Divorce

Divorce is an institutionalized way of voluntarily ending a marriage. There are other forms of voluntary marital dissolution, such as desertion or a mutually-agreed-upon separation; but divorce differs in that it is officially sanctioned by the state or the ruling group, and it allows both partners to remarry. In some traditional Islamic societies, divorce was easy to obtain and quite common; in other traditional societies, such as China before the twentieth century, divorce was rather rare. Social and economic development has often brought a lowering of divorce levels in societies where it was quite common, and an increase in societies where it was quite uncommon. Previously, a divorce was granted when one partner failed to fulfill an important responsibility: sexual fidelity, economic support, and so forth. Because of the rise in divorce in the West, three family forms are becoming dominant: families of first marriages, single parent families (usually a mother and children), and families formed by remarriages after divorce.