We’ve all heard that 50% of marriages end in divorce, but we’ve all heard wrong.
Justin Wolfers of Michigan State points out that the divorce rate has steadily dropped since the '80s and estimates that roughly 2/3 of today’s marriages will survive.
Sounds like a good thing, but is it?
Despite plummeting divorce rates, only 17% of marriages are happy marriages, according to Dana Adam Shapiro in a survey cited in You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married): Looking for Love in the Age of Divorce.
Over half of the therapists asked to comment on Shapiro’s survey agreed that Shapiro’s estimates are more or less accurate.
Taken together, Wolfer’s and Shapiro’s findings suggest that more people than ever find themselves in unhappy marriages but are sticking with them.
Some good will come of this tenacity. Fewer kids will live in broken homes. Fewer singles will struggle with their finances. Fewer men will die prematurely from bad eating habits and poor lifestyle choices (married men live longer, healthier lives than single men).
These benefits of married life might partially explain why people are staying together despite being dissatisfied with their mates.
But couples might think twice about toughing it out if they were fully aware of the consequences of living in stressful marriages.
At, least, the female half of each couple.
It turns out that the health benefits of staying married—even when unhappy—fall disproportionately to men.
Sociologists Hui Liu and Linda Waite discovered that marital stress, particularly in older couples, correlated with greater incidence of cardiovascular disease in both men and women, but the correlation was much stronger in women.
The researchers speculate that women bottle up their negative feelings more than men, producing more stress and more damage to their cardiovascular systems.
Liu and Waite go on to point out that health effects of negative marriage quality increase steadily with age, indicating that cardiovascular damage from chronic martial stress may be cumulative, starting much earlier in life and progressing steadily as the unhappy marriage continues.
For the (apparently) growing numbers of women who find themselves in stressful marriages, these findings have a profound implication: the sooner women leave stressful marriages, the less cumulative damage they will do to their bodies.
Single women, it turns out, do not suffer from being alone nearly as much as men.
On top of that, by leaving an unhealthy marriage, women have the opportunity to get into relationships that will improve, rather than degrade their health. According to recent research in psychoneuroimmunology, loving relationships promote stronger immune systems, lower levels of depression and anxiety, and lower heart rate and blood pressure.
In other words, leaving a bad marriage—for women—can take away a negative while adding a positive.
This doesn’t mean that unhappy women should immediately call a divorce lawyer. Reaching out first to a marriage counselor, who might help turn a stressful marriage into a supportive one, is usually a better idea.
But the sad truth is that over half of couples who go into counseling eventually split up, and even after “successful counseling” marital stress often does not go away. Neither do the cumulative negative health effects of marital stress.
So—from women’s point of view anyhow—it might be better if the apocryphal 50% divorce rate weren’t apocryphal.
Not a happy conclusion, but one supported by statistics.
Dana Adam ShapiroYou Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married): Looking for Love in the Age of Divorce Scribner, 2012
Grewen KM, Anderson BJ, Girdler SS, Light KC. Warm partner contact is related to lower cardiovascular reactivity. Behavioural Medicine, 2003;29:123-30.
Medalie JH, Goldbourt U. Angina pectoris among 10,000 men. II. Psychosocial and other risk factors as evidenced by a multivariate analysis of a five-year incidence study. American Journal of Medicine, 1976;60:910-21.
The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, edited by David M. Buss, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005. Chapter 14, Commitment, Love, and Mate Retention by Lorne Campbell B. and Bruce J. Ellis
Following a Randomized Clinical Trial Comparing Traditional Versus Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 78 (2), 2010.
Douglas K. Snyder, Ph.D., et al., "Long-Term Effectiveness of Behavioral Versus Insight-Oriented Marital Therapy: A 4-Year Follow-Up Study," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 59 (1), Feb. 1991.
We’ve all heard that 50% of marriages end in divorce, but we’ve all heard wrong.
Justin Wolfers of Michigan State points out that the divorce rate has steadily dropped since the '80s and estimates that roughly 2/3 of today’s marriages will survive.
Sounds like a good thing, but is it?
