Is divorce contagious? New research by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Dan Cox suggests the answer is yes. Looking at data from the Survey Center on American Life, he found that divorced Americans are much more likely to have close friends who are divorced and that people in social networks with more divorce also seem to have lower marital satisfaction themselves. Among Americans who are divorced, 41% have “some friends” who are divorced. Among those who are married, only 21% have “some friends” who are divorced.
As Cox concludes, “When divorce becomes common in a friend group, it can influence how people view commitment, conflict, and the purpose of marriage itself.”
Which makes sense. At every stage of life, we look around at our friends and wonder whether we are on the right track. Is it time to get married? Should we start having kids? How many kids should we have? Is it time to buy a house? Where should we send our kids to school? And when things are not going well, we look at our friends to see what they are doing. Do we have the same complaints? Are they more serious or just the typical stresses of marriage and family? When their relationships aren’t going well, it’s hard not to wonder about our own. As the cultural scripts in America become less clear, the scripts we get from people around us can become much more important.
But what is the tipping point? At what point are too many of your friends splitting up? So many that it makes it likely your own relationship will become less stable?
I was thinking about this as I was listening to Jen Hatmaker’s recent bestselling memoir, “Awake.” The evangelical influencer learned about her pastor husband’s affair in 2020, when she overheard him speaking to his girlfriend in the middle of the night. She immediately asked him to leave the home they shared with their five children and filed for divorce in their two-decade-long marriage.
Hatmaker has become controversial in recent years for espousing positions that have put her at odds with many in her church community, including support for same-sex marriage and abortion rights. This started before the revelation of her husband’s infidelity.
But it’s clear that the divorce upended not only her life but also her worldview, including ideas about “purity culture” and evangelical attitudes about men and women. Her pain is clear as she recounts stories about Bible camp and Sunday school lessons that treated men and women differently. She harbors anger about the shame she believes women are taught to have about sex and their bodies. She looks with suspicion at the “patriarchy” and wonders over and over again why she and her husband were allowed (and even encouraged) to marry so young (while they were in college). How did they know themselves? Shouldn’t they have been able to grow up more first?
What’s interesting is that in the wake of divorce, Hatmaker is surrounded by a support system of several other couples, Hatmaker and her husband’s closest friends, the people they raised their children with. The men, upstanding and kind in her telling, offer to stand outside her house while she confronts her husband. They offer her words of encouragement when she is at her lowest moments. The couples continue to sustain her and her children.
Her support network is not just “you go girl” girlfriends but the married couples she and her husband have lived around for decades. It is easy to understand how something as devastating as infidelity would turn everything you think upside down, but one wonders about the culture that produced these other stable couples and faithful men. Most, we presume, were raised with the same values, married young and continued to believe in a traditional view of marriage. When one relationship goes sour, should we throw the baby out with the bathwater?
How do we keep the cultural norm of marriage when a marriage in our circle falls apart? How do we prevent a crack in the foundation from spreading? No one wants to return to a time when women had to tolerate infidelity (or worse) in order to avoid communal shame. Few want couples who are deeply unhappy to be forced to remain married till death do they part. And we want the people we love to feel as though they have our support if things do go south in their partnerships. But we also want our children to grow up in a world where marriage is the default arrangement for forming a family. The balance can seem all but impossible.