Intense Commitment vs. Divorce's Role in Ultimate Happiness: Annotated Results of a Study (#2)

Does Divorce Make People Happy? is a very interesting study of the effects of divorce on happiness compared to that of couples who remained together in attempt to resolve issues within their unhappy marriages. The findings are quite interesting and well-approached--probably the most scholarly approach to the subject at hand than any of the other resources I've noted this far.

The study was conducted by the Institute forAmerican Values, founded in 1987, which states is goal as serving to contribute to the renewal of civil society. The institue is widely praised, by many publications, professors, and politicians. David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America and numerous articles on family and civic issues, is the Institute's president and founder. Throughout his career, he has worked for numerous nonprofit and advocacy organizations.

The study itself was conducted by Linda Waite, a leading sociologist at the University of Chicago, leading a team of other family scholars.

This article linked above summarizes the conclusions of the study, which ultimately seems to indicate the significant value of sticking out the rougher times.

In confronting the "divorce assumption," that

a person in a bad marriage has two choices: stay married and miserable or get a divorce and become happier

the study showed

no evidence that unhappily married adults who divorced were typically any happier than unhappily married people who stayed married.

(One question that arose for me, in reading this was what constitutes a "bad marriage?")

But furthermore, according to the findings

Two-thirds of unhappily married spouses who stayed married reported that their marriages were happy five years later.

This is surely a testament to the value of commitment. Marriage not just a matter of blind abidance--or the mere endurance of whatever agony the union may impose until death finally parts you--but is actually a matter of active responsibility and following through on the commitment and vows made that brings results, then. Or so it seems, based on this aspect of their conclusions.

So, yes working at it, or "making it work" has its place, but I'm wondering if it really resolves the issues that made this "bad marriage" bad.

Is it ever more that the people involved figure out make their peace with that bad element because they know they mean to stick it out lifelong, and may as well just get used to whatever it is they're unhappy with? I don't know, but I'm just wondering how much of this happiness that surfaces within that hypothetical five year span is actually in the name of resolution, genuine compromise, or just learning to endure something you'd still rather not deal with. And does this matter in the overall scheme of things? Does one or the other hold more value in the determination and validity of this "happiness" of which the researchers speak?


Another significant finding was that

average unhappily married adults who divorced were no happier than unhappily married adults who stayed married when rated on any of 12 separate measures of psychological well-being.

Furthermore, the researchers noted

Even unhappy spouses who had divorced and remarried were no happier on average than those who stayed married.

And finally, we arrive, from their conclusions, at an answer to my first question:

They found that many currently happily married spouses have had extended periods of marital unhappiness, often for quite serious reasons, including alcoholism, infidelity, verbal abuse, emotional neglect, depression, illness, and work reversals.

Thus

Marriages got happier not because partners resolved problems, but because they stubbornly outlasted them. With the passage of time, these spouses said, many sources of conflict and distress eased: financial problems, job reversals, depression, child problems, even infidelity.

So it's kind of like the learning curve idea, calling for a need to be mature enough to sustain the relationship even as things get worse in order to ever see them get better, as the oftenwill--according to this study's conclusions--given time and genuine mutual effort. So we must factor in to what extent a person's immediate happiness is important to them, versus their long-term happiness--and a person's decision to focus on either are perfectly valid, as far as I'm concerned.

But even all this said, at what point do we know the learning curve has spun out of control and really is approaching the limit of no up-side? At what point should a couple assume that it's actually never going to get better, and it's "safe" to give up and walk away from it? I'm thinking, given discussion in a previous post regarding marriage as eternally binding is that the answer is "never," once you've made that commitment. It's a drastic thing, requiring a massive amount of faith. Being married, truly, means you actually do not even resort to giving up, ever, as an option--and hopefully, this works out in all cases that the issues can be dealt with and overcome in a way that ultimately contributes to the overall happiness of all parties involved, even if not immediately.

