Lady Chatterley started blogging on The Malta Chronicle. She’s got some points to set straight about marriage and blogging… not in that particular order.
I wonder whether the same rules apply here and whether I should wait till I’m married before I start blogging. Well, that may never happen, which would be a real waste. So here I am. About to consummate my relationship with the blogosphere and press send. I didn’t wait for marriage to have sex either. If I had, I’d be a 37 year old virgin and that’s pretty sad, even Kate Gonzi would probably agree. I mean, imagine the spots. Imagine how angry I’d be all the time.
Instead I have a 12 year-old, and I’m only angry some of the time. Like now, because we’re doing Maltese homework and it’s that time of the year, when the horrible word ‘revision’ comes home to roost.
But I’m here to talk about divorce. I was having a chat with a guy last night on facebook and he gave me the ‘between you and me, I’ll be voting against divorce’ spiel. I replied with my best ‘each to his own, different strokes for different folks’ all embracing response and tried to sound like I meant it. And yet after I logged off, I couldn’t help but wonder, how someone so bright, so young, so cool and so with it I suppose, could miss the point so ferociously.
You see, what he effectively told me, was that his reservations stemmed from the fact that divorce offered people an exit, which would make people leave marriages with greater alacrity. So then I gently pointed out that separation offered people a very real and valid exit too, which was also resorted to, with reckless abandon. So no difference there, right.
Then he said that people would shack up with other people with greater ease, and once again, I came back with more or less the same argument – that today people are free to leave their original spouses, shack up with new partners, have children outside of wedlock. It happens all the time.
And if they really want to seal the deal, then they usually try and wrangle an annulment, unless they’re lucky enough to create a domicile in an estranged land. And if and when that happens, they’re laughing. Then they can even remarry, which until that point, was the only thing that differentiated separation from divorce.
So all we are arguing about here is one thing – that divorce will facilitate re-marriage. Facilitate NOT bring about. That is the only novelty it will bring about. Divorce will not be the catalyst for marriage breakdown, for children suffering, for depression, mental breakdown. It will not be the cause of anything we don’t already know. It will just facilitate a remedy which to-date is also available, admittedly from the back, not the front door.
That is basically it. We’re essentially arguing about exit via a back or a front door, about semantics. Annulment is divorce by any other name (oh not legally I know that, God forbid!); separation is as heart wrenching and traumatic as it’s twin brother divorce or twin sister annulment; annulment permits remarriage; re marriage is available to the people who want it badly enough via annulment or overseas divorce. And on and on it goes. And we’re still talking about it.
And I’m actually blogging about it. Yes, there’s always a first time.
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Zolabytes is a rubrique on J’accuse – the name is a nod to the original J’accuser (Emile Zola) and a building block of the digital age (byte). Zolabytes is intended to be a collection of guest contributions in the spirit of discussion that has been promoted by J’accuse on the online Maltese political scene for 5 years.
Opinions expressed in zolabyte contributions are those of the author in question. Opinions appearing on zolabytes do not necessarily reflect the editorial line of J’accuse the blog.
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