Despite plummeting divorce rates, only 17% of marriages are happy marriages, according to Dana Adam Shapiro in a survey cited in You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married): Looking for Love in the Age of Divorce.
Over half of the therapists asked to comment on Shapiro’s survey agreed that Shapiro’s estimates are more or less accurate.
Taken together, Wolfer’s and Shapiro’s findings suggest that more people than ever find themselves in unhappy marriages but are sticking with them.
Some good will come of this tenacity. Fewer kids will live in broken homes. Fewer singles will struggle with their finances. Fewer men will die prematurely from bad eating habits and poor lifestyle choices (married men live longer, healthier lives than single men).
These benefits of married life might partially explain why people are staying together despite being dissatisfied with their mates.
But couples might think twice about toughing it out if they were fully aware of the consequences of living in stressful marriages.
At, least, the female half of each couple.
It turns out that the health benefits of staying married—even when unhappy—fall disproportionately to men.
Sociologists Hui Liu and Linda Waite discovered that marital stress, particularly in older couples, correlated with greater incidence of cardiovascular disease in both men and women, but the correlation was much stronger in women.
The researchers speculate that women bottle up their negative feelings more than men, producing more stress and more damage to their cardiovascular systems.
Liu and Waite go on to point out that health effects of negative marriage quality increase steadily with age, indicating that cardiovascular damage from chronic martial stress may be cumulative, starting much earlier in life and progressing steadily as the unhappy marriage continues.
For the (apparently) growing numbers of women who find themselves in stressful marriages, these findings have a profound implication: the sooner women leave stressful marriages, the less cumulative damage they will do to their bodies.
Single women, it turns out, do not suffer from being alone nearly as much as men.
On top of that, by leaving an unhealthy marriage, women have the opportunity to get into relationships that will improve, rather than degrade their health. According to recent research in psychoneuroimmunology, loving relationships promote stronger immune systems, lower levels of depression and anxiety, and lower heart rate and blood pressure.
In other words, leaving a bad marriage—for women—can take away a negative while adding a positive.
This doesn’t mean that unhappy women should immediately call a divorce lawyer. Reaching out first to a marriage counselor, who might help turn a stressful marriage into a supportive one, is usually a better idea.
But the sad truth is that over half of couples who go into counseling eventually split up, and even after “successful counseling” marital stress often does not go away. Neither do the cumulative negative health effects of marital stress.
So—from women’s point of view anyhow—it might be better if the apocryphal 50% divorce rate weren’t apocryphal.
Not a happy conclusion, but one supported by statistics.
Dana Adam ShapiroYou Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married): Looking for Love in the Age of Divorce Scribner, 2012
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4325990/
Fisher HE, Aron A, Brown LL (December 2006). "Romantic love: a mammalian brain system for mate choice". Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci. 361 (1476): 2173–86. doi:10.1098/rstb.2006.1938. PMC 1764845. PMID 17118931
Sussman, Robert W. (2004). The Origins and Nature of Sociality. Transaction Publishers. p. 432. ISBN 978-0-202-30731-2.
http://www.nel.edu/pdf_/26_3/260305A13_15990734_Esch--Stefano_.pdf
Grewen KM, Anderson BJ, Girdler SS, Light KC. Warm partner contact is related to lower cardiovascular reactivity. Behavioural Medicine, 2003;29:123-30.
Medalie JH, Goldbourt U. Angina pectoris among 10,000 men. II. Psychosocial and other risk factors as evidenced by a multivariate analysis of a five-year incidence study. American Journal of Medicine, 1976;60:910-21.
The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, edited by David M. Buss, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005. Chapter 14, Commitment, Love, and Mate Retention by Lorne Campbell B. and Bruce J. Ellis
http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec01/badmarriage.aspx
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is-over-but-t...
Following a Randomized Clinical Trial Comparing Traditional Versus Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 78 (2), 2010.
Douglas K. Snyder, Ph.D., et al., "Long-Term Effectiveness of Behavioral Versus Insight-Oriented Marital Therapy: A 4-Year Follow-Up Study," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 59 (1), Feb. 1991.