# Importance of Sentimental Grievance explained — Getting Married

> Chapter companion for Getting Married by George Bernard Shaw.

## What happens

The chapter argues that divorce laws should prioritize sentimental grievances and avoid creating conventions that pressure individuals to seek divorce based on specific grounds like jealousy. It advocates for private divorce proceedings and the recognition that the only valid reason for divorce is the desire for one, emphasizing the right to sexual experience and separating law from parentage.

## Themes in this chapter

### Divorce and Legal Reform

The chapter advocates for reforming divorce laws to prioritize sentimental grievances, eliminate public disclosure, and recognize the individual's right to seek divorce without social pressure.

### Sexuality and Impersonality

The chapter asserts that every human being has a right to sexual experience, and that the law should only concern itself with parentage, separating sexuality from legal and social judgment.

## Key lines

> Any tolerable western divorce law must put the sentimental grievances first, and should carefully avoid singling out any ground of divorce in such a way as to create a convention that persons having that ground are bound in honor to avail themselves of it.

A decent divorce law should prioritize emotional complaints and not designate specific reasons that pressure people into feeling obligated to divorce.

_This emphasizes the need to avoid social conventions that compel divorce based on specific grounds._

> There should be no publication of the grounds on which a divorce is sought or granted; and as this would abolish the only means the public now has of ascertaining that every possible effort has been made to keep the couple united against their wills, such privacy will only be tolerated when we at last admit that the sole and sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is that they want one.

Divorce proceedings should be private, and this will only be accepted when society recognizes that wanting a divorce is reason enough.

_This advocates for privacy in divorce and a shift in societal attitude toward individual choice._

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/getting_married_se/chapters/importance-of-sentimental-grievance
- Book: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/getting_married_se
- All chapters: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/getting_married_se/chapters