Cultural Myths that Enable Divorce, Part I

Two fish are swimming through the water, when they meet an older fish swimming the other way. “Morning, boys! How’s the water?” The two fish swim on for a while, when one of them looks at the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”

This story serves to illustrate a very basic point about human life: we’re frequently so blind to our environment we don’t understand that we’re moving through a medium. To the fish, that medium is water — the medium I’m talking about today is culture. Americans are notorious world-wide for assuming that our cultural standards apply everywhere, and for being baffled at the hideous weirdness that is ‘any other culture.’

It’s important, because we have an amazing ability to get divorced (or blame other’s divorces) on things that we, as a culture, simply made up. Today, I’m going to shoot down several of America’s favorite excuses for divorce by pointing out that they don’t actually exist. Buckle your seatbelts!

The Seven-Year Itch
Originally a term that referred to a long-term skin condition possibly associated with scabies, a 1952 play (and 1955 film) associated the phrase with couples breaking up (generally due to an affair) after around seven years of marriage. The median length of a marriage in the US is around seven years — but that doesn’t mean that there’s anything special about the seventh year; it’s an average that includes just as many two-month marriages as lifelong ones. Instead, studies have shown that every culture has its own ideas of when marriages are most likely to suffer issues — in fact, in the US and UK alone, the 2nd, 3rd 4th, 7th, 9th, 10th and 12th years have all been accused of being the “itch year,” and that’s only studies that have come out since 1980. The only reasonable conclusion is that there’s no such thing as an “X-year itch” — there’s just people who decide to cheat.

Research reveals that no matter when the “itch” to cheat (or do anything else to escape from a malfunctioning marriage) rises, the number one thing you can do is wait: 86% of couples who simply put up with the bad stuff for a couple of years found themselves enjoying renewed domestic bliss.

Mid-Life Crises
How many times have you looked at a middle-aged man in a sports car and thought, ‘mid-life crisis’? Well, guess what? That’s another cultural fiction that isn’t actually a thing. The main reason we believe in this myth is that it appeared in a popular book, The Seasons of a Man’s Life (but even that first popularization was a profound corruption of its original form, which was in an analysis of the lives of creative geniuses.) In the ‘Seasons,’ the idea was that at some point, a man realizes that his upcoming death is closer to today than his now-distant birth, and this causes a panicked reassessment of everything in his life — with many men choosing younger women and higher-horsepower cars in the attempt to recapture the feelings of youth.

Research, naturally, reveals that there is no midlife crisis. Rather, people are simply bad at statistics, and thus they remember the few balding men in sports cars that they’ve seen rather than remembering the millions of middle-aged men who are perfectly content with their lives.

We’ll talk about a couple of other similar myths later this week — along with a short discussion of why this is all actually important enough to talk about. (Hint: it’s all about divorce.)