There is a pretty well known statistic in the US Navy with divorces in families when the spouse stops deploying or retires and they are home all the time. Sort of a ‘honey I love you, but leave me alone or I will kill you!’ I grew up with my dad being away a lot, so the lack of living together time doesn’t bother me - but I knew some dependents who had issues with the husband deploying so frequently. [if you didn’t want your husband deploying, don’t marry military!] But I do like mrAru being home all the time.
Who knows. There has been more tension between my wife and me. And not sexual tension.
Also, i think I read that domestic violence cases have gone up.
If you make a large salary but aren’t insanely wealthy, you have to live in a cramped expensive place in a major city. That’s some law or something.
I’m working poor, pretty much, but my main house is 1160 sq ft. Plus I have a finished basement and “crawl space” that’s really an inhabitable storage area that’s just a shorter part of the basement. Plus a garage, deck, and yard. So at least I have some options for escaping my spouse to an extent. Then of course the whole working outside of the home thing.
Or delay them even more for economic reasons. I know at least 4 people in the same situation I am, only legally married (though mostly living together still).
I think it would take a very long time to raise the divorce rate- but I also don’t think tension during this time reflects the underlying health of a marriage. I’ve been married 32 years and I won’t be getting divorced because of all this forced togetherness, but it’s hard even though it’s only the two of us in our 1200 sq ft house. And I’m an essential worker so I still go to work every day - if it was 24/7 it would be even worse. Under normal circumstances my husband is out bowling 2-3 nights a week - but the bowling alley is shut down. No shopping (except for groceries ) or seeing friends or family. He’s not used to being home so he’s not underfoot exactly, but he won’t let me watch a TV show or read in peace. I’ve said for years that my husband is going to have to get a part-time job or something when he retires and I am now certain that I was correct.
My guess is higher.
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The financial stress adds fuel to every fire. When the money is fine, it’s ok to think ‘you spent HOW much on a new outfit?’ When money gets tight, then it can easily turn into a fight over who’s spending too much.
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A bad economy means one or both parties find themselves stuck in jobs they hate with bosses demanding more for less. That kind of tension just need a spark to set off an explosion.
Maybe some folks are enjoying the time at home, but I think it’s safe to say a massive pandemic and the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression is not generally fantastic for stress levels, which in turn doesn’t strike me as being a recipe for generally increased domestic bliss.
There will be lots of divorces and people moving back in with their parents after this is all over.
I don’t really care for the “if this ends your marriage you were doomed anyway” mentality. I work with people who are poor, homeless, unemployed, or caught in other difficult circumstances, and I see how it affects them. People in more stable circumstances like to imagine that they earned their peace somehow, that poor people are of fundamentally inferior character and such strife would never befall them. They like to think that not only are they more deserving of their wealth, but that even if they lost their money they’d never lose their cool. I think a lot of people are about to find out just how untrue that is.
also after a war there’s all the "quickie marriages " where 2 people get married because “we might die tomorrow” when they met on a shore leave …(i have a Vietnamese cousin that came about this way) then afterward when they didn’t they find out they can’t get along or didn’t know each other and divorce …
Yes I’m thinking financial stress will be more that’s unambiguously in the direction of more marital trouble. As others also said, and as well if this had happened when we had two (then three for a bit!) small kids in <700 sq ft (and at first needed every paycheck) it would be have been tough. I’m not selling us short and saying we would have broken up over it, but tough.
As is we were a bit snitty with one another one evening last weekend which is rare for us now, 37 yrs in, empty nest, financially stable. It’s stressful, worrying about grown kids (not married but their jobs/finances) and other people in general, and non zero chance we get it and it’s bad (though we’re only 60-ish pretty good health and actually might have had it already, persistent mild flu symptoms through much of March after attending a large gathering in NY area, or just the flu, anyway…). And with less distraction of outside activities, also a bit boring. I can conceive of the ‘get a chance to reconnect’ etc positive in some cases but tend to think it’s outweighed by stuff in the other direction for most people.
I think it will be a wash. For every marriage that would benefit from more time spent together, there’s probably another marriage that will be harmed by it.
This is EXACTLY why the divorce rate was so high in the late 1940s. Most of those marriages were childless, which made the process much easier for everybody.
I’m mostly afraid that we’re going to have a few Andrea Yates situations all over again - a (more likely) mother who has gone insane with the isolation, possibly on top of pre-existing mental health issues, and one day she snaps and kills her children.
Back in with their parents, or into their parents’ now empty home. 
I was wondering about the “after a war” thing. I presumed that the quickie marriages were during the war. But looking at the chart I gave (which includes marriage and divorce curves) it does look that there were quite a few marriages right after the war. But this spike corresponds to the divorce spike. I don’t think a lot of people got married and then quickly divorced at that time. The other way I see: people getting divorced and then quickly marrying someone else. There’s a slight lag of the marriage spike from the divorce spike so that fits.
The WWI marriage spike is clearly post-war. No big changes after Korea or Vietnam. (The latter more spread out with soldiers rotating out of country over a period of time.)
Basically, the economics seems to be more important than actual war. So our upcoming economic situation should have similar effects, divorce-wise.
Eh, it’s a lot of stress at one time which could break something otherwise stable.
You can have a shelf and hold 10lbs of books for a lifetime. Or put a filled aquarium on it for twenty seconds. But the fact that it couldn’t hold up 90lbs of water doesn’t mean it was “headed in that direction” when used to hold books.
My wife is a bit over-stressed at this time, enough so that she has had a Skype session with her GP to discuss medication. It’s understandable, even though there’s no direct financial impact on us and we’re self-isolating quite comfortably. Of course, we have some conflict about even MY going out (with reasonable precautions and care) to pick up groceries.
Re the possibility of a surge in births down the road…all I can say is that all four of my grandchildren have birthdays in October. When asked about it, my daughter says simply, “It gets cold in CT in January.”
Divorces skyrocket in China amid COVID-19 lockdown
I can totally see how this whole thing will cause lots of marriages to crumble. I’m thinking of all the women married to men-children who during normal times didn’t do their fair share of housechores and child-rearing. But it was tolerable because at least they were bringing in a paycheck and they weren’t always underfoot, getting in the way. I’m also thinking about the men who are married to nagging harpies. During normal times a guy in this situation could go to the bar whenever the nagging harpy attacked. Now he can’t do that.
On Reddit, I have read several threads written about couples who are on totally different pages with respect to social distancing. Imagine being scared about getting sick while your sidekick is going shopping and hanging out with friends like everything is normal. A person in that situation would be an idiot not to consider a divorce.
This is pretty much my life right now too. I already worked remotely for my company. My wife was flexible, she would go into the office regularly but had the freedom to also work from home. Now she is working from home exclusively. We have a 5 year old who was in pre-K and a 20 month old - both are home 24x7 since earlier in March when we pulled them from daycare out of concern for exposure.
We both feel we are failing miserably trying to balance our work and our children’s needs. We probably were not in the best place with our relationship before this and this is definitely adding mountains of stress on top of that. We’ve been self-isolated in our home for 22 days so far and the idea of sex hasn’t come up one time. I wouldn’t have the energy even if she expressed the interest. And I doubt she’d express the interest as basically once we get the girls to sleep, we’re either doing more work and/or collapsing into bed to try and rest.
Yates wasnt insane; she had postpartum depression.