Somewhere along the way, marriage stopped being a promise and became a preference. You hear it in the language we use without noticing: falling in love, falling out of love, growing apart, not feeling it anymore. All of it treats the marriage the way you’d treat a subscription. Good while it serves you, cancelable when it doesn’t.
In this session, Katy just walked through what changes when a culture makes that swap, not for the adults doing the swapping, but for the kids standing in the room where it happens. Mom’s love, dad’s love, and stability are the three things every child needs to grow up whole. The first two only get delivered in full by a child’s own mother and father. The third, stability, only comes from one place: a marriage that was built to last, not one built to feel good.
Cohabitation and no-fault divorce are not two unrelated modern problems. They’re the same problem, just in different stages. Both trade a lifelong vow for a feeling. Both hand children a home with an expiration date.
This is session three of our series walking through the Them Before Us book, section by section. We’ve covered whether children have rights, and why biology matters to those rights. This week, we ask what happens to those rights once the adults in a child’s life stop making promises and start making preferences.
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