Several years ago, a friend announced on Facebook that she and her husband were getting a divorce. In her reel, she assured everyone, through smiles and occasionally laughter, that no one had “done” anything — they were both just feeling the need for change and growth in a new direction. According to the friend, what mattered was that both of the spouses were at peace with their decision.
The upbeat divorce narrative is not new, but social media has taken it to new heights. Divorce announcements, which were once the province of major celebrities, have likewise trickled into common use. Like celebrities wanting to keep up their image, these announcements employ cheery phrases, like “co-parenting,” “mutual respect,” and “growth journey,” that make the dissolution of one’s marriage sound like a couples retreat.
While it’s laudable to not expose marital acrimony or spousal failings, presenting divorce as nothing more than the healthy evolution of a normal relationship doesn’t make it better, it just adds a disorienting senselessness. Framing divorce as a cheerful, win-win scenario conveys the idea that sometimes our most intimate relationships just end for no reason, as unforeseeable and unpredictable as a tornado descending from clear skies.
In the first place, research has clearly debunked the myth of the no-downsides divorce. Statistically, children of divorced parents experience more mental health problems, have worse relationship outcomes as adults, make less money, have lower educational attainment, and may even fare worse physically.
Adults are not immune from the effects of divorce either. Research published in the Journal of Men’s Health found that divorced men “have higher rates of mortality, substance abuse, depression, and lack of social support.” Ann Gold Buscho, a psychologist who specializes in family issues and divorce, notes that “people who remarry fare somewhat better, but still have 12% more chronic illnesses and are 19% more likely to have problems with mobility than married people who never divorced.”
This doesn’t mean that divorce isn’t a good option in some cases. According to psychologists Paul Amato and Alan Booth, who have studied the effects of divorce on children’ s wellbeing, the damage of high-conflict marriage, which includes issues like adultery and abuse, divorce can be a relief. “When kids came from a high-conflict home, they did pretty well when the marriage finally ended and they got out of it,” says Booth.
But while divorce is sometimes necessary, it’s never ideal. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis argues that divorce is more like an amputation than the termination of a contract. While amputations can be necessary, they’re not cheerful occasions. And were a doctor to amputate simply because he thought the patient might want to try something new, our reaction would not be celebratory, but horrified.
This is exactly what happens in the dissolution of low-conflict marriages. Paul Amato and Alan Booth’s 2001 longitudinal study found that children from low-conflict marriages fare worse after divorce than those from high-conflict marriages. “On every measure, we found that coming from a low-conflict marriage that ends in divorce had a devastating effect on the kids,” summarizes Booth.
According to Amato and Booth, children in these marriages are often very surprised to learn of the divorce given the lack of serious conflict. Unlike in high-conflict marriages, which include severe issues like abuse and adultery, when a low-conflict marriage ends, the children find themselves losing more stability than they gain. The lack of serious problems in their parents’ marriage, along with the loss of security, means that children from these divorces,“see nothing but bad things following from it.”
Ending low-conflict marriages also prevents children from learning how to resolve conflict. “When kids grow up in families with parents who had these ‘good enough’ marriages that end in divorce, they do badly,” according to Amato. “They are more likely to see their own marriages end in divorce and have problems in general forming intimate relationships.” This tracks with the findings of Judith Wallerstein, a psychologist who conducted a landmark 25-year study on the effects of children from divorced families. Her work finds that “the children of divorce never acquire what others unwittingly derive from years of home life: an ‘inner template’ of how a committed husband and wife cooperate and play, fight and make up, and generally live out their lives as a couple.”
Because the upbeat divorce narrative reinforces the idea that impermanence is a feature of our most intimate relationships, children from these marriages often fear forming intimate and committed relationships. Continuing the weather analogy, they worry that a tornado might descend at any moment. Wallerstein’s study found that 40% of children from divorced families had never married and “two-thirds have decided never to have children.” By contrast, only 16% of children from intact families had not married. According to Amato, children whose parents end low-conflict marriages “have trouble making a commitment, question how much one can trust love and commitment, and in marriage, they have a lower threshold for problems which trigger thoughts of divorce.”
This likely contributes to falling marriage rates, as both Amato/Booth and Wallerstein found that the majority of divorces (about 60%) occur in low-conflict marriage - with many of these couples struggling with things like boredom, lack of sexual fulfilment, or loneliness. Of course, these are real problems that should be addressed, but the chance to solve those problems get bypassed for the nuclear option.
That inability to address problems often continues into subsequent relationships. Booth and Amato looked at how the quality of the first marriage “carried over” into their second. They found that “for the vast majority, [a second marriage is] different, but not an improvement.” Jolie Warren, a marriage and family therapist, reflects on her own divorce: “I can look back now and realize that we both had romanticized notions and high expectations of marriage. We were looking for the “fairytale” and for marriage to make us happy.”
Warren urges couples in low-conflict marriages to try and work things out - with her own experience teaching her how easy it is to “fall victim to divorce…to taking the easy way out in spite of the fact that what we had was a perfectly acceptable union.”
Divorce in these situations sends the message that love and commitment are not worth the inevitable challenges of a shared life. Dressing it up in cheerful language doesn’t change this, it only makes it less comprehensible. Divorce-as-mutual-fulfillment callously attempts to subvert a truth we know instinctively: that real fulfillment is a product of enduring commitment to one another, through thick and thin.