It is bitterly fitting that the New York Times this weekend ran a profile of an Internet divorce service in its Sunday Styles section. Divorce, which even half a century ago was still something of a tragic novelty, has now made a seamless transition to the digital era.
The slogan of the service, It’s Over Easy, is “divorce the easy way,” as if the crumbling of a marriage were as simple and as emotionally staid as a bag of self-rising flour (“Divorce sucks! We’re making it easier,” trumpets a popup on the website, with no traceable sense of irony.)
The founder of this depressing little startup is Laura Wasser, a lawyer who has “handled a number of high-profile, high-net-worth dissolutions” over her 20-year career. One gathers that you should feel secure that the practical failure of your wedding vows are in the hands of a high-powered celebrity divorce attorney. The Times describes Wasser, a 50-year-old divorcée herself, in the poshest of terms, decked out in “a red Valentino empire waist minidress with Dior motorcycle boots.” Like Steve Jobs with his turtlenecks and Mark Zuckerberg’s T-shirts, the world of tech—even the part of it that helps contribute to the culture of marital disintegration—dresses hip.
It is about time for us to admit the obvious: divorce—specifically no-fault divorce, which, after Ronald Reagan signed it into California law in 1970, soon spread to every state in the union—has been, on balance, a sham, a catastrophic sort of prank pulled on every one of us. During the middle of last century, when activists were demanding no-fault divorce laws throughout the country, skeptics were assured that the effect would be minimal: no-fault divorce would only matter to a small minority of marriages in which the spouses were truly unhappy.
Fifty years later, the most popularly cited reason for obtaining a divorce is “lack of commitment,” as if one can dissolve a marriage on the same grounds that one cuts a lackluster player from the high school football team.
Divorce rates are as astronomically high as they are in no small part because of this liberalization—because we adopted the utterly preposterous policy that we could somehow strengthen marriage by weakening it. In this respect, an Internet divorce service is by-and-large unsurprising.
One user of It’s Over Easy spoke glowingly of the site’s “yellow series of icons that shows the percentage of progress made in each [divorce] category.” Another is grateful for the sped-up divorce track it offers: “There are women telling me they won’t date me until I’m divorced. I want to live my life.” As one does.
A service like this (and more are sure to follow) is virtually guaranteed to drive up the divorce rate. For her part, Laura Wasser resists the label of “divorcemonger.” As she put it, “Divorce is happening. I’m making it easier.”
We have heard this before, and we will surely hear it again—when the iPhone divorce app comes out, or when you can get divorced at a Times Square kiosk, or when the state permits spouses to marry someone else even before their divorce is finalized (“I want to live my life,” someone will say). “I’m making it easier,” Wasser says.
Yes, and—as we’ve seen time and again—when you make divorce easier, more and more people will do it.
Daniel Payne is a writer based in Virginia. He is an assistant editor for the College Fix, the news magazine of the Student Free Press Association. He blogs at Trial of the Century.
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