If you’re curious to know just how bad the state of marriage is in this country, we now have what can accurately be referred to as “divorce season.”

Last weekend, the University of Washington published a study that captures patterns in divorces filed based on the time of year. Associate sociology professor Julie Brines and doctoral candidate Brian Serafini presented what they believe to be “the first quantitative evidence of a seasonal, biannual pattern of filings for divorce” at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Seattle on Aug. 21.

Divorce Season

By tracking divorce filings in the state of Washington between 2001 and 2015, the researchers found that couples are most likely to split in either August or March — after the summer and winter holiday seasons. So there are, in fact, two divorce seasons.

“People tend to face the holidays with rising expectations, despite what disappointments they might have had in years past,” Brines said in a statement. “They represent periods in the year when there’s the anticipation or the opportunity for a new beginning, a new start, something different, a transition into a new period of life. It’s like an optimism cycle, in a sense.”

The researchers concluded that the consistent pattern they observed reflects “the disillusionment unhappy spouses feel when the holidays don’t live up to expectations.”

“It was very robust from year to year, and very robust across counties,” Brines said.

The pattern persisted even after other seasonal factors, such as unemployment and the housing market, were taken into account.

Divorce Culture

This is disheartening for at least two reasons.

For one, divorce signifies the end of something that was once understood to be eternal. A covenant, if you will. But even if you don’t believe that, a civil marriage is still a considerably binding legal process. So if it’s not devastating from a moral and relational standpoint, divorce at least means financial stress and mounds of paperwork. It’s inconvenient, and therefore not ideal.

Aside from the rise in emotional and financial stress a phenomenon like “divorce season” signifies, this spike points to the normalization of divorce in American society. The consequence is even more tragic than the former.

It’s fatalistic and abhorrent to normalize divorce. Like abortion — another form of family breakdown that has become more socially accepted since the Sexual Revolution — divorce is a type of death. Namely, it is the death of a marriage, something originally and ideally conceived of as eternally binding. Also like abortion, divorce is something that has largely lost its stigma and instead has become a symbol of feminism, freedom, and independence.

Divorce Parties

The culture of divorce in America has gotten so bad that it’s actually treated as an occasion for celebration among some circles. Today, people cope with marital dissolution by throwing “divorce parties.”

Some will say that this was never really a trend, but rather a fringe fad that the media blew out of proportion (HuffPo will do what HuffPo does). Nonetheless, and I hate that this is a criterion, but “divorce party” has its own Wikipedia page. So if it’s out there, it’s definable. And if it’s definable, we can discuss it.

The very concept of a divorce party is so disgustingly objectionable that it can be rightly called subhuman. Sound too extreme? Consider this: Grief is a human practice. There used to be a way to characterize those who do not lament what is truly lamentable: barbarians. Why don’t people laugh at funerals, or when a friend is fired from a job? Because these are not occasions for celebration.

“Divorce season” and “divorce parties” are symptomatic of a culture that has become so comfortable with the suboptimal that it has embraced it.

Divorce is something to be avoided. If it can’t be avoided, then it is to be survived — never celebrated. The normalization of death — in any of its forms — is chaos. (For more from the author of “How Confused Is Our Society? Some People Now Throw ‘Divorce Parties'” please click HERE)

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