The last essay C.S. Lewis ever published before his death was entitled, "We Have No Right to Happiness," and was about this very topic. He also covers the breakdown of marriage in "That Hideous Strength" against the backdrop of a world run by a Transhumanist conspiracy.
Very ahead of his time.
Lewis is holding to a sacramental view of marriage and as a Christian I agree with him. I think it's the only way out of this mess but it will take several generations, if only because the youth are so broken - young women by hypergamy, men by pornography, all by Boomer divorce.
Some people view Church as a magic spell that turns hypergamous women into doting housewives but that's simply not how it works. Lewis knew this in the 40s. I feel for young men who are trying to be monogamous but whose only options are often women who've swapped fluids and tossed aside several men before finally seeking material security in marriage as they age.
It's a terrible foundation for a family - Christian or not, there are spiritual laws of cause and effect. Traditionally, licentious women would've found repentance in the chastity of a Monastery, not in marriage, but this practice is even more broken than marriage.
Thanks Reinhardt, I'm going to read Lewis's We Have No Right to Happiness and look into his Space Trilogy. I agree with you that there are spiritual laws of cause and effect - including from hookup culture, but also many which pass down generationally - and the widespread feelings of nihilism, atomization and disconnectness that society feels has been a long running and intensifying trend as industrialization and technology ascended...
They're both very good reads - the essay is quite short and the last book of the Space Trilogy is almost a standalone as it's intended to be a fictionalized variant of his nonfiction "The Abolition of Man."
The whole trilogy is good but knowing your work I'd say That Hideous Strength is the one you'd get the most out of.
Lewis' deep understanding of occult mysticism, Taoism, and apostolic Christendom give his work a numinous prescience. It's incredible how much of the picture he managed to discern when the technostructure was still in its infancy.
the changes that have been unleashed on us in the last 10 years are on the scale of once-in-a-lifetime events for previous generations. it is simply cope to think that marriage will be able to survive the massive social engineering that has been wrought on society going forward. as an institution, marriage is simply gone among 30 and unders.
in general, women have no agency and are just the reflection of social trends and chthonic psychic undercurrents sweeping through our age. they are a like a dirty, cracked, distorted mirror reflecting all of society's ills at us. they are the frontline soldiers of the regime, enforcing the terror and nastiness that has been cooked up for us.
the insane sex obsession, novelty drive, rampant narcissism, social climbing, vicious shaming tactics, ratting out others for personal gain, the mental illness, hormonal disorder, desire to hurt and main and snuff out life, etc. these behaviors are tolerated in women and even held up as good things. this is because men are essentially second-class citizens. we don't have the same rights or privileges as women do anymore. we are essentially powerless when it comes to women tyrannizing us in schools, at the workplace, in the family, at the level of politics, etc.
men have no recourse at all.
thus, i think that talk of marriage at this stage of decline is akin to polishing the brass on the Titanic.
i don't know of a single healthy m/f relationship among anyone that i've ever met. not one. not growing up and not now, even among so-called "trad" advocates. men should cut themselves some slack. we're in the middle of a raging wildfire that will consume the old world. social life as we used to know it is simply over, people are just in denial about this.
what is the answer to this?
well, i think the correct mental model to adopt is essentially to view oneself as being in a hostile wilderness. society is the unforgiving cold or the saber-tooth tigers. social organization is a tool to survive the elements. all that is detrimental to survival has to be jettisoned, including these old ways of thinking about relationships and so on.
It seems to me that Afghanistan still has some rather healthy birthrates. Maybe those people are getting something right, that we are getting wrong? Maybe it doesn't even matter that much, wether we end up understanding what - since demography will adjudicate the Earth to those who get it right anyway?
Divorced parents run two houses, have two electric bills. Kids of divorce as adults have to go to and extra Christmas, and Thanksgiving. Drive more. Costs more gas and wear and tear.
They inherit less money to Kickstart their lives per capita when their parents die.
Everything about divorce destroys the family, as the entire point of family is the combination of people produces more effective resource management. Same way it costs less per person to feed a family of 6 than it does to feed a family of 3.
So if you feed two families of 3, you lose to someone feeding one family of 6. It's generational degradation and the concept of divorcing when your kids are older, still degrades the family.
It divides the resources of the lineage and increases the amount of peasant stock. If two parents living together die in their 400K home and have 2 kids, their kids get 200K each.
