One question occurs to me: how much (stable, lasting) marriage do we want in a society? Not that we have tons of control over this stuff, but as a thought experiment. If we want more people to get married and stay married, I think we need to seriously rethink things because we're clearly doing it wrong. The way people understand what marriage means and entails, the way they filter their prospects, meet, and stay together today is all radically different than in prior generations in almost every respect (one reason there are so many divorces may be that people actually aren't that great at picking a spouse for themselves, and having extra family and community help/input is important because other people often know us better than we know ourselves). Or—we could accept that marriage isn't for everyone and that our culture may evolve into one in which only a minority of people who are really gunning to get married actually do it, with everyone else doing just whatever. But I'm not sure the second option is sustainable on a civilizational level. Gotta think about this some more.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! I agree that the "optimal marriage level" is worth thinking about but my bias is definitely pro more stable marriages. And as you suggest I think one way to get there is to improve the selection process which, especially for people marrying in their early to mid 20s, should include input from family/community. I do wonder if we're all too nervous about telling the people close to us that we think their partner is a bad match. I also think discussing relationship conflict more openly could help younger people understand the appropriate boundaries for conflict as well as pragmatic strategies to work through it. I think a lot of Esther Perel content for example models this but think people are often too private about these things and so lack perspective. Of course I don't think everyone needs to know the intimate details of your relational conflicts, but having a couple of trusted people to turn to is a big positive. That said, I still think that most of the time divorces that happen should've happened although there's surely some level of "bad divorces" where the couple would've been better off trying a bit harder and working through their issues.
I think it would be worth categorizing the root causes of divorce. To do this correctly, one should lay out the functions of marriage, then address divorce as functional failure, but that's a longer post. I'd propose the categories: bad match, bad person, values grow apart, building resentment, simple lack of commitment and bad event (child's death, illness etc).
Bad match comes in a variety of flavors, but this is really a failure of the filtering process and communities to support the marriage initially. One of the points of marriage is to end bad ones before they start. An over abundance of individualism has people fun shy about preempting bad marriages. Proxy with short marriages?
Bad people are bad matches in spades with a layer of deceit. This includes violence, narcissists and low integrity people. This needs to be filtered before a horrible marriage and divorced if missed.
Values can change especially when someone marries younger. The goal of marriage is to grow together, but people values can change unreconcilably. Easy example is initially not wanting kids, then pivoting at 35. Religious/spiritual and material values also apply. Hard to proxy without an explicit question.
Building resentment categorizes general life stress that gets redirected at the partner, kills communication, just general deterioration. I'd proxy this with 7 year hump stuff. Marriage counseling/social slap in the faith and recommitting to each other can work if caught early as most marriages deal with this, move through it and thrive. I'm not saying this is universally fixable, but this is what people are discussing when they recommend working through marriage struggles.
Lack of commitment. Proxy with multiple marriages, high relationship counts. Not everyone who legally gets married is all that committed. I'd consider this marriage light, not really worth discussing. If only one person is low commitment, this is incredibly tragic and overlaps with bad match. If both are commitment light, whatever.
Bad event. About 100 horrible things that poison the marriage from the outside. Optimally the marriage should be a source of strength for deaths, cancer, rape, financial catastrophe. But if your spouse reminds you of your dead kid or sex is now deeply traumatic or you just can't handle a new situation divorce is simply fallout.
My point: sometimes the matching process is the issue, sometimes people need to be better at marriage and sometimes exogenous events hit. More often then not, divorce is not a great signal about your type and decision making even if it's ex post optimal. Because divorce is often downstream of casual ugly, it's hard to draw empirical solutions. Maybe use temporary separation or marriage counseling as a control to differentiate working through marriage issues vs divorce?
Great comment - thanks! I like the categories you outlined and think they pretty much cover it. I think that "Bad event" breakdowns could be worked through in some cases but not always. As for Building resentment - this one can also overlap with Bad match and Growing apart. Even if you seem to be a good match initially you may find that your parenting styles or something else that you didn't correctly predict lead to growing resentment. And that's not always fixable, or could be so much effort to fix that everyone is actually better off breaking up.
