Will the issue of divorce scare off men from getting married?

In My Humble Opinion
181

Define “working”.

For some people having kids is a huge priority in life - if they get married and successfully raise kids together they might see that marriage as an overall success even if 5 years after the last kid leaves home a divorce occurs. If the goal “have and raise kids” then the goal was reached even if the marriage didn’t last an entire lifetime.

I’m not sure that a 20, 30 or 40 year relationship that ends is inherently a “failure” in all things. No, it didn’t last forever but nothing ever really does, does it? If the two part ways in an amicable fashion then it’s not so much a disaster as a change. Maybe for the better.

182

Exactly. This assertion that divorce means marriage didn’t work doesn’t seem to apply to everything else in life. “The business partnership lasted 20 years, so it was an obvious failure.” “That couple cohabitated for 30 years, so their relationship was an obvious dud.”

183

Also, even to compare to my point, this would need to compare LTRs and marriages of 5+ years, not up to five years. Unless you think the ideal model is a long series of 3-5 year relationships? That sounds dreadful to me.

184

It’s sociology - there will never be rigorous, double-blind controlled experiments of appropriate sample size, because these are people’s lives.

You suggested cohabiting and married people with children or financial entanglements would split up at about the same rate, I provided a cite that indicates they split up at 3x different rates.

Sure, there’s confounding variables, and there always will be. It’s sociology.

I contend it points to a ground truth that LTR’s, even with kids / financial entanglements, are easier for the couples to break up than a marriage.

185

"Of the 10 years of marriage, two of them were the most miserable years of my life, and the subsequent rocky divorce has left us both embittered, penniless, and deeply in debt, as well as possessing a powerful personal animosity towards each other.

But hey, those 8 years of non-misery were an obvious success!"

You’re the 30% success cases talking about the 70% failure cases, of course you have a rosier view of things.

186

What other things that end are always retroactively declared failures from the beginning?

ETA: And I haven’t been talking about my marriages at all, so I’m perplexed why you are.

187

To use an earlier example, what if you intended to get a Phd and after 4 years didn’t achieve it? Would you consider it a failure despite the time commitment?

In theory, marriages are til death do you part. The vast majority don’t make it that far. Would you argue that people go into marriage fully intending to bail in 10 or 20 years?

I asked before, but how would you define marital failure if divorce or net misery doesn’t define marital failure?

On you talking about your marriage, apologies if you specifically hadn’t talked about it, but the general consensus in this thread from married folk in earlier posts has been from people who were very happy in their marriages and with their spouses, who couldn’t see anything wrong with marriage at all. I was speaking to that.

188

I think net misery should define marital failure, but see no reason why divorce should define it. I think net misery should define a bad job, but see no reason why leaving a job should define it.

I sincerely doubt there is anyone in this thread who thinks that marriage is a perfect lovefest that every person should enter. I know there are people in this thread who think that marriage does things that are very important for some people in some situations, including many legal issues. I also know that there are people in the thread who think divorce creates problems with ending a relationship rather than divorce simply being the name we give to the process of ending a specific type of relationship.

189

Lemma: The majority of the time people get a divorce or leave a bad job, it is because they are net miserable, and said net misery inspired the divorce or job search.

Conclusion: We can safely use the fact of divorce or not as a strong indication that the divorced marriage was net miserable.

If you disagree with the above, why?

Sure. And despite me being seemingly the only anti-marriage person in this entire thread, I actually don’t have anything against it personally. I’m totally fine if people want to marry. If my little sister told me she was getting married, I’d be happy for her because she would be happy.

I would still think that marriage overall is a bad bet in both the general and particular, barring extraordinary evidence from the particular couple being married indicating it’s less of a bad bet, for the reasons I’ve cited.

190

Because I don’t have statistics on why people leave marriages or jobs, but I know anecdotally that sometimes it’s because they want something better or different. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were miserable.

And if you’re happy for a year then unhappy for a year and get a divorce, is that “net miserable”? That’s not how I would define the term.

And I was pretty fucking unhappy after my first husband died. It was devastating. Does that reflect on the marriage? If not, is it reasonable to apply the unhappiness people feel after a divorce to the marriage’s ledger?

191

So many good thoughts by Manda JO. She saved me a *lot *of typing the last 24 hours.

Big picture, like Manda JO I *strongly *question IT’s assertion that LT deep relationships break up more easily than marriages. Do short term shallow relationships break up more easily than hasty marriages? You bet. And for a net benefit to the participants and the larger society? You bet.

But after a few years, a shared mortgage, and maybe some kids, the obstacles to break-up seem just about as daunting.

