Recent Divorce Trend in Iran

There has recently emerged an unprecedented increase in number and rate of divorces in Iran—where strong cultural-religious traditions and legal prescriptions and proscriptions have largely mandated early, lifelong marriages, precluding divorce save in exceptional circumstances. This article examines recent divorce trends, along with demographic and social changes that are evolving in Iranian society. Family remains a very strong institution in Iran. However, some aspects of family, including marital dissolution, are changing rapidly, no longer protected by the strong tradition of family morality rooted in social contracts between large extended families. Instead, there has emerged a “developmental idealism,” demonstrated in a strongly secular move toward individualism and self-actualization, in effect altering wide-ranging behaviors including later marriage and fewer children but also earlier and more frequent marital dissolution. Changes in these realms, and in educational and career goals and behaviors, portend a perhaps inexorable move toward individual and cultural modernity.