Rights to Happiness

Happiness is something that can be seen in many contexts.  When people think about long term happiness though, there is a general understanding that it correlates to lifelong partners, or marital spouses.  However, with our legal system, they are not necessarily lifelong because there are many times when divorce comes into existence.  "Have a Right to Happiness" is a strongly opinionated argument in which C.S. Lewis attempts to label divorce as something solely based on sexual impulses.  

After explaining a situation in which Mr. A and Mrs. B were not satisfied with their original marital partners, and so divorced them in order to get together with one another.  C.S. Lewis describes their story differently than he explains it, which is where the first issue arises within this piece.  In the description he mentions a few reasons for each divorce which all seem to hold some merit.  "Mrs. B had adored her husband at the outset.  But then he got smashed up in war.  It was thought he had lost his virility and it was known that he had lost his job."  Upon explaining their relationship after the story though, he states that their only reason for divorce, through a character named claire, is of a sexual nature.   

Is their divorce truly something that can be labelled so boldly though?  Although I don't believe that this was divorce was the sole point C.S. Lewis was attempting to make, I can't help but be critical on each part of his essay, this being one of them.  Because his example is flawed from description to explanation, the rest of his essay is built on weak grounds.  

While the essay does not prove its point through logic, it still has the correct morals.  Sex in Lewis' culture may have started to become more abundant and less meaningful, but over the course of the past sixty years or so, it has gotten exponentially worse.  Because individualism is so high, there are many opportunities for people to elope for a while and make decisions based on hormones.  In addition to that, the media has also become accustomed to using sex as a means to sell products.  And if it that doesn't say enough, playboy was founded in 1953 and pictures our decline into selling sex for pleasure and forgetting it's emotional connections.

Happiness can be derived from any number of things.  Do we deserve to be happy? That is a question I will leave to fruitless debates of theologians and philosophers.  But what I do know is that sexual happiness isn't something that should define whether a marriage stays together or splits apart.

Happiness can be found in the strangest of places...