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Divorce in The Time of a Coronavirus Pandemic
The inevitable recession is going to challenge couples like never before. So it’s time to get creative about expectations
Maybe you’ve been unhappy in your marriage for a long time. Maybe you just came to that realization. Maybe you’ve been going to marital therapy or have been reading up about divorce. Maybe you’ve spoken to a divorce attorney. Maybe you were close to deciding what to do — and then the coronavirus pandemic hit.
Your financial situation is unsure. If you have children, it hardly seems like a good time to add more stress and anxiety in their life.
Should you leave? Should you stay?
There’s a complicated history of how people have reacted during pandemics.
As the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio wrote about the bubonic plague in the 14th century, husbands left wives and vise versa. Perhaps worse, parents abandoned their children.
The Spanish influenza pandemic of of 1918–1920 didn’t seem to lead spouses to abandon each other, but it did lead to a lot of people widowed.
OK, parents are probably not going to abandon their children nowadays. But, will spouses abandon their vow of “for better or worse”?
