The ongoing debate about divorce in Malta has practically exhausted the themes relevant to the issue.

What, however, has not featured so prominently is the thesis which holds the view that the main factor that drives a person to marry is the psychosocial need felt by human beings to have a “significant other”.

The definitions given by psychologists and sociologists to this concept may be different but, by and large, they all refer to a person who is important or influential in one’s life.

A sociology dictionary defines it as “one who is given importance in a person’s life and who constitutes an important audience for a person in a particular role”. When we are young the “significant others” are our parents and maybe our older siblings.

As we grow older and acquire a higher degree of autonomy which tends to make the social bonds within the family of orientation less tight than they used to be; or maybe as we realise that our parents are getting older and moving closer to death, we start looking for a replacement of the significant other.

Very often this is the lover or the spouse with whom one hopes or seeks to share a long-term sexual relationship. The high level of mutuality and reciprocity developed in the interrelationship of the spouses as they become significant to each other creates what D.H. Lawrence defines as a feeling of being “together in otherness”.

The question that revolves round the issue of divorce is how liberal or restrictive can the legal framework governing marital relationship be when in the conjugal bonds of marriage, for one reason or another, this significance of the other ceases to be mutual and reciprocal and the spouses, each going his/her separate way, decide to seek a “significant other”.