Abstract
This paper asks three inter-related questions, proceeding chronologically through a divorcee’s experience: (i) is it responsible and rational to make an unconditional marital vow in the first place? (ii) does divorce break that unconditional marital vow? And the main question: (iii) can the divorcee make a second unconditional marital vow in all moral seriousness? To the last question I answer yes. I argue that the divorce process is so disorienting – to use Amy Harbin’s term – as to transform the divorcee and therefore partly release her from the original vow. Arguing this will require a specific understanding of personal identity and change.
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Notes
This article was inspired by the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams, who entitled her 2018 article ‘I do, again: there is nothing as deadly serious as a second marriage’.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/may/05/i-do-again-there-is-nothing-as-deadly-serious-as-a-second-marriage [accessed July 2019]
Perhaps the statement of good faith could be accompanied by something like the following text, for which I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer:
I commit to a life with you, through ups and downs and changes of all kinds, but I recognize that life is complicated and I can’t entirely control what we face together or how we grow in response to challenges. If it becomes clear that our relationship changes so much that there is little joy in our connection or if our personal journeys do not coincide, as much as we had hoped for and worked for otherwise, then our promise can be broken.
Archer and Lopez-Cantero (this volume) discuss the example of falling out of love as a disorienting experience, and obviously a lot of what they say will be relevant to my discussion. However, I incline toward Mendus in seeing deep qualitative differences between being in love and being married, and therefore between falling out of love and divorcing. As I will be discussing below, falling out of love can be explained ‘away’ as the unfortunate end of a discrete project; divorcing can amount to the death of part of one’s self.
In the next section I will discuss Brake’s distinction between a ‘promise’ and a ‘commitment’. Mendus seems to consider them more or less synonymous.
This situation is also discussed by Brake (2011) in Section 2 of her article. Brake is careful to note (p. 26) the difficulty in comparing marriage to a contract with implicit conditions.
In the same line of thinking, many would see pre-nuptial contracts as a supremely rational kind of insurance, especially for individuals with wealth pre-dating the marriage.
An anonymous reviewer raised an interesting scenario. I declared Tereza childless to keep things simple. What if Tereza enters the marriage with an existing unconditional commitment to another person, for example to a living child? However devoted she is to her fiancé, her wedding vow must surely carry an implicit condition that, if eventually forced to choose, she will choose the child. And he will probably understand that, even without her telling him. In my original version, the non-parent Tereza enters the marriage in a spirit of making it work, whatever the cost to herself; but that spirit would not work if the costs are borne by her child. And while the non-parent Tereza does not attend to the possibility of future failure while making her unconditional vow, the parent Tereza brings her child along to the wedding itself, and the child’s present and future welfare will be uppermost in Tereza’s mind.
In the same way one might see divorce as an event, one might have a purely passive conception of love. One day the love will dissolve, and that will be an event which we will just have to deal with by deciding on the course of action most likely to generate happiness in the future. However, Brake herself allows for a more sophisticated view of love which she calls “smart love” (p. 32). Love is actually “complex, trainable, shot through with reason and belief” (ibid.). Still, Brake suggests that it is still uncontrollable enough to disqualify one from whole-heartedly promising to love; whereas I would see it as controllable enough to promise.
In his famous discussion of moral luck, Bernard Williams (1981) uses the example of Anna Karenina (Tolstoy’s eponymous heroine), who abandons her husband for Vronsky. At the time of the abandonment, writes Williams, it was not clear whether she was objectively justified or not; once the affair fails, however, the abandonment is retroactively ‘unjustified’ (Williams’s word). I disagree with Williams here. That the original abandonment was unjustified is Anna’s conclusion, and we can certainly understand why she might conclude that. However, that does not mean that Williams has to accept her conclusion.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this objection.
This is to be distinguished from the straightforward case where the husband would have been actually killed in combat, and the wife would have thereby been fully released from her wedding vow. Although even here, we can imagine a woman who considers herself still married to her dead husband, and who refuses to engage in any new intimate relationships precisely out of wedding-vow loyalty. Even though the wedding vow stipulates only “as long as you both shall live,” she may well believe that he is still alive in her heart, or in heaven, or just ‘somewhere’. Only a fool would call such an attitude delusional, and refuse to accord it moral respect.
It is true that the breakdown of a morally serious marriage need not be traumatic, and therefore need not result in transformation or disorientation, if both parties have the maturity and decency and self-confidence to admit that they no longer belong together. Again, I am limiting my discussion to traumatic (but faultless) divorce cases such as Tereza’s.
Harbin (p. 155) stresses the importance of ‘interpreters’, close friends and family who can help the disoriented individual avoid being overwhelmed by the disorientation. As part of this, she adds, “what feelings an individual can have depend to some extent on what feelings they are enabled to express to others” (p. 156).
Note: Harbin’s ‘resolvism’ should be distinguished from the ‘resolve’ which Mendus described as essential to marriage.
I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for emphasising this.
In passing, I am taking a not uncontroversial view of factual significance as shifting in time. Tereza remembers the facts of the first meeting with her husband. But when she fell in love, she blessed the day; during the divorce, she cursed the day; ten years after the divorce, she is bittersweet about the day – throughout, the remembered facts remain the same. Importantly, I am taken such perspectival significance as objective in the sense of discoverable and serious. There is then a further question of whether the final significance of a fact in one’s life, within the deathbed perspective, is somehow ‘more accurate’ than the earlier significance; unfortunately I do not have space to discuss that.
For a very recent exploration of this kind of ‘biographical perspective’, see Golub (2019). I am hoping that the reader will accept the loose Nietzschean spirit of my argument, without picking me up on the many assumptions I am making about causality. It can be notoriously difficult for therapists to identify causal influences on character change.
References
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Cowley, C. Divorce, Disorientation, and Remarriage. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 23, 531–544 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-10036-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-10036-4