Intimate

Relationships

Rowland S.Miller

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C H A P T E R 13

The Dissolution and Loss of Relationships

The Changing Rate of Divorce ◆ The Predictors of Divorce ◆ Breaking Up ◆ The Aftermath of Breakups

◆ For Your Consideration ◆ Chapter Summary

Sometimes the stresses and strains two partners experience catch up with them. Perhaps their conflict is too constant and too intense. Perhaps their part- nership is inequitable, with one of them exploiting the other. Perhaps their passion has waned, and new attractions are distracting them. Or perhaps they are merely contented with each other, instead of delighted, so they are disappointed that the “magic” has died.

There are myriad reasons why relationships may fail, and the deterioration of any particular partnership may involve events and processes that are unique to that couple. On the other hand, there are also personal and cultural influ- ences that can have generic, widespread effects on the stability of intimate rela- tionships, and relationship scientists have been identifying and studying them for years. In this chapter, we’ll consider the correlates and consequences of the decline and fall of satisfaction and intimacy. I’ll have a lot to say about divorce because a decision to end a marriage is often more deliberate and weighty, and the consequences more complicated, than those that emerge from less formal partnerships. There’s also been much more research on divorce than on non- marital breakups. Nevertheless, the dissolution of any intimate relationship— such as a cohabiting partnership, dating relationship, or friendship—can be momentous, so we’ll examine how people adjust to the end of those partner- ships, too. Let’s start with a reminder that the cultural landscape we face today is quite different from the one our grandparents knew.

13.1 THE CHANGING RATE OF DIVORCE

The Prevalence of Divorce

As you recall, current divorce rates are much higher than they were when your grandparents married. In the United States, there are currently half as many divorces as marriages each year (Cruz, 2013), so the chance that a recent mar- riage will ultimately end in separation or divorce still hovers around 50 percent. This is remarkable because it suggests that despite all the good intentions and warm feelings with which people marry, the chances that they will succeed in living out their lives together are about the same as the chance of getting “heads” when you flip a coin.

Indeed, a typical American marriage won’t last nearly as long as peo- ple think it will. Only about two-thirds (64 percent) of married couples stay together for 10 years, and fewer than half reach their twenty-first wedding anniversary, so the average length of a marriage in the United States is just over 18 years (Elliott & Simmons, 2011). That figure counts all marriages, including those that end with the death of a spouse, but the leading cause of death of a marriage in its first 20 years is, of course, divorce. Lots of people don’t turn 30 without having been divorced; the median age at which men encounter their (first) divorce is 31.8, and for women, it’s 29.4 (Cohn, 2010).

Two other patterns that result, in part, from the high divorce rate are noteworthy. First, only about half (51 percent) of the adult U.S. population is presently married (Fry, 2012). That’s an all-time low. Second, 25 percent of American children—1 out of every 4 people under the age of 18—now live in single-parent homes, most of them run by their mothers (Wilcox & Marquardt, 2010). That rate is 3 times higher than it was in 1960.

Any way you look at it, divorce is now commonplace in America. Divorce rates have also increased in other countries over the last 50 years, but the United States has had the dubious distinction of leading the pack. The divorce rate in the United States is noticeably higher than in all of Europe, Canada, or Japan (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). Marriages are less likely to end than other romantic relationships are—see the box on the next page—but they’re also less likely to last than they used to be.

Why Has the Divorce Rate Increased?

There are no certain reasons why the second half of the twentieth century saw such a huge increase in U.S. rates of divorce. But there are several possibilities, and all of them may (or may not) be contributing influences.

One possibility is that we hold different, more demanding expectations for marriage than people used to. Our great-grandparents generally believed that if you wanted to live with a romantic partner, if you wanted to have children, and if you wanted to pay the bills and live well, you had to get married. Nowadays, how- ever, cohabitation is widespread, there are lots of single parents, and most women have entered the workforce. As a result, marriage is no longer the practical neces- sity it used to be. Instead, in the opinion of some observers, people are more likely than ever before to pursue marriage as a path to personal fulfillment (Finkel, Hui, et al., 2014). Marriage is supposed to be play, not work; it’s supposed to be excit- ing, not routine, and passionate, not warm (Amato, 2009). Thus, our expectations for marriage may be too high. A happy, warm, rewarding partnership may seem insufficient if it is measured against over-glorified and unrealistic expectations.

