The Last Straw Is Not the Whole Load: Divorce, Causation, and Blame

Divorce hurts everyone involved. I do not think there is any clever philosophical argument that makes that reality disappear. Even when divorce is necessary, even when both people agree to it, even when years have passed and life has moved on, there can still be pain attached to what happened. Divorce can affect our sense of identity, our family relationships, our finances, our friendships, and the story we tell ourselves about our own lives. Important to note is the American Psychological Association notes that divorce can be associated with depression, loneliness, isolation, difficulties with self-esteem, and other forms of psychological distress. If you have witnessed a divorce, you know this all too well.

C. S. Lewis put something important about suffering into a wonderfully compact sentence:

“Pain insists upon being attended to.” – C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

But attending to pain is not the same thing as assigning blame or cause to a divorce.

I have been thinking about that distinction lately because several friends have gone through divorces, and eventually some version of the same question seems to surface: Whose fault was it? We human beings seem to like that question. Maybe we like it a little too much. We want the hero and the villain. Or we want a victim and a villain. We want the innocent party and the guilty party. We want to identify the moment when everything went wrong, point at the person standing nearest to it, and announce, “There. That is what caused the divorce and associated pain.”

I tend to think that it takes two people to make a marriage, and in most cases, two people participate in its unraveling. Rarely, if ever, is one person completely “innocent,” even if their contribution is sometimes little more than complacency, avoidance, or allowing unhealthy patterns to continue. In law, we recognize that responsibility is not limited only to the person who commits the final act; concepts such as aiding and abetting remind us that people can contribute to an outcome in different ways and to very different degrees. Marriage is much the same. Both parties usually play some role in the chain of events that leads to divorce and in at least some of the pain surrounding it. That does not mean the responsibility is always equal. Serious wrongdoing such as abuse, coercive control, violence, chronic infidelity, abandonment, addiction, or financial exploitation can create enormous asymmetries of responsibility. But even then, human relationships are rarely as clean as the categories of innocent victim and obvious villain suggest. There is usually some muddy water between the two, and if we want to understand what actually happened rather than simply assign blame, we have to be willing to wade into it.

I want to stop here and make an important point: human behavior is complex. There are no hard and fast rules for how any particular person will respond to a given situation, and the same event can produce very different reactions in different people. More importantly, human behavior is rarely the product of a single cause. Personality, past experiences, expectations, emotions, stress, learned behavior, trauma, communication patterns, and the immediate circumstances may all interact at once. So when we talk about divorce, conflict, pain, and responsibility, we should resist the temptation to reduce everything to one event, one motive, or one person. Simplistic explanations may feel satisfying because they give us someone to blame, but feeling satisfying is not the same thing as being accurate. If human behavior is complex, then our explanations for it should leave room for that complexity.

The Camel in the Room

You have probably heard the expression, “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” It is such a familiar saying that we hardly stop to think about what it really means. Did a single straw break the camel’s back? That sounds a little odd to the ear. When we think about it, we know there were many straws that came before it, each adding a little more weight to the load. One piece, then another, then another, and another, until eventually someone places one final straw on top and the camel collapses.

Someone with simplistic thinking might ask, “Who broke the camel’s back?” and answer, “Well, obviously, it was the person who put on the last straw. Case closed.” Except we know it is not that simple. That final straw would have accomplished absolutely nothing if the camel had not already been carrying an enormous load. The last straw matters because it is part of the causal chain, but making that one straw carry the entire blame for everything already piled onto the camel is asking quite a lot from one little piece of straw.

Now let’s add a little more complexity to the equation. Imagine there are three farmers, and each of them is placing straw on the camel’s back. Back and forth they go, taking turns adding to the growing pile. Eventually the camel is injured. Which farmer caused the injury? Someone might point to the last farmer and say, “There. That was the one who did it.” But if the other two farmers had not already added their straw, the final farmer’s handful would not have been enough to break the camel’s back. The last farmer may have supplied the immediate trigger, but the injury resulted from the accumulated actions of all three. Once again, the final act matters, but it does not tell the whole causal story.