The summary of the study finally poses the inevitable question

Were the marriages that ended in divorce much worse than those that did not? There is some evidence for this point of view. Unhappy spouses who divorced reported more conflict and were about twice as likely to report violence in their marriage than unhappy spouses who stayed married. However, marital violence occurred in only a minority of unhappy marriages . . .

On the other hand, if only the worst marriages ended up in divorce, one would expect divorce to be associated with important psychological benefits. Instead, researchers found that unhappily married adults who divorced were no more likely to report emotional and psychological improvements than those who stayed married.

Is this actually another argument that sticking it out possibly would have yielded greater effects in favor of later and long term happiness, in even the violent marriages that ended?

The most unhappy marriages reported the most dramatic turnarounds: among those who rated their marriages as very unhappy, almost eight out of 10 who avoided divorce were happily married five years later.

This would seem to indicate the latter, in answer to my question just above... And this, I'm not sure I appreciate. I have to decide how I feel about this indication, that perhaps even marriages on the abusive side could yield significant turnarounds toward happiness, with the passage of time. I agree with the possibility. But is it worth the risk?

A Basic Sequence of Events: Emergences of the Church... then the State... then Love, in an Initially Pragmatic Institution

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Comment on post, "Thoughts on Marriage"

The original post can be found here: http://jon.limedaley.com/plog/archives/2007/01/17/thoughts-on-marriage

The following is my (rather longwinded, I apologize) comment on it:

You make some excellent points about what marriage IS and IS NOT.

"The love that makes marriage work is not a feeling of love. If it was, then feelings come and go and so would marriage. Marriage love is a DECISION to value the other person as highly as yourself...."

You later talk about 'true love,' and that, to me, is an ideal--and not the element of the type of love a marriage demands, in spite of the often evanescent feeling, as you were describing it.

"BUT that is not true love. Love is self-giving. That is, when it does not benefit yourself and only the other person you still do it."

The love you were describing is more accurately defined as "unconditional love," I'd think, though. The connotation that the term "true love" holds is a bit more idealistically sappy and romantic--a love that does incorporate that feeling and transcends that agreement involved in maintaining a marriage. Within that ideal, that feeling of love does persist forever, it never does fade. Who am I to be bold and declare it unnattainable? I won't do that here, although I've been guilty of it before. (Sometimes I can be a bit extreme.) But to be more accurate, it'd probably suffice to say it is rare, if not impossible. So even in its absence, a married party is obligated by the vows they took to make it work anyway. That's only part of why this marriage thing is risky business.

I do admire that, and I respect it. But I don't want it. I want to be free to abide by my whims, acknowledge a situation for what it is, and act in accordance with that as I go, aware that at any moment, it could all change. A marriage, however, demands the dismissal of such whims in the name of mutual agreement to forever, no matter what. And that "no matter what" business is quite a bit of pressure--far too much for me. Some call that commitment-phobic. I don't mind.

That said, I do believe there's something to be said for the validity of other types of love aside from unconditional. That missing element does not necessarily make love less true, (to me, that is--I understand that idea could seem ridiculous and take a bit of arguing, but I'll leave it at that anyway.) It just makes the love unsuitable for the sustenance of a marriage. The quest for true love and the pursuit of a successful marriage are quite arguably drastically different things, as you insinuated:

"People think you get married just because you are in love."

And I love the summing up of marriage as a vow "... to never give up on each other."
This is a big dang deal. This is nothing to be taken lightly. Many in our society have forgotten that, and the problem lies in that we as a society continually fail to make that distinction as our fascination with falling in love grows.

Don't get me wrong--as I was getting at before, there's definitely something to be said for the feeling of love and allowing relationships to grow out of that. But, as you emphasis, this is not what a marriage depends on, and should thus not be used as the basis of its survival.

There's even something to be said for being selfish, I believe. It's been a personal declaration of mine for years that I never want to get married because I very consciously want the freedom to remain selfish. I'm a self-proclaimed serial monogamist who sincerely believes that "it" works as long as "it" works and who has no desire to push anything any further than that. Enjoy it for what it is while it is, and for what it was when it's gone, but when it's gone, move on. This is inaccordance with the feeling of love. I'm a fan of it, fickle as it may be.