If those parents divorce and sell the house and each live in an apartment on half the retirement, odds are those kids now get like 25K or something. If you care about your lineage, your legacy, you descendents.... your sole reason for having been relevant to the species, divorce is a sure fire way to degrade your genetic line in every way imaginable.
The only legitimate concept to divorce is if someone is truly degrading the line so bad that they are doing more overall harm than if the line is degraded, it's like cancer surgery. And basically if the parent deserving of divorce is still palatable by the kids, either the kids are fools, or, they should be rejected by the kids as not part of the family.
I very much agree with you - divorce impoverishes the family and the only ones who benefit from it are the attorneys. For a long time I knew of couples where the man complained that he was “too poor to divorce”, and I didn’t understand what he meant until I was older…
More so than divorce, and as a general rule, sexual "freedom" is an unmitigated disaster for any complex social system. Society rests on the work of males, and traditional monogamy allows them to 1) have a personal stake in the collective wellbeing 2) do something else than chase women.
With the sexual "liberation" and widespread divorce, you have neither. Not only are you supposed to waste a huge amount chasing potential partners, but you're also supposed to work your ass off even though she can leave with the children because her emotions told her so. This is clearly unsustainable.
Well written! My wife and I were both children of divorced households. It is something one must deliberately overcome and even then it is not easy. I laid out a defense of marriage in Discourse 4.
I think most people.. are either too immature or too narcissistic for marriage. Not to mention the perception of marriage has been abused by social engineers, turning it into a battle if not flat out undesirable.
Thanks Hugh, and congratulations on overcoming both you and your wife’s backgrounds. I agree with you; traditionally the nuclear family was held together by religious and social mores, but those have been eviscerated and discarded, and the nuclear family is very weak these days. Pervasive immaturity and narcissism in the West makes marriage a barely tenable proposition for many…
Observationally I see this in my friends from college (very few high school friends whose parents are divorced). Not to sound like a communist, but I also have to wonder how much of this is a deliberate tactic to impoverish us by the powers that be. Paying for individual housing and/or two families is much more expensive than for a single combined family. Not to mention all the legal fees.
Yes, exactly. Marx and Lenin were both major critics of the nuclear family and wanted to transform it; those with healthy family structures don’t need to make an ideology their God. I actually had a short segment from the Trading Places producer Aaron Russo that I almost included in this post where he talked about how the elite conspired to break up the nuclear family to increase their own power, which you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdtdidL2MQo
However, it came to my attention that the connection that Russo relied on for that information was a guy named Nicholas Rockefeller. The only problem is Nicholas Rockefeller was a fake: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14386439/fake-Nicholas-rockefeller-harvard-yale-Spiro-Pavlovich.html . Now, this guy still went to Harvard law school and had connections with many of the high-up elites, so who knows how much of what he said is true, but he wasn’t a Rockefeller…
Thanks Larry, I'll check it out. It's a sad thing, so many of these kids didn't have a chance at life before the rug was yanked out under them. The worst cases are when mothers actively groom their children into turning transsexual, holding back affection unless they comply...
I’m sorry to hear, and yes, it very much is a generational curse. For whatever it’s worth many of my family members who got divorced had a much more successful second marriage…
Oh I have as well. My second wife and I have been together for 18 years and while we're not always happy with each other, we manage. The sad part was my daughter left her husband over something relatively trivial. I look forward to future articles in this vein. You have quite a diverse topic spread.
Wallerstein's study was too small to reach many conclusions other than the obvious one, "Divorce bad, staying together better." Which we already knew without her help.
However, I submit (largely from personal experience) that it's possible for a dysfunctional marriage that stays together to harm the kids just as badly, or worse, than divorce. Leading to the same, or worse, inabilities to form relationships. And Wallerstein's study, due to its small size and the era in which it was conducted, couldn't really account for this. Since in that era, a marriage that was that dysfunctional was almost certain to end in divorce, and the very few severely dysfunctional ones that stayed together were, as far as she was concerned, just statistical outliers. If any like that showed up in her small study at all. They'd perhaps end up in the 6% of the comparison group who never got married.
But they do exist. I know. I remember as a child wishing my parents would get divorced. With good reason. Eventually their marriage got better, but it was a really rough 20 years before it did. I can't imagine anyone else staying married that long in a marriage like that. I still find it incredible that they did.
