Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E becomes final today
Me and little J-O-E will be goin' away
I love you both and it will be pure H-E double L for me
Oh, I wish that we could stop this D-I-V-O-R-C-E.
~Tammy Wynette

Divorce is ugly. In the south it’s so bad, some people can’t even say the word. They have to spell it.

The husband/wife relationship in Dixie is unique. Down here, marriage is still considered a sacred thing. In the Bible Belt, scripture says it is the woman’s place to keep the family together. If a divorce happens, it is always going to be blamed on the woman. After all, it’s up to her to hold the marriage together, to do enough to keep him interested and to always fight for him. Loretta Lynn can handle this one:

You say you're gonna take him
But I don't believe you can
Cause you ain't woman enough to take my man

Down south, a divorcee is considered a fallen woman who must have done something wrong. Or perhaps she didn’t do something right. In either case, she drove him away. A divorced man, however, is considered a good prospect.

“Before my friend divorced her husband for infidelity, his mistress she caught him with, sat up in bed and said if you were satisfying your man, he wouldn’t have to go looking for it someplace else,” said Tahira Hensley, a home loan specialist.

“The woman is the bad guy, every time.”

Gina, a home stager, says “My family was so upset when I told them that Bill had walked out on me and our boys that they actually called him to try to patch things up for us. Talk about humiliating! It’s not bad enough he left us to find himself, my family took his side!”

“Southern women prefer to be married,” Gina continued. “I admit it. I love men, and I want to be a wife.” Such thinking, she says, can lead to mistakes. “We want to be married so badly that we might settle. And then, if that marriage fails, we’re back out there, almost immediately, seeking another husband. It’s a little embarrassing, but it’s the truth.”

In the South, young women still have cotillions, and marriage is a woman’s highest calling. And they certainly want to be married before thirty – even if they have a career. Ambition to wed we call it. So, it stands to reason that remarriage after divorce is inevitable.

“Four marriages. Yep. Four marriages,” says Maria, who was born and raised in Tennessee. “My weakness is and always has been men, or maybe it’s marriage. I can’t help myself.”

Southerners may like to get married, but they have a problem staying married. Southern states have some of the highest percentage of divorce per thousand in the U.S. Arkansas is No. 2, Oklahoma is No. 3. Tennessee is No. 4, Alabama is No. 7, Florida is No. 10, Mississippi is No. 13, and Georgia is No. 17. (You had to ask? Nevada, home to Reno, is No. 1.) Down South, when one marriage fails, it’s on to the next.

That’s why country songs are still saying the same thing today that they were saying 40 years ago. It’s all about "standing by your man.” Or, as the case may be… "men."