NO
By Kaitlin Rothridge

First, let me say that if you’re in an abusive marriage, this is a no-brainer. If there is abuse in the home, there is no justifiable reason for staying.

Even if abuse isn’t present, staying in a loveless marriage is still the wrong option. Children know and recognize insincerity. If you don’t truly love your spouse, your children will know - and wonder when you will stop loving them, too. It’s difficult for you to show your children how to love your spouse when you don’t love him yourself.

If you and your spouse don’t share a genuine interest in working on the marriage, you’ll end up existing in a marriage instead of living in one. Under those circumstances, one parent or the other becomes ever more resentful of the situation and that resentment emerges in many forms. Often, it ends up being unintentionally directed towards the children. Children would rather be with two happy parents, even if those parents live separately, than with two parents who are miserable and making their home a battlefield.

Coming from a dysfunctional family is better than being in a dysfunctional family. You owe it to yourself to divorce, and find a happy loving relationship: a relationship that models for your children what married life as an adult should be like.

YES
By Angela Mascellino

It’s a well-known fact that half of all marriages end in divorce.

Although I don’t dispute that sometimes divorce is the only option, like when domestic violence, drug abuse and similarly damaging situations arise, I will say that, in this “Age of Me,” people are generally far too ready to toss aside their marriage commitments when things get difficult.

What part of “for better or for worse” do we fail to understand?

It’s long been said that marriage is less about finding the right person than about being the right person, but the wisdom of that statement is lost as we create co-dependent marriages that can be abandoned when our needs aren’t met, as if our spouses have violated some sort of contract by not making us happy.

It is our children who end up paying the cost of our selfish decisions. Statistically, children of divorce have a higher risk of turning delinquent, performing poorly in school, and experiencing serious emotional and social problems.

Simply put, we owe it to our children to put our families before our own personal wants. We need to demonstrate the importance of commitment, and show them the reality that good marriages don’t just happen: they are the result of hard work.

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