Chapter 15 Separation and Divorce

Summary

This chapter (1) describes what divorce is, (2) the reasons behind it, and (3) the affects of it.

(1) 'Divorce' is defined in this chapter against the concept of 'separation'. Separation occurs in stages and may result in different outcomes. The stages of separation include preseparation, early separation, midseparation and late separation. The outcomes of separation may be reconciliation, no divorce or divorce.

What is typically thought of as divorce, the breaking away of legal bonds between two people, is designated as 'legal divorce' and is only one type of divorce among many. Other forms include emotional, economic, coparental, community, and psychic divorce.

(2) The chapter then moves into a discussion of the reasons behind divorce. As usual, it notes macro-level, demographic, and micro- level reasons.

Macro-level reasons include lax divorce laws, acceptance of divorced peoples within religious institutions, poor economy and financial strain, military service, cultural values, social integration, and technology.

Demographic reasons for divorce include parental divorce (having parents that divorced increases chances), age at marriage (youth increases chances), premarital pregnancy and childbearing, premarital cohabitation (specifically serial cohabitation increases chances), presence of children, gender (female's are more likely to ask for divorce), social class, race and ethnicity, religion, and similarity between spouses.

Micro-level reasons for divorce include unrealistic expectations among spouses, conflict and abuse, infidelity, and communication problems.

(3) Third, the chapter discusses the affects of divorce on both adults and children. Adults in general experience negative effects physically, emotionally, and financially from a divorce. Furthermore, if they have children, they sometimes have the added stress involved in custody battles and/or having to pay child support.

Children also experience affects: they are sometimes treated more like their parents' peer than like their child, they assume the role of comforting the parent, they struggle academically, typically have low self esteem and behavioral problems. There are, however, positive affects for children in that after divorce they are often living in a less stressful environment. The chapter also notes that younger children are in general more affected by divorce than older children.

Lastly, the chapter shows the affects of marriage counsiling, divorce mediation, and collaborative legal processes on divorce. The main points seems to be that marriage counsiling is to a large extent ineffective, that divorce mediation is the first step towards negotiating a divorce, and that collaborative legal processes have positive affects, but are limited to only six states.

What I learned

Some of the divorce types I had never thought about before as a distinct type of divorce rather than as a consequence of legal divorce. For example, community divorce and psychic divorce.

Question/Concern

The chapter describes many reasons for why people have a divorce. Do you think that these are genuine reasons, answers that people can provide when asked 'why they got a divorce?' -- or might we be better off to think of them merely as trends, descriptive of the population of people who get divorced?