Misreading the Frum Divorce Crisis

By: Anonymous

Here is the golden rule when it comes to marriage advice. There is no such thing as objective marriage advice. When someone is giving you a tip or advice, it comes from some experience, trauma, or mistake they made. It’s like a window into the advice-giver relationship.

Being recently married, I hear, “Oh, you haven’t reached the tough times yet.” And while I agree that relationships will always have ups and downs and need serious work and maintenance, please don’t prescribe your mistakes and failures to me.

I am referring to the writer of the recent op-ed titled “Are Divorce Rates on the Rise in the Frum World.”

I concur with your idea that many newlyweds don’t understand the full scope of what they are getting into. I highly agree the mechnachim and mashpiim and rabbonim need to make a much larger effort to teach and clarify what it means to be a spouse, to have a successful marriage from years earlier, and not have the first time you hear these ideas during chosson classes, after you are already engaged. Hopefully, this will filter out all getting married for the “wrong” reasons.

However, that is where you and I stop seeing eye to eye.

I see this idea of a “marriage counselor” more and more during the engagement period. I could not disagree with it more. Why fix something that isn’t broken? Why force a young couple into a robot relationship where this “one size fits all” advice is going to force a couple to make up for an argument the way the doctor ordered, and not through their unique way of communicating and understanding each other, that gets developed over time.

A marriage is two people coming together, and part of that coming together is working on and building their own physical and emotional language and problem-solving techniques. I can agree that there is basic general information that you must know about how men and women see the world differently, but each person and each relationship is unique. There is no one piece of advice, one way to end an argument, one way to apologize, or one way to make up.

Everyone figures that out within their own relationship based on their needs. And it’s always been that way. That’s how humans work. When you have 2 people committed to the marriage, that happens automatically. Aside from the fact that when you have a “prescription,” you start seeing symptoms everywhere. Non-issues that could be ignored, but the therapist said something that makes you believe “it could turn into a 3-headed dragon if you don’t deal with it now.”

Let’s talk divorce rates.

I don’t claim to know the frum Chabad community divorce rates, and I haven’t heard a number in a while to quote you. But I will just ask, are they really so much higher? Or do we just hear about them more? With social media and our unlimited access to phones and information, with people needlessly sharing private details of their lives, we are more aware than we used to be, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening before.

I am not claiming that the divorce rate is still the same, but I do believe it is a little higher—not enough to warrant redeveloping the entire system to cope with an issue within a niche.

Bad news makes noise. You will always hear about the couple who got divorced over those who got married, especially when they divorced so soon. You will always remember that conversation at the Shabbos table where you heard that your friends, cousin’s brother is going through a rough patch, but never about the couples who aren’t.

Let’s not succumb to this trap of bad news that seems larger than it is. I agree that some need help that will relate to what you’re saying. But let’s not act like we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and start over with the shhidduch system. It’s not a modern innovation; it’s the way things have always been done, and like I said, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.