For instance, decades ago, Slater (1968, p. 99) warned:

Spouses are now asked to be lovers, friends, and mutual therapists in a soci- ety which is forcing the marriage bond to become the closest, deepest, most important and most enduring relationship of one’s life. Paradoxically, then, it is increasingly likely to fall short of the emotional demands placed upon it and be dissolved.

We marry for love and passion and think that they won’t change, and we expect our spouses to be soulmates who will never disappoint us. But these are lofty, perhaps impossibly high standards, and indeed, recent cultural history suggests that “no sooner had the ideal of the love match and lifelong intimacy taken hold than people began to demand the right to divorce” (Coontz, 2005, p. 8).

People may simply be expecting too much of marriage. The percentage of U.S. spouses who report that their marriages are “very happy” is lower now than it was 25 years ago (Wilcox & Marquardt, 2010), and the number of conflicts and problems that spouses report are higher (Hostetler et al., 2012). On the whole, the average perceived quality of American marriages has declined since 1970.

But the broader culture has changed, too, and several societal influences may be affecting not only the expectations with which we begin our mar- riages but also the situations we encounter once we are wed. For instance, most women in the United States now work outside the home, and their entry into the workforce has had several effects. First, spouses report more conflict between work and family than they used to, and the more hours a wife works during the week, the lower the quality of her marriage tends to be (Hostetler et al., 2012). Car repairs, child care, and the scheduling and cooking of meals (to name just a few examples) are more problematic when both spouses are employed, and the amount of time spouses spend together tends to decline. Both spouses are also affected by their problems at work, so that decreases in job satisfaction are asso- ciated with increases in marital discord (Amato et al., 2007). Participation in the labor force also increases spouses’ access to interesting, desirable, alternative partners, and divorce is more frequent when women work in occupations that surround them with men (McKinnish, 2007).

Furthermore, women earn more money than they used to, and, around the world, divorce rates are higher when women are financially independent of men (Barber, 2003). People who are able to support themselves have more free- dom to choose divorce when a marriage deteriorates, and in the United States there is a straightforward, positive correlation between a woman’s income and her odds of divorce: The more money she makes, the more likely it is that she will someday be divorced (Mundy, 2012). But don’t think that your mar- riage will be more stable if you just do without money; poverty has even more impact on marital quality. In general, couples with money troubles are less content with their marriages than are those who are better off; in particular, couples with rather low incomes (under $25,000 per year) are twice as likely to divorce as are couples with higher incomes (over $50,000 per year) (Wilcox & Marquardt, 2010). Having money may make it easier to divorce, but being poor can cause stress that undermines a marriage, too.

Overall, then, women’s increased participation in the labor force has plau- sibly increased conflict at home, made alluring, new romantic partners more available, and decreased wives’ economic dependence on their husbands. Per- haps for all of these reasons, the trend is clear: As the proportion of American women employed outside the home increased during the twentieth century, so, too, did the divorce rate (Fitch & Ruggles, 2000).1

1 As I describe these various patterns, do remember, please, that all of these links between social changes and divorce rates are correlations that allow diverse possibilities to exist. A connection between women’s working and divorce does not necessarily mean that employment undermines women’s commitment to their marriages. To the contrary, women are more likely to seek employ- ment when there is preexisting discord and strife in their marriages, so it is just as likely that marital dissatisfaction causes women to find work as it is that women’s work causes marital dissatisfaction (Rogers, 1999). Keep an open mind as you consider the implications of societal change.

Our gender roles, the behaviors we expect from men and women, are changing, too. Women are gradually becoming more assertive and self-reliant (Twenge, 2009), and the partners in many marriages are dividing household responsibilities more equitably (Amato et al., 2007). Over the last 25 years, less traditional gender roles and increases in the equality of family decision making have been associated with higher marital quality for both husbands and wives (DeMaris et al., 2012). However, the new division of household labor has had different effects on men than on women; husbands are less happy now that they’re doing more household chores, but their wives are much more content (see Figure 13.1).

