Those campaigning against divorce legislation were out on the hustings again yesterday, with more of the sort of irrational reasoning that makes the rest of us even more determined to vote Yes.

Nationalist MP Edwin Vassallo, who is not to be confused with Labour MP Adrian, who shares his sentiments, wants to drag teachers into the debate. He wants them to tell us what they think about divorce and how it affects children. He is keen to get teachers involved because he assumes that they will agree with him, but if I were a teacher the first thing I would say is that divorce won’t make a blind bit of difference to whether parents split up because they’re doing so in droves already.

Vassallo was never going to be the sharpest knife in the government’s drawer, but surely even he understands that the only way Maltese teachers can know how divorce affects Maltese children is through seeing the present-day effects of marital breakdown.

If Edwin Vassallo understands that what affects children is the parting of their parents and not that piece of paper called divorce, then why exactly is he so panicked at the thought that people might yet be able to divorce in Malta?

I, for one, believe that without divorce legislation, family situations will actually deteriorate further, become even more confused, confusing and unstable. Divorce actually forces people to think harder about whether they want to leave their spouse or not, because it is final. Walking out with a suitcase to a rented flat and a separation agreement does not have that degree of finality about it, and while many people do think long and hard about it, equally many others do not. I laugh when I hear the No campaigners describe divorce as the easy option. It is not – nothing final ever is an easy option because the psychological hurdles are tremendous. The easy option – if it can be called that – is what we have today.

The inability to divorce and remarry is not going to reverse or stop the escalating rate of marital breakdown, formation of what are effectively extra-marital relationships, and the birth of children within those extra-marital unions. I think it will actually have the opposite effect. People enter into cohabiting relationships more easily if they know that the other cannot begin agitating for marriage because marriage is not legally possible.

We are indeed on the brink of a great leap into the darkness, but it is not the darkness which the anti-divorce legislation campaigners envisage will happen should parliament legislate for divorce. The Great Unknown is what will happen with a No victory. Malta is the only country in Europe where the decline and eventual dissipation of social strictures on cohabitation, marital breakdown and birth outside marriage has not been met with divorce legislation.

Some brick-wall thinkers in this country believe that divorce actually caused the tendency of people to live together without being married, leave their spouses, form new relationships and have children with somebody other than a spouse. But European divorce legislation of the 20th-century was not the cause of these social changes; it was the result of them. That it is not divorce that changes society and ‘weakens morals’ (which is the way these campaigners see it) should be obvious from the Maltese experience, were the campaigners not so blinkered. We have no divorce legislation, and yet we have all of that and more.

Malta is currently in the unique position, globally, of being a laboratory experiment in what happens when the social norms and strictures on family, marriage and childbirth are abandoned in a situation where there is no legislation to deal with it.

An absence of divorce legislation – as with Italy and Ireland up to relatively recently, or divorce legislation which is restrictive and relatively inaccessible – as with Britain and North America up to the 1960s, works only when society is self-policing and uses shame, ostracism and social censure to keep spouses together, prevent lovers from sharing a roof, and stop babies being born and raised out of wedlock.

Britain and the United States have had divorce for all these centuries, but make no mistake about it, until the 1960s divorce was calamitous, divorced women were ostracised, divorced men regarded as dishonourable, and gentlemen allowed their adulterous wives to divorce them, rather than bringing action themselves, because women who were divorced by their husbands (rather than the other way round) were irremediably disgraced.

But when society loosened up, when people stopped policing each other and using shame and dishonour to keep everyone in check, divorce legislation eased up in response to the inevitable, allowing new forms of regulation to take place.

In Malta, there has been a total loosening of social strictures over the last 20 years, to the point where there are now none. But the legislative void in which this has happened has been space for the formation of any number of curious and more straightforward set-ups. We have skipped the century-long process of social and legal evolution that our European neighbours went through in the 20th century, and yet we have arrived at the point where we have all of the thinking and behaviour that they have, but none of the legislation to suit.

With the No vote victorious, this is going to be a high-risk leap in the dark. One thing is certain: that legislation will be required to cope with these social changes, and if it is not the universally tried-and-tested divorce, then it will have to be a raft of complicated and piecemeal legislation that doesn’t do the job and instead creates even more confusion.