My personal opinion is that the social pressure to stay married rather than to divorce and the idea of “staying married for the children’s sake” is a good thing that has much merit. Because often divorce damages the children (shuffling them between two homes every week or two, not living with both parents, one parent not living with the children, the cost of maintaining two households, boys not having a father to take them to shul on Shabbos and Yom Tov, and other issues including just each parent themselves living a solitary single/unmarried life) is more often, though not always, more damaging than the problems associated with having a non-ideal marriage. Many couples considering divorce haven’t fully thought through the difficulties for the children and themselves of divorced life. If there was no social differences between being married and being divorced we would see,I think, a tripling of the number of divorces. Mah harayah? The secular world got rid of the social cost of divorce and their divorce rate skyrocketed.
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