Great work here, it’s nice to read an informed piece that identifies issues in the research and discussion.
I also seem to recall that it is men who are happier when married, not necessarily women (so happiness levels vary by sex or, perhaps critically, gender role). And women take a much bigger financial hit with divorce than men do, which only adds to the importance of uncovering why women are still significantly more willing to leave a marriage behind.
According to this particular study by Peltzman, which received a lot of media attention, there wasn't a discernible difference by gender. But this is not reinforced by my own observations! And yes, I don't even want to think about the financial hit I'll be taking, but it is still 100% worth it to me.
My mom, all my aunts, and BOTH my great-grandmas all divorced their husbands, so my family narrative was that I came from a long line of strong/brave independent women! It was nice not to have the family stigma when my own divorce rolled along. I wish I could give you (and countless others) my family history of happily divorced women and their thriving kids.
Also, I thought only married MEN were happier in all those studies, lol.
Maybe that's why this particular study was supposed to be so groundbreaking... it claimed there was no discernible difference in happiness levels by gender. But "happily divorced" is a term I've been hearing more and more these days and it's what I'll soon use to describe myself!
Yeah right, I don’t buy it (the study, that is). Yay for being happily divorced. I am also happily divorced and happily remarried. 🥰 Have you ever read Ann Patchett’s “The Sacrament of Divorce”? It’s a short story and brilliant.
Great piece. All these article's you cited -- their writers should come interview us strippers about the state of American marriage. We can tell you a lot more about the state of marriage in the US than a survey administered to particular kinds of people in order to engineer data to hype up a crumbling economy.
Thank you for writing this and asking the GOOD questions, Kerala!! Saving this one to read over and over again. Especially interesting to me is the increasing isolation in general. Back when there was easier access to close communities, it perhaps helped women put up with unhappy marriages a little more, especially since they had no options for leaving a marriage.
Like you, I swore I would NEVER be divorced. I am remarried, and happier. My anecdotal evidence is that life is more complicated with a second marriage. I am happier.
The crap about kids being happier if the original parents are together is crap. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I saw my kids' friends adjust and be calmer after their parents divorced. I remember thinking my parents were happier but did not know it when they divorced after I finished college. Great article. Keep asking questions, Kerala.
ME TOO! It's probably one of my biggest regrets. I've been eyeing some lately but feel that my kids are too settled to uproot them at this stage. Maybe when I'm an empty nester?
One important piece about whether divorce harms children that isn't usually addressed is how the divorce is handled. It's high conflict in 10-20% of divorces that causes emotional and other harm. I'm currently witnessing this in a family close to me. It's the verbal, emotional, financial, and legal abuse high conflict people enact that hurts the children.
Yes, exactly. I'm in what you'd call a high-conflict divorce but so far we've been more or less able to keep the children out of the conflict. And it's so much better for them than our high-conflict marriage, which they were much more exposed to.
Great questions! And your critiques of those studies are spot-on. So many factors they don’t consider. We need a much more comprehensive and nuanced view of marriage, and we need many more ways for people to live together without necessarily being married. I say this as someone who likes being married and has also been divorced and then single for years. I don’t really like living alone, which I did for a decade, but it helped that I lived in a building where I made some real friends. If we had real community and more ways to live communally, marriage wouldn’t matter as much.
I'm loving living with my kids and new kitties! And it's nice to occasionally get the whole house to myself. I'm not sure if I'll love living completely alone, though as you say, it entirely depends on the community I do or don't have access to.
Good as always, digging beneath the norms and histories. First marriage, awful, I got through part of it by traveling for work a lot. Second marriage, amazing. It's so different to trust and be trusted. My Mom didn't get that, but she was told to do what a husband says, by her mom who was born 122 years ago. Writing like this can help future people. I say people on purpose. I've met abused men. I've also seen men financially wiped out by divorces and paying alimony even when highly paid ex wives are remarried. There are a lot of inequities in law it seems, and locations matter. True, women have had the short end of many things thought time. In some countries, they are still property. Thanks for writing this.
Thanks for this! Like others who've comment, I really appreciate it. I'll start by apologizing for not following the links to the original sources--I don't have time, which makes me sad because this is fascinating--but I'm wondering why everyone seems to assume that to the extent that happiness and marriage are correlated--and your points about the sample are well taken--how do we know that marriage is causing the happiness and not happiness causing the marriage to continue?
Kerala, glad I discovered this, it was so refreshing and enlightening and so much of what you brought seems to be ignored by too many.
