People today seem to have a different understanding of marriage commitment than in the past. The transition is from a commitment to an institution to a more personal bond. While promoting good relationships is extremely important, failing to defend and to preserve marriage as a social institution can be equally harmful. This means that a balanced view of marriage is imperative today more than ever before. As the personalisation of marriage blends with the privatisation of the relationship and with the modern market economy, the chances are that when a person’s needs are not met in the relationship, satisfactions could be sought elsewhere (Paul Pace 2009).

The Permissive Society of the 60s was imported into Malta years ago (we don’t take that long to catch up with certain things), but it needed time to establish roots. The Internet, Facebook, Twitter and the other tools that enable one and all to pontificate on any subject under the sun have put us in touch with the rest of the globe. Those roots are now strong enough to try and reshape Maltese society. The issue of divorce cannot be analysed without taking into account other factors changing the shape of our society, factors that have not been truly addressed.

Up to a couple of years ago, Malta had one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies and of children born out of wedlock (31 per cent), comparable to the USA (33 per cent). One needs to factor into the equation the fact that, as yet, abortion is illegal in Malta. Why the implied doubt? Well, if the ambition to Europeanise Malta is realised, then it might be difficult to cut out abortion from that particular political programme. More to the point, will all these out-of-wedlock (PC at its best) births disappear with the advent of divorce? Or will they, in the absence of that benchmark called marriage-till-death-us-do- part, increase?

Researchers provide many reasons for the phenomenon of burgeoning single parenthood, some more acceptable than others. The results from the Survey on Income and Living Conditions in Malta show that during 2005, the poverty rate was highest among people living in single parent households. This stood at the staggering rate of 47.9 per cent. In 2006, 1,879 single mothers received Lm3,571,780.63 in social benefits and allowances, relief, etc. All this is bound to have increased since then. Paul Pace, in his study on marriage and families in Malta, lists the help that single parents are getting. His telling questions, however, are: why not help all married mothers even more if we want to increase the birth rate? Why are only single mothers helped in this way?

There are issues of education, or lack of it. With such a high dropout rate, there is an alarmingly large number of young people out there unable to find answers to their problems. There is the issue of sex education that in Malta comes up against deeply held traditions. It seems that there is still a strongly held view that would prefer to set teenagers adrift in our sexualised society rather than give them the knowledge and the tools to protect themselves. About a year ago, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Malta admitted that Personal and Social Development (PSD) classes are not working well enough. That comes as no surprise to a doctor.

There is the issue of poor parenting – and not only on the part of the educationally deprived but also in the upper levels of society, where the pursuit of wealth, or increasing hedonism, or both, is leaving its mark on the upbringing of children who, in turn, are opting in increasing numbers for a life untrammelled by offspring. Yet Europe would rather spend millions importing foreign cultures, with the attending huge costs of trying to integrate them, than spend money on its own families. Truly, as they say, those who the gods would destroy…

There is the issue of drug abuse, a phenomenon that refuses to go away. I said in another article that, apart from a lack of a principled home environment, drugs also indicate the proportion of our citizens who feel alienated, who feel helpless in a society led more and more by the competitive needs of global economies. There is extreme poverty of more than one kind in Malta, even if much of it is quite well hidden. People who entered the married state and for a number of reasons drifted into the shallows, are now trying to make their presence felt. Not all the deprived have that privilege.

Another factor is the media. There are of course media houses that are obviously in favour of the introduction of divorce. Journalists fly under the colours of progressive, liberal, humanistic, secular and others; what many seem to have in common is to regard any faith belief as superstition. Such trends and attitudes, as usual, have arrived rather late in Malta, but they are the spawn of the cultures that created havoc in European society, cultures that believed that opening Pandora’s Box was smart. What they failed to foresee was that it would be next to impossible to return to it the nasty creatures that had flown out.

In the UK, certainly, there was a concerted effort by the press to undermine family life. This trend was very evident in the leftist press, which often saw the family as a barrier to their eternal attempts to re-engineer society. Values that had stood the test of centuries were slowly but surely eroded, to be largely replaced by the dreadful “celebs” living their trashy lives on the front pages of the tabloids. All this was fodder for the young, the frail and people with little knowledge of why society followed certain paths. As ever, destroying is easier than building.

