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   Home  > Articles

Review of Smart Marriages Conference, 2001

By Harry Benson

The big message about marriage and divorce

Below are some comments and observations on the major presentations. The most striking presentations came from top researchers Linda Waite, Judith Wallerstein and Paul Amato. If ever there was a case for sticking at marriage, and treating divorce with the utmost caution, these presentations make it very strongly. Because you may want to relay these stories further afield, I’ve tried to include some of the relevant figures. If figures merely confuse you, please ignore them and look for the basic underlying message.

  1. For those of us who seek to understand the research "case for marriage", Linda Waite’s book of that name is the definitive guide and an easy informative read. I encourage you to read it. In her presentation, she highlighted an unexpected bonus finding from her research into a US national household survey of 10,000 adults. All rated the quality of their marriage twice, in 1986-87 and again in 1992-94, on a scale of 1 (hell) to 7 (heaven). Of the 81% of married people who started off "unhappy" (rated 1-4, 10% of those surveyed) and who were still married five years later, 86% of these became happier. More remarkably, 77% of those unhappiest (rated 1-2, 2% of those surveyed) actually said they were "happy" or "very happy" (rated 6 or 7) five years later. 72% of all the unhappy people had happy spouses. The surprising messages from this huge survey were therefore that:
    • very few married people are unhappy at any given time,
    • unhappily married people invariably get happy if they stick it out, and
    • it’s generally people and not marriages that are unhappy.

    Further investigation of the same sample found that divorce is not the way to happiness. Those who divorced were far less likely to say they were happy with life in general. Those in the unhappiest marriages who then divorced also ended up with very poor levels of emotional well-being compared to those who stuck it out. This rather decimates the argument of those who promote divorce on the self-interested grounds of "doing what’s best for you". More recent focus group work on the reasons why unhappy people so often stick it out successfully suggested four main areas: "just keeping going", "working at it", "knowing s/he will walk out" or "changing my attitude".


  2. In the 60s era of free love and personal freedom, Judith Wallerstein asked the far-sighted question "what happens to the kids?". She has been interviewing a batch of 93 children of divorce on and off since the early ‘70s. Her book "The unexpected legacy of divorce" is a must-read. Her key findings are that
    • the immediate trauma of divorce is less important than its later effects, and
    • the impact of divorce tends to grow and crescendo in the first ten years of adult life.

    When the man-woman relationship comes to centre stage, the ghosts of divorce re-emerge. Kids of divorce are then trapped between their desires to succeed in relationship and their fears that it will all go horribly wrong. What was especially striking for me personally was to hear my own experience as a child of divorce validated as the norm. For me, as for many, divorce is the central issue of life. All children of intact marriages can describe their parents rituals or even courtship in detail. Yet children of divorce lack the central image of an intact marriage. Reasons for divorce are often seen as a black hole. Following divorce, children frequently experience bewildering change and multiple losses. For my wife Kate, it was also enlightening to hear my own experience normalised. If you’re not a child of divorce yourself, and especially if you’re married to a child of divorce, please sit up and take note of Kate’s discovery and read Judith Wallerstein’s book. Public awareness seems like the best place to start.


  3. One possible caveat to the "divorce is bad" argument comes from work by Paul Amato. His 20-year study of 2,000 married adults and 700 of their offspring divided families into "low-" and "high-conflict", married and divorced. Nearly 300 divorces occurred in his group during the study and he now has a great deal of information on the state of marriage and well-being of adults and children in both intact marriages as well as before and after divorce. What he found is that 60% of the marriages that ended in divorce looked little different from other intact marriages an average of a year and a half before the divorce, in terms of satisfaction and conflict. He termed these "low-conflict". The remaining 40% were low in satisfaction and high in conflict before the divorce. The low-conflict majority of divorces generally occur due to "growing apart" but, from the point of view of the child, these are the most inexplicable and damaging. Children’s well-being is very poor in both high-conflict marriages and following low-conflict divorce. Children appear emotionally resilient following high-conflict divorce, perhaps relieved of the pressure of living with fighting. But we need to put these findings in the context of Judith Wallerstein’s longer-term findings of how the ghosts of divorce re-emerge in early adulthood to sabotage adult relationships. It will be interesting to see Amato’s findings from this group in 10-15 years time. For now, children’s well-being is by far the best within low-conflict marriages.

Conference summary

Other comments of interest


In this article
- Introduction
- Conference summary
- The big message about marriage and divorce
- Other comments of interest
- Marriage education programmes
- Conclusions

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Copyright © 2001, Harry Benson.


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