This is where the philosophy of causation becomes surprisingly useful. Philosophers and scientists distinguish between proximal, or proximate, causes and distal causes. A proximal cause is close to the outcome in the causal chain, often the event immediately preceding it. A distal cause is farther upstream, perhaps operating through several intermediate events before eventually contributing to the outcome. There can also be contributing causes, factors that help produce the outcome even though none of them, standing alone, would necessarily have been enough to cause it.

That sounds suspiciously like our camel. The final straw may be the proximal cause, but the accumulated load consists of all those contributing causes that made the collapse increasingly likely. Decisions made much earlier may be distal causes, and somewhere farther back there may be vulnerabilities, circumstances, habits, wounds, expectations, personality differences, or patterns that we cannot completely reconstruct. Once we recognize all of that, “Who broke the camel’s back?” becomes a much more interesting question. And so does, “Who caused the divorce?”

I also want to pause here and make an important distinction that you may already be starting to think about. Causation and moral blame are related, but they are not the same thing. A person may play a causal role in an outcome without bearing the same degree of moral responsibility as someone else involved in that causal chain. We will come back to that question in due course, because it matters a great deal when we start talking about divorce, responsibility, and pain. For now, it is enough to recognize that identifying who or what helped cause an outcome does not automatically settle who deserves blame for it. And, as we will see, once we move from causation to moral responsibility, the waters may not become much clearer.

The Day My Marriage Ended

When I think about my own divorce, this distinction helps me understand what happened far better than the simple language of blame ever did.

Toward the end of my marriage, my former wife and I had been arguing for years. We were increasingly living separate lives while occupying the same house. There were things said that should not have been said and things left unsaid that probably should have been said. There were commissions, things we did, and omissions, things we failed to do. There were patterns that I experienced as verbal abuse and gaslighting. There were also things I did poorly. Looking back now, I can recognize conversations I wish I had handled differently, things I could have said better, moments when I could have listened more carefully, and choices I would not make today.

The few years before our divorce were not good ones for either of us. We both carried unresolved childhood trauma, and I had finally begun dealing with mine. My wife at the time was not dealing with hers, or at least that was how I understood it then. Denial might be a more accurate way to describe what I perceived. Through therapy, I began to understand more about our relationship dynamics and how unresolved trauma might be influencing the way both of us thought, reacted, and behaved. I also began to see patterns in my wife’s behavior that troubled me, and I started calling attention to them. That was not received well.

Then one day, during an argument, my former wife said something like, “Why don’t we just get divorced?” I called the bluff. “Okay.” She agreed. That was in the fall of the year before we first separated. By January of the following year, we had decided that we could probably handle the paperwork ourselves, and I became the one who began that process. In the meantime, the arguments continued, as did what I experienced as unnecessary yelling. Pressure from work, along with some difficult decisions our children were making in their own lives, added even more weight to the load we were both carrying.

By then, I was sleeping in a separate room, although in many ways not much had changed because we had already been living largely separate lives under the same roof. We had made very little progress on the divorce paperwork. Then, that spring, I met someone else. That made the story even easier for outsiders to compress into a familiar narrative: he met another woman, left his wife, and filed for divorce. Blame was affixed, and for some people no additional facts seemed capable of changing that judgment.

If someone freezes the story at that point, it becomes very easy to say that I caused the divorce. Except that version of the chronology leaves quite a lot lying on the cutting-room floor.

The divorce petition was certainly part of the causal chain. It was a proximate step in the legal dissolution of the marriage. The “other woman” entered the picture after we had already discussed and agreed to divorce, but before the paperwork was ultimately completed and filed. She was therefore part of the later chronology, but not the beginning of the breakdown of the marriage. Long before any paperwork appeared, long before anyone else entered the picture, the camel was already carrying a substantial amount of straw.

