Pulling the plug on marriage

I was at a pantomime with my son a few years ago, under the great big tent. At some point we were approached by a 10-year-old boy who appeared out of nowhere, unsupervised and unaccompanied. He was one of those chatty, confident, uninhibited children who could easily have been cast in an American sitcom.

I liked him immediately. He asked us where we lived and when I volunteered the information, he piped up and said his father used to live close by. He said it in a way which suggested that his mother and father did not share the same postal address and I spent the rest of the evening pondering the little domestic snapshot, and my son's seeming immunity to what he had just heard.

Had I been exposed to the same conversation at the age of eight, I'd have probably taken my mother aside frantically and asked where the boy's mother lived, why she did not live with his father and whether she was dead.

You see, I grew up assuming that men and women lived together as married, and the children who tagged along were their own. You can no longer make these assumptions and I strongly suspect that my son, for instance, has grown up making entirely different value judgments about life generally. He'll ask to have a friend over and when this is not possible because it happens to fall on a day where his friend goes over to his dad's house, he doesn't ever question my response.

I sometimes wonder whether he thinks it is normal that parents live apart - a default mode which happens as soon as you get married. It has happened so many times, with so many different friends of his, and I have gotten so used to hearing myself say 'he can't come round I'm afraid because he's with his father today', that I rather suspect this to be the case.

The funny thing is that adults continue to make assumptions. Although circumstances have dictated that our children be raised otherwise, we continue to live in stereotypes.

Some of us like to think that we don't, but I don't believe it's something we can even help. If you happen to see a Maltese, paunchy, middle-aged man chatting up or being chatted up by a blonde 15 or 20 years his junior, their marriage is not the first thought that pops into your head.

You are more likely to think that he is married to someone else, who in all likelihood is not blonde. You assume that the blonde is Russian, not particularly serious, neither respectable nor financially sound.

And that she is definitely not dumb, or in love with the 50-plus menopausal guy. They both have an agenda and hers sounds very much like ka-ching! Yes, that sounds about right.

That she's actually happily married to this man, or a neurosurgeon, recently widowed, with two young children she brings up alone, never enters your head for a second. And that when she's not using her scalpel or baking, she's nursing her sick father or raising money for charity.

So I wasn't really surprised when I read that the Archbishop succumbed to his own assumptions and stereotypical views on marriage and divorce, which I imagine many people subscribe to. That divorce would somehow make it easier for men to leave their long-suffering wives of many years, to set up house with younger, prettier talent.

He immediately reduced the breakup of marriage to a gender discrimination issue, which, I suspect, it might very well be.

You know how psychologists like to get people to draw things. They'll ask a child who may be experiencing one problem or another to draw a picture, in the hope, of course, that the problem will usually come to life and find its way onto the blank sheet of paper.

Truth be told, if they asked almost anyone to draw a picture of divorce, the most popular picture would be the one advocated by the Archbishop.

For some reason we don't think of divorce in terms of 'oh what would happen to all those desperate menopausal middle-aged men who suddenly found themselves bored, lost and lonely?' Who would cook, wash their clothes and iron them if their wives upped and left the whole family in the lurch for a younger, taller, more virile, much sexier six pack?

We could draw lots of pictures and conclusions, but as Lino Spiteri said last week, it is not really our place to moralise the issue and it certainly is not the Archbishop's. Divorce is purely a civil issue and should be treated as such.

We don't expect or want the Archbishop to agree with divorce and its introduction onto the statute books would in no way be interpreted as something he has given his blessing to. It would not make Malta less or more Catholic. And I very much doubt it would suddenly make people leave marriages more flippantly than they did before.

I still believe marriage (and especially children) is more cohesive than divorce is divisive. The idea that people leave marriages to be with other people is somewhat simplistic. People leave marriages that have stopped working and, yes, they usually look for companionship elsewhere. As it happens, men tend to find younger women but that is a whole other story.

It seems the Church and the state see divorce as a threat to the First Wives Club, attributable perhaps to the fact that compared with other EU countries, Malta has the lowest percentage of women in gainful employment.

This puts men at a marital advantage and comes with its fair share of social welfare problems for the state.

But marriages should not be looked upon in the same way government jobs are, where complacency and mediocrity are continually celebrated while attractive long-term pension plans are negotiated.

Security of tenure can actually breed a lot of contempt and the Archbishop may find that divorce is actually the shock treatment that helps resuscitate a few comatose marriages that have long needed a wake-up call.

michelaspiteri@gmail.com