I might be way off here, but my experience as a man (and a cranky old Gen Xer to boot) who is recently divorced from a woman 14 years younger seems different from the mainstream narrative, but that's not worth getting into now. The main point is, we - my ex and I - are both happy with this outcome. Life has been absurdly topsy turvy for the past few years (TL;DR - I'm British/American, my ex is Ukrainian, things were on shaky ground, then the war happened, we left, are in Vienna, I'm unemployed, can't find work, trying to write, in debt, ex doing well career wise, met a new man, I'm happy to be a single father of a lovely 6 year old girl, I do the bulk of child rearing, not looking for anything new - I think that covers it!).
The big thing I want to mention - what is it with people who can't accept that this divorce is a good thing and that we're both happy. Especially with my parents, all this 'but we want you to be together AND happy'. What's wrong with being just happy, full stop? 'Oh, but what about poor Emi?' What about her? Happy parents = happy kid, right? Stay together, unhappily, for the sake of the kid? No!!!
What a refreshing piece on marriage and its trials and tribulations. I dont believe any female gets married with the anticipation of divorce. However should that transpire as it did in my situation whereby my ex-husband and i are now able to amicably coparent because we like each other more, then so be it. My children are not traumatised, they are happy, well grounded, emotionally aware children who have seen the benefits in standing up for equality and happiness.
Such a great piece! I too am skeptical of the claim that married women are happier. Happier than who? single women who face stigma and harassment? divorced women who lose status and financial stability? Maybe if you control for stigma, status and stability, you’d find that the relationship/intimacy advantage to marriage disappears. Seems like a lot of women choose stability over emotional happiness—and I don’t blame them, in our precarious society.
Me, I divorced over a decade ago, for all the usual reasons: a lack of emotional support and intimacy plus having to shoulder an undue share of the domestic and caregiving work, despite being the breadwinner. I was way happier, and built up more and better friendships. Figured I’d never live with and certainly not marry a man again. The unexpected part is that my ex and I reunited after ten years apart. I changed a little, but he changed a lot and really cleaned up his act. He made a lot of new friends after moving back to his hometown and became much more socially active than he was before. Plus our kids were grown and launched. So yeah, we live together now; but even though I always did and still do love him, I do not see remarriage in the picture at all. Maybe I just need to make sure he stays on his toes.
Great work here, it’s nice to read an informed piece that identifies issues in the research and discussion.
I also seem to recall that it is men who are happier when married, not necessarily women (so happiness levels vary by sex or, perhaps critically, gender role). And women take a much bigger financial hit with divorce than men do, which only adds to the importance of uncovering why women are still significantly more willing to leave a marriage behind.
According to this particular study by Peltzman, which received a lot of media attention, there wasn't a discernible difference by gender. But this is not reinforced by my own observations! And yes, I don't even want to think about the financial hit I'll be taking, but it is still 100% worth it to me.
My mom, all my aunts, and BOTH my great-grandmas all divorced their husbands, so my family narrative was that I came from a long line of strong/brave independent women! It was nice not to have the family stigma when my own divorce rolled along. I wish I could give you (and countless others) my family history of happily divorced women and their thriving kids.
Also, I thought only married MEN were happier in all those studies, lol.
Maybe that's why this particular study was supposed to be so groundbreaking... it claimed there was no discernible difference in happiness levels by gender. But "happily divorced" is a term I've been hearing more and more these days and it's what I'll soon use to describe myself!
Yeah right, I don’t buy it (the study, that is). Yay for being happily divorced. I am also happily divorced and happily remarried. 🥰 Have you ever read Ann Patchett’s “The Sacrament of Divorce”? It’s a short story and brilliant.
Great piece. All these article's you cited -- their writers should come interview us strippers about the state of American marriage. We can tell you a lot more about the state of marriage in the US than a survey administered to particular kinds of people in order to engineer data to hype up a crumbling economy.
Would love to see you write a piece to that effect!
Not to shamelessly self promote... ok I'll shamelessly self-promote lol. I have a whole substack and am writing about it. 7 pieces posted now. xoxoxo
Thank you for writing this and asking the GOOD questions, Kerala!! Saving this one to read over and over again. Especially interesting to me is the increasing isolation in general. Back when there was easier access to close communities, it perhaps helped women put up with unhappy marriages a little more, especially since they had no options for leaving a marriage.
Like you, I swore I would NEVER be divorced. I am remarried, and happier. My anecdotal evidence is that life is more complicated with a second marriage. I am happier.
The crap about kids being happier if the original parents are together is crap. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I saw my kids' friends adjust and be calmer after their parents divorced. I remember thinking my parents were happier but did not know it when they divorced after I finished college. Great article. Keep asking questions, Kerala.
That would be a brilliant study and I suspect not result in married people’s favor. I wish i could go back in time and find a cohousing community!
