No one can blame Kate and Jon personally. After all, we live in a divorce culture -- only a slight majority of marriages make it "till death do us part." And 40 percent of American babies are now born to women (and men) who dispense with marriage altogether. Well, that is one way to avoid the trauma of divorce.
The family generates love like no other, and it is the place we therefore celebrate love, but in its deepest conceptual meaning the family is the place of obligation, of duty, of unchosen relationship. Our friends are the people in our lives only because we love them and chose them. Our children are not ours because we love them; we love them because they are ours.
A wedding is the weak link in the family system -- the extraordinary attempt to make biological strangers into closest kin. For me ,every divorce -- not just Jon and Kate's -- prompts questions:
Is being a wife merely a role I've chosen, a thing I enact so long as it benefits me? Or can I do something else with marriage -- import another human being into the essence of my identity -- make being a wife something I am, like being a mother, not merely something I do? Is it possible to really become one flesh?
More questions: Is this kind of irrevocable prime commitment a good thing? Or is it an unreasonable imposition on our human freedom?
Marshall McLuhan was wrong: The revolution will be twittered; it is the divorce that will be televised. |