Marriage Resource Center

10 Reasons to Divorce

Through the years, there has been lots of advice given to couples who are considering ending their marriage. Some of it is true, some a bit misleading, and some outright false.

These 10 justifications for divorce come from the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. Can you decide which of the following ten reasons are true and which are false?

1. Because people learn from their bad experiences, second marriages tend to be more successful than first marriages.

2. Living together before marriage is a good way to reduce the chances of eventually divorcing.

3. Divorce may cause problems for many of the children who are affected by it, but by and large these problems are not long lasting and the children recover relatively quickly.

4. Having a child together will help a couple to improve their marital satisfaction and prevent a divorce.

5. Following divorce, the woman's standard of living plummets by seventy three percent while that of the man's improves by forty two percent.

6. When parents don't get along, children are better off if their parents divorce than if they stay together.

7. Because they are more cautious in entering marital relationships and also have a strong determination to avoid the possibility of divorce, children who grow up in a home broken by divorce tend to have as much success in their own marriages as those from intact homes.

8. Following divorce, the children involved are better off in stepfamilies than in single-parent families.

9. Being very unhappy at certain points in a marriage is a good sign that the marriage will eventually end in divorce.

10. It is usually men who initiate divorce proceedings.

As you realized, all the answers are false. If you want to see the reasons why and the research to back them up, go to the National Marriage Project Divorce Myths page. Although the publication is from 2001, neither the reasons people give for divorce nor the research that dispels those reasons have changed.