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Home Home and Family Marriage Concepts Of Divorce In The West
Concepts Of Divorce In The West PDF Print E-mail
Written by Adriana Noton   
It is probably safe to assume that people have been looking for ways to dissolve marriages ever since the concept was introduced. The trappings and particular requirements may have changed many times over the course of history, but the ability to divorce one's spouse remains a fundamental aspect of human partnerships. The ability to extricate oneself from what may be in retrospect a bad decision to have made is as important to personal liberty as the power to select one's own mate in the first place.
by AdrianaNoton


It is probably safe to assume that people have been looking for ways to dissolve marriages ever since the concept was introduced. The trappings and particular requirements may have changed many times over the course of history, but the ability to divorce one's spouse remains a fundamental aspect of human partnerships. The ability to extricate oneself from what may be in retrospect a bad decision to have made is as important to personal liberty as the power to select one's own mate in the first place.

In the Roman Empire, marriage and the dissolution thereof were considered to be part of the basic rights available to a citizen. For a Roman couple seeking to end their wedlock, a short trip to the magistrate and a declaration of their wishes was enough to consider them no longer husband and wife. This is not to imply that such a parting of the ways was to be undertaken lightly, as family and social considerations would often require a couple to give serious thought to taking this step.

During Europe's Medieval Era, the pervasive power of the Catholic church and other religious institutions removed the authority to pronounce and end marriages from the civil sphere. Marriage ceremonies soon became religious affairs, with a man and a woman bonded together by the authority of the priest and under the auspices of God. Civil courts no longer had jurisdiction over matrimony.

Before this point there had been no real stigma attached to those who dissolved their bonds. However, if wedlock was as the church claimed a holy state blessed by God, then those who sought to remove those bonds were seen as being not very serious about their faith, and possibly not pious people at all.

This sentiment remains an undercurrent in many societies even today. Perhaps the religious considerations are still strong in some cultures, in others it may be that social taboos exist to dissuade people from marital separation. Whatever the case, there are many married couples in the world who no longer wish to remain together but are not able to easily break their contract with each other.

The earliest and possibly best known defiance of the Catholic church's domination of matrimonial proceedings came from the English king Henry VIII. Unable to secure an annulment from the papal authority and increasingly unhappy with his wife Catherine's inability to sire a male heir, the king took matters into his own hands and broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534.

Things are no longer as difficult for couples seeking an acceptable way to split apart. While it is true that many countries in today's world still have religious qualms about the ease with which marriages can be terminated, a new and very secular consideration has arisen in recent decades. More of a civil contract than a spiritual one in the minds of many modern nations, it is now necessary to be aware of and address many different legal issues germane to the process and execution of annulment and separation.

The argument has been presented that in order for marriage to be truly free and open to all then the ability to remove oneself from such a contract must be equally available. It can be shown that in some countries, especially highly-progressive western nations, have an incidence of divorce nearly as high as that of marriage, but this can be seen as the exercise of personal liberty rather than spiritual weakness or defiance of convention.

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