When divorce appears at all in fiction, it usually gets a bad rap. It breaks up families, causes tense arguments between couples, or traumatizes innocent children, like in Judy Blume’s It’s Not The End of The World. In historical or epic fantasy fiction, on the other hand, divorce seems to simply not exist. There are plenty of unhappy marriages, certainly, but the estranged couples either endure unhappily, murder each other, or flee in terror.
I’d like to present a case for the awesomeness of divorce, its historical antecedents, and why it can be a useful tool for creating complexity and drama in speculative fiction and fantasy.
First of all, divorce is in no way a modern invention. In the Roman Empire, at least one-sixth of elite marriages are estimated to have ended by divorce within the first decade, and probably substantially more (as detailed in Marriage, Divorce, and Children in Ancient Rome, edited by Beryl Rawson). In ancient pre-Song dynasty China, women could initiate divorces and own their own property; sometimes mothers-in-law even forced their sons to divorce insufficiently respectful daughters-in-law (for more on this, see Patricia Ebrey’s Women in the Family in Chinese History). Henry VIII is, of course, famous for his divorces as well as his marital executions. While divorce and annulments were more rare in medieval Europe, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s separation from the King of France and subsequent remarriage to the future King of England was not by any means unique.
The potential ability of women to initiate divorce and to own property has had profound positive effects on many cultures, as well as on the lives of women themselves. On a basic level, if a woman can choose to leave a marriage and take her dowry back to her birth family, her husband has pragmatic reasons to keep her happy and listen to her opinions. The threat of divorce, especially when accompanied by potential financial loss, offers meaningful leverage to both sides in a marriage. For instance, the first known marriage contract to ban domestic abuse comes from Greek-controlled Egypt in 92 BCE. The size of the wife’s dowry probably contributed to her ability to require her husband to treat her well, to forbid concubines, and even to allow for her own brief affairs as long as she kept them discreet. In the Jewish Talmud, a husband who refuses to have sex with his wife unless they both are fully dressed is required to divorce her and give her dowry back.
On a larger societal level, I don’t think it’s coincidental that the high Roman Empire, Tang Dynasty China, and the early United States were all societies that legalized female-initiated divorce and prospered economically and culturally. Both Rome and China faltered during later eras when women’s rights were reduced; prosperity in the 20th century around the world is closely correlated with women’s property and divorce rights. The option of divorce lifts all boats—logically enough if you assume that having two people rather than one contributing to the economic decisions of a family increases the odds of success.
Introducing divorce, especially wife-initiated divorce, into a fantasy setting can also allow an author an opportunity to make their society less horrifically patriarchal and misogynist than many imaginary worlds modeled on medieval history. Many authors already try to fix this problem, of course, but often they simply tape a feminist drape over an oppressive basic structure, without thinking about larger issues. If divorce is a possibility, Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere do not necessarily have to endure an endless doomed love triangle. Guinevere can legally leave Arthur, marry Lancelot, and live peacefully and virtuously ever after. The wars and deaths caused by Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen’s apparent illicit romance might have been solved much more simply by Rhaegar divorcing his Dornish princess and marrying Lyanna. The Cinderella and Prince Charming of Into the Woods can simply admit that some marriages don’t end happily ever after and move on without the need for faked deaths.
Divorce can also allow for a much wider variety of complex family structures and relationships. A famous ancient Roman legal case involved a couple where the husband believed that his wife had become pregnant by him before their divorce was final. She denied that she was pregnant at all. The court resolved the case by empaneling a trio of three experienced midwives to examine the woman and determine, by majority vote, whether she was indeed expecting a child. If she was pregnant, her ex-husband had the right to post armed guards outside her new home for the entire duration of the pregnancy, in order to prevent her from aborting the fetus. As soon as the babe was born, he would have full legal custody. On the other hand, if the midwives ruled against the husband, he would have to pay a fine and all legal fees. The potential for drama in this scenario alone could produce a dozen stories, although unfortunately we don’t know the actual verdict.
Questions of child custody provide another potential avenue to explore. In most pre-modern societies, the father had complete control over his biological children. However, his power did not necessarily prevent a mother from visitation rights. Imagine, for a moment, the spoilt young heroine who runs away to her non-custodial parent, because “Daddy lets me ride a unicorn when I’m at his castle.” If issues with wicked stepmothers can be potentially resolved by appeals to living biological mothers, it is possible to keep the drama of the neglected child without killing off quite so many older female characters as typical in many fantasies.
