I was recently scrolling through Douyin and saw a video by an American who goes by "Cao Cao." He told a story about how he said "Black people" to his daughter, and she corrected him, saying he should say "African Americans" instead—that "Black people" is racist. I don't want to debate whether saying "Black people" is truly racist, but I think what Cao Cao said next gets at the heart of the matter: Can I speak up? Yes. Should I speak up? I should. But do I want to? No. Who wants to get yelled at every day?
But if none of us are willing to speak up, we surrender the space to polarized voices—to those who fervently advocate the "Three Obediences and Four Virtues" and those who fervently oppose the divorce cooling-off period. As a citizen, I may not want to speak up, and in truth I can't change much. But I also don't want every voice out there to be a polarized one. On Zhihu, every answer is railing against the cooling-off period. I am one hundred percent certain that a meaningful proportion of people support it, and an even larger proportion don't care either way. But why does Zhihu look the way it does? Because only polarized voices are willing to be heard.
In my previous article, I already explained why the arguments against the cooling-off period are absurd, or at least insufficient. Let me reiterate: divorce primarily regulates property relations, not personal relations. Chinese law does not support one spouse having dominion over the other. That is to say, separating, giving the silent treatment, and effectively ending the marital state—these freedoms are still unaffected by this law. So what does affect these freedoms? The parties' capability, especially economic capability. If the financially weaker party in a marriage wants to effectively end the marital state, they will obviously face many difficulties. For instance, hypothetically, someone like me who's living off his spouse—if I wanted to end the marital state, I'd have to go back to earning my own keep, which is obviously painful. So what's the real focus for solving these problems? Social security and social welfare, and in a broader sense, balanced development and gender equality—the very question Lu Xun raised over a hundred years ago: what happens after Nora leaves? The cooling-off period neither prevents Nora from leaving—she can leave whenever she wants, married or not, that freedom isn't affected—nor does it affect what happens after she leaves. It's hard to imagine that in contemporary Chinese society, not getting divorced for one month would meaningfully affect someone's ability to make a living.
The divorce cooling-off period merely adds a small inconvenience to the legal procedure of settling property relations. So what benefits does this inconvenience bring?
First, consider this scenario: a wealthy woman has taken a lover, has turned against her devoted husband, and has made long and careful plans. With the help of the elite lawyer Luo Bin (played by Jin Dong), she drafts a divorce agreement that appears fair but is riddled with traps. Then on a rainy morning, she uses some underhanded tactic against her husband (say, berating him for being a kept man), goading him into rushing to the civil affairs bureau to sign the divorce papers. Without the cooling-off period, the wealthy woman would succeed. But with it, the weaker party in the marriage has one month to examine the post-divorce arrangements for property and children, and thus has the chance to reconsider and negotiate better terms. In this case, the cooling-off period protects the weaker party.
Second, divorce carries a degree of potential social harm. Of course, I'm not saying every divorce is socially harmful, or that people who divorce are a menace to society. I'm merely stating an objectively existing possibility. Divorce is, first and foremost, the dissolution of an economic unit, which introduces certain default risks—mortgage defaults, unpaid debts—and many other potential default risks not yet considered, such as investment losses for both sets of parents. In our era, it's common for young couples to receive investments from both sets of parents. Those who invest in you expect returns: the fulfillment of certain filial duties, the bearing of children to bring joy to the elderly, and so on. Divorce clearly inflicts investment losses on both sets of parents. In severe cases, I'd say it's no different from—perhaps even worse than—those street vendors who scam the elderly with fake fitness equipment. Additionally, divorce affects child-rearing. Naturally, a bad marriage also affects children, but we're debating which is worse. By common sense, it seems reasonable to assume divorce has at least some impact.
Given these premises, we can say that in a significant proportion of cases—say, forty-two point five percent or more—divorce may carry some degree of social harm. Within that forty-two point five percent, perhaps three point two four percent are largely impulsive divorces. The cooling-off period may not stop impulsive people from being impulsive, but at least they must make the same declaration of intent one month apart, which makes divorce a somewhat more solemn affair. Perhaps this could salvage some unfortunate marriages from becoming even more unfortunate through divorce. And from another angle: suppose, as those vehement opponents on Zhihu insist, one absolutely must divorce a terrible man—well, once divorced, releasing such a man back into the world (to form another family) and harm society—isn't that just shifting the problem to your neighbor? Highly inadvisable.
One final point: people really are prone to impulse. For example, writing this article was itself an impulse. If publishing on WeChat also required a thirty-day cooling-off period, I wouldn't publish pieces like this, but rather articles I at least believed were somewhat better written. I've observed the lives of many older couples. Not a single one, in my experience, has come even close to ideal. But I also feel that not a single one is entirely devoid of something precious. Setting aside those at the extreme edges of the bell curve, we must call ourselves ordinary. You may not be ordinary—I am. In ordinary life, there are moments of mutual hatred, mutual resentment, mutual harm. The question is how much weight we give any single moment. This is the moment I must divorce, I absolutely must—and yes, you have every right to do so, from the perspective of natural law, from the perspective of philosophy, you are not wrong. But why must you have that piece of paper this very moment? When it comes to effectively ending the marital state, does that paper really matter? I believe the cooling-off period is a good opportunity to consider this. Let us assume both parties are generally reasonable, which should be the case in a large proportion of situations—why should we worry about not being able to divorce after one month?
For those truly unfortunate people who worry about not being able to divorce: as we said before, what they should really worry about is not having the chance to fail at the second visit. Someone who would truly use this system to make their spouse's life difficult would never show up for the first visit in the first place.
Does that make some sense?
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