ME TOO! It's probably one of my biggest regrets. I've been eyeing some lately but feel that my kids are too settled to uproot them at this stage. Maybe when I'm an empty nester?
One important piece about whether divorce harms children that isn't usually addressed is how the divorce is handled. It's high conflict in 10-20% of divorces that causes emotional and other harm. I'm currently witnessing this in a family close to me. It's the verbal, emotional, financial, and legal abuse high conflict people enact that hurts the children.
Yes, exactly. I'm in what you'd call a high-conflict divorce but so far we've been more or less able to keep the children out of the conflict. And it's so much better for them than our high-conflict marriage, which they were much more exposed to.
Great questions! And your critiques of those studies are spot-on. So many factors they don’t consider. We need a much more comprehensive and nuanced view of marriage, and we need many more ways for people to live together without necessarily being married. I say this as someone who likes being married and has also been divorced and then single for years. I don’t really like living alone, which I did for a decade, but it helped that I lived in a building where I made some real friends. If we had real community and more ways to live communally, marriage wouldn’t matter as much.
I'm loving living with my kids and new kitties! And it's nice to occasionally get the whole house to myself. I'm not sure if I'll love living completely alone, though as you say, it entirely depends on the community I do or don't have access to.
Good as always, digging beneath the norms and histories. First marriage, awful, I got through part of it by traveling for work a lot. Second marriage, amazing. It's so different to trust and be trusted. My Mom didn't get that, but she was told to do what a husband says, by her mom who was born 122 years ago. Writing like this can help future people. I say people on purpose. I've met abused men. I've also seen men financially wiped out by divorces and paying alimony even when highly paid ex wives are remarried. There are a lot of inequities in law it seems, and locations matter. True, women have had the short end of many things thought time. In some countries, they are still property. Thanks for writing this.
Thanks for this! Like others who've comment, I really appreciate it. I'll start by apologizing for not following the links to the original sources--I don't have time, which makes me sad because this is fascinating--but I'm wondering why everyone seems to assume that to the extent that happiness and marriage are correlated--and your points about the sample are well taken--how do we know that marriage is causing the happiness and not happiness causing the marriage to continue?
Kerala, glad I discovered this, it was so refreshing and enlightening and so much of what you brought seems to be ignored by too many.
I might be way off here, but my experience as a man (and a cranky old Gen Xer to boot) who is recently divorced from a woman 14 years younger seems different from the mainstream narrative, but that's not worth getting into now. The main point is, we - my ex and I - are both happy with this outcome. Life has been absurdly topsy turvy for the past few years (TL;DR - I'm British/American, my ex is Ukrainian, things were on shaky ground, then the war happened, we left, are in Vienna, I'm unemployed, can't find work, trying to write, in debt, ex doing well career wise, met a new man, I'm happy to be a single father of a lovely 6 year old girl, I do the bulk of child rearing, not looking for anything new - I think that covers it!).
The big thing I want to mention - what is it with people who can't accept that this divorce is a good thing and that we're both happy. Especially with my parents, all this 'but we want you to be together AND happy'. What's wrong with being just happy, full stop? 'Oh, but what about poor Emi?' What about her? Happy parents = happy kid, right? Stay together, unhappily, for the sake of the kid? No!!!
I'd best stop. I might get carried away!
What a refreshing piece on marriage and its trials and tribulations. I dont believe any female gets married with the anticipation of divorce. However should that transpire as it did in my situation whereby my ex-husband and i are now able to amicably coparent because we like each other more, then so be it. My children are not traumatised, they are happy, well grounded, emotionally aware children who have seen the benefits in standing up for equality and happiness.
Such a great piece! I too am skeptical of the claim that married women are happier. Happier than who? single women who face stigma and harassment? divorced women who lose status and financial stability? Maybe if you control for stigma, status and stability, you’d find that the relationship/intimacy advantage to marriage disappears. Seems like a lot of women choose stability over emotional happiness—and I don’t blame them, in our precarious society.
Me, I divorced over a decade ago, for all the usual reasons: a lack of emotional support and intimacy plus having to shoulder an undue share of the domestic and caregiving work, despite being the breadwinner. I was way happier, and built up more and better friendships. Figured I’d never live with and certainly not marry a man again. The unexpected part is that my ex and I reunited after ten years apart. I changed a little, but he changed a lot and really cleaned up his act. He made a lot of new friends after moving back to his hometown and became much more socially active than he was before. Plus our kids were grown and launched. So yeah, we live together now; but even though I always did and still do love him, I do not see remarriage in the picture at all. Maybe I just need to make sure he stays on his toes.