I have always recognized my own failures in the marriage. There are things I did poorly, things I wish I had done differently, and things I learned only after the fact. But recognizing my failures is not the same as accepting that I was the sole cause of the divorce. When my former wife explained the dissolution of our marriage, the story was much simpler: I was the cause, and the reason was that I had become involved with another woman. In that telling, there was little or no acknowledgment of her own culpability in the deterioration of the marriage or in the pain that accompanied our separation. I could say all day long that we both played a part. I could explain the timeline. I could point to years of conflict, distance, unhealthy patterns, and unresolved issues that existed long before anyone else entered the picture. It did not matter. For some people, all they could see was the last straw.

Research on marriage gives us good reason not to ignore those earlier patterns. Longitudinal work by John Gottman, Robert Levenson, Sybil Carrère, and others has shown that patterns of communication, conflict, and emotional interaction can be associated with later marital stability or dissolution. In other words, the relationship history matters. Yet when people are emotionally invested in a simple story of blame, the science can become almost inaudible. The proximal cause is vivid. It is easy to point to. It gives the story a villain and a clean ending. The distal and contributing causes are messier, less satisfying, and much harder to fit into a sentence.

But marriages do not usually arrive at the courthouse one morning in perfect health and then inexplicably die when somebody signs a form. There is a history. There are accumulated patterns, wounds, habits, arguments, silences, choices, reactions, and missed opportunities that often stretch back years. That history is part of the causal chain, even if outsiders never see it. If we focus only on the final straw, we may identify the event closest to the collapse while completely misunderstanding why the camel was carrying so much weight in the first place.

A Marriage Contains an Enormous Amount of Data

Think about how much information passes between two people over the course of a marriage. There are words and tones of voice, facial expressions and body language, touch and silence, kindness and sarcasm, affection and resentment. There are promises kept and promises broken, things remembered and things forgotten, the conversation you had last Tuesday morning and the conversation you avoided three months earlier. Over years, these interactions accumulate into an enormous amount of relational data.

That matters because marriage is not a single event. It is a dynamic and interactive relationship in which each person’s behavior becomes part of the environment in which the other person thinks, feels, and responds. Human behavior is complex enough on its own, but it becomes even more complex when two people are continually reacting to one another. I say something, you respond. I respond to your response. You interpret what I say through everything that has happened before, and I interpret what you do through my own history, expectations, wounds, and assumptions. Before long, we may not even be responding simply to what was just said. We may be responding to what those words have come to mean after five hundred previous conversations.

I can see this very clearly when I compare my former marriage with my current one. For whatever combination of reasons, my former wife and I seemed to bring out some of the worst in each other. My current wife and I tend to bring out the best in each other. I am still me. I did not become an entirely different human being when I remarried. Yet my behavior is influenced by the person I am interacting with, just as their behavior is influenced by me. Different relationships create different dynamics, and those dynamics can encourage patience, trust, humor, generosity, and affection, or they can reinforce defensiveness, resentment, suspicion, anger, and withdrawal.

That observation does not eliminate individual responsibility. Quite the opposite. I remain responsible for what I say and do regardless of how someone else behaves. But responsibility does not require us to pretend that human beings operate in isolation. We influence one another. We can calm each other down or wind each other up. We can make it easier for another person to be vulnerable or make vulnerability feel dangerous. We can reinforce healthy behavior or unhealthy behavior, sometimes without even realizing we are doing it.

This also means that causation within a relationship can become recursive, meaning that causes and effects begin feeding back into one another. I respond to something you do, you respond to my response, and then I react to that. Over time, the original cause may become almost impossible to identify because the interaction has become a feedback loop. Add memories, assumptions, unresolved hurts, and expectations to the mix, and a relatively ordinary disagreement can carry the emotional weight of years of previous conflict.

