Why couples divorce
The stats are damning: Four of every 10 happy couples turn into bitter adversaries. What leads from the altar of happiness to the solitude of separation? We explore 10 common marriage- killers and how to avoid them.
Melanie Rockwell was 19 when she donned the white dress and walked down the aisle, revelling in the day she’d been planning for since she was a little girl. Even though there was some doubt in her mind that the man standing beside her at the altar really was her soulmate, she vowed to stick with him for better or worse, in sickness and in health, till death do them part.
Seventeen years later — some good, most bad — her marriage was over.
Rockwell is not alone. If statistics are anything to go by, four out of every 10 couples who marry in Canada today will be separated not by death but by that other dreaded d- word: divorce.
In an effort to help those tying the knot in the coming months avoid such a fate, The Sun embarked upon a highly unscientific study of what kills marriages. We spoke to academics and counsellors, and men and women who have themselves been through a divorce.
Infidelity didn’t figure highly in our top- 10 list of marriage killers. Neither did financial differences.
While every marriage, and every divorce, is unique, there is some consensus about the biggest marriage killers out there. Our research suggests one of the biggest may in fact be the people sitting in the pews when the wedding march strikes up.
1. In- laws and outlaws
Interference in the relationship by extended family members was the most frequently occurring theme in our discussions with divorcees on what breaks up marriages.
According to Vancouver- based relationship counsellor John Boland, this is not simply a case of shifting the blame for the demise of the marriage onto someone else’s shoulders.
“It’s huge,” he said. “I think extended families can make it very difficult to stay happily married together.”
For a marriage to work, Boland said, the loyalty has to be to the couplehood and not to the extended family.
“But that’s really hard for a lot of people, especially when mother- inlaws or father- in- laws or other family members are undermining the marital relationship.”
The unsolicited involvement of friends and family was a factor in the divorce of Surrey- based rodeo announcer and building contractor Rod Macbeth. Macbeth’s professions took him out of town for days at a time and his ex- wife’s parents didn’t approve of it, he said. This put a strain on their relationship.
“Her parents didn’t agree with what I did, but they’re still great people,” he said. “People tend to listen to what other people think. I like to think I’m my own person and can make my own way, but not everybody’s like that.”
The over- involvement of extended family is also something Rockwell said she has seen put a heavy strain on the marriages of her friends.
“It’s manipulative, it’s premeditated and it’s causing all kinds of ripples because if you love somebody and you care about them, you don’t like to see them hurt. Family ... kind of feel like they have that right to kind of walk all over you, and your spouse is standing there like ‘ Are you kidding me with this?’ ”
2. Under pressure
Pressure from family, or society in general, can also influence the decision to tie the knot in the first place — leading some to get married not because they’re in love, but because it was what was expected of them.
Marrying the wrong person out of a sense of expectation or obligation was something all members of our informal focus group identified as a contributing, but not decisive, factor in their breakups.
Boland, however, said this may be something of a red herring.
“There is no magical right person,” Boland said. “There’s always work to do in any relationship, whether you get married at 18 or at 45, there’s always ways of growing and maturing together and working through your issues. Or not.”
Macbeth held off getting married until he was in his 40s, eventually taking the plunge when he met someone whose company he enjoyed. “It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” he said.
Macbeth emphasized that the decision was his own, but says he was to some extent influenced by what his family had done in the past.
“I was looking at what my grandparents and my parents did,” he said. “I felt like that was the way things were supposed to be and now I have come to realize that I really don’t think marriage is necessary.”
The expectations of family and community in small- town England weighed heavily on Derek Spragg when he married in 1962 at age 25.
“When I got married, it was sort of the ‘ done’ thing to do. You didn’t ... question it,” said Spragg. “Your role in life was to find yourself a girl and get married, have babies.”
In those days, Spragg said, it really was till death do you part. Divorce was not on the radar — he was brought up to believe that you worked at marriage until you solved the problem.
Cultural and familial expectations may also have been indirectly responsible for the demise of Spragg’s marriage.
The couple lived with Spragg’s parents initially, something “nobody should do,” he cautioned. He found himself in the middle of conflicts between his mother and his wife, but the living arrangement was necessary to save money to leave the country.
“I’d reached an age where I just had to get away from other people’s expectations,” he explained.
Twenty years later, in the 1980s, Rockwell was coping with many of the same expectations.
“There wasn’t really any question in my family that I was going to get married, it was just a matter of who,” she said. “It was expected, it was just a given. It wasn’t really even discussed.”
Rockwell, now 48, said she married her husband at 19 because “I felt that’s what I was supposed to be doing.”
In hindsight, she said, “I never would have married the man I married, to be perfectly honest, and I knew that at the time. I knew it on the day of the wedding.”
3. Failure to grow
Rockwell does not, however, blame the demise of her marriage on a vague sense of familial expectation. She chalks it up to something much more basic: a lack of intimacy.
“There wasn’t this connection that will keep you through the years, because we change,” she said.
Women, in particular, change immensely throughout their 20s, Rockwell said, and in ways that are difficult to predict. Sometimes that change means people grow apart.
In Love in the Present Tense, relationship counsellors Morrie and Arleah Shechtman argue that one of the most common marriage killers is the failure of one or both partners to grow as a person. “If your partner doesn’t grow, then he becomes boring to you. If you don’t grow, then you become boring to yourself.”
The Shechtmans emphasize it is essential for couples to share common core values. One of the most important of these, they say, is a mutual commitment to personal growth.
4. Lack of connection
Constant bickering is one thing that can chip away at the intimacy at the heart of a healthy marriage, Boland said.
“If you’re having a lot of conflict about anything, whether it’s who cleans the bathroom or who takes care of the kids, that might not be the reason why people are saying they’re divorcing, but it kind of undermines the connection, the glue that keeps people together.”
