Change of Heart by Eden Monroe

 

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In Barlowe Pride, Hayden Barlowe chose the wrong bride when he married Mary Rae Sutherlyn, and paid dearly for his youthful lapse of judgment. Not surprisingly, divorce was eventually necessary after the five-year marriage had completely unraveled. Now, seven years later, he’s back in Naomi Martel’s life.

Dealing with the subject of divorce made me curious about how dissolving the bands of matrimony has played out through history, so I did a little digging. When it comes to marriage, the institution that creates the option for divorce, there are any number of obscure reasons why couples decide to get hitched … besides love. And so conversely the motivation for ending the union, if that’s the way it goes, can be just as varied.

So here’s my little peek over time into a change of heart from the perspective of divorce.   

In Ancient Rome if a woman was caught making a copy of the household keys her husband could divorce her. Given the dominant male culture in many of those early societies I was amazed to learn that around the second century women were also given the right to divorce. However there had to be sufficient grounds to do so, no matter which partner initiated the action, and in ancient Rome those ranged from infertility and drunkenness to what is probably the most common reason even today: adultery.

Most divorce proceedings were kept private in ancient times, such transactions not a matter of public record. Nevertheless in Rome at that time there were rules that had to be followed regarding the dissolution of a marriage, and it could only become official if done in front of seven witnesses.

So it seems that as long as there is marriage there will be those who change their mind about their spouse and seek a divorce. In one country in particular we have an interesting assessment of the latter. According to Statistics Canada in a fifty-year analysis of divorces (1970 – 2020), there was an actual drop in the number of divorces. The aging of the married population is cited as a likely factor in that trend, as well as young Canadians deciding to live common-law rather than choosing traditional marriage.

COVID-19 also played a role during the time of this study. There were 25% fewer divorces during the first year of the pandemic in 2020 as compared to the previous year, no doubt due to public health measures in place at the time. Still, in 2019 Canada had the second lowest crude divorce rate among G7 countries. Internationally speaking, it seems Canada has “relatively few” divorces.

And how do divorce rates stack up for Canadians in general? Between 2016 and 2020, Yukon and Alberta had the highest divorce rate while Nunavut and Newfoundland & Labrador had the lowest.

 

No matter the geographic location though, the reasons for divorce can be pretty individualistic, such as a wife wanting out because her husband talked too much and couldn’t keep secrets; a woman upset that her husband voted for Trump; similarly a woman who wanted to divorce her husband because he went to work for Trump. And then there was the wife who spooked her husband so badly by levitating that he was done with the marriage, and a Nigerian woman who sought divorce from her husband because of his … well … oversized appendage that made intimate relations “a nightmare”. Another woman cited her reason for wanting a divorce was because her husband left dirty dishes in the sink, and a man who finally saw his wife without make-up and wasn’t impressed. There was also a woman who divorced her husband because he refused to provide her with a proper indoor toilet (she was tired of relieving herself in fields) and lastly, at least for this rather conservative list, a woman filing for divorce because her husband refused to shower for eight weeks.

A ten-year Swedish study revealed that couples with longer job commutes (involving one or both partners) were 4% more likely to call it quits compared to those working closer to home. And how about the power of influence? In a study published in Social Forces, participants were 75% more likely to divorce if a close friend or family member ended their own marriage, and if a friend of a friend got divorced, that number dropped to 33%.

Also, sixty years of US Census data indicates that if the first-born child is a daughter it leads to divorce more often than if the newborn is a son, and a University of Washington study says if a first baby of an unmarried couple is a boy, they are 42% more likely to marry.

Remarriage is common across time, however most people obtain a divorce before they revisit the altar. But not a man from New York City identified as Fred Jipp. According to The New York Times he was finally apprehended at the age of fifty-three and eventually convicted of bigamy and fraud. Jipp said I DO to no less than 104 women, and possibly 105 (he said he met most of them at flea markets), between 1949 and 1981. There is no mention of divorce from any of his wives, although it was reported he married some of them more than once.

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