There's recently been a frenzy of publicity about the "science" of happy marriages, based on the last decade of psychological and sociological research about why our unions work--or fail. Where's your marriage in all this?
Factors like living in a red state, arguing about finances once a week or more, having parents who divorce, and having a daughter versus a son all increase the likelihood that a person will divorce--often dramatically. So does having twins or triplets versus having children who are not multiple births, having "below average" intelligence, and being a woman who is two years older than her husband versus having a husband who is one year younger or three years older.
But beware: these factors all hinge on other, underlying realities. For example, those living in red states marry earlier than the national average, and the younger the partners in a marriage, the greater the risk of divorce. So it's not a forgone conclusion that if you move to Arkansas, you're headed for divorce court. In the words of Timothy Urdan, author of Statistics in Plain English, "Whenever you see an explanation for anything, try to figure out what the explanations are for those explanations."
And that brings us to the factor that really grabbed my attention. I study remarriage with children, and the emotional and social reality of women with stepchildren in particular, and this stopped me in my tracks: "If only one partner in your marriage is a smoker, you're 75 percent to 91 percent more likely to divorce than smokers who are married to fellow smokers."
Sometimes a cigarette is just a cigarette. But not when it comes to this finding. In this case, a couple in which there's a smoker and a non-smoker stands for something else. "The more similar people are in their values, backgrounds, and life goals, the more likely they are to have a successful marriage," explains Tara Parker-Pope, who set off the entire media stampede of divorce prediction with the release of her book For Better: the Science of a Good Marriage. Whether it's a vice like smoking or gambling, a wide age gap, or one partner whose parents are loaded and one who grew up in poverty, dissimilarity between partners, it turns out, is a marriage killer (yes, there are exceptions, but we're talking about broad statistical realities here).
Which brings me to an astonishing omission from this list of factors that determine whether a marriage will thrive--or wither and die on the vine. Nowhere in our recent national conversation about divorce risk have I heard mention of the single greatest risk to a marriage: the presence of children from a previous marriage or relationship. That's right, according to a comprehensive 2002 eight-year longitudinal study, the most reliable predictor of marital dissolution is a stepchild, whether it's a him or a her, whether he or she is 4 or 44, whether she or he lives nearby or far away. In fact, couples in a remarriage with children are twice as likely to divorce as those in a remarriage without kids.
When, then, is a cigar not just a cigar? When it's a stepchild. A child of any age from a previous union or marriage is the ultimate "dissimilarity"--one with opinions, loyalty conflicts, likely some resentment and anger about the divorce, and financial wants and needs. Talk about something to disagree about! While they are husband and wife, parent and stepparent may well have vastly different emotional investments and feelings about this person within their marriage. And so it's no surprise that the divorce rate among couples in a remarriage with children is somewhere in the range of 60% (if one partner has kids from before) to 72% (if both partners do).
The good news here is that predictions are frequently wrong. And just as often, they only tell part of the story. People beat the divorce odds every day, even people--remarrieds with children--in the group at highest risk.
As I discuss at length in my book Stepmonster, by letting go of certain harmful myths--the myth of the "blended" family and of the "maternal stepmother" among them--couples in a remarriage or repartnership with children can set themselves on a course of long-term relationship satisfaction fueled by reasonable mutual expectations. Knowing you're at risk doesn't have to fill you with fear. It can be a welcome validation of your sense that remarriage with kids is hard, reassurance that you are not the only ones struggling, and proof of the strength of your partnership or marriage that you have persevered in the face of the odds.
Still addicted to the stats? Put this one in your pipe and smoke it: after the first (usually very difficult) five years, a remarriage with children is actually more likely to endure than a first marriage.
Interested in a parlor game about your divorce risk? First, promise to take it with a grain of salt, then click on the divorce calculator.
Sources:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-19/15-ways...
Alan Booth and John N. Edwards, "Starting Over: Why Remarriages Are More Unstable," Journal of Family Issues 13, no.2 (1992): 179 - 94.
Rebecca Kippen, Bruce Chapman and Peng Yu, "What's Love Got to Do With It? Homogamy and Dyadic Approaches to Understanding Marital Instability," Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, 2009
Mavis Hetherington, For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered (Norton, 2002)
Virginia Rutter, "Lessons from Stepfamilies," Psychology Today, May 1, 1994.