Fantasy characters with longer lifespans also suggest the possibility of multiple singular marriages over centuries. Elrond’s wife Celebrian separates from him when she goes off to the West to deal with her trauma after being abducted by Orcs. This leaves Elrond to be a rather incompetent single dad, but there is never even a suggestion that Elrond might form a relationship with some other lucky elven lady. A wise stepmother might have been able to offer useful advice to Arwen Undomiel. In general, serial polygamy ended by divorce rather than by death would make a very logical marital pattern for many versions of elves.
Many fantasy authors wrestle with the desire to produce historically plausible narratives that are not innately offensive and oppressive by modern standards of gender, sexuality, and race relations. This is a worthwhile struggle; there are far too many lazy works that blame their prevalence of rape and misogyny on “historical accuracy.” At the same time, patriarchy and sexism have actual societal consequences; you cannot just create a world where women can become fighters and everyone wears a magic birth control necklace and expect that nothing else will change. Adding divorce into the mix is one means of balancing gender and marital dynamics, without sacrificing the coherence and logic of a fictional society.
An awareness of these actual historical patterns can also offer opportunities to depict seemingly implausible and fantastical character relationships. Ancient Roman familial dynamics could get even messier than Game of Thrones—take the marriage of the future Emperor Tiberius and his stepsister Julia the Elder. Tiberius’ stepfather, Julia’s father Augustus, forced him to first divorce his beloved wife Vipsania, who was also Julia’s stepdaughter by her previous marriage, before reluctantly marrying his stepsister/mother-in-law. Apparently Tiberius retaliated by utterly ruining the political career of his ex-wife Vipsania’s next husband. The Roman politician Cato the Younger, still a revered conservative icon today, made a political alliance by divorcing his beloved wife so that his colleague could marry her instead and they could share a peculiar semi-familial bond. Sometimes history is more sensational than even the most outrageous fantasy.
Top image: Into the Woods (2014)
Anise K. Strong has degrees in Classical Studies from Yale and Columbia. She is an Assistant Professor of History at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and is also a consultant for various television series in their depictions of antiquity. Despite the theme of this article, she is also very happily married with children and dog. She’s happy to answer questions about ancient gender and sexuality on Twitter at @anisekstrong or you can read her new book, Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman World (Cambridge, 2016).
Why divorce her when she’ll probably die in childbirth anyway?
From a storytelling standpoint, this offers a lot of great opportunities: you could suddenly gain a new political ally when a noble couple divorced. You can also benefit in terms of tactics or finance if the wife took her dowered lands back to her parental relatives. There can also be alternatives to having your brave adventurer motivated by the deaths of his wife and child – maybe he ensured their safety from their enemies by having a divorce and letting her take their children and move elsewhere. (Maybe he’s been gone over a decade and she’s being pressured to remarry – oh wait, that’s the Odyssey. Except in that case they assumed Odysseus was dead.)
It’d make an interesting story if the midwives’ verdict was wrong. It could swing widely between farce and tragedy by playing off the absurdity of a woman being declared legally pregnant when the physical evidence is lacking while contrasting it with the actual consequences to the woman in question.
I love this post, thank you! The serial monagamy thing will be relevant for a lot of people today, never mind elves. I hope more writers do start to think along these lines it makes so much more sense than the ‘paste on a few exceptional females while the rest are stuck with marriage for life and all that implies’ thing.
How many people read fantasy to see a character resolve their problems with a legal action?
@5 I guess somebody hasn’t been reading the Craft Sequence :P
Yes! The Roman attitude to marriage and divorce is really important – women had a lot more rights in marriage, and divorce didn’t have the kind of social stigma that it had in Western culture as recently as the 1980’s. (In 1982 my recently divorced mother was forced by a bank to get her ex-husband’s permission to enter into a mortgage)
Property laws are fascinating and very different throughout history – there are so many different options to draw inspiration from than the generic medieval Christian default.
