Divorce

Divorce Definition

Divorce is the legal termination of a valid marriage while both partners are still alive, leaving them free to remarry. It is distinguished from separation — the temporary or permanent severing of a marital relationship — which may or may not lead to divorce. The conditions required to end a marriage vary widely between cultures and over time; in some societies the rights of men and women in this respect remain highly unequal, though Western societies have moved toward accepting the irretrievable breakdown of a marriage as sufficient grounds. Divorce has been the subject of extensive sociological study, directed both at its causes and at the variations in divorce rates across geographical, cultural, age, and other divides.

Rising Rates and Their Measurement

Divorce rates have risen markedly in most industrial societies. In Britain the rate rose from 2.1 per thousand of the married population in 1961 to 13.0 per thousand in 1999 — though such figures are somewhat crude, since they ignore the age structure of society. A more meaningful measure expresses divorces per thousand people married in a particular year; on this basis it is estimated that two in five marriages contracted in the 1990s will end in divorce. In the United States, divorce rates were relatively stable between 1950 and 1965, rose dramatically between 1965 and 1980, then declined modestly: from 1980 to 2000 the rate per 1,000 married women fell from 22.6 to 19.0, a decrease of 16.3 percent that recent evidence indicates is not explained by increased cohabitation or population aging. It has been projected that about half of all US marriages will end in divorce and half of all children will spend some time in a single-parent home before age 18. Rising rates have periodically reached the status of a moral panic in Britain and the United States, though the alarm should be weighed against high remarriage rates and the growing preference for common-law unions among groups most at risk. One widely cited statistic holds that one in five British children will experience parental divorce or separation by age 16.

Why Rates Have Risen

Several forces lie behind the long rise. Sociologists have observed that divorce rates respond to rapid social change and upheaval: in the US they rose after both world wars and during and after the Vietnam War, and fell during the Great Depression. The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s — civil rights and feminism among them — fostered a growing individualism, making personal happiness the primary purpose of marriage; when love wanes, dissolving the relationship becomes the logical solution, and commitment to marriage weakens while acceptance of divorce and cohabitation grows. Young married mothers today are far more likely than in the past to say divorce is the best solution to persistent marital problems, and social sanctions against divorce have faded. Women’s economic independence has also grown: in the US the share of bachelor’s degrees earned by women rose from 35 percent in 1960 to 57 percent in 2002, and married women’s labor-force participation from 32 percent in 1960 to 61 percent in 2003 (60 percent even among those with children under six). An employed woman can more easily leave an unhappy marriage — and an unhappy husband may leave more readily knowing his wife is financially independent. Legal change has worked in the same direction. Britain’s Divorce Reform Act (1969, implemented 1971) added irretrievable breakdown to the older doctrine of matrimonial offence, under which a spouse had to be “guilty” of cruelty or adultery. In the US, debate continues over whether no-fault laws raised divorce rates or merely reflected cultural change already under way; one estimate suggests rates would have been 6 percent lower without them, implying the laws both mirrored and reinforced the growing acceptance of divorce. Importantly, the increased propensity to divorce need not signal growing family disorganization, since many marriages formerly broke down without ever ending in divorce.

Who Divorces: Risk Factors

Divorce risk varies systematically. It rises with early childbearing, premarital pregnancy, and childlessness; those who marry in their teens or early twenties are more likely to divorce than later marriers; the longer a marriage lasts, the lower the propensity to divorce; and rates are higher in lower socio-economic groups. Other documented risk factors include premarital cohabitation, parental divorce, infidelity, alcohol and drug abuse, poor financial management, and domestic violence — though the strength of these factors differs across groups (in the US, premarital cohabitation predicts dissolution among non-Hispanic white women but not among African American or Mexican American women). Where marriage expectations are primarily those of the kin group, as with arranged marriages, breakdown rates tend to be low; where individual expectations dominate, as in most Western societies, dissolution is more readily accepted so that expectations may be fulfilled elsewhere. Research on couple interaction has produced some surprises: Gottman and colleagues found that neither active listening nor the sheer amount of anger expressed predicted dissolution. What mattered was how couples handled disagreement — those who could disagree without contempt or withdrawal stayed married more often, with soft start-ups, humor, and accepting a partner’s influence linked to stability, while contempt, belligerence, and defensiveness raised the risk. Women’s employment, meanwhile, raises dissolution risk only among unhappily married women.

Consequences of Divorce

Compared with married people, the divorced tend to suffer more economic hardship and poverty, lower psychological well-being and happiness, more health problems, and higher mortality — findings confirmed across some twenty countries. A persistent question is whether these differences reflect selection (poorly functioning people being more likely to divorce) or the stress of divorce itself; recent research indicates that although selection accounts for part of the gap, divorce has a significant independent impact on well-being. Outcomes nonetheless vary greatly. Hetherington identified six patterns of adjustment: at one pole the “enhanced” — successful at work, socially, as parents, and often in remarriage — comprised 24 percent of women and 13 percent of men ten years after divorce; at the other, the “defeated” spiraled into low self-esteem, depression, antisocial behavior, and substance abuse — about a third of divorced adults after one year, though only 10 percent remained there after ten. Four factors aid successful adjustment: adequate income, a new intimate relationship, relative youth (older divorcees have invested more in the marriage and find new partners harder to come by), and supportive social networks. The personal costs extend to children: Brown and Harris, in Social Origins of Depression (1978), identified parental divorce as among the more stressful life events experienced by women suffering depressive conditions, and the damage done by legal wrangling over children and housing is well documented. Divorce is also a multidimensional social process — emotional uncoupling, negotiating custody and child care, settling property and maintenance, realigning community relationships — studied in detail by sociologists and family conciliation practitioners alike.

Family Change and Future Research

Rising divorce has been the major cause of the growth of single-parent families, while remarriage — two-thirds of divorcees eventually remarry — has multiplied reconstituted families in which one or both parents were previously divorced; remarriages involving at least one divorced partner rose from 14 percent of all British marriages in 1961 to 36 percent by 1994. Marriage itself remains popular. Future research needs identified by scholars include the process of divorce itself — the identity change from married to single, decisions over money, residence, and childrearing, and the legal course of dissolution, all comparatively neglected next to causes and consequences; divorce across different cultures and subcultures, about which relatively little is known; and the dissolution of other intimate relationships, such as cohabiting unions, whose risk factors, processes, and economic consequences are only beginning to be examined. The basic statistics and their policy implications are discussed in Janet Finch’s Family Obligations and Social Change (1989).