Family Law is a Misnomer.

It is true. Family law, as Justice Choo has said, is a misnomer. It is not a law to keep a family going. It is a law to save parties, including the kids, from a family breaking up.

Leo Tolstoy said: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family are unhappy in its own way.” I guess this is where Family law comes in; to address and resolve the many ways unhappiness is expressed within a family - to put it mildly. 

Family law is one of society’s handmaidens to help parties resolve disputes, especially one that can be as bitter as divorces, family violence, the division of assets accumulated jointly, and the issues concerning the care of their young children. 

Justice Choo said: “By the time the (law) is involved to resolve domestic problems, it usually means that the family can no longer mediate within itself. It is one thing for a family to give and take within itself, and another for a third party to determine how they should do it.”

Unlike a commercial contract, a marital vow comes frontloaded with great expectations. No ordinary contract signed on the dotted line ends with the lifetime bond of nuptial union. Imagine business partners shaking hands, smiling at one another, saying, “Till death do us part”. Scary right?

Usually, when a commercial undertaking is realised and the net profit is divided amongst the parties based on the contractual terms, the partnership ends there. 

You take your money as a reward for the faith, trust and effort invested in a business venture for a period of time, and each of you walks away, satisfied. Most of such handshakes, should the purpose for which they join hands come to pass, conclude with a happy ending. Incidentally, friendships are then forged. 

Even for commercial disputes, when things go down south, the parties are often kept at arms’ length. While emotions may flare up and distrust deepens for the long run, once the matter is arbitrated and resolved, you can generally expect the business wounds to heal. 

For a marriage, however, things are never that simple or straightforward. The wounds for some are never healed. 

What complicates the issue even more, if not much more, is the consummation not just of hearts, bodies and souls, a spiritual union of sorts, but it is the unyielding fruit that such intimacy brings. Mind you, that is part of the covenantal expectation of a marital union. 

When something as miraculous as a life is being conceived in a womb by the joint and indispensable efforts of two ordinary and broken souls (who never stop wondering how undeserving they are), the vows they take to each other suddenly comes alive and the gravity of their passion unknowingly sets the law of love in their hearts. 

When I first held my firstborn in my arms, his vulnerability became my vulnerability, his hopes became my hopes, and his joy became my joy.

From there on, Anna and I know that no contractual terms or language can ring fence or define that kind of passion, commitment and nurture each of us is call to bring into the marriage, which has, by sheer deliberation, served one of its highest purposes, that is, the conception of a life, or in my case, three.

You can therefore see how when a marriage is taken seriously, it can lead to a perpetuated “lawless” (or law-superfluous) bliss that is governed by the self-sacrificial acts of love. 

Family law would then become redundant in a family that has no use for it when love as an ideal is diligently applied to raw reality and is then transformed into a love that is resilient and always overcoming. And when you have arrived at that level of marital commitment, you would then need family law as much as a fish would need a bicycle. 

But any commitment below that covenantal threshold is witlessly beholden to the laws of familial disunions. It is therefore bound by its human-directed solutions, one that can never reach a perfection that the perfection of love in a marriage can reach over a joint and shared lifetime. 

Let me end with our greatest aspiration as a human being with a sealed expiry date. Our greatest aspiration as a living soul is to be loved and accepted, and in return, to give love and accept another, both unconditionally. 

That kind of mutuality is beyond the ambit and reach of a commercial handshake. That kind of union is nurtured in the timeless womb of love that only produces eternal results when two lives come together to sacrifice for one another. 

Marriage is therefore not a self apart from another self. It is instead two selves losing themselves in a union that is transformed by selflessness. No other secular bonds come close to such nurtured resilience, growth and maturity over one’s lifetime. 

So, yes, family law will always be a misnomer because it is nevertheless society’s earnest handmaiden of resolving conflicts that arise from a bond that often operates not on the covenantal level, but one out of a passivity based largely on natural convenience.