Ancient Roman women could not only leave a marriage without fuss or complex legal ritual (in Republican Rome they literally only had to speak the words ‘I take my things and go’ but they were also entitled to receive back their dowry or equivalent. They didn’t even change their names upon marriage. They didn’t have to cite a REASON for wanting to end a marriage. (And neither of course did the men) Outside the city itself, women had more freedoms and widows & divorced women whose fathers had died had the greatest financial freedoms and power. Many of them became civic leaders, or businesswomen. (that dowry money comes in handy as a self-starter)
Marriage laws got more hardcore during the reign of Augustus the first Emperor, particularly with the outrageous definition of adultery which only referred to the marital status of the woman, and with the alarming legal punishments for adultery (which were very rarely actually employed – Republican men had the legal right to beat a wife caught drinking alcohol but there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that actually using that right would be seen as outrageous by family and friends).
There is still plenty of potential tension in a world that allows for divorce – children’s custody being the most complex issue especially with heirs and royal families. But oh wouldn’t it be nice to have some DIFFERENT romantic/relationship patterns in fantasy fiction?
I might add, fairy tales are already on top of this — the popular Disney series Sofia the First is about a blended family, with Sofia the stepdaughter of a king (who is either widowed or divorced; as with the Brady Bunch this is never made clear) who chose to marry a commoner as his second wife. Sofia has to learn to be a princess and deal with moving house, balancing old friends with new friends, and becoming a step-sibling to the king’s existing children. These stories work in magical kingdoms!!!
GOT has a society of rules based I’m part on medieval Europe. Women were oppressed, owned by their fathers and then husband’s. This whole situation gives birth to the entire story lines. And it is a reminder of how blessed we are in many countries to have our God given rights respected no matter our gender, color or religion… at least that’s the goal.
If Cersei so miserably sold off to Robert for her father’s ambition hadn’t been treated like this we might not have the antagonist we love to hate. IfDany had a say in who she married she never would have been sold to the Dothraki and have her character tempered like the finest steel into a strong and powerful Queen. Brienne wouldn’t be the amazing character she is if she hadn’t had to overcome this rigid patriarcal society where she cannot fit into their rigid gender rules and suffers cruelty her entire life only to embrace her curse as a gift and become not only a formidable female knight but the knight with the most honor of any other in the series and one of the best fighters.
I agree exploring more societies could make amazing stories but I disagree that we should change existing stories to include divorce or women’s rights etc. The story is a lesson and we all need to see things in these alternative light, focus etc.
Also… divorce would seriously mess up their alliances. Marriage wasn’t about love in GOT. Just ask the attendees of the red wedding.
Interesting points, but one caveat–this storyline really doesn’t work at all within the philosophical structure of Middle-Earth, and not just because of Tolkien’s Catholicism. There are several fascinating essays about Elven marriage in Morgoth’s Ring, in which Tolkien says both that lengthy separations between spouses are not uncommon among Elves, given their potentially infinite lifespan, and that remarriage even after the death of a spouse, while permissible, is an ethical gray area since Elves can be reborn with the same personalities from the dead. That worldbuilding, IMHO, creates plenty of room for interesting narratives that don’t conform to expectations. (Including a story that comes very close to woman-initiated divorce by abandonment in the First Age narrative of Eol and Aredhel, at least in some versions. The Second Age tragedy “Aldarion and Erendis” in Unfinished Tales is also arguably a story about divorce in all but name.)
On the other hand, a real-world influenced fantasy (@7’s citation of just some of the ludicrous marital gyrations of the Julio-Claudians is a good reference point!) isn’t bound by that very specific piece of metaphysics.
(And P.S.–I’ve never heard anyone suggest that the death of the Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods is faked. I suppose a director could play it that way, but I don’t think it was Sondheim/Lapine’s intent.)
I can’t remember the details now, but when I was reading the History of Middle Earth series, there was a whole big portion of stuff about the Valar debating whether or not Finwe could be allowed to remarry after Miriel decided to die; since Elves were created to not suffer natural death (and also have the possibility of reincarnation) their marriage bonds were supposed to last (although I recall that they didn’t always necessarily live together and could just do their own thing a lot of the time and that’s seen as totally normal. I think Galadriel and Celeborn separate for awhile too after all the events of the books – one of them goes to Valinor well before the other), but the departure of Miriel left Finwe so depressed that they had to hold a council to determine what to be done about it; in the end it was determined that there had to be a waiting period of some type, and then if he remarried it meant she could never reincarnate (which she had no plans for).
Of course, given all the drama that came from Finwe’s second marriage it’s hard to say if this was meant to prove a point or not ;)
Anyway, divorce (or rather, the breakup of a once happy marriage that then spurs on a divorce) is a sucky thing but I think it is true that if it is to exist, the opportunities need to be equal.
