Rationalizations for a divorce

In the personal happiness epic, marriage problems did not seem to change that much. Instead married people in these accounts told stories of finding alternative ways to improve their own happiness and build a good and happy life despite a mediocre marriage.

Unhappy spouses who divorced reported more conflict and were about twice as likely to report violence in their marriage than unhappy spouses who stayed married. However, marital violence occurred in only a minority of unhappy marriages: twenty one percent of unhappy spouses who divorced reported husband-to-wife violence, compared to nine percent of unhappy spouses who stayed married. Divorce did not typically reduce symptoms of depression, raise self-esteem, or increase a sense of mastery

Most people assume that a person stuck in a bad marriage has two choices: stay married and miserable or get a divorce and become happier. Everyone's experience in divorce is different. I'm not going to try and cover all the possible reasons and circumstances where the persons divorce, those that vary from person to person. Instead, I'll focus on things that are almost universal...

Sometimes the partners were not good matches to start with, or were too young to make good choices about partners and commitments. Many view the relationship as a "mistake of youth" and see divorce as a chance to start over. They may leave the relationship with few negative feelings about their ex and enter new relationships with less "baggage"...

Sometimes partners change over the course of the years. Denied needs come out, new needs and desires develop, hurts pile up, and the change may become so great that the couple is no longer compatible. Sometimes the couple finds initial differences that they thought they would overcome have instead led to painful struggles, unhappiness, and failure

Sometimes one partner hid psychological problems, or developed them during the course of the relationship. Sometime the other partner failed to see the warning signs. Communication and problem-resolution skills suffer, as does intimacy and sexual closeness. Therapy and any changes it produces may be "too little, too late."

While couples present many different reasons for considering a divorce, they many times reflect one of the above situations. Regardless of the specific problem that brings a couple to consider divorce, many of the same kinds of problems can develop.

The most unhappy marriages reported the most dramatic turnarounds: among those who rated their marriages as very unhappy, almost eight out of ten who avoided divorce were happily married five years later. Separation somehow seems to make divorce less cruel. You're permanently linked to the source of your pain, suffering the loss over and over again. When there are issues of child custody, support, visitation, dating, adultery, the emotions just get deeper and more painful. Divorce, like grief, creates emotions of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance just like any other major loss.

Everyone who grieves goes through some amount of denial, even those whose loved one dies. For divorce, the denial seems more reasonable. After all, they're just across town...it's just temporary...they'll get over it. With many forms of grief, denial is a very short experience, but with divorce, the denial can go on for months...even years...some never get out of it. They sadly wait the rest of their lives for their love to return. This is a lot like denial, except, in bargaining, you try to believe there are things you can do to get your spouse back. 'If I just say I'm sorry for the thousandth time, they will take me back.' 'If I can convince them I've changed, they'll leave their new partner and come back to me.' Every time your mind hits upon a new tactic, you're on the phone or at their door, trying to get back. With divorce, this is usually more severe than with the death of a loved one. This is because they aren't dead! Either they abandoned you or created the conditions where you had to leave them...either way, it was their action that seems responsible for your pain and loss. The stronger the anger is, the more it chains you to your pain and suffering. It really doesn't matter how justified love is, the person it's hurting... No matter what it takes, to find a way to move past the and put it behind us and move on. Maybe during this stage we were able to blame all our hurt on them, but since the bargaining phase we've begun to realize to had a hand in it. Here it becomes clear that we and our spouse could have done things differently. We learn from the things we've discovered about ourselves and accept the things we've discovered about them. We realize there will always be a place in our heart where we miss how things might have been, but that is no longer the focus of our lives. We're even able to consider the risk of another relationship, hopefully, equipped with all we've learned from the last one.