Agree with your summary: "sometimes the matching process is the issue, sometimes people need to be better at marriage and sometimes exogenous events hit."
The first two categories can maybe be improved, but for already existing relationships although I don't know for sure, I expect that most of the time when couples divorce it wouldn't have been worth staying together and working on it for longer.
Thanks. There is some overlap, but my growing resentment was intended as root cause is fundamentally misplaced resentment/relationship mismanagement, disjoint of mismatch. Often a deeper issue will present itself as resentment, but sometimes resentment is just misplaced attribution to normal life struggles. Every marriage will have some surprises and things you will need to navigate. Some are fundamentally irreconcilable, some are difficult but resolvable and some become issues because of lack of effort/communication.
Marriage should come with some baseline expectation of struggle and development as is the case with everything worth doing. People can work and improve their marriages (outcomes are path dependent and not predetermined). My view is that most (not all) couples that are divorced should have never gotten married or turned to counseling/support considerably earlier, but by the time you're getting divorced damage is done.
I agree that most couples that get divorced should never have gotten married. And I also think divorce is not nearly as big of a deal if the couple doesn’t have kids. So it’s much better to realize that mismatch and get divorced relatively early and before kids than to try to force the match to work and build a family on an unstable partnership.
May I suggest it may be because men tend to face the worse situation as a result of a breakup.
1) Dont men tend have much less in terms of a social support network especially outside of joint friends. I suspect it's often the woman who undertakes managing social contacts leaving the men with a bigger downside.
2) Also doesn't the data on depression/happiness suggest that being single is much worse for men.
I don't know if it's true but there is a very plausible evopsych story here where evolution pushes single men into greater unhappiness to prompt more risky behavior.
Yes, I think 1 is true in most cases and definitely matches my anecdotal experience. I haven't looked into 2 but certainly possible as well. But I also think women spend more time thinking and talking about relationships and therefore are quicker to notice issues.
This whole essay was excellent and well written, so me singling out one sentence is just me singling out one sentence, but this one sentence was fantastic, "Marriages are WAY harder to leave and come with several layers of added social embarrassment and so it seems even more reasonable to assume that if someone’s leaving they probably should."
Divorce IS almost always good news. As is a career change. Or anything else that has to overcome the human propensity for inertia. Annie Duke is right - status quo bias seems much stronger than some desire for novelty or some other psychological bias that pushes towards quitting/divorce, especially when quitting also comes with social sanction.
Most people require a much higher level of certainty (that they’re making the right decision) while quitting than they do before accepting a job or entering into a relationship. In the process, they leave a lot of expected value on the table. This utility loss, in these specific instances is not just bad for the person, but also for others. As one drags their feet and refuses to quit, someone else is deprived of the great partner or great employee - You.
This seems like an excessively feeble vision of marriage. Should people's true unstated marriage vows really amount to promising to be with someone so long as it's optimizing their personal happiness or seems like a good deal? If so, then the entire institution is suspect. Also, it's unclear to me why elevating marriage above other relationships necessitates religious commitments.
I think marriages should end if they're not serving either party, yes. I think the marriage vow should be a commitment to make a strong effort to care for the relationship and the other person, but that if both people are trying and it just isn't working they should end the relationship. Also if one person fails to uphold their end of the agreement the other person should end the relationship. I do elevate marriage above other relational commitments and I think it's good that it's harder to leave a marriage than it is other relationships. The legal structure built around marriage serves an important purpose regardless of whether you believe marriage is sacred. It provides guardrails to decide how finances and other things will be dealt with in the event of a breakup and these guardrails allow people to safely pursue projects together as a couple. But in that context... if a couple has come to the conclusion that they should get divorced I have a strong prior that they are right about that and should get divorced.
