I’ve long had a very short list (three items) of necessary conditions for a viable marriage. This isn’t what you have to do to make a marriage work; it’s what you have to have in order to have sufficient reason to try to make it work in the first place.
The first is mutual trust and respect.
The second is shared or compatible values, goals, and worldview.
The third is simply enjoying being with and doing things with each other.
Getting back to the OP, chances are that in the absence of either of the first two, you’re going to want to avoid conflict, either because you’re afraid of how a spouse who doesn’t respect you is going to handle their end of the conflict, or because you’re worried about a conflict exposing fundamental differences that you’re papering over; bad handling of conflict is in these cases a symptom, and not the problem itself.
Couples that do satisfy the first two conditions still need to handle conflict properly, but they’re more likely to get there on their own.
This was probablyJohn Gottman, who has done a number of studies on this. I read a couple of his books and liked them, and found them pretty relevant to my sister’s relationship at the time (which subsequently failed in flames, not surprisingly).
Interestingly enough in relation to the OP, Gottman does not find that conflict avoidance predicts divorce. In fact, one of his “styles” of successful marriages is the conflict-avoidance style. Apparently if you are both good at avoiding conflict, but you still respect each other, then it can work.
Anecdote: My parents spend half their time avoiding conflict (like, they don’t tell each other things that might upset each other – that would really bother me) and the other half exploding at each other. And they are still married more-or-less happily, forty years next year. I mean, I wouldn’t want their relationship, but they seem to like it!
Actually, that number (80% divorce rate after a first divorce) is misleading because there’s a small number of serial divorcee’s (like Elizabeth Taylor) who marry/divorce many, many times in their lives.
I’ve heard that too and it’s always stuck with me. I’m more than a little amused by the banality of it. And yet, it’s true in my experience as a child of 3 divorces and having known lots of divorcees. It always seems to me like saying “The number one indicator of future employment termination is being fucking awful at your job”. Trite but still true.
I could believe it. I am/was right on the edge of a divorce, and what we have been discussing since the revelation about it was that my striving to avoid conflict, working hard to keep from “making her angry” just made it so she viewed me as a doormat, and lost respect for me.
Since then, I have been trying hard to, when the impulse to avoid an issue due to “Anger”, diving right into it. We have had some pretty decent arguements, but we have surprised each other with the compromises we have been able to reach. We shall see what happens.
I have recently had some time to reflect on my life and my parents’ lives. My mom utterly avoids conflict, whether by nature or nurture I don’t know. She divorced my dad, her parents were divorced, and both sets of her grandparents were divorced (at a time when divorce was very rare). Neither I nor my brother has married, and no kids, so I guess that trend ends with her.
Couldn’t prove it by me. My dad remarried and has been for 25 years or so. My mom’s dad remarried and they stayed together until his death. And at least one of mom’s grandparents remarried happily.
I can see how avoidance of conflict is a problem. But to me, conflict doesn’t have be expressed to exist. Even if you’re swallowing it just to keep the peace, you’re still internally conflicted. So the true problem, in my mind, is excessive conflict. If a couple is not seeing see eye-to-eye on a whole lot of things, I can’t see how those who argue it out are doing much better than those who are choosy when picking their battles.
I still believe that contempt is the best prognosticator for divorce. Once that seeps into the relationship, it’s really hard to go back to happy times.