A majority of couples have considered divorcing their spouse according to new findings.
A team led by Dr Alan Hawkins of Brigham Young University in Utah polled 3,000 people across the US aged between 25 and 50 who had been married for a minimum of one year, asking whether the couples in question had ever thought about divorce and the circumstances in which such ideas had come to them.
More than half the respondents admitted that they had indeed contemplated divorce in the recent past, but of those, as many as 43 per cent insisted that they hadn’t really meant it. Meanwhile, 23 per cents said they would be willing to work on the relationship as long as their spouse agreed to make changes.
A decisive 90 per cent of the respondents who had contemplated divorce had nothing to start the process, while a tiny one per cent admitted that the prospect of staying with their spouse made them unhappy.
Unsurprisingly couples with fewer identified marital problems were more optimistic about the future of their marriage and more likely to insist that they did not really wish to divorce.
Dr Hawkins said the findings suggested that thoughts of divorce could be a spur to positive change and improvements in a relationship.
“Thoughts about divorce can be a healthy wake-up call to work on a marriage. According to our research, most people’s thoughts about divorce are more ‘soft’ than ‘serious’ and can help spur needed actions.”
I don’t think it says much positive about marriage having read the article – so many were staying in the marriage to avoid the massive disruption, or because financially they weren’t confident that they could survive and so were stuck, or because they didn’t have any decent options outside marriage either, or just general anxiety and inertia.
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Everybody to their own but that just doesn’t sound great to me…