Marriage and Divorce

A recurring question across the canon pairings is whether these marriages would actually survive. Mrs. Rowling’s own comments suggest she is not entirely confident they all would.

The Ron and Hermione pairing is the most obvious case. While I do not believe in divorce, it is almost certain that Hermione would. Mrs. Rowling’s comment that their marriage would “maybe” survive with counselling¹ implies that divorce is, in the characters' minds and morality, a real possibility.

This raises a broader question about the wizarding world: does magical society even have divorce? We see no evidence of it in the books. Contracts and magical bonds are a staple of fan fiction precisely because the books leave this undefined. If magic can bind people together — through marriage vows, through life debts, through other mechanisms — then the question of whether a bad marriage can be escaped becomes much more interesting than in the mundane world.

The tension between secular and non-secular views of marriage runs through several of these pairings. From a secular standpoint, if a marriage is not working, divorce is the obvious answer. From a non-secular standpoint, the commitment itself has weight regardless of whether the relationship is easy. Mrs. Rowling never clearly establishes where wizarding culture falls on this spectrum.