AIBU to think it's very hard to LTB if you're Irish?

[TirNaNog100]

I’m not disputing that it’s often right - and necessary- to LTB. I usually agree with the advice given on the Relationships board. But I think that it’s often overlooked that cultural context may make this very difficult to do, even in cultures ostensibly quite similar.

I’m thinking specifically of Ireland, where I have returned after many years in London. From what I see, there is a world of difference between how ‘broken’ marriages are viewed in the UK and in Ireland. Among my Irish circle of friends, I don’t know anybody who is divorced. Not one couple. The same applies to my husband’s friends. And those of my three sisters. I live in the country so I accept there is probably a Dublin/rural divide going on, but I think divorce and separation are also rare in Dublin.

This train of thought was prompted by recently attending a school reunion where only one out of forty women (late thirties) was divorced. And by considering my parents-in-law wretched marriage – my MIL will soon be celebrating forty years of being tethered to a violent, manic drunk. It is accepted here that women of her generation really had no way of exiting horrific relationships. But despite greater financial freedom and legal rights, I'm not sure the situation has changed that much. Would love to know other mumsnetters' views?

ha ha noddingoff, I remember kind of envying the ''culchies'' their double life.

A woman at work was telling me that her husband of 17 years was winding her up quoting what had been said to them at their communication class! She was laughing mind you. But she had to say it to him again ''in my opinion .....

My x was nothing. Truly completely nothing. He went to a church of england school and I think I hoped that he would label himself c of E but he was 'nothing' to the core in such an unapologetic way. I hadn't come across that in Ireland very often. Everybody was something. Everybody was connected to some parish even if ti was very peripherally.

The thing about people being more attached to their parents at a later age seem to apply to people I know who are born in the UK but with Irish parents. I think it's that it's part of growing up with Catholicism, and the idea that divorce is bad so Irish/UK Irish young people are more careful about who they tie the knot with.
My Irish SIL and brother didn't get married until they had been together 6 years, and it was because they wanted kids, which makes sense. The bizarre thing to me was that she pretended to her parents for 4 years that they were not living together!

The op seems to suggest that because only one out of a large group of women in a particular age group was divorced this implies that Irish women may be trapped in unhappy or abusive marriages. It just seems an odd conclusion to come to. I mean unless you know of a good number of women who are in that situation surely you'd assume that they are together because they are happy?

I've no doubt that there are some people who feel unable to leave their relationship but unlikely to be proportionally any more than in the UK I would think and certainly not because of some kind of social/cultural pressure. The hold the Catholic Church had on Ireland in the past is long gone! While it would be true that my parents/your MILs generation would have found it a lot harder to leave it certainly isn't the case in this day and age.

As pps have pointed out, in Ireland we tend to get married in our 30s but generally couples will have been together for a few years before that so going in eyes wide open which I think has a bearing. Also the long wait for a divorce - lots of people legally separate but don't bother with getting the divorce.

Thanks for this thread OP, I have found it really interesting.

I'm English, but family is (nominally) Catholic and MC and in the entire extended family going back generations, there's only me and my mum's cousin's daughter who are divorced.

Not frowned upon really, just not the done thing.

I left when mine was a baby Chippy and I agree with PP that she's never known anything else and has never found it hard. Plus she doesn't remember all the rows and the really hard times. As far as she's concerned, mum and dad get on fine, they just don't live together (and I will go to my grave before I disabuse her of that incorrect assumption)

A divorce rate of 42% in England/Wales is absolutely scandalous. That's a dysfunctional society.

I had heard that there are people with multiple divorces that skew the statistic.

I don't think Northern Ireland/ireland can compare. There's are so many cultural differences & what "we" think is outrageous the "English" think is normal & vice versa.

I agree Irishdad if that's the statics something is very wrong.

My sis in Scotland seems to know v few divorced people, I know loads and am married to a divorcee. She was quite shocked at it all.

That explains my Irish MIL's obsession with my Parents divorce, that happened 30 years ago and bout 22 years before I met DH

42%! That is quite something. Although as a pp said if it's multiple divorces for some of the same people that partly explains it. (The Ross from Friends effect?)

Scandalous? I'll tell you what's scandalous, the punishing and protracted hoops that Irish people have to jump through in order to obtain a divorce!