Britain is now counting the cost as it witnesses the astonishing speed at which traditional family life has collapsed (History and Family: Setting the Records Straight by the Centre for Social Justice). It is now despairing of the shocking figures that reveal births outside marriage at their highest level in two centuries, while nearly half of all children can expect their parents to separate by the time they turn 16. Nine out of 10 couples now live together before – or instead of – tying the knot (before the 1940s it was one in 30). Divorce, long present in the UK, has resolved nothing.

The CSJ research shows that marriage and commitment tend to stabilise and strengthen families. Locally, commitment has been extensively studied from the perspective of the investment model in social psychology and it is distinct from “satisfaction”. While the latter is understood as a positivity of affect or attraction to one’s relationship, “commitment” is the tendency to maintain a relationship and to feel psychologically “attached” to it. This definition of commitment includes two categories: “behavioural intent” and “psychological attachment”. According to this model, these two categories of commitment go together and influence each another. Commitment has been studied from a relationship dynamics perspective using constructs such as communication and conflict. Results have shown that, consistent with commitment literature, higher reported commitment was associated with less feeling trapped in the relationship, and greater relationship satisfaction. (Paul Pace 2009)

In ancient societies, marriage was mainly an arrangement between families and often the wishes of the couple were ignored. The Church helped to define marriage as a matter of free consent between husband and wife. It gave it a sacramental character. The idea of the contract which elevated the rights of the individual in marriage was more the product of the Enlightenment. The downside of the marriage contract model was that it began to look more and more like a business deal, which could also be revoked by the consent of the parties, should conditions change. No wonder the super rich demand a pre-nuptial agreement to safeguard their money, should the marriage fail to make it. At the other end of the scale, hard-working people prefer to seek employment rather than work on their own, simply to hide their earnings and deny their separated partners any money the court might award. Guaranteed maintenance indeed! 

Divorce is a structure lacking both permanence and depth. Strengthening families is vital both to the health of a nation and to ensuring a more socially just society. The fact that a number of marriages are brutal and fleeting should not obscure the centrality of marriage to family life in previous decades. It is a stark fact of reality that the retreat from marriage has had negative effects on children, families and society. It is also a fact that 80 per cent of relationship breakdowns in young families take place in unmarried families. There is a wealth of evidence showing that the family environment in which children grow up is key to determining their success or failure in their future lives. Such an environment is generally more to be found in married families than in other forms of alternative – or reconstituted - families.

The OECD report for 2011 (Doing Better for Families) states that, with marriage rates down and divorce rates up, there is an increasing number of children growing up in sole-parent or reconstituted families. Sole-parent families are of particular concern due to the high incidence of poverty among such households.

I have no doubt that we will, sooner rather than later, follow this road unless serious attempts are made in Malta to remedy the situation. I have been publicly proposing this since long before the divorce question arose. But it seems that nowadays politicians and churchmen need to see the brick wall right up close before they can find the will to act. There have been many who have been pointing out to Church and State the reality behind the façade. The divorce question has showed how prescient these courageous people have been. I laud their bravery because, in Malta, rocking the boat comes at a heavy price.

End Game

I was sipping a coffee in Valletta, killing time before a hearing at the Law Courts. Two young women sat at the next table. One of them took out her mobile. I had no reason to twitch my ears until I heard her yell about money into the phone. She was furiously explaining that “he” was behind in his payments and that the last one had been for April and not May, which was now due. A subject truly fit for the coffee table in a public place! The conversation ended by her threatening to go to the police.

My surgery has seen too many men come in seeking an abortion for their mistresses, too many married women desperate to wipe out the results of the one-night-stand, too many mothers anxious to have their single daughters not become pregnant, to have but one answer for the referendum on the 28th. I shall vote No to divorce, hoping to stop the rot from spreading further. In the meantime, I pray that State and Church will find the necessary courage to attack the malignant disease at the heart of so many of our institutions before people completely lose whatever respect they might still have for any authority.