Many people take this serial-monogamist approach, but are not so honest or self-aware to acknowledge that they're doing so. That is, many enter into a union based on little more than the feeling of love, in the hopes that this ideal will be sustained for all eternity and that it is this that will make thier marriage work. But no feeling can accomplish that--just as you stated--only a significant amount of work and drastic level of dedication and committment can. But out society has become one who gives up and parts ways when that feeling does not suffice, and this is where we've gone wrong in calling this union and that a marriage, all willy-nilly: When we consider that a defining component of marriage is that all-important "forever" requirement, a marriage that ends was never a marriage to begin with. Is that fair to conclude?

Introduction to My Interest and Intent

Even when my own parents seemed happy together, I had a hard time making sense of the institution of marriage. There's always been something a bit suspicious about the whole gimmick. Something about monogamy and human nature has never seemed to add up, and I wish to begin an investigation into the history and evolution of marriage in the hopes of putting my finger on just what that "something" is.

From my understanding, marriage began as a practical engagement that had nothing to do with love or romance or religion, or even the law, necessarily, but basically served as the most convenient means of preserving the human race, carrying on lineage, and passing on property and wealth.

In its beginning, if a couple simply said to one another, "We are married," then it was so. Now one needs witnesses and a license, as the union does not count unless recognized by God and the government.

In its beginning, a bachelor would simply make an offering to a father and would thus be granted one of his daughters to marry and provide for. Now, there is a notion of needing years of searching and courting to find and fall in love with "The One" first--which, it seems, rarely happens.

I strongly suspect that these and other evolutions that marriage has undergone over the centuries have done more than many of us care to realize to complicate a once quite simple situation.

My aim is to decipher what happened in-between to incite such evolutions to the institution--why the aspects of marriage and its role in society that have changed have changed, and why the aspects that remain the same have remained the same.

And from there, I aim to form a more informed opinion regarding the validity of the institution in the context of our current society, especially among its variations and alternative forms such as polygamy, group marriage, gay marriage, serial monogamy, Boston marriage, common-law marriage, covenant marriage, and many others.

My theory, pre-investigation (or, my uninformed opinion):

Marriage "worked," historically, because it had to. (Unfortunately), a woman rarely had much say in who she wound up with, held a blatatly established subservient role within the union, and tended to have no way out, or even a way to survive if she were for some reason tossed out. Love had little, if anything, to do with it.

However, as women became a bit more independent, over time, our culture came to regard marriage as less of a necessity and more of a mere economic strategy (as far as the most logical way to pool incomes and successfully raise a family)--and eventually even less of that than the acknowledgement of the undying love between to people.

This is where the problem comes in. Love, in the romantic sense, does tend to die, sometimes peaceful deaths, sometimes quite horrendous ones--but die nevertheless. I'll go so far as to say this is not always the case, but it is so often enough for "true love" to concern me as the primary basis upon which a society's worth of people (cl)aim to maintain an eternal union. Marriage only "works" if the couple is true to the vows it declared and sticks together anyway, beyond the faded romance. It's the classic internal struggle between practicality and passion, and there's something to be said for either. However, marriage is not for the passionate, but for the practical, and that "love" thing is something altogether different.

I have nothing against marriage, per se. I have nothing against the pusuit of true love. But I am very much against the assumption that the two are necessarily and directly related to one another. From what I've observed they're two different pursuits.

Yet people with either motivation take the exact same vows and violate them with no regard.

Thus, I propose, at the very least, that an ambitious couple not blindly and irresponsibly promise to forever uphold a set of vows that have nothing at all to do with them. People should take that option to write their own vows a bit more seriously, and sit down and very honestly and realistically consider what they can offer and what they absolutely must have in return so that there is no misunderstanding when they join in the name of "forever."

Speaking on this, I realize that I sound like the ultimate cynic and bitter spinster, and this is why I must research this subject. I must know to what extent my suspicions are warranted, and to what extent I simply enjoy attacking the masses, with little motivation.

Hi...

I'm Memphis, from Memphis.

Thanks.