Research on marital attributions, the explanations spouses give for one another’s behavior, helps illustrate this point. We do not respond only to what our spouses do. We also respond to what we believe their actions mean. If I interpret something you forgot as an innocent mistake, I may respond with patience. If I interpret the same forgotten thing as evidence that you do not care about me, my response may be completely different. Then you respond not simply to the forgotten task but to my anger about it, and another layer is added to the interaction.

That means even the story we tell ourselves about what our spouse is doing can become another piece of straw on the camel’s back. Over enough time, those pieces accumulate. That is one more reason why reducing the end of a marriage to one action, one person, or one final event so often fails to capture the complexity of what actually happened.

But Someone Still Has to Take Responsibility

At this point, someone might object, “Isn’t all this talk about complex causation just a sophisticated way of avoiding responsibility?” It can be. People are remarkably creative when constructing elaborate excuses for behavior they simply do not want to own. But that is not what I am suggesting. Understanding complexity should not become an escape hatch from accountability.

The difficulty is that we still want to blame someone. Maybe we blame ourselves. Maybe we blame the other person. She is hurt and crying, so you conclude, I caused her pain. He left, so you blame the other woman. Someone filed the paperwork, someone moved out, someone said the final hurtful thing, and we move almost immediately from identifying a cause to assigning moral blame. But those are not quite the same question. A useful word here is culpability, meaning the degree of moral or legal blameworthiness attributable to a person for an act or outcome.

Go back to our camel and the three farmers. All three farmers may be causally involved in the camel’s injury, yet their culpability could be very different. One farmer might knowingly continue piling straw onto a camel he knows is already overloaded. Another might negligently fail to notice the danger. A third might reasonably believe the load is safe. They are participating in the same causal chain, but it would make little sense to say they are therefore equally blameworthy. The law recognizes this general principle as well: responsibility can vary according to what a person did, what they knew, what they intended, and the circumstances surrounding their conduct.

Now apply that idea to a marriage. If we look backward across the entire causal chain, through the distal causes, the contributing causes, and finally the proximal cause, we may discover culpability at many different points. Both spouses may have contributed to the breakdown, but perhaps not equally. One person may bear considerably more responsibility for some things and considerably less for others. It may be 70/30, 90/10, 55/45, or something we could never meaningfully reduce to a percentage at all. The point is not that every divorce is 50/50 or 0/100. The point is that the final event does not automatically tell us how moral responsibility should be distributed.

There is an enormous difference between saying, “I contributed to this outcome,” and saying, “Therefore, the entire outcome was my fault.” The first can be accountability. The second may be distortion. Likewise, saying that another person contributed to an outcome does not automatically make them entirely responsible for everything that followed. Several causes can operate together, and one factor can make a substantial contribution without being the sole cause.

There is also an important moral distinction in the kinds of behavior involved. One spouse might contribute to an argument by becoming defensive while the other engages in sustained verbal abuse. Both behaviors may technically participate in the interaction, but it would be absurd to conclude that they therefore deserve equal moral blame. One spouse might withdraw emotionally while the other commits repeated infidelity. Both may be part of the history of the marriage, but the moral weight of those actions is not necessarily comparable. Again, not everything is 50/50 or 0/100.

That is why examining the causal chain is not an attempt to divide blame evenly. It is an attempt to understand responsibility more accurately. If I did something wrong, I should own it. If the other person did something wrong, they should own that. If we both contributed to an unhealthy pattern, we should acknowledge that as well. The goal is not to make everyone equally guilty. The goal is to resist the comforting simplicity of assigning all culpability to whoever happened to place the last straw on the camel’s back.

Grace Is Not an Excuse, but It Is Needed

I should not have to say this, but you do not know everything that happens inside another person’s marriage. Heck, you probably do not even know everything that happens inside your own. Human beings are complicated, relationships are complicated, and much of what happens between a husband and wife is invisible to everyone outside the relationship. Frankly, much of it is none of our business. That said, I hope I have demonstrated that in many divorces both causation and culpability are far more complicated than they first appear. If nothing else, that complexity should give us pause. It should slow our rush to judgment and encourage us to lead instead with agape, the kind of self-giving love that seeks the good of another person.