Hi Martin, I edited the post a couple hours ago to add an addendum referencing a strong, detailed article from The Atlantic in 1993 which you may appreciate: https://archive.ph/OyOWd . It discusses the criticism surrounding Wallerstein's small sample size, but it also points to a bunch of other evidence from other studies that Wallerstein's conclusions were accurate.
I agree with you that it's possible for a highly dysfunctional marriage to harm children perhaps even worse than divorce would, and thanks for sharing your anecdote -- it's a bummer you had to go through that. The point of this post was to argue, though, that the data shows that the degree of dysfunction would have to be really high to surpass the damage from divorce, at least for most.
Reading their stories, I realized that until/unless I somehow reconcile with my estranged wife, I'll be imposing massive cost on our children and grandchildren for generations (if we even get to have any). Divorce is truly a generational curse.
Admitting I was wrong to leave was humbling. Rebuilding trust is much harder than maintaining it would have been. But it's the only moral path forward, when I consider the big picture.
Thanks Jerome, I'm going to order that book and read it, even though I'm sure it will be tough emotionally. I hope things go well for you on your personal path - marriage can be very difficult and the "grass is greener" mentality can be really enticing, and I do understand and empathize with it. With that said the data is unequivocal regarding the generational curse, and it's a hard thing to knowingly allow it to be imposed on one's children...
A child of divorce myself, I've noticed I'm pretty passive with women and have had nothing but negative experiences and as I'm also autistic I don't know how to read them and so dating is tough on me.
Still I've begun to learn how, and have become ever more confident and what not. Strangely it took going to France where women checked me out, winked at me and flirted openly to help me realize I wasn't totally undesirable.
I'm however convinced I must only marry someone from a good family background, who hates divorce and believes in God and marriage. My reasoning being I must avoid by any means someone who would divorce.
So definitely understand you on this topic and fully agree, good sir.
Thanks Krynn, it sounds like our experiences are fairly similar in this respect. For whatever it's worth, my understanding is that American women are by far the most toxic in the world in this respect, and that it is easier to find a more family oriented and religious woman abroad. It's sad that conditions are as bad as they are...
Our experiences do sound a lot alike. My parents were friendly after the divorce but it still affected me negatively, so do understand you good sir. I’m just glad you found someone and have moved on in life, I admire that if I’m being honest.
Well I’m of Quebecois descent, so I’m looking into mostly Irish or French women, as they fit the mold of what I’m looking for more (countryside ones those raised in the city are like Canadian women to my understanding).
I do believe you’re right, though apparently many Canadian women are more American than American women statistically (though it is case by case).
My pet theory is that I think people learn how to be human by watching others.
I think a big reason people struggle is because we don’t see enough real interactions growing up.
Families are often too small for kids to watch how people negotiate, disagree, or solve problems - children are either being spoken to or are in silence.
Imagine a single mother with a single child!
But in a bigger, familiar group (like a village), you get to see all kinds of behaviour and figure out your own way of dealing with life.
You can’t just decide to be confident or outgoing - you need to see it modelled first by familiar faces.
I suspect that the effects of divorce on children are especially pronounced in countries/ cultures that do not have a strong extended family culture.
I don’t know any such studies in my Celtiberian middle of nowhere, but I can easily see that children from divorced parents here will still have several good marriage models from their immediate family - uncles, grandparents, older cousins, etc. that might compensate for the bad experience at home. Maybe…
What I think is really universal is what you pointed out that (especially young) women are the most vulnerable to propaganda & social manipulation.
The last essay C.S. Lewis ever published before his death was entitled, "We Have No Right to Happiness," and was about this very topic. He also covers the breakdown of marriage in "That Hideous Strength" against the backdrop of a world run by a Transhumanist conspiracy.
Very ahead of his time.
Lewis is holding to a sacramental view of marriage and as a Christian I agree with him. I think it's the only way out of this mess but it will take several generations, if only because the youth are so broken - young women by hypergamy, men by pornography, all by Boomer divorce.
Some people view Church as a magic spell that turns hypergamous women into doting housewives but that's simply not how it works. Lewis knew this in the 40s. I feel for young men who are trying to be monogamous but whose only options are often women who've swapped fluids and tossed aside several men before finally seeking material security in marriage as they age.
