Cultural Myths that Enable Divorce, Part II

If you haven’t read Part I, start there, or this won’t make a lot of sense to you. If you have, let’s just jump right in with the next myth to be dispelled:

More than Half of All Marriages End in Divorce (I.E. Marriage is Doomed Before it Starts)
This myth was once true…in the 1970s and 80s. But it hasn’t been true for more than three decades — today, 72% of all married people are still married to their first spouse, and the chances of being a multiple-marriage type of person are directly related to how old you are. In other words, the divorce rate spiked because of a generational cultural phenomenon, and as that generation ages out of the picture, the high divorce rate is aging out with it.

Now, it is true that the younger generations has a lower marriage rate as well, and studies do show that much of the difference in divorce rate is due to the fact that the highest-risk groups are simply not getting married in the first place. But that still translates into great news if you’re a married couple: your marriage isn’t doomed to failure, no matter what your grumpy uncles try to tell you.

It’s Better for the Kids if You Get Divorced
This is an incredibly hotly debated issue, and it’s easy to see why: everyone who is suffering in a constant-combat kind of marriage wants to get out! It doesn’t help that the research is nigh-unto-impossible to perform, because it’s impossible to study a set of children and find out both what would happen during a divorce scenario and what would happen during a stay-together kind of scenario. Nevertheless, Johnathan Gruber, an MIT economist, figured out a clever way to do it by examining what happened when states changed laws, usually from ‘at-fault’ divorce to ‘no-fault’ divorce.

His findings were that children of divorced parents got married earlier in life, got divorced more often, had more children, and were less likely to attend secondary education or be fully employed — all of which combined to mean a much lower income and standard of living. The caveat: the significant changes were concentrated specifically in the oldest female child of families with two or more children. Essentially, the eldest female child is the one upon whom the most additional responsibility falls to compensate for the ‘missing’ parent, and thus they slip easily into the role of wife and mother at an early age, avoiding the challenges of school and work to do so. (A similar but less-intense effect applied to the eldest male in multi-child families with no older female children.)

In contrast, research has shown that parents who fight — even screaming and slamming doors — in front of their children can easily learn to do so in a way that is actually constructive to the child. It literally doesn’t matter how outrageous your fights get, provided that A) no one gets hurt, B) you fight until you reach a conclusion (no withdrawing or stonewalling), and C) you have your entire fight — from first barb to final kiss-and-make-up — in front of the children. Do that, and your kid will learn what it means to start, have, and finish a fight while still maintaining affection for the person they’re fighting with, which is an important skill for every human being to have.

What It All Means
The point of all of this mythbusting is simple: divorce happens. It happens for a million different reasons, under a million different circumstances, and each one of them is unique to the family and the environment they live in. But it doesn’t happen because men have some mystic timeframe that compels them to cheat, and it doesn’t happen because our culture is somehow irresponsible about getting married in the first place. It most definitely doesn’t happen for the children’s wellbeing. Own your divorce. Even if you’re not the one filing for it, even if you don’t want it, it’s still your divorce. Don’t let some goofy myths we made up about how relationships work take that away from you.