Pragmatic tradition or romantic aspiration? The causes of impulsive marriage and early divorce among women in rural Malawi

Abstract

1.IntroductionThe last decades of the 20th century have seen important shifts in the way young people meet, marry, and interact with their spouses in sub-Saharan Africa. Recently, social scientists have taken an interest in the rise of romantic courtship and companionate marriage (Cole and Thomas 2009; Hirsch and Wardlow 2006; Padilla et al. 2007). This spike in interest, however, should not obscure the fact that the defiant appropriation of romantic love by young generations has been happening for nearly a century and might have become an African tradition in itself (Thomas 2009). First through literature, then through photography (Behrend 1998), films from India (Fair 2009), and more recently through mobile phones (Archambault 2011), social media, and Nigerian blockbusters (Abah 2009), young Africans avidly consume narratives of romantic love and create their own.While unions based on love and companionship are highly desired in most young adult relationships in sub-Saharan Africa (Clark, Kabiru, and Mathur 2010), there is little consensus as to whether modern unions or traditional marriages are more stable. Goode (1993) and Takyi (2001) contend that unions with low involvement from kin are inherently less stable, while Jones (1997) believes that such unions are more stable as the couple is likely to be more mature and compatible. Changes in the nature of unions and their implications for divorce are of special concern in countries like Malawi, where divorce rates are high and where divorce and remarriage are linked to poorer health outcomes for both women and children (Boileau et al. 2009; Clark and Brauner-Otto 2015; Reniers 2003).In this paper we interrogate the phenomenon of early divorce as a primary component of overall union instability, and as a prism that reveals changes in the ways young people meet and marry. We explore three aspects of early divorce in Malawi. First, we show that much of this high divorce rate in Malawi is driven by early divorce, defined as unions ending within the first three years. Second, we use discrete-time survival analysis to identify which relationship characteristics are associated with early divorce. We find that couples who have known each other for only a short time and whose relationship is not embedded in family ties are much more likely to divorce early. Finally, we turn to qualitative data to make sense of these volatile relationships as part of young women's transition to adulthood.Although we set out to determine whether early divorce was driven by traditional or modern marriage practices, we instead find that early divorce most often results from impulsive marriages that correspond to neither fully traditional nor modern unions. Impulsive unions are not embedded in family and community ties, but neither are they rooted in deep affective ties between individuals. This kind of marriage, between people who are not particularly invested in each other and whose families have little or no stake in making the relationship work, are particularly fragile and tend to dissolve rapidly. They reflect hybrid patterns of courtship and spouse selection in which traditional ideas about what makes a good spouse collide with contemporary ways of knowing a person's character.2.BackgroundIn this section we provide information about marriage in Malawi, including definitions of what we mean by 'traditional' and 'modern' forms of marriage.2.1Defining 'modern' and 'traditional'Most discussions of romantic love and changes in affective patterns rest, more or less explicitly, on the opposition between a 'traditional' form of marriage and a 'modern,' romantic, or companionate alternative. Wardlow and Hirsch (2006) define companionate marriage as a relationship in which emotional closeness is the basis of a union, its mode of operation, and a key measure of its success. In companionate marriages the conjugal partnership is privileged over other family ties, and personal fulfillment takes precedence over social reproduction. …