This is why I think people who have gone through divorce need something more useful than blame. They need grace. And, for crying out loud, sometimes the rest of us need to give it to them. Divorce is hard enough already without friends, family members, church communities, or casual observers appointing themselves judge and jury over a relationship they only partially understand.

“If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” – Romans 12:18

Grace does not mean pretending nothing happened. It does not mean calling wrong behavior right. It does not mean erasing responsibility, minimizing abuse, excusing betrayal, or refusing to acknowledge real harm. Grace and truth are not enemies. In fact, genuine grace requires truth because there is nothing gracious about asking someone to live inside a lie.

Grace means allowing another human being to be more complicated than the worst thing they did during one of the worst periods of their life. It means recognizing that people can fail badly and still be more than their failure. It means acknowledging that someone can cause pain without being the sole cause of everything that went wrong. It means resisting the temptation to reduce an entire marriage, perhaps decades of history, to one decision, one argument, one affair, one signature, or one last straw.

It also means extending some of that grace to ourselves. Self-compassion does not mean saying, “I did nothing wrong.” In some ways, it requires something harder: owning what is mine without taking ownership of what was not. That means resisting two very tempting stories. The first says, “This was completely their fault.” The second says, “This was completely my fault.” Occasionally, one person’s wrongdoing really does dominate the moral landscape. But much of the time, reality stubbornly refuses to fit neatly into either box.

The better question may not be, “Who can I blame?” but, “What can I learn?” Own your mistakes. Apologize where you need to apologize. Make amends where you can. Learn to communicate better. Deal with the wounds you have ignored. Become wiser. Become kinder. Become more emotionally mature. Become a better friend, spouse, parent, or human being than you were yesterday.

But do not pick up the entire load simply because you happened to be standing there when the camel finally collapsed.

There is enough pain in divorce already. We do not need to manufacture more by confusing the last link in the causal chain with the entire chain, or by confusing honest responsibility with limitless blame. Have grace for the other person where you can. Have grace for yourself where you should. Tell the truth about what happened, including the uncomfortable parts. After all, the Truth will set you free.

And then, once you have learned what the past can teach you, put down the straw and keep walking.

Resources

• American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Divorce and child custody. https://www.apa.org/topics/divorce-child-custody
• Carrère, S., Buehlman, K. T., Gottman, J. M., Coan, J. A., & Ruckstuhl, L. (2000). Predicting marital stability and divorce in newlywed couples. Journal of Family Psychology, 14(1), 42–58. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.14.1.42
• Ellison, J. K., Kouros, C. D., Papp, L. M., & Cummings, E. M. (2016). Interplay between marital attributions and conflict behavior in predicting depressive symptoms. Journal of Family Psychology, 30(2), 286–295. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000181
• Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1992). Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: Behavior, physiology, and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(2), 221–233. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.63.2.221
• Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1999). Rebound from marital conflict and divorce prediction. Family Process, 38(3), 287–292. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.1999.00287.x
• Lewis, C. S. (2001). The problem of pain. HarperCollins. (Original work published 1940).
• Sbarra, D. A., Smith, H. L., & Mehl, M. R. (2012). When leaving your ex, love yourself: Observational ratings of self-compassion predict the course of emotional recovery following marital separation. Psychological Science, 23(3), 261–269. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611429466
• Talbert, M. (2026). Moral responsibility. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2026 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

Excerpt

Divorce is rarely explained by a single event or one person’s failure. Causation, culpability, pain, and responsibility are often tangled together. Own what is yours, learn from it, and extend grace to yourself and others. The last straw matters, but it is never the whole load.

Things are not always as they seem.