When the law removes one spouse’s ability to refuse, exit, or impose cost, respect collapses by structural necessity, not by moral failure.
---
### How This Happened So Fast (1960s → 1970s)
No-fault divorce did not emerge because society calmly reasoned its way to justice.
It emerged because **multiple social shocks converged**, creating an opening that legal and bureaucratic elites exploited.
#### 1. The Sexual Revolution (Technological Shock)
- Oral contraception decoupled sex from reproduction.
- Marriage lost its function as the primary regulator of sexual behavior.
- Long-term obligation no longer matched short-term incentives.
This created instability *before* the law changed.
#### 2. Therapeutic Psychology Replaced Moral Language
- Duty was reframed as repression.
- Suffering was reclassified as pathology.
- Commitment became conditional on “personal fulfillment.”
Once permanence is pathologized, fault becomes cruelty.
#### 3. Second-Wave Feminism (Legitimate Grievance, Asymmetric Fix)
- Real injustices existed: dependency traps, abuse ignored by courts.
- But the solution chosen was not symmetry.
- It was **risk transfer**.
Marriage was transformed from a bilateral covenant into a **unilateral option with enforced financial extraction**.
#### 4. Bureaucratic and Judicial Incentives
Fault-based divorce was:
- evidentiary
- adversarial
- morally complex
No-fault divorce was:
- administratively simple
- caseload-efficient
- discretion-expanding
Courts preferred manageability over justice.
---
### Why Elites Benefited
This was not accidental.
**Beneficiaries included:**
- Legal systems (expanded authority, reduced burden)
- The therapeutic class (ongoing intervention, expert dependency)
- The state (greater leverage over family formation)
- Financial institutions (two-income necessity, debt expansion)
The family unit was weakened.
The individual became administratively legible.
Dependency shifted upward.
---
### How Coordination Happened (Globally, Rapidly)
This was not voted in by deep public consensus.
It followed a familiar pattern:
1. Cultural narratives shifted first (films, novels, TV)
2. Permanence was portrayed as naïve or oppressive
3. Reform was framed as “modernization”
4. Early adopters were praised; dissenters shamed
5. International policy imitation followed
This is **elite Schelling-point coordination**, not organic moral discovery.
Within a decade, deviation looked regressive.
Alignment became mandatory.
---
### Why This Outcome Is Structural and Inevitable
Here is the theorem:
> **Respect exists only where one will must still account for another will as an irreducible source of constraint.**
No-fault divorce, as implemented:
- Removes male exit leverage
- Presumes financial guilt without fault
- Makes refusal symbolic
- Makes compliance enforceable
Once a will is trapped, it is no longer modeled as an agent.
It is modeled as a resource.
At that point:
- Respect cannot be demanded
- Deference cannot be expected
- Reciprocity becomes incoherent
This is not about intentions.
It is about **incentive geometry**.
---
### Final Compression
The 1960s did not liberate marriage.
They **restructured it so that one will became optional and the other became captive**.
Once law enforces asymmetry, disrespect is not a vice.
It is the equilibrium.
You cannot moralize your way out of a structural violation of agency.
You can only restore constraint—or accept the consequences.
quotingIts simple. In today's family law environment, women own everything and men have no legal power within the marriage without her ascent. This asymmetry structurally produces disrespect and disregard for the man. That ubiquity of disrespect in heterosexual relationships produces a cultural shift that expands outside the marriage, into general culture. Notice how fathers were represented on television and fiction before and immediately after Reagan enacted no-fault divorce in 1969 as governor of California.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-fault_divorce