Arrgh, I see @9 beat me to the Tolkien reference ;)
As an aside, I’m pretty sure that the Gwen/Arthur/Lance tragedy was a problem of her loving them both, not falling for Lance and being trapped with Arthur. She wouldn’t have divorced Arthur any more than she’d have denounced her fling with Lance.
@12 OT3 FTW?
Recognizing that not all failures of monogamy need to destroy a relationship is another useful tool.
On a larger societal level, I don’t think it’s coincidental that the high Roman Empire, Tang Dynasty China, and the early United States were all societies that legalized female-initiated divorce and prospered economically and culturally.
Strong counter-example: in Great Britain from 1700-1850, womens’ rights were at their nadir. Divorce was theoretically available, but required an Act of Parliament, thereby placing it out of the reach of all but the very wealthiest. The religious doctrine underpinning marriage held that the wife became part of the husband’s flesh, quite literally, so that all her property and all her rights were subsumed under his, so that she wouldn’t have any legal right to hold money of her own — thereby making it impossible for a wife to initiate the (very costly) divorce proceedings. (The practice of a wife taking her husband’s name is a hold-over from this tradition.) Abortion carried the death penalty (as murder); contraception was generally unavailable or illegal. Indeed, the rights of women in the UK during this period were even more restricted than they are in Saudi Arabia or Iran today …
… Despite which, this is the culture that produced the industrial revolution and went from being a minor power on the outskirts of Europe (at the start) to being a world-spanning imperial colossus responsible for 50% of planetary GDP (by the end).
In fact, if I was going to cherry-pick, I could probably make a case proving that the relative decline of Britain’s status as a great power was the result of female emancipation. (But we all know that the end of empire actually came about for entirely different reasons, so I’m not going to tweak your noses.) The point is, while it’s absolutely true that enhanced rights and status for women is essential to a modern liberal state, and that achieving modern liberal statehood correlates strongly with prosperity, this isn’t a direct causal link. And by all means let’s see more fantasy with interesting family trees!
Well………………in the show, Vikings… the way Lagertha divorced Earl Sigvard worked for me!
@14: First of all, I’m glad you enjoyed the piece.(And that goes for all the other commenters as well!) I’ve been fascinated by your take on fantasy and economics for many years. Regarding your counterexample, you’ve just hit on the grant proposal I’m writing over the next few weeks so that I have the time and space to do more research! Current scholarship has a lot of different perspectives about how common wife-initiated divorce was in the British Empire during the late 19th century, as well as in the U.S. from 1780-1815. See Stephanie Coontz’s various articles, on the one hand, and Mary Shanley’s _Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian Englend._ What I hope to argue is that in fact, after 1856, with the passage of the Divorce Act, both British women and Great Britain itself prospered. Of course, this requires me to emphasize the dominance of the British Empire from 1850-1918, rather than, as you point out, its rise from 1700-1850. But that actually fits with the other evidence – the Romans were more oppressive towards women during their rise to power from 250 BCE-30 BCE as well, and then gave more independence during the late Republic and early Principate. The same is approximately true for China. This is a big project, and you’re right that sweeping generalizations and cherry-picking examples are really dangerous. We’ll see how the research turns out! I’ve just learned from Twitter that apparently the Ottomans and Mameluk Egypt are also known for wife-initiated divorce, including, according to Shan Chakraborty, that women could divorce their husbands for not providing them with sufficient coffee. So there’s another whole angle to look at. Put another way, there’s a reason that _Divorce: A Force for Progress_ wasn’t my _first_ book, or probably my second.
One clarification that may be worth making: I’m not suggesting that Tolkien or GRRM’s works would be necessarily improved by adding divorce – those works stand on their own merits, and I especially appreciate commenters’ notes on Tolkien’s complex views on elven lifelong monogamy. I was simply using them as a thought experiment, since they are familiar fantasy texts which have a very wide audience, to point out how different stories might be with this extra element.
The Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust has Vlad separated from his wife in later books. It causes him and the reader a lot of heartache since Vlad never actually gets over his wife.
@16: Divorce for not enough coffee sounds totally reasonable to me! (And only a totally delinquent shitbag of a husband would be so mercilessly cruel in the morning …)
Yes we really need to support divorce as an acceptable alternative to conflict resolution. While we are at it, we can also continue to prop up the “women are always the victims in relationships” trope!
