Julie Delegal: The end of marriage? Alimony reform would mean more divorce

First of three parts.

A Jacksonville attorney says that despite all the GOP rhetoric about the importance of matrimony, the Florida Legislature is poised to hasten its demise.

Judith Erwin embodies most people’s definition of accomplishment, but she’s not so sure. She’s a successful family law attorney.

She recently published her first novel, “Shadow of Secrets,” about a woman who desperately works to keep her marriage together after the worst imaginable violation. She teaches a memoir-writing class at the University of North Florida’s Department of Continuing Education. She writes a blog called “The Death of Marriage.”

Erwin has been a student of marriage for three decades — since she started her life over in the wake of her divorce. She’s got a library full of books on the subject, a head full of doubts and fears, and one big sorrow.

She has been divorced for 31 years and she still regrets that her grown children can’t see mom and dad under the same roof for “the events of life”: holidays, birthdays, graduations.

“It’s not just the loss of companionship and love of a mate,” says Erwin, 75. “It’s the unity of the family. Divorce fragments the family.”

Erwin worries that by the year 2100, marriage won’t be in our vocabulary. “For better and for worse, in sickness and in health, it’s all going out the window.”

And in Florida, Erwin contends, lawmakers are helping to push matrimony over the ledge. Along with her cohorts in the Florida Bar, Erwin opposed the alimony “reform” bill passed last year by the Florida Legislature, but vetoed by Gov. Rick Scott. That bill would have ended permanent alimony — in which the high-earning spouse has to write the low-earner or non-earner a check every month for the rest of his or her life — and made it more difficult to collect alimony following marriages lasting 11 years or fewer.

Ending permanent alimony, Erwin argues, chills a partner’s willingness to sacrifice vocational pursuits for the good of the family. She also has strong opinions about the economics of teamwork and how feminism has affected marriage — for better or worse.

“If we destroy the family,” Erwin says, “we destroy how our children grow up, and what they learn about values.”

Marriage rates are declining, especially among young people. In 2012, only 31 of 1,000 previously unmarried women tied the knot, the lowest rate in at least a century, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage Research. That’s down from 92 in 1920.

Since 1960, the marriage rate has declined by 60 percent, as societal constraints have loosened and more young couples opted for cohabitation. Divorce rates, meanwhile, have shot up, and those who divorce are less likely to remarry.

The drop in marriage rates has not escaped the attention of politicians. Conservatives are latching onto these statistics and blaming the behavior for stagnating social mobility in the U.S. Meanwhile, liberals prefer to talk about poverty in terms of policies that exacerbate economic inequality.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., caught flack from women’s groups last month for highlighting the strong correlation between unmarried, single-parent families and childhood poverty. In a speech at a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, Rubio argued that being unmarried causes poverty.

“The greatest tool to lift people,” Rubio said, “to lift children and families from poverty, is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by 82 percent. But it isn’t a government program. It’s called marriage.”

That number, as the PolitiFact website pointed out, is closer to 71 percent. Even so, there’s some evidence that Rubio is confusing correlation and causation and that the causal relationship between marital status and economic status may be the reverse of Rubio’s theory.

Research tells us that more educated, wealthier individuals are more likely to get married in the first place. In other words, higher socioeconomic status leads to marriage, which in turn, enables a couple to build more wealth.

Given these facts, perhaps the more accurate version of Rubio’s assertion is that low earning power causes unmarried parenthood. Single parenthood, rather than “causing” poverty, tends to “sustain” the lower earning potential that prevents individuals from marrying in the first place.

Tomorrow: The economics of marriage.

Julie Delegal is a writer who lives in Jacksonville.