One question occurs to me: how much (stable, lasting) marriage do we want in a society? Not that we have tons of control over this stuff, but as a thought experiment. If we want more people to get married and stay married, I think we need to seriously rethink things because we're clearly doing it wrong. The way people understand what marriage means and entails, the way they filter their prospects, meet, and stay together today is all radically different than in prior generations in almost every respect (one reason there are so many divorces may be that people actually aren't that great at picking a spouse for themselves, and having extra family and community help/input is important because other people often know us better than we know ourselves). Or—we could accept that marriage isn't for everyone and that our culture may evolve into one in which only a minority of people who are really gunning to get married actually do it, with everyone else doing just whatever. But I'm not sure the second option is sustainable on a civilizational level. Gotta think about this some more.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! I agree that the "optimal marriage level" is worth thinking about but my bias is definitely pro more stable marriages. And as you suggest I think one way to get there is to improve the selection process which, especially for people marrying in their early to mid 20s, should include input from family/community. I do wonder if we're all too nervous about telling the people close to us that we think their partner is a bad match. I also think discussing relationship conflict more openly could help younger people understand the appropriate boundaries for conflict as well as pragmatic strategies to work through it. I think a lot of Esther Perel content for example models this but think people are often too private about these things and so lack perspective. Of course I don't think everyone needs to know the intimate details of your relational conflicts, but having a couple of trusted people to turn to is a big positive. That said, I still think that most of the time divorces that happen should've happened although there's surely some level of "bad divorces" where the couple would've been better off trying a bit harder and working through their issues.
I think it would be worth categorizing the root causes of divorce. To do this correctly, one should lay out the functions of marriage, then address divorce as functional failure, but that's a longer post. I'd propose the categories: bad match, bad person, values grow apart, building resentment, simple lack of commitment and bad event (child's death, illness etc).
Bad match comes in a variety of flavors, but this is really a failure of the filtering process and communities to support the marriage initially. One of the points of marriage is to end bad ones before they start. An over abundance of individualism has people fun shy about preempting bad marriages. Proxy with short marriages?
Bad people are bad matches in spades with a layer of deceit. This includes violence, narcissists and low integrity people. This needs to be filtered before a horrible marriage and divorced if missed.
Values can change especially when someone marries younger. The goal of marriage is to grow together, but people values can change unreconcilably. Easy example is initially not wanting kids, then pivoting at 35. Religious/spiritual and material values also apply. Hard to proxy without an explicit question.
Building resentment categorizes general life stress that gets redirected at the partner, kills communication, just general deterioration. I'd proxy this with 7 year hump stuff. Marriage counseling/social slap in the faith and recommitting to each other can work if caught early as most marriages deal with this, move through it and thrive. I'm not saying this is universally fixable, but this is what people are discussing when they recommend working through marriage struggles.
Lack of commitment. Proxy with multiple marriages, high relationship counts. Not everyone who legally gets married is all that committed. I'd consider this marriage light, not really worth discussing. If only one person is low commitment, this is incredibly tragic and overlaps with bad match. If both are commitment light, whatever.
Bad event. About 100 horrible things that poison the marriage from the outside. Optimally the marriage should be a source of strength for deaths, cancer, rape, financial catastrophe. But if your spouse reminds you of your dead kid or sex is now deeply traumatic or you just can't handle a new situation divorce is simply fallout.
My point: sometimes the matching process is the issue, sometimes people need to be better at marriage and sometimes exogenous events hit. More often then not, divorce is not a great signal about your type and decision making even if it's ex post optimal. Because divorce is often downstream of casual ugly, it's hard to draw empirical solutions. Maybe use temporary separation or marriage counseling as a control to differentiate working through marriage issues vs divorce?
Great comment - thanks! I like the categories you outlined and think they pretty much cover it. I think that "Bad event" breakdowns could be worked through in some cases but not always. As for Building resentment - this one can also overlap with Bad match and Growing apart. Even if you seem to be a good match initially you may find that your parenting styles or something else that you didn't correctly predict lead to growing resentment. And that's not always fixable, or could be so much effort to fix that everyone is actually better off breaking up.
