14. The Penalties of Divorce

There are, of course, many reasons for divorce, but chief among them seems to be the growing aversion and hostility that men have for the feminine mill-stone hanging around their necks.⁹²92 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, p.237.

I never knew what real happiness was until I got married. And by then it was too late.⁹³93 Fred Metcalf, op.cit., p.158.

For a sane man, divorce is the legal exit route from the nest slavery of marriage. In any given society, whether this exit route from marital misery is inviting or daunting depends on the obstacles and penalties with which it is surrounded.

In strict Mohammedan countries, like Saudi Arabia, where matriarch power is probably at its weakest in the world, divorce is not very difficult for a man to obtain. In strict Roman Catholic societies, where matriarch power is probably at its strongest in the world, divorce is prohibited by either secular or religious law, or by both: a man’s only escape routes from nest-slavery are, therefore, the illegal ones, namely, desertion, wife murder, or suicide.

Where there is an absolute legal or moral sanction against divorce, marriage becomes, for the husband, a form of life imprisonment, with the hard labour of carrying a talking and nagging millstone around his neck. Where divorce is allowed, but is hedged with discriminatory penalties against the husband (e.g. alimony; child custody rules that are weighted in the mother’s favour; the ouster of the husband from his family house; the loss of half his estate to his wife; social censure; etc.), such penalties can keep a husband trapped for life in his wife’s nest.

Consider the plight of a man who goes naively into marriage, expecting happiness ever after, only to discover that his happy days are already behind him! When the bride he wedded has turned into a decorative presence, a nagging harridan, a heartless slave driver, and a financial millstone; when the sex-for-the-asking he was led to expect is no longer forthcoming, either because the sex-eager fiancée has turned into a frigid wife, or because she has gone off him and taken on outside lovers; when the love mists have cleared from his eyes, and he sees that his home is his prison; and when he contemplates making a break for freedom: in that moment of truth he has to consider what divorce would cost him.

Against remaining in nest-slavery, he will weigh the following:

1. the vexation of making alimony payments with which she will support herself and some new lover;
2. the humiliation of being ousted from the house he built or has bought, and seeing it turned over to the woman he no longer loves;
3. the penalty of losing half of his estate to her, an estate he either inherited or won with his sweat;
4. the fear of her getting custody of their child, with him having to endure a partial or total loss of access to it;
5. the fear of social censure, with loss of prestige, in a society that will view him as a weak man who could not keep his wife.

Caught between the prospect of unhappiness-ever-after under the lash of his slave-driving harridan, and the certainty of such wounding penalties and humiliations, the average male, with his super-fragile ego, would choose divorce only as the last alternative to going insane, or to suicide, or to murdering his enslaver and being hanged for it.

Once a wife is satisfied that her husband cannot divorce her, either because divorce is illegal or theologically frightening, or because it is too costly financially and psychologically, she gets her licence to be as heartless a slave-driver as she likes. She will mercilessly drive him to the brink of desertion, insanity, murder or suicide before pulling back. It is in this way that the harsh penalties surrounding divorce, penalties which make his jailbreak forbiddingly costly, are exploited to keep a husband trapped in nest slavery. The men who, as legislators, pass such divorce laws, or who, as priests, decree divorce a sin, are indeed heartless jailkeepers to all husbands within their jurisdictions.