Marriage and the Power of Divorce

N

nobody's prefect_sl

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Khane_sl said:
You're pretty dumb for a lawyer.
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And where did you get the idea that lawyers are smart?

edit:

Yeah, we've both realized we're not happy and we're selling the apartment and so forth. I wouldn't say the D is a done thing, because it isn't, but we've both said we don't care to go on living this way. But that kind of spoils the previous post where I set myself up as a dumbass who goes down with his ship. If you can't make entertainment out of your personal failures...
 
Noodleface

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Why did you guys get married if you had no common interests at all?

Me and my wife went different academic routes and have vastly different interests, but we share a lot as well. I can't come home and talk about how hard it was for me to figure out how to build the CDB for my SCSI requests based on the documentation I had available, but I can come home and talk about how cool Game of Thrones was, or watch her play some video games and relax, or take our dog for a walk together. Maybe it won't work, but I'm optimistic.

If anything, the women in her family are entirely stubborn. Her parents now live in separate rooms (on separate floors), argue constantly, no physical contact, always mad at eachother, cook separate meals - by all accounts they are divorced, but they will never go through with it. Listening to them makes me angry.
 
N

nobody's prefect_sl

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Well, to put it bluntly, we were madly in love and full-on tards believing thatour relationship is different.Which is why I now advocate living together for some years before proposing.

And a big factor is that our interests went separate ways, you know? I was hell-bent on having kids when we married, then decided that wasn't so hot. She decided she didn't like my summer house after all, so spending time there kinda went out the window, as did her interest in skiing. I dropped finance & accounting (still getting that MSc. econ. this spring just out of pride tho) and became a jurist instead - I had no passion whatsoever for that numbers thing, but the law... awwwwyeah.

edit: and she's become more centered around her profession as well. Probably does not help that our professions have been around for a long time and the trainingdoestend to impart a certain ..attitude towards laypeople.

People change over time. Their priorities change. When you've (here meaning myself) only known someone for a very short time, you are not best equipped to judge whether the stuff that's more permanent about them is enough to maintain your interest when the more labile stuff is gone to shit and replaced with stuff that bores you to tears.

The experience echoed repeatedly in this thread is that having kids does tend to disincentivise divorcing. I think there's some psych literature out there that found that simply taking care of an entity together had that effect.
 
Ryoz

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You both sound like selfish egotistical assholes. Until you can put that shit aside, you probably won't be up for the challenge that is marriage. It's also about compromise and finding shared activities.
 
Joeboo

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nobody's prefect_sl said:
Well, to put it bluntly, we were madly in love and full-on tards believing thatour relationship is different.Which is why I now advocate living together for some years before proposing.

And a big factor is that our interests went separate ways, you know? I was hell-bent on having kids when we married, then decided that wasn't so hot. She decided she didn't like my summer house after all, so spending time there kinda went out the window, as did her interest in skiing. I dropped finance & accounting (still getting that MSc. econ. this spring just out of pride tho) and became a jurist instead - I had no passion whatsoever for that numbers thing, but the law... awwwwyeah.

edit: and she's become more centered around her profession as well. Probably does not help that our professions have been around for a long time and the trainingdoestend to impart a certain ..attitude towards laypeople.

People change over time. Their priorities change. When you've (here meaning myself) only known someone for a very short time, you are not best equipped to judge whether the stuff that's more permanent about them is enough to maintain your interest when the more labile stuff is gone to shit and replaced with stuff that bores you to tears.

The experience echoed repeatedly in this thread is that having kids does tend to disincentivise divorcing. I think there's some psych literature out there that found that simply taking care of an entity together had that effect.
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Just curious, how old were you two when you got married? Seems like the younger you are the more likely one or both people are still going to go through some major life changes that can drastically affect the marriage.
 
mkopec

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Actually statistics say that if you live together ahead of time, you have a better chance at divorce than those which do not live together beforehand. I know it seems backward, but I did read that somewhere.

edit, here is an article about it...

Does Cohabitation Lead to More Divorces? | Psychology Today

The gist of it is that when you live with each other before getting engaged and making the decision to marry, you kind of fall into or drift into marriage rather than wanting to get married because of a stronger bond and growing love for each other. Then when problems crop up later on, the bond is not as strong as a couple which made the decision to marry before living with each other.

Its quite a good theory realy, give it a read.
 
Khane

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Interesting theory but it still doesn't make sense to me. It seems like all the reasons he gives for why cohabitating might drain the relationship have to do with time spent living together and would end up happening after X number of years anyway whether you lived together beforehand or not. In other words he makes it sound like it's an inevitability anyway so why does it make a difference?

For instance
When a couple enters a marital relationship after having cohabitated, their passion is not at its peak, as frequency of sexual activity declines steadily as the relationship lengthens, reaching roughly half the frequency after one year of marriage compared to the first month of marriage, and declining more gradually thereafter. If people have reached their peak of passion during cohabitation, they come to the challenging years of marriage without the drive that passion gives the relationship
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What exactly are the "challenging years of marriage"? Do psychologists literally have a number for which years most marriages hit the rocks? Is it a small window like he is suggesting here? How come there the article sounds as if the amount of time spent cohabitating before marrying is inconsequential? 6 months, 12 months or 5 years spent living together beforehand doesn't make any difference?

The author talks about "many studies that have linked cohabitation and divorce rates" but doesn't cite any of them.

The study also doesn't consider something I would say is a very important factor. People who choose not to cohabitate beforehand tend do so because of deep religious faith. People that committed to their religion are probably (I'd like to see a study on this) a lot more likely to never even consider divorce no matter how dire the circumstances because of that faith.
 
