I did not write much in 2025, but I finished out the year with a bang: Making fun of divorced people. Irresistible. After listening to one too many women explain that she is divorcing a “good man,” I decided to write about how silly that is for the Federalist. It’s not groundbreaking stuff, but the responses were interesting.
Sadly, emails from several men confirmed how consistent the social contagion is. You can pretty much predict, line by line, how the scenes unfolded. How she suddenly revised her life’s story, plotted for months or years, and then pulled the rug out from under him, all the time reassuring him he “did nothing wrong.” Of course, that is in retrospect. For the men in these situations, they are often taken totally by surprise. Imagine being decades into what you think is a decent marriage, only to discover you’re down one wife and forced to pay whatever the state decides.
This is not to say that these men are without their faults. Undoubtedly, they left their wives unfulfilled; maybe they were annoying to live with. Was it their job to fulfill their wives? More to the point: that’s not what marriage vows entail.
Fulfillment in marrigae appears to be what women expect, but it’s a big mistake. The men in these shallow and mediocre marriages were in it for the long haul, most of them pretty happy. How then was he supposed to figure out that she longed for greater emotional intimacy? She was the one with the longing.
Only one woman had the chutzpah to write to me, proclaiming, laughably, that in her experience much more than two percent of the male population is narcissistic. You, madam, may have a sample selection problem! Her defense of divorce was that she did not want to be in a cold marriage. Naturally!
But does a “cold” marriage violate the promises made in wedding vows? Women (and men, for that matter) have taken to casually proclaiming that divorce is not morally wrong. You can assert that there is no moral question in breaking marriage vows if you first ceded your integrity and the ability to stand on your word. That seems a big concession to make upfront.
It’s not enough to be opposed to divorce. That can get you to strange and terrible places. Take, for example, this finely crafted story showcasing the absurd actions of Ryan Borgwardt, who faked his own death and moved to the other side of the world because, having been scarred by his own parents’ divorce, he wanted to spare his children the pain of divorce. Spoiler alert: It turns out pretending to die, swindling a small town out of tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of manhours as they search to find your body and turning up a few months later after getting tracked down with your mistress is also traumatic for your kids.
It’s not enough to stick it out, no matter what, letting dreams die and bitter bickering afflict everyone with the misfortune of entering the orbit of your putrid marriage. Just staying married is not the point. Being refined by sacrificial love, learning to elicit greater intimacy, finding joy in the life you have been given and the choices you have made. That’s where the meaning lies. Focusing on that meaning may alleviate the unhappiness haunting so many women in objectively good and stable circumstances.
In the past few months, I’ve had the experience for the first time of knowing casual acquaintances who have become great-grandparents. That revelation affected me more than I would have anticipated. The great-grandparents are, in many ways, so far removed from the baby, and yet, the unavoidable means of his existence. How small our petty disappointments appear in the face of generations.
People make a false choice between staying in a “cold” marriage “for the kids” and finding freedom. What if freedom is found interiorly, even in difficult and challenging circumstances? What if finding that freedom, developing a rich inner world of meaning and purpose, thaws the cold and disconnection? Maybe it doesn’t, but many people have found a place for enduring hope, a hope that leads to life abundant.
I’m reminded of George MacDonald’s “At the Back of the North Wind,” the fantastical yet mundane story of the boy Diamond, who saw eternity and came back to the world, bringing hope to people in ordinary, painful, difficult lives. At one point, the narrator observes: “But to try to make others comfortable is the only way to get right comfortable ourselves, and that comes partly of not being able to think so much about ourselves when we are helping other people. For our Selves will always do pretty well if we don’t pay them too much attention. Our Selves are like some little children who will be happy enough so long as they are left to their own games, but when we begin to interfere with them, and make them presents of too nice playthings, or too many sweet things, they begin at once to fret and spoil.”
Perhaps the greatest challenge to marriage currently is too much of a fixation on whether it is making us happy. It would be a mistake to think that it’s a uniquely modern problem. Having recently reread parts of “Madame Bovary,” it appears, indeed, to be a tale as old as time.
