Life & Wisdom Quote by Gerald F. Lieberman

Lieberman flips the romance of civic myth into the wreckage of private life, and the joke lands because it borrows the clean moral geometry of 1776 to describe something that never feels clean. A “declaration of independence” is supposed to be brave, public, righteous: one side standing up to tyranny, names inked like proof of principle. Divorce, by contrast, is usually two people untangling a shared country they built together - property, routines, friends, kids, histories - with no tidy enemy and no cheering crowd. Calling it independence is both relief and indictment.

The knife twist is “only two signers.” Declarations are designed to become collective stories; they recruit. Divorce is the opposite: a civic-seeming act that shrinks your universe, witnessed by lawyers and judges but experienced as an intimate referendum. Two signatures make it official, but they also emphasize isolation: the rest of the “citizenry” of the marriage doesn’t get a vote. Even when family and friends have opinions, the legal machinery insists the story belongs to the couple, and the couple alone carries the costs.

Subtext: modern marriage sells togetherness as a kind of nation-state, then acts surprised when exit resembles secession. The line’s wit is its moral ambiguity. Independence can be emancipation from harm, or it can be abandonment dressed up as principle. Lieberman’s framing doesn’t pick a side; it exposes how readily we reach for grand narratives to justify, sanitize, or survive a profoundly personal break.