EDITORS DESK
Divorce is the sound of a bell solemnly rung at a funeral. Everybody is a witness to the loss, if not even a victim. It’s a circus come to town, or more like a circus leaving town, with all its aerial silks, daisy chains and slings, pulleys and swivels left on the ground dismantled, disassembled, even dismembered, along with its forgotten thrills, expired joys, discarded memories.
Yet, out of 193 countries on earth, based on the United Nations’ list of member states, only two remain closed to the option of divorce. One of them is our country, the Philippines, and the other is Vatican City, whose population of 800 is mostly committed to the vow of celibacy.
“It is hard to believe that all the other countries collectively erred in instituting absolute divorce,” argued Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman, one of the foremost voices for the reinstitution of absolute divorce in the Philippines. He scored a coup just last month when, on Aug. 17, the House Committee on Population and Family Relations endorsed the still unnumbered bill he sponsored for plenary debates.
There is no divorce in the Vatican, but the world’s smallest state has no longer been all that averse to the idea of divorce either, not since 2014 when, in two successive synods, divorce, along with contraception, same-sex unions, and living together before marriage, was discussed.
The result was a 270-page exhortation, Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), released in 2016. In it, albeit ambiguously, Pope Francis announced that those divorced and remarried, undeserving of excommunication and discrimination, should be welcome to take communion. He pointed out, however, without necessarily contradicting himself, that the bread and wine at Eucharist are “not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”
The priests are married too. To the Church, yes. A man’s decision to take the Holy Orders is an eternal vow, but even a priest has a way out, via laicization or dismissal from the clerical state, which may be imposed ad poenam, as punishment, or granted pro gratia, as a favor, at the priest’s request.
For Filipinos, even those languishing in bad, unhappy, abusive, failed, or loveless marriages, there is no way out, unless the aggrieved party could prove the marriage invalid on the grounds of, say, psychological incapacity.
Nevertheless, more and more Filipinos are proving desperate enough to go for it. According to a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of population sciences published by Jeofrey B. Abalos in 2017, the number of separated Filipinos increased 10-fold from 28,988 Filipino men and 52,187 Filipino women in 1960 to 330,253 men and 565,802 women in 2010. In 2013, at least 10,000 petitions were filed to end marriages in the courts, according to the Office of the Solicitor General.
Given our population of some 100 million — 111,273,028 as of latest count — it’s only a small number that dares put asunder what God has joined together, but it’s also undeniable that breaking up is impossible to do for most Filipinos, who do not have the resources to do it for many reasons.
Number one: It’s very expensive. To legally separate from your spouse, you will need to cough up somewhere between ₱200,000 and ₱500,000, provided no one contests the annulment, otherwise, prepare to spend millions.
Number two: It takes too much time. Six months, if you have the money or the right connections or both, or only God knows how many years you will have to wait to be released.
Number three: It takes guts. The couple seeking to part ways will have to exaggerate their misgivings as well as each other’s faults and flaws. They will have to sling mud, draw blood, beat each other black and blue to break the marriage apart.
Number four: It takes the whole village. It takes your family, your community, your country, if not even heaven and God, to let you go.
Divorce isn’t any easier. It’s also costly and bloody, not to mention sad. The main difference between divorce and annulment is that the former ends a legally valid marriage while the latter ends a marriage that supposedly never happened or happened illegally.
With divorce, neither man nor woman need connive with lawyers and psychiatrists to turn a husband’s lack of affection into impotence or erectile dysfunction or a wife’s mood swings into a dissociative personality disorder.
They can simply fall out of love. Divorce acknowledges this fact, although in court it is usually couched in more practical terms, such as conflict, constant arguing, lack of commitment, infidelity, or lack of physical intimacy.
Divorce is realistic. We all make wrong choices. Divorce gives us the chance to unchoose them.
(AA Patawaran is the editor of Manila Bulletin Lifestyle section.)