Will you end up divorced? Part 3
by Mira and Charles on June 14th, 2010More on the crazy business of predicting marital success
OK, so here’s an answer you didn’t expect to the question, “Will you end up divorced?”: So what? So what if you end up divorced?
I know: I’m being horrible. But I just want you to consider something that Deirdre Bair talked about in a recent New York Times op-ed, during all the talk about the Al and Tipper Gore breakup. She has data, which our own research and clinical experience confirm, that shows that divorce isn’t necessarily the disaster that people usually think of it as. She was writing about people who’d been married more than twenty years and then got divorced.
And guess what? Lots of times the divorce was all about moving forward into a new and better future. Lots of times people were happy they were divorcing and were happy with how things turned out post-divorce.
For some this symbolized a new freedom. For some it was a way to end a dead, draining marriage. For some it was part of making a new beginning.
And by the way, in Bair’s data women who wanted new partners found one within two years. Our data show similar results.
Bottom line: there were few regrets.
This of course is just what we found in our landmark book Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay, published almost fifteen years ago. It’s not divorce that’s bad. What’s bad is divorce for the wrong reason, or divorce when you don’t want one. The truth is that divorce is to marriage what bankruptcy is to business. It’s a way to clean the slate, to get out of a bad or unproductive situation and start over. It’s a way not to be trapped in the mistakes of the past. It’s a way to be happy when what’s making you unhappy is a bad marriage.
In Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay, over and over, with each diagnostic question, we say if your answer was such-and-such, then if you’re like most people you’ll be happy you left and unhappy if you stay. Divorce is not the road to regret. Divorce in fact can be regret-proof if you make the right decision for the right reasons.
We all understand that you get a divorce if things are horrible and you just can’t make them better. The point here is that divorce can make sense if things just aren’t at all what you need, in spite of your attempts to get your needs met.
If you’re thinking that maybe staying married is a mistake for you, or if you’ve been stuck in relationship ambivalence for a long time, you must check out Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay for clear and helpful guidance about whether you’ll be happier staying or leaving.
If things aren’t good in your marriage, they don’t have to stay that way. Many marriages can be made better than you every imagined, no matter how bad they seem right now. We do that all the time here at The Chestnut Hill Institute. But divorce can be an option too. Not a painful last step. But a release into a new and better future.
