The Nice Thing About Being An Atheist

[Astonished]

And there's plenty wrong with divorce. Making your kids feel like shit, breaking apart a family, breaking a promise you made, having to live knowing you made a huge mistake and everyone who is aware of the 'd' word will be judging you and questioning your judgment. I mean, yeah, there's benefit to getting out of a shitty marriage but why not be more careful going in and make sure the risk is minimized?

...No one wants to address the roots of the problems, only the symptoms, and that's just foolhardy.

I have to say that's a very 'traditional' view of divorce and not really representative of the realities. Most often, children are happier once the breakup has occurred because it's worse to be in a dysfunctional relationship, rowing endlessly, than it is to leave it; it means an end to the breakdown of the spousal relationship and the beginnings of healing. You also seem to hold an idealistic view of the nuclear family and are ignoring the fact that it's an entirely recent concept, possible due to the cessation of familial death caused by modern medicine. As for the stigma to which you refer, that's becoming less and less common and certainly shouldn't be used as a rational for staying in a relationship. Would you really tell an abused spouse that they're better off taking it because of what the neighbours think?

Commonly, the root cause of a dysfunctional relationship is the people in it and likewise, the best solution is to remove them. Relationship counciling works by finding resolution to the arising conflicts and separation is a perfectly acceptable outcome.

Really? As a child of a broken home I had the cumbersome burden of knowing I wasn't wanted and living with the stigma of that, so there's the reality of a situation even if it's not the norm; what kid doesn't spend at least some time feeling like their parents would be happier if they could go back and do it all over again, without their divorce spouse and without the burden of being a single parent? And having that sort of stigma attached to the parent as a divorcee made it impossible for my mom to ever find anyone else. I don't mind if the statistics say that my situation isn't the normal state of affairs but to ignore that those situations happen is to shit all over my suffering and I don't stand for that kind of shit. It's not for everyone and don't try to tell me it's preferable to having gone into a committed relationship with better planning and prep beforehand in the first place.

But then, that's not a very great thing when you're an atheist child in a neighborhood full of hypocritical theistic bigots.