Agree with your summary: "sometimes the matching process is the issue, sometimes people need to be better at marriage and sometimes exogenous events hit."
The first two categories can maybe be improved, but for already existing relationships although I don't know for sure, I expect that most of the time when couples divorce it wouldn't have been worth staying together and working on it for longer.
Thanks. There is some overlap, but my growing resentment was intended as root cause is fundamentally misplaced resentment/relationship mismanagement, disjoint of mismatch. Often a deeper issue will present itself as resentment, but sometimes resentment is just misplaced attribution to normal life struggles. Every marriage will have some surprises and things you will need to navigate. Some are fundamentally irreconcilable, some are difficult but resolvable and some become issues because of lack of effort/communication.
Marriage should come with some baseline expectation of struggle and development as is the case with everything worth doing. People can work and improve their marriages (outcomes are path dependent and not predetermined). My view is that most (not all) couples that are divorced should have never gotten married or turned to counseling/support considerably earlier, but by the time you're getting divorced damage is done.
I agree that most couples that get divorced should never have gotten married. And I also think divorce is not nearly as big of a deal if the couple doesn’t have kids. So it’s much better to realize that mismatch and get divorced relatively early and before kids than to try to force the match to work and build a family on an unstable partnership.
Agreed
May I suggest it may be because men tend to face the worse situation as a result of a breakup.
1) Dont men tend have much less in terms of a social support network especially outside of joint friends. I suspect it's often the woman who undertakes managing social contacts leaving the men with a bigger downside.
2) Also doesn't the data on depression/happiness suggest that being single is much worse for men.
I don't know if it's true but there is a very plausible evopsych story here where evolution pushes single men into greater unhappiness to prompt more risky behavior.
Yes, I think 1 is true in most cases and definitely matches my anecdotal experience. I haven't looked into 2 but certainly possible as well. But I also think women spend more time thinking and talking about relationships and therefore are quicker to notice issues.
This whole essay was excellent and well written, so me singling out one sentence is just me singling out one sentence, but this one sentence was fantastic, "Marriages are WAY harder to leave and come with several layers of added social embarrassment and so it seems even more reasonable to assume that if someone’s leaving they probably should."
Thank you so much Scott!
Divorce IS almost always good news. As is a career change. Or anything else that has to overcome the human propensity for inertia. Annie Duke is right - status quo bias seems much stronger than some desire for novelty or some other psychological bias that pushes towards quitting/divorce, especially when quitting also comes with social sanction.
Most people require a much higher level of certainty (that they’re making the right decision) while quitting than they do before accepting a job or entering into a relationship. In the process, they leave a lot of expected value on the table. This utility loss, in these specific instances is not just bad for the person, but also for others. As one drags their feet and refuses to quit, someone else is deprived of the great partner or great employee - You.
This seems like an excessively feeble vision of marriage. Should people's true unstated marriage vows really amount to promising to be with someone so long as it's optimizing their personal happiness or seems like a good deal? If so, then the entire institution is suspect. Also, it's unclear to me why elevating marriage above other relationships necessitates religious commitments.
I think marriages should end if they're not serving either party, yes. I think the marriage vow should be a commitment to make a strong effort to care for the relationship and the other person, but that if both people are trying and it just isn't working they should end the relationship. Also if one person fails to uphold their end of the agreement the other person should end the relationship. I do elevate marriage above other relational commitments and I think it's good that it's harder to leave a marriage than it is other relationships. The legal structure built around marriage serves an important purpose regardless of whether you believe marriage is sacred. It provides guardrails to decide how finances and other things will be dealt with in the event of a breakup and these guardrails allow people to safely pursue projects together as a couple. But in that context... if a couple has come to the conclusion that they should get divorced I have a strong prior that they are right about that and should get divorced.