Divorce

Divorce. There have been several times before that I have felt unqualified when writing one of these blog posts due to my lack of personal experience on it. This topic takes the cake, though. It is an important subject though so I will try to address it the best I can.

I have (thankfully) never been divorced. I do not have divorced parents. Honestly, divorce was something I barely even thought about until around when I got engaged. Around then I was suddenly coming into contact with a lot more divorced people. Something that had barely shown up in my life up until that point suddenly seemed like it was everywhere. I’ll admit that it was a bit intimidating to me. I knew I was young, and making one of the most important decisions of my entire life. And here I was surrounded by people who had made their decision and had decided later it was a bad decision. While it didn’t destroy my confidence in my own ability to have a happy marriage (after all, my parents had done it and his parents had done it, so it must be possible) it definitely was anxiety-provoking to me. And to be honest, if I wasn’t at least a bit intimidated by getting married, I would not have been taking it seriously enough.

So, what are the results of divorce?

First of all, here are some statistics that my Family Relations professor found:

70% of people regretted their divorce within 2 years of it. 

70% of divorced men remarried in 2 years. 

70% of people who stayed in a marriage they rated “very unsatisfactory” changed their rating to “satisfactory” or “very satisfactory” within 5 years.

So, this begs the question, if apparently a lot of the reasons that divorce happens can be fixed and divorce is something that is often regretted, why do people divorce?

One recurring theme I see is that people didn’t really expect marriage to be as hard as it is. They think it will be a lot of fun. After all, you get to spend a lot of time hanging out with your best friend. What could be better? If you read my post about transitioning into marriage, I point out that there are a lot of struggles that come with learning how to be married. If you come into it thinking that marriage will solve all your problems, or that you have found your “one true love” and that everything will flow naturally now because that’s how marriage works, when things go wrong you’ll think you didn’t find the right person. No matter who you marry, marriage is going to be hard, and take a lot of unselfishness and sacrifice.

There is also this weird tendency in women to think that the problems that exist before the marriage are going to go away after the marriage. This is unlikely. In fact, they’ll probably get worse.

Other marriages fail because the couple is not fully willing to commit. They get married, but they do so in such a way to have an escape route if things do go bad. Then when things do go bad, they just use their escape route. To be honest, if you build an escape route, it is a way of saying that you don’t really believe in this relationship’s ability to endure. And if you don’t believe the marriage will endure, it won’t. They get married, but plan for divorce. That is a good way to get divorced.

I’m not sure about this one, but I also think people underestimate how hard the divorce will be. I’ve never been through one myself, but I do know that I underestimated just how much it would hurt to break up with my high school sweetheart. I expected it to only hurt for a week or two. It hurt for half a year, from when I first broke up with him shortly before high school graduation until December when I left for college. I don’t regret it. It was the right choice, but it still hurt a lot. Just imagining that compounded by being actually married, with all the hopes and dreams that come with marriage, makes me realize how heartbreaking it really is.

I’m not saying there is never a reason to get divorced. In cases of abuse, please get out. It will not get better. In fact, the research shows it’s likely to get worse. In every other case, I will just say to use your best judgment, and pray a lot. There have been many cases where people have been able to build a stronger marriage even after everything that led them to the breaking point. There have also been many cases where they couldn’t. A lot of people get divorced multiple times because they think the problem is who they choose to marry and not that they don’t know how to be married. Some people really did pick the wrong person. I don’t know your situation, so I cannot advise you on what you need to do. All I can say in the end is be cautious, and remember the statistics. This will affect more than just yourself and more than just this moment.