Conclusions, Predictions, and Prognostications 231
warped by growing up in friction-filled homes. But is divorce any
less harmful, or does it cause as much or more social disruption
than it solves?
It may be that divorce (like so many of our other snazzy mod-
ern social advances) affords us some immediate, but temporary,
present comfort at the price of future upheavals in our society.
Perhaps every divorce decree granted today should be accom-
panied by a surgeon general’s warning: “Caution: Every ‘easy
divorce’ granted in over 50 percent of all marriages at the turn of
the 21st Century... may contribute to the demise of our family/
society/nation by the year 2025!”
The inalienable right to divorce. The reality of the situation in
America today is that we all tend to take for granted, as some sort
of inalienable right, the expectation of a happy marriage. If this
fails to transpire, then everyone feels an ancillary right to escape
the trap of an unworkable marriage. In today’s America, virtually
everything is disposable, from razorblades to relationships. This
is certainly a far cry from preceding generations, where marriage
was embraced as a societal and economic necessity, and where
religious and community standards made divorce an anathema.
Divorce can indeed be a positive development for many peo-
ple. It can represent the conclusion of a difficult or unhappy time
in their lives—one they may feel quite relieved to see end. It can
bring them to the threshold of a new growth phase of their lives,
in which they can successfully structure a more meaningful and
more happy relationship for themselves and improve their qual-
ity of life in general.
Does divorce = personal growth? One of the most trendy and pop-
ular treatises on divorce that appeared back in the 1970s was an
excellent book entitled Creative Divorce: A New Opportunity for Per-
sonal Growth, by the divorce therapist Mel Krantzler. His upbeat
and optimistic view was that a series of positive lessons learned
through the divorce process could be healthy contributing fac-
tors to one’s own personal growth—that this could in fact go a
long way toward improving the next juncture of that individual’s
life—not the least of which might be their next marriage.
Krantzler’s book was extremely well received, and the very ter-
minology he employed seemed to embody the popular view (one