly, marriage still matters.You do not have to be the marriage and family lady to have the news of others’ divorces hit hard. There is the rare occasion where you can see the divorce coming from many miles away, and there is relief. But generally, we are all encountering the so-called “low conflict” divorce, which means the marital problems were imperceptible to those on the outside. (Please note this entire article is written with low-conflict marriages that were freely entered into in mind.)Divorce is the demise of a world. We know the individuals who got married, but also the partnership as a separate entity. In my life, perhaps also in yours, sometimes it’s the spouse that makes a person tolerable. Sometimes it’s the spouse who helps heal an argument. Sometimes the partnership helps bring something out of a person that wasn’t previously there. C.S. Lewis remarks upon this in the context of friends, when one dies. “Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald,” he wrote in The Four Loves. A divorce similarly often means either getting less of a person in your life, or getting the same amount of a completely different person.So as the marriage and family lady, I’ve struggled for a while with what it means to advance healthy marriages in a culture where divorce and/or separation announcements come fast and furious. Some might expect, being the marriage and family lady after all, that I have a clear answer or idea of what to say or do when someone tells me they are divorcing. I do not..Up front, it needs to be stated again that I am not the “stay married at all costs lady.” There is a place for divorce. Divorce, while painful, can be utterly necessary.At the same time, if marriage matters, and it does, for individuals and for communities, then divorce likewise matters, and by that I mean, attempts at avoiding it, where possible. Yet obviously, “where possible,” is very fuzzy and individual terrain. (It starts with avoiding entering into a poor choice for marriage, but this would be the subject of a different article. Make that a different book — there’s so much to be said.) The questions remain for me: What does it mean to nurture family stability in an era where divorce is still extremely prevalent and culturally permissible? How do we defend marital stability today, and not just in public policy discussions or academic papers? Is there anything we can say to a spouse who feels cheated out of his or her marriage? Is there a path forward in receiving the information of a pending divorce that is compassionate and appropriate and something better than “sorry to hear that”?The answer, I think, is to bring soup. And maybe, but not always, to ask some questions.Bringing soup is my stand-in for compassionate presence. Whoever has just told you they are separating/divorcing has been de facto having a rough time. When our most intimate, primary relationships don’t work, not much else in our lives does.The struggle for the marriage and family lady who is also an enneagram number one (I see a problem and I wish to fix it) is whether or not this is enough..In most ways, it is. We are living in a world of soulmate marriage. Baked into this variant of marriage is the very idea that divorce is an acceptable outcome. Better put, where we adopt a soulmate model of marriage, we think it is important to get out of a marriage for whatever reasons, if one or the other party believes that they must.Ultimately, then, reframing, re-approaching marriage in a bigger picture way is something that is important. Writing articles and books about marriage is not irrelevant. The epic adventure of our lives has ups and downs, in relationships too.Yet there is a silly, sinful temptation, a hubris to think I can or must fix others’ relationships. I cannot. There can be no good that comes of playing superhero without all the facts. And a person who is not in the marriage never has all the facts.Unfortunately, the cold, hard truth is that neither do the people in the marriage. This is where there may be a place to ask some questions compassionately. Asking does not mean answering them. These are questions only for the separating/divorcing person to address in the quiet of their own heart. However, because pain, emotional or physical, can cause myopia, it is not unkind to open up a world that person may not be seeing in that moment. Put differently, even the desperate person who sees separating or divorcing as a solution needs to be sure years from now that they made the right choice. (If they have a choice, that is. In an era of no-fault divorce, read unilateral divorce, there is often no aspect of choice involved.)I recently received an announcement of separation that was accompanied also, a bit later, by the words: “I’m telling people to figure out if I’m doing the right thing.” That is essentially an invitation to offer more than soup. .In this case, I asked if she’d be willing to read an article. I chose Harry Benson’s story. In it, he chronicles how he thought he was a good husband, but actually wasn’t. His wife gave him an ultimatum to change, or she’d leave in a certain amount of time. She had to guide her husband toward being the husband she needed. He didn’t get there on his own. He got there with her help.His story is proof that some divorce-bound marriages can be saved. We do have that evidence all around us. There are retreat centres dedicated to this.So some marriages, however few, both can and should be saved. Some people in our culture simply need to be encouraged to fight for their marriage. The book How to Stay Married is emphatic on this point. Recently, Larissa Phillips, in conversation with Tara Henley, spoke of her own marriage and remarked that when she and her husband hit a time of protracted difficulty, she knew the one thing she could give her kids was the marriage. That both of them together was in itself a gift. I am marvelling at this — how is it that a progressive, non-religious woman arrived at this idea of the marriage as the ultimate good thing? But she did, and in her story, she was right.We should not be apathetic about the circumstances of those around us. And this is why I believe it is important, in certain circumstances, to ask questions and be interested in someone’s divorce announcement beyond simply saying “I’m sorry.” But if there is no soup, or tea, or whatever your stand-in for care is, then all the questions in the world are just painful and irrelevant. A person announcing separation or divorce already feels alone and needs to know he or she is not, come what may.Andrea Mrozek is a Senior Fellow at Cardus Family.