It's a terrible foundation for a family - Christian or not, there are spiritual laws of cause and effect. Traditionally, licentious women would've found repentance in the chastity of a Monastery, not in marriage, but this practice is even more broken than marriage.
Thanks Reinhardt, I'm going to read Lewis's We Have No Right to Happiness and look into his Space Trilogy. I agree with you that there are spiritual laws of cause and effect - including from hookup culture, but also many which pass down generationally - and the widespread feelings of nihilism, atomization and disconnectness that society feels has been a long running and intensifying trend as industrialization and technology ascended...
They're both very good reads - the essay is quite short and the last book of the Space Trilogy is almost a standalone as it's intended to be a fictionalized variant of his nonfiction "The Abolition of Man."
The whole trilogy is good but knowing your work I'd say That Hideous Strength is the one you'd get the most out of.
Lewis' deep understanding of occult mysticism, Taoism, and apostolic Christendom give his work a numinous prescience. It's incredible how much of the picture he managed to discern when the technostructure was still in its infancy.
the changes that have been unleashed on us in the last 10 years are on the scale of once-in-a-lifetime events for previous generations. it is simply cope to think that marriage will be able to survive the massive social engineering that has been wrought on society going forward. as an institution, marriage is simply gone among 30 and unders.
in general, women have no agency and are just the reflection of social trends and chthonic psychic undercurrents sweeping through our age. they are a like a dirty, cracked, distorted mirror reflecting all of society's ills at us. they are the frontline soldiers of the regime, enforcing the terror and nastiness that has been cooked up for us.
the insane sex obsession, novelty drive, rampant narcissism, social climbing, vicious shaming tactics, ratting out others for personal gain, the mental illness, hormonal disorder, desire to hurt and main and snuff out life, etc. these behaviors are tolerated in women and even held up as good things. this is because men are essentially second-class citizens. we don't have the same rights or privileges as women do anymore. we are essentially powerless when it comes to women tyrannizing us in schools, at the workplace, in the family, at the level of politics, etc.
men have no recourse at all.
thus, i think that talk of marriage at this stage of decline is akin to polishing the brass on the Titanic.
i don't know of a single healthy m/f relationship among anyone that i've ever met. not one. not growing up and not now, even among so-called "trad" advocates. men should cut themselves some slack. we're in the middle of a raging wildfire that will consume the old world. social life as we used to know it is simply over, people are just in denial about this.
what is the answer to this?
well, i think the correct mental model to adopt is essentially to view oneself as being in a hostile wilderness. society is the unforgiving cold or the saber-tooth tigers. social organization is a tool to survive the elements. all that is detrimental to survival has to be jettisoned, including these old ways of thinking about relationships and so on.
It seems to me that Afghanistan still has some rather healthy birthrates. Maybe those people are getting something right, that we are getting wrong? Maybe it doesn't even matter that much, wether we end up understanding what - since demography will adjudicate the Earth to those who get it right anyway?
People underestimate the power of logistics.
People talk about money issues and divorce etc.
Divorced parents run two houses, have two electric bills. Kids of divorce as adults have to go to and extra Christmas, and Thanksgiving. Drive more. Costs more gas and wear and tear.
They inherit less money to Kickstart their lives per capita when their parents die.
Everything about divorce destroys the family, as the entire point of family is the combination of people produces more effective resource management. Same way it costs less per person to feed a family of 6 than it does to feed a family of 3.
So if you feed two families of 3, you lose to someone feeding one family of 6. It's generational degradation and the concept of divorcing when your kids are older, still degrades the family.
It divides the resources of the lineage and increases the amount of peasant stock. If two parents living together die in their 400K home and have 2 kids, their kids get 200K each.
If those parents divorce and sell the house and each live in an apartment on half the retirement, odds are those kids now get like 25K or something. If you care about your lineage, your legacy, you descendents.... your sole reason for having been relevant to the species, divorce is a sure fire way to degrade your genetic line in every way imaginable.
The only legitimate concept to divorce is if someone is truly degrading the line so bad that they are doing more overall harm than if the line is degraded, it's like cancer surgery. And basically if the parent deserving of divorce is still palatable by the kids, either the kids are fools, or, they should be rejected by the kids as not part of the family.
