Will This Marriage Last? - Divorce in Your Past

From Po:

Today I'm going to discuss the odds of divorce when there's already been a divorce in your family history - whether it was your parents that divorced, or whether you've been divorced and are remarried. I'll even bring up the factor of whether your grandparents divorced.

What these three categories have in common is this notion that somehow divorce begets divorce. That once you see it as an option, however painful, it becomes a more likely option later. That there might be something broken in you deep inside, such that sustaining a marriage is harder to pull off. It's a pop-theory that seems to fit the data.

You might have heard the broad strokes: If you were raised in a divorced home, you are more likely to divorce when you grow up. And if your marriage is a second marriage, post-divorce, your second marriage is likelier to end in divorce. It's even true that if your grandparents divorced, your are more likely to get divorced (regardless of whether your parents divorced).

Thus, the theory, that there's something inexplicably dangerous about divorce. I've talked to parents in very unhappy marriages who are afraid that if they divorce, they'll scar their children twice - the divorce will cause them turmoil, and then, when they grow up, their own marriages are then likely to end in divorce.

But when we look closer at the data, the pop theory doesn't fit. There's other explanations going on. Divorce is not contagious.

For example, the bewilderingly curious fact about the impact of a grandparents' divorce. How could that infect the grandkids? Especially if the intervening generation didn't divorce? Well, the sociologists have studied this, and it turns out that the grandparents of today's married couples were born a long, long time ago. Back then, divorce had a far greater financial impact than our era, when mothers have been protected by laws entitling them to equal assets or at least a livable income. When our grandparents divorced, a woman was very likely to end up without any financial support. So she, and her children, were much likelier to be raised in poverty. And poverty perpetuates, so the grandchildren today have higher odds of divorce. It's the lack of money, not the divorce, that trickles down generations.

In the same way, reasonable explanations fit the other data better than this pop theory.

For instance, second marriages are more likely to end in divorce than first marriages. But this is often overstated. For a middle-class family, a second marriage has only 3% increase in the odds of divorce. That's fairly small. And sociologists who've looked at the data a lot longer than I have believe the reason for that 3% higher rate has nothing to do with divorce being "wired" into a person. It's that people on their second marriage have shopped for a spouse in a smaller pond. They've had less choices from which to find a good fit. Second marriages tend to be less homogamous - the couple are not as similar to each other as an average first marriage. This factor alone easily explains the tiny 3% increase in risk.

Now for when your parents have divorced. This is not a small factor. If your parents divorced before you were 17, you have a 14% increase in the chances of divorce.

Let's look within that number, in several ways.

First, this impact is larger on daughters than on sons.

Second, consider the style of communication around that divorce. This really matters.

Before the parents divorced, was their conflict loud and visible to the children? Or was their conflict kept hushed behind closed doors? Of those two styles – called High Conflict and Low Conflict – the Low Conflict dissolution is worse for the children, in terms of their odds of successful future marriage. Those are the kids who, when they grow up, tend to have the divorces.

Kids who grew up in a house filled with yelling before their parents divorce, aren't really divorcing more than those who grew up with two married parents. But those whose parents acted like everything was all right until one night at the dinner table, when they suddenly announced their divorce -- those kids don't trust their relationships. Constantly believing that their worlds may turn upside down at any moment, they're the ones who divorce at a higher rate.

Divorce in a child's life should not be taken out of context. Divorce is just one of many possible stressors on a child. Sociologists have done studies on children who have significant stress events in their childhood, and they all tend to get divorced more often when they grow up. Divorce is not more or less important than these other stressors. We shouldn't treat divorce as significantly more relevant, or as our only focus.