One thing’s for sure. Posit the steroetype scenario of breadwinner lazy manchild and the long-suffering wife as homemaker getting tired of the scullery work. If they’re married, she may feel stuck, but she’s got the hope of some alimony on the way out. If she’s in an LTR she waived 100% of those rights years ago. In that scenario the LTR woman is *less *likely to leave than is the married woman. Why? Because they’re equally miserable of they stay, but LTR woman in more screwed in the aftermath than married woman would be.

As TI says, it would be nice if we didn’t have so much societal pressure that “there’s marriage, and then there’s all the ways to do it wrong.” The truth is there are other viable alternatives. They, and their various pros and cons should be more well-known and well-accepted.
There are people who look at LTRs as long term *provisional *relationships. In caricature, “My partner needs to earn my continued allegiance every week or else I’m gone.” They probably think that helps keep the partner on his/her toes. I suspect that model works real well when the partners are very equal in income, education, dating profile 1-10 score, etc. DINKs (including many gay/lesbian couples) might be examples.

Sadly, it also “works” in the case of very unequal relationships. One partner “buys” through spending, sex, or whatever, the long term acquiescence of the other. The other is kept perpetually on his/her toes by fear of abandonment.

Conversely, the situation where the LTPR works *least *well is where the partners are sorta unequal, say 60/40 or 33/66. Oddly enough, that’s about where most male/female couples come out in money, ambition, education, and all the rest. In that environment what we really have is one person committed to an LTR and one committed to an LTR while still shopping around. With zero legal protections for either.

When one is 25 or 30 it’s easy to imagine living in a world of plentiful dates and a fresh man/woman every 3 months until you find one good enough for a couple years. Blithely assuming you can just lather, rinse, repeat until you’re elderly.

The world doesn’t work that way. The reason 65- and 75- year olds stay at each other sides through the failing health years is precisely that they did not approach their earlier years as provisional or transactional.
One closing thought. We have some pretty solid statistics about how many marriages end in divorce. We have exactly zero statistics on how many LTRs end in breakup. We have some WAGs about net-unhappy marriages. We have some different WAGs about net-unhappy LTRs. Trying to do math on one stat and 3 WAGs is a pretty weak place to build an argument. Let’s try to find more and better data.

192

So, what if we have one stat and FOUR WAGs? :smiley:

193

96% of undergraduate applicants to Stanford don’t get in. All alone, that stat is entirely useless to someone deciding whether or not to apply.

The set of people who marry before having a kid and the set of people who move in together but don’t marry is so different on so many levels that I don’t see how you can begin to compare their outcomes. You can’t posit that they started with the same level of happiness, that they prioritized staying together the same way, that they faced the same challenges or the same choices, that they had anything like the same community support.

You can’t just say “if all we have is very bad data, we will have to draw conclusions based on that”. You especially ought not make determinations about what the best course is for any given individual based on such a messy data point.

The issues you have are much more with LTRs and the messy business of entangling your life with another mutable mortal, not with marriage.

194

Well, per LSLGuy’s recent post, more data is probably helpful.

“Amato and Previti (2003) found that when divorced individuals were asked open-endedly to provide their reasons for divorce, the most cited reasons were infidelity (21.6%), incompatibility (19.2%), and drinking or drug use (10.6%). A statewide survey in Oklahoma found that the most commonly checked reasons for divorce from a list of choices were lack of commitment (85%), too much conflict or arguing (61%), and/or infidelity or extramarital affairs (58%; C. A. Johnson et al., 2001)”
(Reasons for Divorce and Recollections of Premarital Intervention: Implications for Improving Relationship Education - PMC)

So the top reasons seem to be:

  1. Lack of commitment
  2. Infidelity
  3. Too much conflict / arguing
  4. Drinking or drug use
  5. Incompatibility

I would chalk pretty much every one of those in the “the marriage was probably net miserable” column, what about you? I would argue it is at least supportive, if not conclusive, to my lemma that most divorces happen due to net misery.

Then to my other supposition that LTR’s are easier to break apart than marriages, and that this is the source of their value. I already provided a cite that even for those with children, people in LTR’s split at 3x the rate as the same age cohort with children who were married. Here’s more:

"As technological changes in the home and workplace reduced the gains from specialization, the value of commitment decreased. Cohabitation, with lower exit costs than marriage, allows individuals to realize many of the gains from co-residence with less commitment.
…
Cohabitating unions tend to be much less stable than marriages for all education groups. The median duration of cohabitations is somewhat longer for the less-educated (22–24 months) than for college graduates (17 months), but is extremely short compared to marriage.