I very much agree with you - divorce impoverishes the family and the only ones who benefit from it are the attorneys. For a long time I knew of couples where the man complained that he was “too poor to divorce”, and I didn’t understand what he meant until I was older…
More so than divorce, and as a general rule, sexual "freedom" is an unmitigated disaster for any complex social system. Society rests on the work of males, and traditional monogamy allows them to 1) have a personal stake in the collective wellbeing 2) do something else than chase women.
With the sexual "liberation" and widespread divorce, you have neither. Not only are you supposed to waste a huge amount chasing potential partners, but you're also supposed to work your ass off even though she can leave with the children because her emotions told her so. This is clearly unsustainable.
Well written! My wife and I were both children of divorced households. It is something one must deliberately overcome and even then it is not easy. I laid out a defense of marriage in Discourse 4.
I think most people.. are either too immature or too narcissistic for marriage. Not to mention the perception of marriage has been abused by social engineers, turning it into a battle if not flat out undesirable.
Families are a threat to power.
Thanks Hugh, and congratulations on overcoming both you and your wife’s backgrounds. I agree with you; traditionally the nuclear family was held together by religious and social mores, but those have been eviscerated and discarded, and the nuclear family is very weak these days. Pervasive immaturity and narcissism in the West makes marriage a barely tenable proposition for many…
Observationally I see this in my friends from college (very few high school friends whose parents are divorced). Not to sound like a communist, but I also have to wonder how much of this is a deliberate tactic to impoverish us by the powers that be. Paying for individual housing and/or two families is much more expensive than for a single combined family. Not to mention all the legal fees.
Yes, exactly. Marx and Lenin were both major critics of the nuclear family and wanted to transform it; those with healthy family structures don’t need to make an ideology their God. I actually had a short segment from the Trading Places producer Aaron Russo that I almost included in this post where he talked about how the elite conspired to break up the nuclear family to increase their own power, which you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdtdidL2MQo
However, it came to my attention that the connection that Russo relied on for that information was a guy named Nicholas Rockefeller. The only problem is Nicholas Rockefeller was a fake: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14386439/fake-Nicholas-rockefeller-harvard-yale-Spiro-Pavlovich.html . Now, this guy still went to Harvard law school and had connections with many of the high-up elites, so who knows how much of what he said is true, but he wasn’t a Rockefeller…
Children of single parents are also more than 8x likely to experience child abuse, typically by a cohabitating partner.
https://rwilson.substack.com/p/are-patriarchs-perpetrators-or-protectors
They are mostly negroes. That may have more to do with it than the single parent family.
Excellent effort and topic. As it turns out, most of the young females who get caught up in gender dysphoria have experienced "adverse childhood events" -- like divorce. See the summary of the "Cass Review", the UK NIH-commissioned report of the new transgenderism craze/malaise at: https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/. All 388 pages of the thing can be found at https://cass.independent-review.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2024/04/CassReview_Final.pdf
Thanks Larry, I'll check it out. It's a sad thing, so many of these kids didn't have a chance at life before the rug was yanked out under them. The worst cases are when mothers actively groom their children into turning transsexual, holding back affection unless they comply...
I suspect these are often also deeply unhappy, lonely (e.g., divorced) mothers, seeking attention for themselves -- as in Munchausen by proxy (https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/munchausen-by-proxy). A real shitfest.
Divorce is a generational curse. My first wife and I were divorced after 8 years. My daughter's marriage only lasted 3 years.
I’m sorry to hear, and yes, it very much is a generational curse. For whatever it’s worth many of my family members who got divorced had a much more successful second marriage…
Oh I have as well. My second wife and I have been together for 18 years and while we're not always happy with each other, we manage. The sad part was my daughter left her husband over something relatively trivial. I look forward to future articles in this vein. You have quite a diverse topic spread.
Wallerstein's study was too small to reach many conclusions other than the obvious one, "Divorce bad, staying together better." Which we already knew without her help.
However, I submit (largely from personal experience) that it's possible for a dysfunctional marriage that stays together to harm the kids just as badly, or worse, than divorce. Leading to the same, or worse, inabilities to form relationships. And Wallerstein's study, due to its small size and the era in which it was conducted, couldn't really account for this. Since in that era, a marriage that was that dysfunctional was almost certain to end in divorce, and the very few severely dysfunctional ones that stayed together were, as far as she was concerned, just statistical outliers. If any like that showed up in her small study at all. They'd perhaps end up in the 6% of the comparison group who never got married.
