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ON OUR OWN: Indonesian actress and single mom Alya Rohali sees her independence from men as a badge of honor

Getting out
	Divorce was once all but unthinkable in Asia, but now it's become almost standard. And these days it's women who are doing most of the dumping
	By Liam Fitzpatrick Hong Kong

Posted Monday, March 29, 2004; 21:00 HKT
Whatever else I thought I would become, I never imagined I would be twice divorced before the age of 40. As a 16-year-old, through shoplifted volumes of Shelley and Keats, I surpassed the peer-group average comfortably when it came to interest in gushing romance. Four years later, I eloped with my then girlfriend and we were married in a registry office above a music store. My abiding memories are of the registrar's ankle boots of bright orange suede, the unspeakable luxury of spending $10 on a taxi home, and of the feeling, as we pronounced our vows, that the marriage was utterly, inviolably, forever. I thought the same of my second marriage, too—moreover, I thought it with the added conviction of maturity (I was 30) and experience (with the first marriage written off as youthful impulse). But here I am: a two-time visitor to the family court. The kind of person that, if I ever make it into the tabloid press, might be snickeringly described as a "twice-divorced father of one." I don't sound good on paper.

But in reviewing my marital history—as one does on a former anniversary, or when chancing on an inscription in the flyleaf of a yellowing book—I have taken some comfort from the fact that, all around me, fellow Asians are divorcing in record numbers. You might think that Asia—with its weighty traditional values, male chauvinism and hang-ups about face—would be less susceptible to the epidemic of divorce that has swept the West these past 40 years or so. If there were one place where two people would be prepared to endure weary decades of unfulfillment for the sake of the children or religion or appearances, you might guess that it would be here. But you would be wrong. While it's difficult to generalize across the region, stigmas once attached to divorce are clearly losing their force across Asia. Says Professor Stella Quah, a sociologist at the National University of Singapore: "There are fewer social pressures to stay married. You feel a bit freer to do your own thing."

In Singapore, the number of divorces is up a third since 1990, while it has nearly doubled in Thailand. In Japan, a couple gets married every 42 seconds, but another couple will divorce before 2 minutes are up. In the past 20 years, the divorce rate has doubled in mainland China and tripled in Taiwan. And the divorce rate in South Korea now exceeds that of many European countries, including the U.K., Denmark and Hungary. Even in India—where a wife was once considered so immutably tied to her husband that she was thrown on his funeral pyre if he died before she did—sociologists estimate that the divorce rate is 11 per 1,000, up from 7.41 per 1,000 in 1991.

Across the region, a battery of counselors, lawyers, publishers and relationship pundits has emerged in response to the lucrative demand for divorce. Pick up the lifestyle magazine of the swanky Lane Crawford department store in Hong Kong and you will be cheerfully informed that "three is the new two"—a reference to the idea that where once two marriages were considered acceptable, it's now O.K. to be married three times. On a quiet back street in Tokyo's sprawling suburbs, you can attend a divorce school to learn the 50 ways to leave your lover. And in Taiwan, you can read marriage counselor Rachel Wang's tell-all chronicle of the breakup of her own marriage. Wang, who had previously penned popular books on the perfect relationship, says her relationship faltered when she learned that her husband was having an affair. "I felt like God had played a joke on me—a marriage counselor who couldn't keep her marriage intact." Now she wishes she had shed her qualms about divorce sooner: "I could have been happier if I had divorced 10 years earlier."

For others, of course, divorce is excruciatingly painful, not merely a liberating transition to a happier life. Many are throwing off a lifetime's cultural baggage when they decide that being a divorcé is preferable to being a battered spouse, unhappy homemaker or being cheated on. Some run the risk that more conservative relatives will never speak to them again.

Indian divorcé Deepa, who asked not to be identified by her full name, filed for divorce in 1997, nine years after her arranged marriage to a man who proved to be an alcoholic. Now 40 and living in the suburbs of Bombay with her parents and her 11-year-old daughter, she recalls how her ex-husband "would get threatening and violent" when he drank. He even blew their daughter's kindergarten admission fees on alcohol. "The salary wasn't coming home at all," says Deepa. "It was spent on bars and drinks even before he got it. I didn't know how I could control him. After seven years of marriage, my life was ruined."

Still, leaving her husband sometimes felt as harrowing as living with him. At times, she wondered if her in-laws were right in saying that she had demanded too much of him, and that his drinking was somehow her fault. At other times, she lamented that she had failed to provide her daughter with what she calls "a proper family life." Now, as a single mother, Deepa works as a financial assistant to support herself and her child. "I don't depend on anyone," she says. "There is nothing shameful in any of this." And yet, she admits, for divorced women in India "there is always a sense of isolation—especially when you see other people go out with a circle of friends, something we don't have. Sometimes we feel like intruders ... It hurts. Why lie about it?" In India, she says, women like her are widely viewed as inferior to those with husbands—and even at family functions, "people make sure you realize it."

Not that Deepa has any regrets. "Whatever I may go through in the future," she says, "it won't be as bad as my past."

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