We Celebrate Divorces

Some days ago I found in my mailbox an advertisement from a production company that “turns celebrations into unforgettable events.” The flyer said, word for word: “Turn your celebration into an unforgettable event. We’re going to have a great time…! We organize children’s parties, baptisms, theme parties, First Communions, quinceañeras, bachelor and bachelorette parties, weddings and Divorces.” Just as you hear it: they organize unforgettable Divorce celebrations!… so that “everyone has a great time.”

Now I ask these “Have a Great Time” people, and others out there doing the same: who do you think is going to have a great time at a divorce celebration? The divorced couple? Their children? Their relatives? Their true friends?

Because if anything is hard to celebrate, it is a divorce, because it is something very sad and very hard; it is the failure of a commitment of love that two people made to each other at some point in their lives. And worse still, it is a family and social upheaval, when there are children involved.

Or is it that you have never had someone dear to you go through that ordeal? Have you never known a child or a teenager who has to go hopping from house to house on weekends to be able to spend time with their parents? Have you never read or heard what psychologists and pediatricians say about how a child whose parents are divorcing is affected in their personal, school and social life?

It seems that whoever made that advertisement did not know what they were doing, and so I publicly excuse them before the many children, young people and adults who have suffered or are suffering a divorce; because it is hard to imagine anyone, however thoughtless, having the nerve to celebrate it. In the end we all have a conscience and a heart, and even if we cover our eyes so as not to see the suffering of the victims of our decisions (and tell ourselves they are mature enough to accept it), we will always know, deep in our souls, that what we did was not for the best and that, one way or another, it affected the lives of those we love most.

Some say that divorce nowadays is something “normal,” and it must be very Abnormal (with a capital A) that in the twenty-first century children themselves, as soon as they understand and see their friends at school suffering over their parents’ separation, ask you anxiously: “Are you and Daddy going to get divorced?” As John Paul II said: “Divorce is the great scourge of the twentieth century,” and it does immense harm to everyone who lives through it, but above all to the children.

My final message goes to all those engaged couples who are about to marry. Know that marriage is something very serious. When you marry, you cannot go on living like a single person. In marriage you have to give yourself to the other completely (the man as much as the woman); there is no room for comfort-seeking, selfishness, whims or bad manners, because that is where the problems begin. And if you marry in the Church it is more serious still, because you are making a lifelong commitment before God. I recommend that before you marry you read several times the words you will say at the altar: “I will be your husband/wife until death do us part: in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad…”

And if before marrying you are already thinking that if things go badly you will get divorced, then it is better to postpone the date and devote yourselves to preparing better for a married life that will lead you to success and not to failure.

And think (and spend) less on the wedding celebration. What truly matters is to know and understand, with your head and with your heart, what a lifelong marriage means, and to be able to give the world happy and fulfilled children. That way you will have not just a good time, but a wonderful time! And if you don’t believe me, ask the couples who radiate complete happiness when they reach their Golden Anniversary!