This is why, for a marriage to be successful, couples need some kind of common interest — a fun activity both enjoy doing — to keep them connected on a level that transcends the kids, the bills and the household, Rockwell observed.
“If you’re not both interested in some sort of similar push, you’re going to drift, it’s going to fade, and nothing will hold you together,” she said.
As important as having some common interests is, however, partners should not try to mould the other person to themselves, expecting them to have all the same interests, said Boland. Partners can be quite different and still have a secure and long relationship.
Rockwell expressed the same sentiment another way: “Don’t make your boyfriend or your husband into your girlfriend. Biggest mistake women make.”
Pressuring one’s partner to do things he or she is not interested in doing is a surefire way to put strain on a relationship, Rockwell said.
5. Child- centric relationships
Another common mistake is thinking a child will be the glue that keeps a relationship together.
Boland puts what he calls a “childcentred family” at the top of his list of “ways to mess up.”
Parents allow their own relationship to become secondary, sacrificing marital satisfaction in a misguided attempt to be there for their kids, Boland said. In doing so, they not only shortchange themselves, but also their children.
“You can’t put marriage and intimacy on hold until your kid is 18,” Boland says. “What you want to model for your children is a healthy momanddad connection.”
Rockwell, who has a son with her exhusband, emphasized that children sense when a parent is suffering and can tell when the other parent is the cause.
“Children won’t hold you together and staying together for the children is not always the best thing. Kids are a lot smarter than people give them credit for and they’re sponges. They’ll pick it up.”
6. Wandering eyes
Another common cause of marital strife Boland comes across in his therapy work is “when everybody else starts to look better.”
“It’s not really a fair contest” when a person who intimately knows their partner’s flaws starts fantasizing that another man or woman would be the really perfect partner, said Boland. “I see it all the time.”
7. Avoiding conflict
Many couples incorrectly assume that if they’re not in conflict, they must be okay, Boland said.
“But avoiding conflict can easily lead to disconnection,” Boland said. “If there’s tension, it’s best to bring it up — to raise what’s bugging you in as kind a way as possible.”
8. The need to be right
But any relationship will have a much better chance if a couple doesn’t succumb to another marriage destroyer identified by Boland: The need to be right.
It’s not useful during times of tension to see your partner as either a “jerk,” “bitch” or “idiot.” Instead, Boland said, it’s crucial to shift to curiosity, to wondering why an apparently trivial issue has become so huge for your partner.
The key to a good lifelong relationship is to develop a genuine interest in one’s partner, he added.
9. Lack of honesty
Our informal poll of Vancouverites with first- hand experience turned up a few other potential marriage breakers.
For rodeo announcer Macbeth, it was a lack of honesty that ended his marriage; something from his past that he hadn’t been completely open about with his wife.
“Once everything came out, it was a problem,” he said. “You have to be totally honest no matter what you get into.”
10. Location, location, location
As a man in his mid- 20s desperate to escape the “boring” small- town life he saw his friends falling into, Spragg moved from England with his pregnant wife — a city girl from Manchester — to Port Alice, a logging community on the northern tip of Vancouver Island, in the late ’ 60s.
His wife was not happy about the move.
“That gave her a lot of stress. It gave me a lot of adventure, which was what I was looking for.”
The marriage lasted 16 years, but it never really recovered from that initial blow.
The physical space where a couple resides — whether that’s the city, the town or even the apartment they live in — can affect the success of the relationship, Spragg said, arguing that this is of particular concern in cities such as Vancouver where high housing prices sometimes result in couples living in cramped conditions.
A one- bedroom apartment or condo is too small for couples to have the space to pursue their own interests, he said.
Having a workshop to putter about in might have gone a long way to relieving some of the tension in his marriage, he said.
Macbeth said he learned to be more supportive and affectionate as a result of his marriage. “You have to sit down, listen, and say, ‘ Yeah, it’s okay, I’m here for you.’ You have to be ... supportive and I wasn’t totally supportive in some things.”
Asked whether he would ever get married again, Macbeth was indifferent. “If it happens, it happens, but if it doesn’t, I don’t care. I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”
Spragg said he realizes now how hard the move to Canada must have been for his wife.
“In hindsight, as an older man, they were problems that I should have understood. But I didn’t ... as a younger man and there was a lot of tension in the marriage,” he said. “I was certainly naive.”
Given the chance to do it all over again, Spragg said he would never have married.
Spragg also noted that the sense of inevitability around getting married, so prevalent when he was a young man, no longer exists and young people today don’t feel the same pressure to tie the knot. This, he says, is a good thing.
It’s slightly different for women, some of whom still plan for their weddings from the time they are little girls and are subject to the ticking of the biological clock, Rockwell said.
However, there is a big difference between the university students Rockwell teaches today and her female classmates in the 1980s.
Well over half the latter group was only in school to become a doctor’s wife, Rockwell said, while her current female students are almost exclusively focused on their careers. They have a deeper sense of self and are clear about who they are as individuals, a quality they will take into any relationship, she said. Or not.
“That Cinderella thing maybe has kind of been washed away a bit.”
For one of Canada’s leading couples therapists, Sue Johnson, formerly of the University of B. C. and now head of Ottawa’s Couple and Family Institute, most couples’ problems boil down to a deceptively simple factor. The loss of that thing called “love.” In her research into the neurobiology of bonding and attachment, Johnson is among those who have concluded, even in this cynical age, that love, indeed, is the answer.
In her book, Hold Me Tight, Johnson writes: “The demise of marriage begins with a growing absence of responsive, intimate interactions.”
And, more importantly, “lasting passion is entirely possible in love.”
But to flourish, it needs attention, Johnson says. It requires knowing yourself, and your partner.