By some accounts, Western culture is also becoming more individualistic, with people being less connected to the others around them than they used to be (Amato, 2009). Indeed, most of us are less tied to our communities than our grandparents were (Ren, 2011). We’re less likely to live near our extended fami- lies and less likely to know our neighbors; we participate in fewer clubs and social organizations, entertain at home less frequently, and move more often. As a result, we receive less social support and companionship from friends and acquaintances than our grandparents did (Oishi, 2010), and we rely on our spouses for more (Campbell et al., 2012), and this may affect divorce rates in two different ways. First, as I’ve already noted, we ask more of our spouses than ever before. We expect them to fulfill a wider variety of interpersonal needs, and that increases the probability that they will disappoint us in some manner. In addition, people who are less connected to their communities are less affected by community norms that might discourage them from divorc- ing. And as it turns out, people who move often from place to place really are more prone to divorce than are those who stay in one place and put down roots (Magdol & Bessel, 2003).

Our shared perceptions of divorce are also less negative than they used to be. In many circles, a divorce used to be considered a shameful failure, and the event itself was often a messy, lurid, embarrassing spectacle in which blame had to be assigned to someone. The advent of no-fault divorce laws in the United States during the 1970s made a divorce much easier to obtain; for the first time in most jurisdictions, once they had agreed on the division of property and childcare, spouses merely had to certify that they faced “irrecon- cilable differences,” and their marriage was dissolved. No-fault laws helped make the procedure more socially acceptable (Wolfers, 2006). On average, we feel that a divorce is a more reasonable and more desirable response to a bad marriage than our parents did, and more favorable attitudes toward divorce appear to reduce the quality of our marriages as time goes by (Amato & Rog- ers, 1999). We may be less likely to work hard to rescue a faltering relationship when divorce seems an expedient alternative (Whitton et al., 2013).

Most couples also cohabit before they marry these days, and as we saw in chapter 1, people who cohabit encounter an increased risk of divorce later on. Despite the widespread belief that cohabitation is a valuable trial run that allows people to avoid later problems, cohabitation is positively associated with the probability of divorce (Rhoades et al., 2009). The good news is that couples who start living together after they become engaged to marry and who cohabit for a shorter, rather than longer, period of time do not divorce much more frequently than do those who marry without living together (Willoughby et al., 2012). Brief cohabitation that is limited to one’s fiancé does not seem to put a subsequent marriage at much risk. On the other hand, people who cohabit before they become engaged (or who ever cohabit with more than one partner) are more likely to later divorce (Tach & Halpern-Meekin, 2012), probably because cohabi- tation changes their beliefs and expectations about marriage. Casual cohabitation seems to lead to (a) less respect for the institution of marriage, (b) less favorable expectations about the outcomes of marriage, and (c) increased willingness to divorce (Rhoades et al., 2009), and all of these make divorce more likely.

In addition, as more parents divorce, more children witness family conflict and grow up in broken homes. Common sense may suggest that youngsters who suffer family disruption might be especially determined to avoid making the same mistakes, but, in reality, divorce is passed down from one generation to the next: Children who experience the divorce of their parents are more likely to be divorced themselves when they become adults (Mustonen et al., 2011). Various processes may underlie this pattern. For one thing, children from divorced homes have less favorable views of marriage, and they report less trust in their partners when they begin their own romantic relationships; thus, compared to children from intact homes, they have less faith that their mar- riages will last (Cui & Fincham, 2010). Furthermore, to some degree, children learn how to behave in intimate relationships from the lessons provided by their parents, and those who remember a childhood home full of strife and dis- cord tend to have more acrimonious marriages of poorer quality themselves (Rhoades et al., 2012b). Thus, as divorce becomes more commonplace, more children become susceptible to divorce later on.

Finally, because divorce is now so commonplace, more of us have friends who will someday divorce—and remarkably, that will mean that we face an increased risk of divorcing, too. For over 60 years, an extraordinary investi- gation, the Framingham Heart Study, has been tracking the health of more than 10,000 individuals—two generations of people—in a large town in Massachusetts. Compared to the average participant in the study, those who had a friend or family member (that is, a parent, child, or sibling) who divorced were 75 percent more likely—that’s much more likely—to divorce as well. If a friend of a friend or relative divorced, people were 33 percent more likely to divorce (McDermott et al., 2013). (And that’s where the effect stopped. If someone with three degrees of separation—for instance, the friend of a friend of a friend— divorced, people were at no greater risk of them- selves also divorcing.) This provocative pattern may spring from several sources—and it makes a fine point to ponder—but the end result is clear: We’re more likely to divorce when others in our social network do (Hogerbrugge et al., 2012).

So, why has the divorce rate increased? There are reasons to believe that, compared to our grandparents’ day: