Divorce and Remarriage

Divorce and remarriage seem to play a large part in the family life topic. However, is the divorce rate really as high as some make it seem? Let's start by looking at the actual divorce rate in the U.S. The author of our sociology book (Henslin) states that the statistics used today to measure the divorce rate are not the correct ones - they tell us that the divorce rate is almost 50% per year. Here, people are comparing the number of marriages and divorces in the same year, which is not a true indicating factor. The true divorce rate in the U.S. is less than 2% per year... not quite as high, right? But, while this does seem much lower, this percentage still equals about 1 million divorces per year. So, what is causing this problem in couples? What factors tend to lead to divorce more often than others and what factors can reduce the probability of getting divorced?

To illustrate these examples, I will use my parents and what I know about their marriage as an example. In my last blog post, I used my parents as an example of things that worked for them in their marriage. However, they did still end up getting divorced after many years of struggling with different parts of the marriage. Their relationship had most all of the elements listed in the book (Figure 16.3) that have been found to reduce the chance of divorce. For example, both of my parents went to college, neither of their parents were divorced, they were both over 25 when they got married, they waited to have kids longer than 7 months after being married, and their annual income was over $50,000. All of these factors potentially help reduce the stress on the marriage because of the lack of negative influence from family and also having the feeling of financial security. However, these are just a few of the many factors that can help reduce the chance, and obviously they don't always "work".

My parents divorced when I was about 7 years old and, quite honestly, I didn't really understand what was going on. I think what made it easy for me is that I was close to both of parents. Henslin says that this makes for the best adjustment with the children. My sister and I also experienced little conflict and our routines stayed consistent. We both still felt loved by both of our parents. Henslin talks shortly about the absent father and serial fatherhood, which is a pattern of parenting in which a father, after divorce, reduces contact with his own children, serves as a father to the children of the woman he marries/lives with, then ignores these children too after moving in with or marrying another woman. My father was not like this at all. I saw him every week, multiple times a week. Statistics actually say that only about one-sixth of children who live apart from their fathers see them as often as every week. The fact that we saw him multiple times a week made this much easier for us. Also, he was not remarried until I was about 15 years old (8 years later).

An additional contributing factor in making divorce easier for children is when the parents still have the "continuities" of their marriage. For example, my dad was still the "handyman" around our house. If something needed to be fixed, he came over and helped my mom fix it. They still got along very well (or at least they put on a pretty good show). Because of this, I didn't see any problem with the fact that my dad lived somewhere else. To this day, our holiday dinners and gatherings are all at my father's parents house and my mom goes with us every single time. The whole family still feels like a family, and it has made my sister and I much more comfortable with the concept of divorce than we ever would have been if the end of their marriage had a negative impact on our childhood.