Most of the correspondents, politicians, commentators and the members of the Żwieġ bla Divorzju anti-divorce group writing against the introduction of divorce legislation harp on the so-called principle of the ‘indissolubility’ of marriage.

The fact is that marriage indissolubility is nothing more than a myth as far as civil marriage is concerned.

As the thousands who are already legally separated (there are at least 15,000 in Malta) as well as the additional thousands who are waiting for the courts to approve their separations will tell you, civil marriage is far from being indissoluble.

All it takes for a civil marriage to be ‘dissolved’ is for a married couple to find that they cannot live together any longer (for whatever reason), register this in the Family Court, undergo attempts at reconciliation, failing which they will agree the terms of separation (or have them handed down by the courts), and eventually the marriage will have been in reality dissolved.

Others do not even go through this process – they simply live apart, sometimes with other partners. This should not be interpreted as a trivialisation of the process of marriage breakdown and separation because it is one of the most traumatic and emotional experiences in one’s lifetime. However, that is it, in reality.

The newly separated people will now go about their separate lives and most will eventually strike up new relationships, some of which may result in lifetime experiences with new partners eventually developing into new families, so there goes the much-vaunted principle of the indissolubility of marriage.

As far as the so-called indissolubility of marriage goes, divorce does not come into it at all. Civil marriage is being dissolved quite well without it, thank you.

Divorce is only required for those instances where separated people want closure on their failed marriage or want to remarry.

It is a civil remedy that may be resorted to (nobody is forced to apply for divorce) subject to a marriage having failed without any hope of reconciliation.

The proposed divorce legislation calls for couples to have been separated for four out of the past five years, apart from other safeguards in relation to maintenance, child support, and so forth.

With or without divorce, civil marriage is being dissolved like anti-acid pills in a glass of water.

With or without divorce, marriages will continue to fail in ever-increasing numbers not because of the introduction of divorce or a ‘divorce mentality’ but because of the pressures that modern life is exerting on marriages.

This is what the various politicians and anyone else in civil society holding on to this particular myth of marriage indissolubility must realise before pontificating against the civil legal remedy of divorce.