How divorce affects marital partners (2)

Divorce is not and cannot be the right answer to broken marriages. But it may be a perpetuation of the problems that disrupt relations between married couples and therefore would probably lead to a second marriage break-up and hence a second divorce.

In fact divorce leads not to an indissoluble but a temporary bond between a man and a woman, one or both of who had been previously married. It is simply a contract which can be dissolved by the partners on agreement. In a few words, divorce does not have a solid foundation.

It is love, I mean true love, that makes for a good, solid and successful marriage. But again many ask what true love is. Such an answer was given by no other than Pope Benedict XVI during a conversation he had with Peter Seewald and which was published in the book God And The World.

To the comment made by Mr Seewald, “It’s not infrequent for partnerships to end in a dispute between the sexes,” the Pope replied: “Man and woman belong to each other. They both have their gifts, which they have to develop so as to realise and to bring to fruition the whole breadth of what it means to be human. That this diversity in unity includes tensions and can lead to attempts to break apart is something we well know. That is the case in every friendship. The closer you are, the easier it is to get in each other’s hair.

“Love makes a demand that cannot leave me untouched. In love I cannot simply remain myself, but I always have to lose myself by having any rough edges taken off, by being hurt. And it is just this – that it hurts me so as to bring out more of my potential – it seems to me, that constitutes the greatness of love, that is part of its healing power.

“We must think of love as suffering. Only if we are ready to endure it as suffering and thus ever to accept each other and once again to take the other to ourselves, only then can a lifelong partnership develop. If, on the contrary, we say when we get to the critical point, I want to avoid that, and we separate, then what we are really renouncing is the true opportunity that is to be found in man and woman being turned towards each other and in the reality of love.”

The right answers for a lifelong partnership are not found in divorce or in empty words and assumptions frequently made by its lobbyists but in the wisdom of wise men such as Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, who is Christ’s successor on the earth we are living in.