The Divorce Fantasy World

JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE

When I published Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak several
years ago, I asked Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse of The Ruth Institute to write the
Foreword.

What she gave me back was, in my opinion, a masterpiece. I was blown away by her description of The Divorce
Fantasy World and its perpetuation, and I don't know why it took me this long to reprint it as a blog post for
sharing!

A special note for spouses who are separated or divorced against their will due to abandonment or situations of
serious abuse: Please take comfort in knowing that by "standing" (staying true to your vow, even in the necessity
of physical separation), you truly are fighting effectively against the Divorce Fantasy World.

Photo by ?? Janko Ferlič on Unsplash.

The Divorce Ideology is one of the linchpins of the Sexual Revolution. Kids are resilient. Parents who don't
get along do their kids no favor by staying married. Everyone has a right to be happy, which means the
right to change sex partners more or less at will. TV sitcoms, movies, academic studies, public policies,
"style" sections of newspapers, women's magazines, therapists, and even some clergy claim divorce is
harmless to children and beneficial to adults.

Unfortunately, these claims are false. Switching partners around can create chaos in the family. Divorce
does not necessarily solve the problems people thought it would solve: The probability of divorce is higher
for second marriages than for first marriages. Family law attorneys tell me that managing post-divorce
conflict is a major portion of their business. And, most to the point of this book: Children do not just get
over divorce.

"The kids will get over it." So say the experts and cheerleaders for divorce. On that basis, many parents end
perfectly good marriages that could have been saved with some effort.

Sustaining the Divorce Ideology requires that people don't ask too many questions or voice too many
objections. According to the Divorce Ideology, no-fault divorce just means that two adults who agree to
divorce do not have to go through the elaborate charade of claiming that one party committed adultery.

In reality, many divorces take place against the will of one of the parties. The law takes sides with the party
who wants the marriage the least, even if that person has committed adultery. That is how no-fault divorce
not only demolished the presumption that marriage is permanent—it also smashed the presumption that
marriage is sexually exclusive.

In the Divorce Fantasy World, there are only two choices. Unhappy parents stay miserably married and
fight for the rest of their lives, or they get divorced and everyone lives happily ever after. The idea that one
or both parents should change their behavior doesn't register as an option, nor does the idea that the
divorce might seriously wound the kids.
In the Divorce Fantasy World, the children are all better off if their parents split than if they stay together.
The children are delighted that their parents are happy. They have no ill-feelings about being asked to
move every other week, a fate that few adults would willingly endure. Children are okay with calling their
mom's new husband "Dad," or seeing their own dad in bed with another woman. Children have no feelings
at all about their family photos being taken down. They never feel jealous of the children of the new union,
children who absorb the attention of their parent and new spouse. No, my goodness, no: The children from
the original union never feel like leftovers from a previous relationship.

To keep the Fantasy alive, anyone who does not follow the Socially-Approved Divorce Script must be
silenced. This is bad enough for abandoned spouses. But for children of divorce, it is a living nightmare.

The kids are socially invisible. If they have a problem, we take them to therapy. We put them on medication.
But we never admit that maybe the adults should have worked as hard on their marriages as they seem to
work on managing their divorce. And we certainly never tell the adults not to remarry.

Even inside the family, the children are not permitted to voice their real feelings. Love inside the family
feels fragile: The kids have absorbed the message that people sometimes leave each other or get kicked
out. They may view love as unreliable. Even if children could verbalize their feelings (which they can't), they
are afraid to risk losing their parents' love. They don't want to upset Mom or Dad.

They learn to silence themselves.

Leila Miller's book, Primal Loss, gives voice to the adult children of divorce. Their stories are not pretty. This
book is significant precisely because it breaks through the layers and layers of pro-divorce propaganda that
we all endure in 21st century America.

The cultural elites love the Sexual Revolution and actively promote the Divorce Ideology. They provide a
platform for happily-divorced people, jolly blended families, and all the rest. They never mention the
abandoned spouses or the shattered children. They need all this propaganda because that's what it takes
to convince people that biological bonds don't matter either to children or adults.

Each parent is half of who the child is. When the parents reject each other, they are rejecting half of the
child. They may tell the child, "We still love you; we just don't love each other." The child cannot make sense
of this impossible contradiction. In my opinion, this is the underlying reason for the well-documented
psychological, physiological, and spiritual risks that children of divorce face.

As a society, we are faced with two competing worldviews. The worldview of people of faith is this: Every
child has identity rights and relational rights with respect to his or her parents. When children are deprived
of these rights without an inescapable reason, this is an injustice to the child.

And these rights impose legitimate obligations on adults to provide these things to children. We don't like
to say this too loudly, because people in our time resist hearing that they have obligations to others that
they did not explicitly choose to bear.

The competing worldview is this: Every adult has a right to the sexual activity they want, with a minimum of
inconvenience, and children must accept whatever the adults choose to give them. We do not just blurt out
that last part because we would be ashamed of ourselves. But that is approximately the position of most of
the people in power in most of the so-called developed countries: They believe it is the job of the
government to minimize the inconvenience that adults experience from their sex lives.
The Divorce Ideology needs the State because it needs enormous amounts of power to accomplish its
impossible objectives. This one insight unlocks the key to the whole course of the Sexual Revolution. We
can now see why enforcing divorce has become a power grab on the part of a whole array of businesses
and professionals who could be called the Divorce Industrial Complex. We can see why the family-
breakdown-is-harmless propaganda seems so relentless, and why the downhill slide into new, more
devastating, and more permanent forms of family breakdown seems to be accelerating.

And we can see why silencing the victims and dissenters is essential to its success. Once people start asking
questions, or raising objections, the whole fragile structure could come tumbling down.

Because of this systematic silencing of the victims, the next generation of children grows up operating
under the very same illusions as their parents. No one ever gets a course-correction.

Leila Miller has done us all a great service by giving a voice to the children of divorce. Please read this book.
Then share it with friends, family, counselors, teachers, and pastors. Break the silence. Do it for your own
family, and for the families of future generations.

This suffering has gone on long enough.

This is J. Fraser Field, Founder of CERC. I hope you appreciated this piece. We curate these
articles especially for believers like you.

Please show your appreciation by making a $3 donation. CERC is entirely reader supported.

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Acknowledgement
Jennifer Roback Morse. "The Divorce Fantasy World," from Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce
Speak. LCB Publishing (May 20, 2017).

Reprinted with permission from Leila Miller.

The Author
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse is the founder of the Ruth Institute, an interfaith international coalition to defend
the family and build a Civilization of Love. She is author of Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love In A Hook-up
World, The Smart Sex Series: 3 CDs, and Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work.

Copyright © 2017 LCB Publishing

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