Over the last several decades, the practice of no fault divorce has grown significantly. The view that marriage can be easily dissolved has enabled couples to choose divorce instead of working through challenges in their marriage. While this “easy way out” mentality is not always the case, many divorces are not necessary and only damage families and individuals.
This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Beverly Willett, author and co-chairman for the Coalition of Divorce Reform, to discuss the great importance of saving marriages and reducing unnecessary divorces.
Learn more about Beverly Willett’s book, Disassembly Required
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Family Policy Matters
Restoring Marriages and Reducing Unnecessary Divorce (with Beverly Willett)
TRACI DEVETTE GRIG: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Sadly, American couples lead the industrial world in divorces. That trend appears to be shifting a bit in recent years, but our guest today says divorce remains far too common and too easy. Beverly Willett is Co-chairman of the Coalition for Divorce Reform, a nonpartisan coalition dedicated to supporting efforts to reduce unnecessary divorce and promote healthy marriages. Beverly Willett, welcome to Family Policy Matters.
BEVERLY WILLETT: Good morning.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: The word unnecessary divorce jumped out at me. What do you mean by that?
BEVERLY WILLETT: That’s a great question. If you look at some of the research, you will find that many couples can reconcile if they get the help and the information that they need. And most marriages, too, are low conflict marriages. So really, what you have is most of the divorces are involving low conflict marriages. And these marriages can be repaired. So, if they can be repaired with help and with information, we know they don’t have to happen. So, they’re unnecessary.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: There are some times, though, when divorce can be considered necessary?
BEVERLY WILLETT: There is some research too, that if there are high conflict situations, then it can be better for spouses, and especially for children, to part. Now, you know, I don’t want to get into all the religious aspects, because people have different views on that. I am Catholic now, I wasn’t when I started this work a long time ago. And Catholics, you know, don’t believe in divorce. There’s an annulment process for various situations, and also a process for those situations that have high conflict for separating. So that just gets us into a whole other can of worms. But yes, generally, of course there are.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, when you say high conflict, you’re talking about the possibilities of abuse and other types of situations like that.
BEVERLY WILLETT: Correct.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, so talk about the trajectory of divorce in American society over the last 50 plus years. What have we seen trend wise?
BEVERLY WILLETT: Well, basically, we saw a shift starting in 1970, when the first no fault divorce law was enacted in California. And before that, we had fault-based divorce. Just like any other lawsuit, you’ve got to have some kind of cause, some sort of wrongdoing, that you go into the lawsuit and say, x caused, you know, Y. You had a shift, basically, that one person could go in and say, You know what I’m done with this marriage. I want a divorce, and they get an automatic out. That was a major shift in 1970. Over the next 15 years, every state in America, but three, I believe, enacted similar laws. 2010 New York signed on to no fault, and there are only two states that have mutual no fault divorce. So that’s basically what you saw in terms of the law. You saw a divorce rate pre-1970 across the country that was in the 20s somewhere. You saw more than doubling after the enactment of no-fault divorce into the 50% rate. And then you just there’s so many different things we can talk about that the consequences that occurred in society, in terms of individual problems, poverty, so many different things that came out of this wave of no-fault divorce that was enacted.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Why is this topic of divorce reform, so personal to you?
BEVERLY WILLETT: Well, I went through an unwanted divorce. It was very complicated, because at the time, New York didn’t have no fault, but they pretty much acted as if they did. I mean, that’s really what the judges, you know, even though you had a right to defend yourself, the judges pretty much thought it was a foregone conclusion, once you get to the court, you’re going to get a divorce. And so, they didn’t really know what to do with me, someone who wanted to save their marriage and said, No, this is not going to be good for me and my children. I think that my ex-husband and I can reconcile, which is what our marriage counselor thought. They didn’t know what to do with me, and I knew it was wrong. In my heart, I still love my husband. I believed in my promise, I believed that the fact that he was having an affair and had broken his promise didn’t absolve me of my obligation to keep my promise and to try and keep my family together. Inevitably, we got divorced because he moved to New Jersey, where they had no fault, and I really couldn’t fight it anymore. Through the course of that, I then started writing about what I had gone through, and from that, people started contacting me from around the country, saying, Me too. Me too. Well, that was totally news to me, because I had never been involved in a divorce. No one in my family had ever gone through a divorce growing up, and so it became personal to me only because of my personal situation, because of my children, and then I saw communities. I saw people suffering who wrote to me personally. So that’s really how it all evolved.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: And you think divorce reform could make a difference in some of these outcomes
BEVERLY WILLETT: We have forgotten in society that, you know, we value what we protect. I mean, I think that just, you know, culture can shape the laws, but the law also shapes culture. And I think that the fact that we don’t protect marriage as we should in our country, and the children of marriages, basically gives sort of a cue to people that we don’t value it very much. And we do know from the research that if we look at situations where couples can get help, where there are low conflict situations, and couples, you know that they can say they’re not happy, but then five years later, they’ve gotten the help that they need, and their marriage is stronger than ever. We know that it makes a difference, and we know that being married makes the difference in terms of the health of individuals, in terms of the health of their children. And then you look at communities. Now, you know, we didn’t have all this research in the beginning, and it took a while for this research to develop, and now it’s continuing. We didn’t have the ability to look at communities. Let’s look at a community and see the percentage of married people in that community versus another community where marriage is in trouble and the marriage rate is low, those communities that have more married couples and families are healthier communities. So, it impacts all of society.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, you mentioned people from all over the country that had reached out to you, saying, me too. Can you give us some examples of some ways that kind of divorce is not working.
