ssions before divorce, while in other states, a one-year waiting period has been put into effect. (Tyson 2)Maybe the smart choice is strengthening marriage bonds. Tom McMillen, director of the Rocky Mountain Family Council in Denver, Colorado, said, "Marriage is not just a lifestyle choice, it's a critical institution that allows our culture to move forward." Some states such as Minnesota and Michigan agree with McMillen and have instituted premarital counseling, rather than pre-divorce counseling. We have to decide what is more important to our society. Research shows that divorced women suffer a drop in income ranging on average from 30 percent to 70 percent. More than half of all female-headed households with children live in poverty, compared with only 10 percent of all other families with children. Medical experts say that men who divorce are to experience greater health problems and higher rates of suicide than married men. Are these things devastating to our society, or do we need to look at the other side of things? Without no-fault divorce, many people may become trapped in abusive relationships. There may be an increase in desertion. One spouse may be lead to use bribes or threats to win the consent of the other to end marriage, thus creating the return of blackmail under the old fault-based system. (Tyson 1-3)Maybe the topic isn't the narrow one we perceive it to be. Maybe the topic evolves more around family itself. Midge Decter does an excellent job of discussing family in her article, "The Madness of the American Family." She explains how a family compares with a rock, and not the Garden of Eden. A rock, can be far from a comfortable place to be. "But," she says, "living on a rock keeps you out of the swamps.....The most dangerous of these swamps is a place of limitless and willfully defined individual freedom. The land of limitless freedom, as so many among us are now beginning to discover, turns out to ...
