The Five Rules Guiding Every Decision to Divorce

Humankind seems like a massively chaotic, incomprehensible entity when you look at it as a whole. Heck, any one human generally seems that way! But as it turns out, while there are infinite variations on the themes of human life, there are certain rules that everyone follows. Even under extreme circumstances, anyone can be counted on to follow these rules — in fact, the more extreme the circumstances, the more likely it is that the decisions someone makes will be easily traced by following their circumstances and applying these five rules. That includes, of course, the decision to seek a divorce.

The “Better or Worse” Principle
The foundation of every human decision is based on a very simple question: if I do X, will my life be better or worse? The five rules below investigate how our minds implement this question and decide on its answer, but the fundamental question is always the same. Absolutely no one looks at a decision between X and Y and deliberately decides to take the path that they believe will lead to the worse result. Of course, this is based on their perception, not on reality, so often the choices this principal leads to are not obvious until you understand how someone sees the world.

Rule One: Survive
This one is simple: if you threaten someone’s survival, everything else stops until that threat is resolved. This is the device that eventually allows many people to get out of truly dangerous relationships — survival trumps everything else.

Rule Two: The Importance of Meaning
The most important aspect of every human life (one that life is safe) is that the human in question wants to feel like they matter. Like someone cares what happens to them, yes, but more importantly, like someone cares about the results of the actions they take. By marrying someone, you essentially agree to them that they will matter to you, and that what they do will matter to you, for the rest of your life. If they begin to feel like their life has no meaning to you, they will also begin to feel like the relationship is fading.

Rule Three: Avoid Pain, Then Seek Pleasure
This one is also simple: given the choice, any human will choose to avoid pain first, and will pursue pleasure only once the pain is safely at bay. This can be overcome with extremes (people will actually choose to get punched in the face if offered $250 for it), but for almost any normal circumstance, people would rather get away from a spouse that they feel is making their life worse than they would stay with one who makes them feel good about their life. This means that it’s much easier to divorce someone you see as making your life worse than someone you see as neutral, even if you think there’s a better option around the corner.

Rule Four: Emotion Motivates, Logic Reinforces
Logic has never motivated anyone to do anything. Ask any trained salesmen: humans make decisions with their emotions first — often before they even know what’s for sale, or before they even answer the doorbell — and then they use what we call post-hoc reasoning to provide grounding for those decisions. But the decisions are definitely made based on feelings, not reason. The decision to divorce is no different: you will probably decide to divorce someone who makes you feel bad, and you’ll probably do it when something has just happened that makes you feel bad (whether it’s relevant or not!) — and once you’ve made the decision, you’ll look for a reason to back it up. (See our next post for more on this phenomenon.)

Rule Five: Time Makes Everything Smaller — In Both Directions
Think of what it’s like to walk down a long road with trees every few hundred feet. Even though you know using logic that all of the trees are about the same height, only the ones just in front and just behind you look that tall. The ones a mile in either direction seem microscopic in comparison. That’s an excellent analogy for how your emotions react to events: the emotional response to events in your distant past or (perceived) distant future are really small; the reactions to events that just happened or are (presumably) just about to happen are huge. This means that the decision to divorce almost always come in response to — or in preparation for — some other big negative event.

How is all of this information useful? That is coming — next week. We’ve got a little more exploration of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of divorce psychology first, but if you stick with us, you’ll get the answer you’re looking for.