…

Economic models of marriage and cohabitation have emphasized one key difference: the costs of dissolution are much higher for marriage than for cohabitation (Brien, Lillard and Stern 2006, Matouschek and Rasul 2008). Ending a marriage involves legal formalities to divide property and debt and, if there are children, to establish custody, visitation, and support arrangements. Divorce became less costly as states adopted no fault or unilateral divorce laws starting in the 1970s, but divorce remains a complicated, uncertain, and often expensive process in both time and money. Unlike marriages, cohabiting unions can be ended simply and quickly outside of the legal system."

Which all seem directly in line with what I’ve been arguing. It is, of course, difficult to get hard, statistically valid numbers of exactly the cuts that may support your point. This is sociology. There will always be confounding variables and exceptions. But I would argue the preponderance of evidence is on my side.

Most marriages probably do end due to net misery. Most marriages do end, or are miserable.

LTR’s actually ARE easier to exit, and indeed in practice are exited faster than and with less hassle than marriages, reducing overall misery-years vs marriage.

Those are the underlying assumptions in what I’ve been arguing, and the preponderance of evidence suggests those assumptions are correct.

I look forward to cites supporting your views if you disagree.

195

I guarantee you that there are only two ways out, and you’re forced to take one or the other.

196

Someone in a LTR which looks exactly like a marriage–shared finances, joint ownership of property, kids, etc.–might as well get married. Marriage would actually simplify things at that point. Firstly, they’ll get all the societal/familial benefits of being married. And secondly, if they split, there is a well-defined way the assets and custody will be split. Is it really any easier to spit a LTR which has kids and other valuable shared assets than it is to divorce?

197

And - I feel this is being overlooked - not everyone has an equally high risk of divorce. Anyone, at any time, can make better choices to lower those odds. Not eliminate them completely. But people seem to act, sometimes, as if you have no control over whether you end up with someone who expects you to clean/parent 24/7 or give them money whenever they want it. It doesn’t work that way. There are a ton of unforeseen factors - miscarriage, disability, death of a parent, loss of job - but there are plenty we do have control over.

In an unrelated note, I was wondering if our high marital strife/divorce rate might have anything to do with our high rate of depression in this country. I’d be curious to see the stats for situational depression and cited factors. I’d also be curious to see stats on whether when we talk about depression in general, it is more often chronic (biologically based) or situational. Allowing that both can happen in the same person. Neurology is tricky.

My take on marriage is usually similar to my take on having kids. Some people were not meant to do it and Og bless 'em for recognizing it.

198

Textual Innuendo writes:

> So let’s take the 40% figure above - there’s a 40% chance your marriage is going to end in divorce. Of the 60% that don’t, at least half
> of those are probably net-negative when it comes to happiness and quality of life, on balance.

Do you have any statistics showing that at least half of the marriages that last are probably net-negative for happiness and quality of life? (Note: Assume the words “in the U.S.” in anything I write in this post.) There is nothing in any statistics I’ve checked that agrees with that claim. Like the claim that 50% of marriages end in divorce, that’s not supported by any current statistics at all. As I said above, the percentage of marriages that end in divorce is closer to 40% than to 50%. I’ve tried to find any statistics about the happiness of people in marriages that last. I can’t find any. There does seem to be some agreement that people are no more or less happy over the long term after marriage than before it. Basically, happiness doesn’t have as much to do with things like marriage and divorce as you might expect. Most people have a given level of happiness which is part of their mental makeup and isn’t as much affected by external factors as you might expect.

199

Spice Weasel, it’s not clear that in the U.S. there’s a “high rate of depression”, unless you mean the rate at which depression is actually diagnosed by doctors. It’s much more common in the U.S. for depression and other mental conditions to be officially diagnosed than in many countries. Some statistical studies claim that the rate of depression in the U.S. is actually about average if you’re talking about its real rate of occurrence as opposed to the rate at which it’s officially diagnosed.

200

It sounds like you’re saying that depression is underdiagnosed in other countries. Is that correct?

It gets complicated here. The DSM is a Western - biased tool and the expression of mental illness can vary dramatically across cultures. So how are other cultures defining depression? When we study it in other countries, how are we measuring it? These are interesting questions to me.

But really I think what I meant was the rate of depression in the US increasing relative to itself in the past. Certainly this is complicated by the fact that people have better access to services, and thus diagnosis, than ever before. I just wondered to what extent, if any, we can see a correlation between divorce rates and depression rates - or, perhaps, what percentage of divorces result in situational depression. Nothing I’m really seeking to prove, just interested in a deeper dive on the subject.