Divorce in the Philippines – A dilemma

THE readouts are thick with religious overtones. People agree to wed, a contract between two people which is a contract with no termination clause, which is a bad contract.

Laws on divorce and annulment are lunatic because they require one party to prove the other lunatic so the marriage can be declared never to have happened. This is just game playing and the court and the attorney fees hold it open only as a resource for the well to do.

Why not be honest? If the marriage is not working, it is not the job of the state or the church to force people to stay bound to one another. It is up to them. This is called freedom; the opposite which is bondage. Marriage is a gamble; either you win or you lose. There is more bondage in the Philippines and it looks like there will be burden and game playing forever.

There is no such thing as divorce in our country. It is an extremely difficult issue that requires a qualified lawyer who is intimately familiar with all the intricacies and complexities regarding divorce and annulment in the Philippines. When love fades in a marriage, divorce is not an option for couples for the reason that it might bring the country to a moral brink. But the current situation is not good enough especially in situations of wife beating or when children are beat up, marital rape and incest. We already have annulment and then there’s legal separation. A lot of homes are broken each year by desertion. This is a poor man’s divorce where no legal action is taken to break the marriage bonds in any official way. Desertion is simply accepted as the end of marriage. There is no divorce, largely because the proceedings cost money. While some have the money to pay for the legal proceedings of divorce, others use desertion as an easy and cheap escape from an unhappy marriage.

People who get legally separated in the Philippines are arguably happy with their lives but they cannot remarry. It is just a matter of separation of bed and board.

Divorce is now breaking up marriages three times rapidly as it did half a century ago. New pressures are causing strain and tension in the relationships between husbands and wives, and making it more difficult for them to stay happily married. The rise in divorce rate is in part the price we are paying for not being able to adjust readily to certain changes in our modern civilization. Divorce is foreign to us Filipinos but with marital problems and desertion on the rise now-a-days, it could be a solution or better still an annulment. It would be best for a couple to part ways rather than living together under one roof and sinning through their violence that will affect and traumatize the innocent children.