'Here ye go, you can have divorce if you must but we won't make it easy for you. You wanton libertines.^

Movember your posts make sobering reading. I wasn't aware that there was no final settlement.

To be honest I'm hard pushed to think of an Irish friend who is divorced or separated. I agree that a lot of that has to do with Irish people's cautious approach to marriage. You rarely hear of an Irish couple having a 6 month whirlwind affair resulting in a wedding. Most couples seem to be with each other for at least a decade beforehand. And marriage under the age of 30 is unusual. These days at least.

I seem to remember that Irish people have always married later than the European average. The average age of an Irish woman marrying in the mid 19th century was 27 (I think). But I'm sure a lot of that was due to forces outside of their control, famines, waiting to inherit a few acres etc.

I'm sure the financial crash meant that a lot of couples whose relationship had broken down were/are forced to remain living together in misery as negative equity and a stagnant housing market meant they were unable to afford to move out.

I too would rather have a 42% divorce rate than people stuck in miserable marriages.

Part of the reason people are stuck in miserable marriages is negative equity which has nothing to do with Catholicism or a desire to maintain a respectable facade..... SO I bet there will be even fewer divorces in my age group. The ones who bought houses at the start of the boom.

Sorry Squoosh, I'm only repeating you there.

IrishDad, don't be so sanctimonious!, you sound like Oprah fgs

Anyway, I know a few couples where the woman is married to a man who's on his second marriage to a younger wife, so if you want to make that legally harder, go ahead!

I don't know any of my single parent friends (women) who've gone on to marry a man with no children. So basically, men often get a second chance in Irish society but I@m not spotting that so much with my own circle of friends.

I think the recession is an important factor Chippy, so it's worth mentioning twice!

A 42% divorce rate IS scandalous. 42% of children coming from a broken home, seeing their parents split up, in mostly acrimonious circumstances. Do English people get married on a whim or something? Marriage there seems like a very flippant, disposable concept.

Do English people get married on a whim or something? Marriage there seems like a very flippant, disposable concept.

I think it's maybe more a 'in an individual social circle' thing. All my friends from university have married (I'm the only one who hasn't) and there isn't a single divorce amongst them after 15 years or so, including friends of friends. No idea how happy some of them are, or how many are bound together by negative equity but there you go.

Eh, irishdad, I am northern Irish and my parents separated 20 years ago after thirty years together (I was teenager) and while it was very sad their relationship disintegrated (whether they remained married or not) and quite traumatic, it was the six years of fighting and drinking too much as both so unhappy and drunkenly fighting that was MUCH more damaging for us kids than the eventual separation itself. We are all now functioning adults with stable relationships, parents were able to move on and become much happier, all get on extremely well, very close as a family. I dread to think what the last two decades would have been like if they'd stayed together. My mothers' parents stayed in an unhappy marriage because it was the 'right' thing to do - my mum is very damaged by the terrible atmosphere in her childhood home. Sometimes 'think of the children' is 'separate/divorce for the children'.

I do think people in the UK settle down earlier. I'm always taken aback on here when frequently say things like "I'm 27, been together 12 years, 2 dcs and another on the way"

No one here bats an eyelid. But that is a MASSIVE cultural difference. That's highly, highly unusual here.

"Broken home" is a very perjorative term.

My home consists of me and DD, but it is not broken and I'd be fucking offended if you said it was.

Totally agree. 'Broken home' should have gone out in the 1950s.

The thing is that a lot of people in Ireland think like IrishDad because of this perception that only very extreme circumstances warrant divorce. Any divorce under extreme and possibly hostile circumstances are going to have an effect on the DC. But that's not they way that most divorces are in the UK, when I lived in London all the divorced and or separated parents that I knew managed it in a very civilised fashion, at least as far as the DC were concerned. My opinion is that that the homes that these DC were from were far less broken than the type of Irish home where the parents stay married but continuously snipe at each other and are miserable.

Also, stats pedant, 42% of marriages ending in divorce does not at all mean that 42% of children are from divorced relationships.

I know loads of people who are separated and living in relationships with others, but divorce is less common. My parents are separated and my mum lives with another man now, but I can't imagine them bothering to get divorced.