@18: And they have a kid, too, which complicates the “get over” part.
In Charles Stross’ Laundry series (fantasy if you believe that Cthulhu doesn’t really exist) Bob and Mo are presently going through a rough patch in their marriage. Bob’s new status (no spoilers) isn’t helping.
Interesting premise with a thesis which is hard to sustain from what you’ve argued. You’ll have to do a lot more work on how to both quantify and link societal gains to your assumptions on divorce providing individual economic gains, which also are going to need to be quantified. A problem you’re going to run into is that data can be mined on a lot of the things you want to argue in some interesting places (wills and deeds, for instance), but it’s not been analyzed in the manner that will make constructing your thesis a matter of referencing it, let alone correlating it.
I’d also point out that if you’re going to start chopping up time periods to meet your thesis – the British rise, for instance – you’d best have VERY good evidence as to why you’re doing so. But then again, I suppose this is why this is your second book.
Regarding fantasy, however, a simpler question: why limit yourself to gendered divorce in your criticism?
Relationships in SF/F are often one of the the weakest spot of most books; I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that incorporated Gottman’s observations on how couples actually interact for better or for worse in their outcomes of getting divorced, and his work is pretty much accepted as canon by academics nowadays. Emotional abuse within relationships is rarely portrayed accurately, and the substantial skewing of it by gender (far more women do so than men within hetero relationships) in practice is almost never done. And last but not least, we rarely see either dysfunctional or complementary relationships navigate the shoals that can drive couples apart.
So you may be right in needing more divorce, but I’d argue that we need more accurate relationships first.
@22: So you may be right in needing more divorce, but I’d argue that we need more accurate relationships first.
Yep, agree 95% (and working on it).
I suspect it’s because a lot of authors are borrowing from time periods like the late middle ages where divorce was difficult or impossible (look what Henry VIII went through). Which is sort of lazy, but then I feel like a lot of high fantasy in general is lazy because people rarely look at the effects that a magic system would have on economics and society in general and just copy and paste a setting with a few changes.
@22: As I said, give me 4 years and I’ll hopefully have a solid structure rather than the very exciting hot air balloon I’ve got currently. :) On the relationship perspective, absolutely you have a good point, but it’s a larger and more complex case to make than suitable for a brief piece like this. But even in shallowly written relationships, the dynamic changes if there is a possible non-fatal ending, in the same way that unplanned pregnancy plots don”t always need to end with “and now the birth mother is raising a child.”
To be honest, I really don’t want to see divorce in fantasy fiction much more than it is already present. (And it is present, just not very common).
The biggest problem I have with fantasy fiction in general is the tendency of writers to simply copy-and-paste contemporary social attitudes to a fictional setting based on a historic era. When I read a story set in a faux-Medieval setting, I expect to see cultures and societies and, yes, even gender roles inspired by Medieval history. These social constructs were not invented by happenstance or whimsy, but rather arose naturally due to many factors. Transplanting modern social constructs and mechanisms to a fictional setting is, far more often than not, a cheap and easy way for a writer to imbue his or her setting with believably without actually devoting the time or effort necessary to bake that believably into the story itself.
Something like divorce is not inherently bad. But if it is to be an element of a speculative fiction story, there needs to be some kind of exploration of why and how it exists as a social institution rather than simply incorporating it because it is such a familiar and common experience in our lives.
I believe at least some Scandinavian cultures (roughly Viking era?) also had straightforward divorce. I believe you had to say, essentially “I divorce you” at three points in the house–the hearth, the bed, and the threshold if memory serves. And yes, the woman could then reclaim the property she’d brought to the marriage. Sorry I don’t recall the book reference–I read it years ago.
Lots of good food for thought here. You talk about some of the conflicts in existing fiction would be unpicked by the option to divorce. But there are plenty of new conflicts that spring up in their place. Divorces are often very messy, especially when it comes to untangling property, and when you involve that in noble families or royal ones, you might be undoing a treaty by ending a marriage, to say nothing of child custody questions and inheritance. There’s lots of room to get GoT-levels of tangled feuding families even more tangled when, say, your ex-spouse is now married into an enemy family and has your heir with him/her for half the year…
@25 I’d argue that’s really more a matter of poor plot development rather than shallow writing, but you’re correct on that both topics are too long for this.
