We’re living in a culture of blame—no wonder no-fault divorce is at risk.
While America’s blamer-in-chief foments a culture of finding fault—blaming Democrats for the LA fires, “DEI” for plane crashes and immigrants for high housing prices—those of us who care about women’s and children’s rights are justly concerned about the future of no-fault divorce.
Although no-fault divorce hasn’t gotten to President Donald Trump’s chopping block yet, rumors have proliferated, and people are justifiably anxious. As Amanda Montei wrote in her newsletter Mad Woman, “No-fault divorce was one of many internet searches that surged in the days following the election. On TikTok, divorce coaches and influencers urged women to get divorced while they still could. Some divorce lawyers offered anecdotal evidence that divorce filings were already on the rise.”
I feel a cold chill reading about these things. My divorce five years ago was painful, but, because New York state has no-fault divorce laws (the last state to adopt this, phew), at least we didn’t have to codify our private struggles within a punitive framework. As of 2010, every state in the U.S. has instituted no-fault divorce, which does not require proof of wrongdoing.
Much of our economy, from housing prices to childcare availability, is designed around the unit of straight married couples. Of course an administration devoted to shuttering social services wants to shore up the institution of marriage.
No-fault divorce sets a legal precedent for ending a marriage without sinking into a morass of enmity. It’s a law that makes space, in other words, for divorce without blame.
Once upon a time (when things were “great,” I suppose), couples looking to end their marriage had to pick something on which to blame their divorce from a set list of legally justifiable reasons like adultery, domestic abuse or criminal behavior. This led to a lot of crafty lying and divorce tourism for those with resources. And for the less resourced, more vulnerable people, it often meant staying in marriages they didn’t want to be in—including the people who needed most urgently to get away, like women who were actually being abused by their husbands.
For some, this is a matter of life and death. A 2006 study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that no-fault divorce “increases the likelihood that a domestic violence relationship ends and acts to transfer bargaining power toward the abused.” (In fault-based divorce, one of the parties can contest the other’s claims in court, a frightening possibility for a victim of abuse.)
No-fault divorce legislation also correlates with an “8-16 percent decline in female suicide, roughly a 30 percent decline in domestic violence for both men and women, and 10 percent decrease in women murdered by their partners.”
Research has shown “the most dangerous time for women experiencing abuse is when they attempt to escape”—evidence in favor of simplifying and potentially hastening divorce proceedings. But while this is obviously important, part of the ethos behind no-fault divorce is that it shouldn’t have to be a life-or-death matter in order for people to choose divorce.
One of my favorite facts about no-fault divorce is that it was first ushered into law in 1969 by a divorced politician called Ronald Reagan, who as you might recall was in fact a Republican. The California Family Law Act introduced the grounds of “irreconcilable differences.” Under this precedent, no one’s “fault” had to be established, and couples could avoid the long, expensive, and bitter process of placing the blame on one or the other of them. Reagan said at the time, “I believe it is a step towards removing the acrimony and bitterness between a couple that is harmful not only to their children but also to society as a whole.” He had just been through a bitter “sideshow” of a divorce from his first wife, and knew of what he spoke.
But some are now wondering if this law will go the way of Roe v. Wade, thanks to Reagan’s own party. Vice President JD Vance’s view of divorce is “that people do it too easily, shifting ‘spouses like they change their underwear,’” the Washington Post reports. Republican and conservative lawmakers are threatening to “eliminate or at least narrow laws that allow couples to divorce without having to prove one person was to blame.” Influential podcasters and right-wing activists (only some of them known abusers!), along with politicians in Texas, Nebraska and Louisiana, have called for the restriction or elimination of no-fault divorce. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said it’s too easy to get divorced (spoken like someone who has never gotten divorced), suggesting that no-fault divorce laws are immoral and somehow responsible for school shootings, another gambit in the party’s bizarre blame game.
Organizations like the National Center for Men claim that no-fault divorce is “a disaster, mostly for men, since most breakups are initiated by women.” Hm, why would that be? Well, studies have found that married men live longer, healthier lives than single men and have more leisure time than their wives; on the other hand, divorced women report more “life satisfaction” post-divorce.
As Joanna Grossman, a professor of family law at SMU Dedman School of Law in Texas, told Slate, men “want the women to be stuck with them because marriage is pretty good for men.”
Let’s be real. The Republican party—roiling as it is with divorcees, serial cheaters and convicted sex offenders—can spare us the lectures on the sanctity of marriage. Nor do I buy that adding friction to the divorce process is about what’s best for children. This administration hasn’t shown much interest in protecting children—poised as they are to slash funding for schools, for example. Besides, as the authors of this historical study of the idea that divorce hurts kids note, “Most of the problems associated with being a child of divorce are instead related to sexism, racism, homophobia, shoddy recordkeeping, and insufficient government support.”
The movement against no-fault divorce is about walking back women’s rights and autonomy. Even opponents of no-fault divorce don’t claim that making divorce harder to obtain will lead to happier marriages, or any change in men’s behavior. As Anne Helen Peterson writes, our culture assumes that a miserable marriage is something that the wife—always the wife—can fix through some good old-fashioned grit and hard work. And that it’s inherently worth such grit and hard-work.
Not to get too Marxist here, but marriage serves a useful function in capitalist society. Much of our economy, from housing prices to childcare availability, is designed around the unit of straight married couples. Of course an administration devoted to shuttering social services wants to shore up the institution of marriage.
The argument that marriage should be an iron-clad contract, however, elides the actual reasons that couples in the modern age tend to get married. Most of us don’t get married in order to protect extant social structures, or to do our part to strengthen the economy. Most of us living secular lives in this country marry for love, seeking spouses we feel a romantic and soul-level connection with. I wasn’t traded to my husband for some goods and a goat or two. We didn’t expect it to be an advantageous match for our family’s land holdings. The reason we got married was as squishy as it gets: We loved each other. It’s the emotions, stupid!
And why wouldn’t we have married for love? No one has to prove anything in order to get married, other than their desire to get married. (Not yet, anyway.) To get divorced, why should couples have to prove anything other than their desire to be unmarried? I got married because of a feeling, and I got divorced because of a feeling.
I’m grateful that, while my divorce wasn’t pleasant or easy, at least it didn’t require me to lie. I didn’t have to invent a crime to accuse my spouse or myself of, the way generations of people did before the advent of no-fault divorce. For us, no-fault divorce meant we could go to mediation together, attempt to have adult and caring conversations, and avoid a punishing, drawn-out court drama that would surely have distressed our children, drained our bank accounts, and nudged us into contempt for each other, as setting people on opposite sides of a battle tends to do. We were able to ethically end our marriage and move on to the next stages of our lives without unduly harming each other.
Because you really can want out of a marriage and not hate the other person. In fact, being able to grasp nuance, to hold several ideas in your head at once (i.e., I can’t be married to this person anymore, and also I don’t think he is a criminal or even a bad person), is, if anything, a sign of emotional intelligence, something I think we could all use a little more of.
No-fault divorce allows for a civil proceeding guided by mutual respect, without accusations or undue legal drama. Without hatred. Without blame. No wonder the blameocracy questions its validity.