Khane

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opiate82_sl said:
You never heard of the 7 year itch?
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Ok but according to the author it starts much earlier than 7 years. As early as the first year if you take what he says about "dwindling passion". And it apparently doesn't matter how long you lived together before hand.

I just want to see the numbers. Theories are fine but he mentioned studies have linked the two but didn't cite any of them.
 
Frenzied Wombat

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Khane_sl said:
Interesting theory but it still doesn't make sense to me. It seems like all the reasons he gives for why cohabitating might drain the relationship have to do with time spent living together and would end up happening after X number of years anyway whether you lived together beforehand or not. In other words he makes it sound like it's an inevitability anyway so why does it make a difference?

For instance


What exactly are the "challenging years of marriage"? Do psychologists literally have a number for which years most marriages hit the rocks? Is it a small window like he is suggesting here? How come there is no difference in how long you cohabit before marrying? Is it any amount of time? 6 months? 12 months? 5 years?

In fact, the whole things sounds preposterous and the author talks about "many studies that have linked cohabitation and divorce rates" but doesn't cite any of them.
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This is another one of those surveys that fails to incorporate scientific controls so that one is really comparing apples to apples. A significant percentage of people who are against cohabitation are also religious, and religious people are generally against divorce. Most people who are ok with co-habituating are more liberal and less religious, and therefore are "ok" with the concept of divorce. Therefore, divorce amongst those who cohabitate first will be higher than those than don't.. If they redid the survey to only include those people who define themselves as "non-religious" in both groups, the results would probably be more valid. Logically, all other things being equal, it just doesn't make any sense that cohabitation would lead to a higher divorce rate.

edit: oops, Just noticed you edited in the same observation while I writing this.
 
Gravy

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Khane_sl said:
I just want to see the numbers. Theories are fine but he mentioned studies have linked the two but didn't cite any of them.
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I'm curious why you want to see the numbers? Relationships are damn near impossible to quantify.

Myself, I did get the 7-year itch, and scratching it was absolutely the worst thing I did to get over it. Luckily, my wife and I realize (I hate the way that's spelled) that there is more at stake here than a weekend of foolishness. We've both had our ups and downs in this relationship, but it always comes back to us talking about things rationally in the end.
 
mkopec

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Shit like this is hard to quantify, but I think what they did is surveyed married couples and asked questions...

Discovery Health


The most recent study about premarital cohabitation was conducted by researchers at the University of Denver (DU) and published in July 2009. The researchers conducted telephone surveys of couples who had been married for 10 years or less and asked about marital satisfaction and whether divorce had even been considered. According to their findings,19 percent of the couples who'd lived together before marriage had contemplated divorce, compared with 12 percent of couples who'd lived together after their engagement and 10 percent of couples who didn't share space until after marriage[source: Bryner]. Additionally, the couples who lived together pre-marriage reported lower levels of marital satisfaction. The DU results are consistent with other studies on the subject, which have found a similar risk for divorce and poorer communication and problem-solving skills in couples who cohabited [source: Ambert].

DU researcher Scott Stanley posits that these cohabiting couples get married for the wrong reasons; rather than making a decision about commitment, couples who live together may find themselves "sliding" into marriage because it's easy to do so [source: DU]. After all, once you have a joint lease and a shared dog, who wants the hassle of a breakup? That may be why couples who move in together after getting engaged but before getting married are immune to the cohabiting curse -- they've already made a deliberate decision about their shared future.
 
Khane

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Gravy_sl said:
I'm curious why you want to see the numbers? Relationships are damn near impossible to quantify.
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I want to see the numbers because the author said the numbers exist, but didn't show them to us.
 
Khane

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mkopec_sl said:
Shit like this is hard to quantify, but I think what they did is surveyed married couples and asked questions...

Discovery Health


The most recent study about premarital cohabitation was conducted by researchers at the University of Denver (DU) and published in July 2009. The researchers conducted telephone surveys of couples who had been married for 10 years or less and asked about marital satisfaction and whether divorce had even been considered. According to their findings,19 percent of the couples who'd lived together before marriage had contemplated divorce, compared with 12 percent of couples who'd lived together after their engagement and 10 percent of couples who didn't share space until after marriage[source: Bryner]. Additionally, the couples who lived together pre-marriage reported lower levels of marital satisfaction. The DU results are consistent with other studies on the subject, which have found a similar risk for divorce and poorer communication and problem-solving skills in couples who cohabited [source: Ambert].

DU researcher Scott Stanley posits that these cohabiting couples get married for the wrong reasons; rather than making a decision about commitment, couples who live together may find themselves "sliding" into marriage because it's easy to do so [source: DU]. After all, once you have a joint lease and a shared dog, who wants the hassle of a breakup? That may be why couples who move in together after getting engaged but before getting married are immune to the cohabiting curse -- they've already made a deliberate decision about their shared future.
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Ok there we go, some numbers.

Interesting. Have there been studies of single people who broke up with their partners after moving in with them because it helped them realize they couldn't possibly spend the rest of their life with this person after they experienced what it was like cohabitating with them? The theory and implications are definitely interesting. It's hard to understand how it really affects marriage itself when there are people who would consider "sliding" into marriage because it's easy and then there are people who would never dream of that and would break up even though moving out of a cohabitated space is a hassle. There is also no mention of the age of the couples in question. Were they all young 20 somethings? Were they well adjusted 30 somethings? Had they been married before?

I personally dodged two bullets in that regard simply because I cohabitated before even considering buying a ring.
 
Gravy

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I've notice that talking with my wife on the phone produces a laxative effect on her. Any armchair psychiatrists wanna take a jab at that?
 
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