But they do exist. I know. I remember as a child wishing my parents would get divorced. With good reason. Eventually their marriage got better, but it was a really rough 20 years before it did. I can't imagine anyone else staying married that long in a marriage like that. I still find it incredible that they did.
Hi Martin, I edited the post a couple hours ago to add an addendum referencing a strong, detailed article from The Atlantic in 1993 which you may appreciate: https://archive.ph/OyOWd . It discusses the criticism surrounding Wallerstein's small sample size, but it also points to a bunch of other evidence from other studies that Wallerstein's conclusions were accurate.
I agree with you that it's possible for a highly dysfunctional marriage to harm children perhaps even worse than divorce would, and thanks for sharing your anecdote -- it's a bummer you had to go through that. The point of this post was to argue, though, that the data shows that the degree of dysfunction would have to be really high to surpass the damage from divorce, at least for most.
Great article! Thank you!
The book "Primal Loss" by Leila Miller includes the stores of more than eighty adult children of divorce. Most of them never get over it. https://search.brave.com/search?q=primal+loss+leila+miller
Reading their stories, I realized that until/unless I somehow reconcile with my estranged wife, I'll be imposing massive cost on our children and grandchildren for generations (if we even get to have any). Divorce is truly a generational curse.
Admitting I was wrong to leave was humbling. Rebuilding trust is much harder than maintaining it would have been. But it's the only moral path forward, when I consider the big picture.
Thanks Jerome, I'm going to order that book and read it, even though I'm sure it will be tough emotionally. I hope things go well for you on your personal path - marriage can be very difficult and the "grass is greener" mentality can be really enticing, and I do understand and empathize with it. With that said the data is unequivocal regarding the generational curse, and it's a hard thing to knowingly allow it to be imposed on one's children...
A child of divorce myself, I've noticed I'm pretty passive with women and have had nothing but negative experiences and as I'm also autistic I don't know how to read them and so dating is tough on me.
Still I've begun to learn how, and have become ever more confident and what not. Strangely it took going to France where women checked me out, winked at me and flirted openly to help me realize I wasn't totally undesirable.
I'm however convinced I must only marry someone from a good family background, who hates divorce and believes in God and marriage. My reasoning being I must avoid by any means someone who would divorce.
So definitely understand you on this topic and fully agree, good sir.
Thanks Krynn, it sounds like our experiences are fairly similar in this respect. For whatever it's worth, my understanding is that American women are by far the most toxic in the world in this respect, and that it is easier to find a more family oriented and religious woman abroad. It's sad that conditions are as bad as they are...
Our experiences do sound a lot alike. My parents were friendly after the divorce but it still affected me negatively, so do understand you good sir. I’m just glad you found someone and have moved on in life, I admire that if I’m being honest.
Well I’m of Quebecois descent, so I’m looking into mostly Irish or French women, as they fit the mold of what I’m looking for more (countryside ones those raised in the city are like Canadian women to my understanding).
I do believe you’re right, though apparently many Canadian women are more American than American women statistically (though it is case by case).
All part of the plan.
Yes, shattered nuclear families makes people much easier to control.
“For I Hate Divorce,” says the LORD, the God of Israel. “He who divorces his wife covers his
garment with violence,” says the LORD of Hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit and do
not break faith. Malachi 2:16
"And why do you all call me 'Master, Master' - Yet not do what I tell you? Luke 6:46
I really liked this!
My pet theory is that I think people learn how to be human by watching others.
I think a big reason people struggle is because we don’t see enough real interactions growing up.
Families are often too small for kids to watch how people negotiate, disagree, or solve problems - children are either being spoken to or are in silence.
Imagine a single mother with a single child!
But in a bigger, familiar group (like a village), you get to see all kinds of behaviour and figure out your own way of dealing with life.
You can’t just decide to be confident or outgoing - you need to see it modelled first by familiar faces.
I suspect that the effects of divorce on children are especially pronounced in countries/ cultures that do not have a strong extended family culture.
I don’t know any such studies in my Celtiberian middle of nowhere, but I can easily see that children from divorced parents here will still have several good marriage models from their immediate family - uncles, grandparents, older cousins, etc. that might compensate for the bad experience at home. Maybe…
What I think is really universal is what you pointed out that (especially young) women are the most vulnerable to propaganda & social manipulation.