Our own horrible sin, error, amartia, in this general issue is seeing marriage as purely individual, as being only “between the couple and God” and “nobody else’s business. But my marriage IS your business, insofar as we are part of one society or community. What I do affects you all, and were I to divorce, that would affect everyone in my community. A reliable “nation within a nation” is lost; a brick has been removed from the house and its structure correspondingly weakened. All of our neighbors and friends, to say nothing of in-laws, that counted on us being there as a family unit, as one thing - “The Smiths”, “the Robinsons” all of a sudden find a hole and a vacuum. I learned so much from Chesterton on the social effects that hardly any of us give the slightest thought to. “The Superstition of Divorce” made crystal clear to me WHY the hard teachings of our Church are right, WHY we do, generally speaking, need to learn to love our spouses when it becomes VERY hard, and generally speaking, we don’t want to. We want to run away, jump off a cliff, do anything in those hardest moments rather than love someone who is hurting us so badly. And we will swallow anything from the modern world, the modern “psych-“ sciences (insofar as they ARE science, that is, true knowledge of our nature), “self-help” books and gurus, rather than love someone who is behaving like our enemy, because loving your neighbor and loving your enemy are non-negotiables in our Faith, and possibly the hardest commandments. How on earth did we ever come to think we can make an exception for our spouse?
If one couple can divorce in the Church because of irreconcilable differences, then all couples can. All stability in the community is lost. And we wonder why we have lost all sense of community, why everyone now lives barricaded behind their own doors, why our neighbors have mostly become strangers. And the idea that the marriage still exists, even if a spouse must be commited to a prison or insane asylum, or if you have to separate in extreme circumstances, has been lost. The institution could be called a “martyrriage”, and that is DEFINITELY in our Tradition and part of a proper catechism, “the little martyrhood” of absorbing the sins of one’s spouse, and forgiving and loving, which really can be like martyrdom if they don’t reciprocate.
Every divorce in my old parish in Russia (and there were more than a dozen, where there were maybe a hundred regular parishioners) was a direct blow on my own marriage. I KNEW, when the first one of our friends went down, that every wife in church looked at each other and thought, “Could my husband also do that?” And the other divorces followed like dominos, and now that parish has fallen apart, divided by divorce before it was ever divided by politics. The community is irreparably broken and fragmented.