One thought though: have you thought about writing something a bit simpler at first – say, the topical equivalent of Abbott’s History of Marriage save that it covers divorce instead? Given that you’re learning random bits on divorce from diverse sources, it doesn’t sound like it’s been covered at that level unless there’s a thesis or two sitting around someplace.
@26 I agree that pasting modern attitudes and social conventions onto a medieval backdrop makes for lazy and unsatisfying worldbuilding. But relying on the same generic view of what a medieval setting is, and the attitudes on any number of subjects, including marriage and divorce, regardless of specific time and place, regardless of the nuance of actual history, also makes for lazy and unsatisfying worldbuilding.
Besides the cultures/eras discussed in the article and comments already of examples where divorce was, historically, relatively easy to obtain, even in some of the eras where divorce “wasn’t an option”…sometimes it was. I’ve been researching Renaissance England for my own novel, and I was surprised at the number of divorces/annulments and separations I came across outside the royal family. I’d always had the impression that Henry VIII’s case was practically unique. But no, there are examples of both men and women divorcing on the grounds of “pre-contract” where one of the parties had been engaged to someone else for a time; it is mind-boggling that an engagement/betrothal that was broken off could interfere with a later marriage, but apparently it could and did…when it suited them. If a marriage was going well, it would never be brought up. But if either party wanted out of the marriage, then suddenly knowledge of their prior engagement, or their spouses’, would “prey upon their conscience” and a divorce could be obtained. Of course, somehow most of those divorces didn’t result in going off to marry the person to whom they had the pre-contract. Though at other times a pre-contract seems to have been invented using very dubious timelines of how the “couple” could have met in order to end one marriage and be together. Given how intermarried the noble families were, it was also quite possible to divorce/annul a marriage based on kinship, such as claiming one was no longer comfortable being married to one’s second cousin even though you’d had a dispensation from the church at the time.
All that may not look like the modern status of divorce, and nor does it look like Roman divorce, and nor does it look like Scandinavian viking-era divorce or historical Chinese divorce. But it does make for some interesting drama. And it really happened. It can add _greater_ historical accuracy and texture to a story.
There is often a dissonance between what a society believes about itself, and the lived experience. There may be stigma and uneasiness around the exceptions, about the moments when a society’s ideals give way to practicality, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen, just that people didn’t want to talk about them much.
For Game of Thrones divorce does exist as an option. In the first book Renly was scheming to put Margeary Tyrell in King Robert’s way in the hopes that he would put Cersei aside and make Margeary his Queen. Which would not have sat well with Cersei, as she may have hated being Robert’s wife, she liked being Queen. What led to the troubles with Rhaegar’s and Lyanna Stark’s relationship did not really have much to do with Rhaegar’s marital status (the normal rules of marriage in the Seven Kingdoms did not apply to House Targaryen). Rather it was the fact he interfered with political alliances between two Great Houses without contacting anyone of his intentions. The rebellion happened because King Aerys burned Ned Stark’s father and brother for even daring to ask what Rhaegar was up to.
This is one aspect of the Harry Potter books that bugs me. Set in the 90’s, when there were so many single-parent families in real life, you don’t see any divorced parents in the Wizarding World. At Bill and Fleur’s wedding, they are declared to be “bonded for life.” Is this a binding magical contract that is impossible to get out of? If so, it’s no wonder the wizarding world is so messed up.
Allowing divorce would have kept them from having Spidey make a deal with the devil…. ugh!
@29, Medieval/Early Modern marriage law was an effing nightmare! But very convenient for the rich and powerful who wanted to go get out of a marriage. Pre contract, consanguinity, or flaws in dispensations from above were all grounds for anullment and you’d normally get away with it UNLESS the spouse you were trying to get rid of or his/her family opposed the anullment and were more powerful than you or your family.
@32 I always it assumed it was the same sort of happy ever after rhetoric you’d find in regular “muggle” weddings which still lean heavily on the “for as long as you both shall live” and “which Heavy G brought together let no man put asunder” language despite everyone knowing you can apply for a divorce pretty easily in most Western Nations these days. People like to imagine they are bonded and soul entwined for ever more, but that is not the case for a sizeable chunk of the population. Then again, a soul bond probably explains why Harry and Hermione didn’t get divorces once they realised their mistakes…like they did in my fanfic. :p