[acb-hsp] FW: MountainWings:Tuesday - The Top Ten Myths of Divorce

[Baracco, Andrew W]

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 -----Original Message-----
 From: MountainWings [mailto:wings at mountainwings.com] 
 Sent: Monday, December 19, 2011 9:10 PM
 To: Andy Baracco
 Subject: MountainWings:Tuesday - The Top Ten Myths of Divorce
 
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 MountainWings       A MountainWings Moment
 #11354         Wings Over The Mountains of Life
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 If you are wondering why I'm sending this issue now, read this 
 issue: http://www.mountainwings.com/past/10256.htm
 
 The Top Ten Myths of Divorce
 =============================
 
 1- Half of all marriages end in divorce.
 
 That may have been the case several decades ago, but the 
 divorce rate has been dropping since the early 1980s. If 
 today's divorce rate continues unchanged into the future, the 
 chances that a marriage contracted this year will end in 
 divorce before one partner dies has been estimated to be 
 between 40 and 45 percent.
 
 
 2- Because people learn from their bad experiences, second 
 marriages tend to be more successful than first marriages.
 
 Although many people who divorce have successful subsequent 
 marriages, the divorce rate of remarriages is in fact higher 
 than that of first marriages.
 
 
 3- Living together before marriage is a good way to reduce the 
 chances of eventually divorcing.
 
 Many studies have found that those who live together before 
 marriage have a considerably higher chance of eventually 
 divorcing. The reasons for this are not well understood. In 
 part, the type of people who are willing to cohabit may also 
 be those who are more willing to divorce. There is some 
 evidence that the act of cohabitation itself generates 
 attitudes in people that are more conducive to divorce, for 
 example the attitude that relationships are temporary and 
 easily can be ended.
 
 
 4- Divorce may cause problems for many of the children who are 
 affected by it, but by and large these problems are not long 
 lasting and the children recover relatively quickly.
 
 Divorce increases the risk of interpersonal problems in 
 children. There is evidence, both from small qualitative 
 studies and from large-scale, long-term empirical studies, 
 that many of these problems are long lasting. In fact, they 
 may even become worse in adulthood.
 
 5- Having a child together will help a couple to improve their 
 marital satisfaction and prevent a divorce.
 
 Many studies have shown that the most stressful time in a 
 marriage is after the first child is born. Couples who have a 
 child together have a slightly decreased risk of divorce 
 compared to couples without children, but the decreased risk 
 is far less than it used to be when parents with marital 
 problems were more likely to stay together "for the sake of the
 children."5
 
 
 6- Following divorce, the woman's standard of living plummets 
 by seventy-three percent while that of the man's improves by 
 forty- two percent.
 
 This dramatic inequity, one of the most widely publicized 
 statistics from the social sciences, was later found to be 
 based on a faulty calculation. A reanalysis of the data 
 determined that the woman's loss was twenty seven percent 
 while the man's gain was ten percent. Irrespective of the 
 magnitude of the differences, the gender gap is real and seems 
 not to have narrowed much in recent decades.
 
 
 7- When parents don't get along, children are better off if 
 their parents divorce than if they stay together.
 
 A recent large-scale, long-term study suggests otherwise. 
 While it found that parents' marital unhappiness and discord 
 have a broad negative impact on virtually every dimension of 
 their children's well-being, so does the fact of going through 
 a divorce. In examining the negative impacts on children more 
 closely, the study discovered that it was only the children in 
 very high conflict homes who benefited from the conflict 
 removal that divorce may bring. In lower-conflict marriages 
 that end in divorce-and the study found that perhaps as many 
 as two thirds of the divorces were of this type-the situation 
 of the children was made much worse following a divorce. Based 
 on the findings of this study, therefore, except in the 
 minority of high- conflict marriages it is better for the 
 children if their parents stay together and work out their 
 problems than if they divorce.
 
 
 8- Because they are more cautious in entering marital 
 relationships and also have a strong determination to avoid 
 the possibility of divorce, children who grow up in a home 
 broken by divorce tend to have as much success in their own 
 marriages as those from intact homes.
 
 Marriages of the children of divorce actually have a much 
 higher rate of divorce than the marriages of children from 
 intact families. A major reason for this, according to a 
 recent study, is that children learn about marital commitment 
 or permanence by observing their parents. In the children of 
 divorce, the sense of commitment to a lifelong marriage has 
 been undermined.8
 
 
 9- Following divorce, the children involved are better off in 
 stepfamilies than in single-parent families.
 
 The evidence suggests that stepfamilies are no improvement 
 over single-parent families, even though typically income 
 levels are higher and there is a father figure in the home. 
 Stepfamilies tend to have their own set of problems, including 
 interpersonal conflicts with new parent figures and a very 
 high risk of family breakup.
 
 
 10- Being very unhappy at certain points in a marriage is a 
 good sign that the marriage will eventually end in divorce.
 
 All marriages have their ups and downs. Recent research using 
 a large national sample found that eighty six percent of 
 people who were unhappily married in the late 1980s, and 
 stayed with the marriage, indicated when interviewed five 
 years later that they were happier. Indeed, three fifths of 
 the formerly unhappily married couples rated their marriages 
 as either "very happy" or "quite happy."
 
 
 Additional Myths
 It is usually men who initiate divorce proceedings
 
 Two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by women. One recent 
 study found that many of the reasons for this have to do with 
 the nature of our divorce laws. For example, in most states 
 women have a good chance of receiving custody of their children.
 Because women more strongly want to keep their children with 
 them, in states where there is a presumption of shared custody 
 with the husband the percentage of women who initiate divorces 
 is much lower. Also, the higher rate of women initiators is 
 probably due to the fact that men are more likely to be "badly 
 behaved." Husbands, for example, are more likely than wives to 
 have problems with drinking, drug abuse, and infidelity
 
 
 ~from the National Marriage Project's Ten Things to Know 
 Series~ http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/tenthingsseries.html
 
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