Will you end up divorced?
by Mira and Charles on June 7th, 2010The crazy business of predicting marital success
Maybe I just woke up in a bad mood, but I’m getting really pissed off at all the articles I’ve been seeing about predicting divorce or marital success. There was one recently in the Daily Beast, for example, and the Gore split up has produced a flash flood of articles, like this one in the New York Times. The articles themselves are good. It’s the stuff in them that fries my onions.
What’s the point of predicting risk of divorce for already-married couples? So you can say, “Oh, we’ve got a high risk of divorce. So why bother fighting it any more? Let’s just break up now and save ourselves any further bother.” Or, “Hey! We’re at low risk of divorce—now we can relax. WooHOO!”
Most of this data just makes us smug or nervous, and it definitely makes us confused. What, for example, are we to make of the finding that you are 40 percent more likely to get divorced if your parents were divorced? Does that mean that children of divorce shouldn’t get married? Is there a divorce gene?? If your parents weren’t divorced does that mean you can just coast??? WTF!!!!
To take another example, what are we to make of the advice that appeared in the Times article that if you want to avoid divorce you have to work on your relationship and stay active in each other’s lives. Well, that’s brilliant. A couple of tiny little questions, though: What makes you want to work on your relationship? What makes you want to stay active in each other’s lives? Come on: aren’t there people you can only stand if you aren’t active in their lives? What if you don’t want to work on the relationship? Will working on it anyway help? Again: so confusing! WTF!!!!
So in the next series of blogs I’m going to comment on some of the findings and suggestions that have shown up recently. My goal is to make you smarter and more effective at dealing with your relationship, and less worried about things that actually have nothing to do with you.
I want to make sure you have advice that’s solidly based, that makes sense, and that you can actually do something about.
For now, I’ll leave you with this: If you’re thinking of getting married, it’s all about like, not love. Marry someone you really like. Someone who likes you. Someone who makes you feel you like yourself when you’re with him. Someone whom you like when you spend one-on-one time together: the more time you spend together, the more you like each other. Someone you continue to like when you’re plunged into the stresses of everyday life.
If you just do this, you’ll be in great shape to beat the odds.
For people who are thinking of getting married, there is a lot more very specific advice in Is He Mr. Right?, the best book on the subject.
And stay tuned for more here. I’ll have a lot more to say about this whole confusing divorce-prediction thing. You’ll be happier for it.
