A two-parent family based on love and commitment can be a wonderful thing, but historically speaking the two-parent paradigm has left an extraordinary amount of room for economic inequality, violence and male dominance.

When parents are educated about how not to involve children in their conflicts and co-parent amicably, a lot of the ill effects of divorce can be alleviated. Divorce is always painful. But kids in a high-conflict marriage or low-conflict but contemptuous ones are often better off in the long run when the parent can disengage.

There is one group of people - social conservatives, religious conservatives - who honestly feel that women's place is in the home and that wives should submit to their husbands.

I think that divorce is a vital escape hatch for people stuck in marriage and it is not a sentence of doom either for adults or children. The community should develop better support systems for saving or restoring potentially healthy marriages.But we should also help people who decide to divorce have healthier partings.

Singlehood is not longer a state to be overcome as soon as possible. It has its own rewards. Marriage is not the gateway to adulthood anymore. For most people it's the dessert - desirable, but no longer the main course.

In industrial countries where male privilege is still firmly entrenched - in Spain, Italy, Japan, and South Korea, for example - women are delaying marriage longer than in America, and often resisting childbearing as well. They are less likely than American women to say that marriage is a good deal.

The historical weight of gender inequality has tended to concentrate women in lower-paid jobs with fewer benefits, at the same time made them primarily responsible for care giving.