BEVERLY WILLETT: It affects children. I’ve had people reach out to me. I mean, I remember a dad very, very early on, and his children were really suffering from the divorce, and one of his children wound up committing suicide. I’ve had, I’ve had men and women, actually, because I wrote an article about this, because they’re increased suicide risk that are associated with divorce, particularly for children, and particularly for husbands, for men. I’ve had people reach out to me and say, until I read your article, and the things that you’d gone through and how you were able to, you know, get healthy again, I was on the edge of that. Or I’ve lost my kids, or I don’t know how I’m going to pay my bills, you know. I mean, it’s not really, I think it’s very easy to understand that a family can live cheaper than two different families that are split. Two people can live cheaper than one. It’s simple math, and so a lot of those people are struggling economically, that have reached out to me.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, North Carolina, as you mentioned, is one of the very few states that maintain some more restrictive laws, alienation of affection laws being one of those. What do you think about those types of laws, and should they be reconsidered as part of your divorce reform suggestions?
BEVERLY WILLETT: Yeah, I remember coming across North Carolina law and thinking, wow, that is wonderful. Very few places have that. And if you look at New York, I just wrote an article about that at the beginning of the year, New York still had adultery on the books as a crime, and they got rid of that because they said we need to be modern here. So that was not a great thing to do. I think it’s a wonderful idea. But I would say that if there’s, you know, if there’s little traction for divorce reform, trying to get something like that implemented is just a real non-starter to try and, you know, get any traction on something like that, because it’s just, you know, it’s just perceived as religious or backward or things like that. But, I mean, I really think in that situation, conservatives need to start stepping up to the plate here. Conservatives are not stepping up to the plate on divorce reform. They’re enacting all these laws. They’re talking about all these policies, all the trouble in America. And if they would just do things to help marriage and get on board with divorce reform, there are a few of them. If they would really do that, they would make a difference, because they’re just not tackling the root of the problem. I think we could use laws like North Carolina has, if we were to say, well, you know, we’re not going to enact that law, but we’re going to consider, let’s say, in the property division, or alimony, or we know we have rehabilitative alimony in most states now, which basically means, even if the wife or the stay at home husband has not been working, we want to get them back to work, because it’s very, it’s a very pro-work society, not valuing the stay at home parent. But if we had that in, you know, consideration, if there’s betrayal and you basically are sued by your spouse who wants to move on with wife or husband number two or three, have that part of the property division. Maybe that might make a difference. It might make people think that, wow, maybe I’ll get less money. I can’t just go out and sue and get what I want and move on and have the money for my new wife or husband. That could be an interesting thing to put it on the other end, when property division comes up. But then you’ve got to make judges implement it. You can’t give them discretion, because they’re so pro-divorce that they’re just going to say, oh, that’s backward. You know, betrayal is normal. Infidelities become normalized. So, you can’t give judges discretion. You’ve got to say, you’ve got to put that into the money calculations.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: You mentioned several times, the judges’ attitudes, basic society’s attitudes toward divorce. Where do we start? Are we starting with laws? You think that’s the place to start, or do we need to start making some changes somehow in how people view divorce, and how would we go about doing that?
BEVERLY WILLETT: Well, you know, I’ve sort of taken a multi-pronged approach to this, and it has changed over time. Because I started out, you know, thinking no fault has got to go, and I still believe that ultimately that’s the thing that needs to happen because it’s unconstitutional. But, you know, I formed this volunteer organization back in, you know, like 15 years ago, and our reform actually, with the Coalition for Divorce Reform, was a modest reform, and didn’t get rid of no-fault divorce at all. It’s called the Parental Divorce Reduction Act, which is basically just extending waiting periods, giving families what they need in terms of, you know, help with communication skills, financial problems that they’re having, so that they don’t feel like they’re hopeless. Because we can give them the things that they need through marriage education. Educate them about the consequences of divorce, because it was just a really non-starter to go after no fault divorce. So, I mean, I’m still absolutely in favor of that. We got to do something so, you know. And I also write about this a lot. I write about this a lot. I try and educate people, I talk on social media. So, I really think it’s a multi-pronged approach, and that’s sort of what I’ve taken, just throw the kitchen sink at the whole problem. But, you know, I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and the needle is not moving a lot. So, I really think, as a lawyer, I really think that we need to go after no fault divorce. I just think we need to just do that now. I’ve sort of come around to that conclusion, along with doing all these other things at the same time.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS; Okay, well, we’re just about out of time. Could you give us somewhere for our listeners to go if they want to get more information about this in your organization?
BEVERLY WILLETT; Yes, well, you can go to my website, BeverlyWillett.com because I have written, I can’t even tell you how many articles that I’ve written on this subject. So, there’s a lot of information there. Coalition for Divorce Deform is DivorceReform.us. We have a wide variety of articles there and a blog, and also our reform legislation, the Parental Divorce Reduction Act. You know, I write a lot for the Institute for Family Studies, and they just have a wonderful library of articles, so I would definitely go there as well.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, sounds good. Beverly Willett, Co-Chairman of the Coalition for Divorce Reform, thanks so much for joining us today on Family Policy Matters.
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