NOT JUST GAY "MARRIAGE"...:

What Hume has to say about divorce and the happiness of spouses contains his most profound insight into human relationships and the difficulties of sustaining marital happiness. Contrary to what some romantics may think, marital happiness and conjugal human love cannot be sustained by amorous or infatuating passions, Hume says, since they are by nature unstable and fleeting. "Amorous love," he says, "is a restless and impatient passion, full of caprices and variations--arising in a moment from a feature, from an air, from nothing, and suddenly extinguishing after the same manner." Whatever its value may be, no marriage can be sustained by it.

Hume proposed as his alternative the companionate friendship that is fostered by and preserves marriage. This, Hume says, is an affection "calm and sedate ... conducted by reason and cemented by habit, springing from long acquaintance and mutual obligations, without jealousies or fears, and without those feverish fits of heat and cold, which cause such an agreeable torment in the amorous passion." Abiding friendship and the sharing of life's experiences and tasks, says Hume, are what render the married state both endurable and happy.

Does the presence of an option for "voluntary divorce" within a marriage negatively affect the cultivation of friendship between the marital partners and hence their conjugal happiness? It does, says Hume, and it does so in a powerful way. If spouses know they can divorce at will and seek their marital bliss with another partner, the relationship dynamics within marriage, he believed, would be radically altered and in such a manner that diminishes marital stability and marital happiness. With no sense of obligation to stick together through thick and thin, they would be less inclined to work together to iron out their differences and keep their conjugal friendship alive.

There is a paradox here, Hume acknowledges, in that "the heart of man naturally delights in liberty," and the liberty to marry the person of one's affection is acknowledged as an important ingredient in marital happiness. But once married, the liberty of easy divorce has the opposite effect on a couple's happiness, Hume says, and he gives as an historical example the decline in marital happiness that followed Rome's abandonment of its ancient proscription of divorce. Under the older dispensation, says Hume (citing the Roman historian and orator Dionysius Halicarnassus), marriages were generally harmonious and satisfying, as couples "considered the inevitable necessity by which they were linked together and abandoned all prospect of any other choice or establishment." "The heart of man naturally submits to necessity," Hume explains, and it will soon lose "an inclination when there appears an absolute impossibility of gratifying it." The secret to happy marriages thus involves principles of both freedom and constraint, principles Hume readily acknowledges that seem to contradict one another. "But what is man," he muses, "but a heap of contradictions!"

Hume would no doubt agree with the claim of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his prison "Wedding Sermon": "It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love." The no-divorce-option marriage, for Hume, is an institution that binds spouses together through strong social and legal obligations, and gives them permanent incentives to sustain and deepen their mutual friendship and love.

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