Love by Numbers by Luisa Dillner

Author:Luisa Dillner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2010-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

IN THE GENES?

My girlfriend and I are thinking of getting married. We’ve been together for five years and I’d like us to get married before we have kids. My parents have been happily married for thirty years. But her parents got divorced when she was twelve and she’s worried this makes it more likely that we’ll get divorced. Does it?

I hate to say this, but your girlfriend’s right. The research is clear that if you have divorced parents, this increases your own chances of getting divorced. Risk factors can often be hard to quantify – but sadly not in this case. A large US study of more than 2,000 people followed up for over twenty years found that the chances of a couple getting divorced increase by nearly 70 per cent if the wife’s parents had split up. If the parents of both the husband and wife divorced, their own risk of doing so increased by 190 per cent. Other studies seem to confirm this.

As you might expect, researchers have tried to figure out why divorce might be, as they say, ‘transmitted across generations’. It’s not just one generation either. There’s a study from Pennsylvania State University of 691 families showing that divorce is more likely in couples whose grandparents got divorced. But these statistics are not the death knell for your marriage prospects. They can give you a forecast of the general but not your own specific risk. On the plus side, forewarned is forearmed.

You can probably guess the theories behind these patterns of divorce. (If not, ask your girlfriend about her parent’s divorce.) The US studies and many others show that it’s how the parents behave to each other that casts the shadow over the marriages of subsequent generations. The six key behaviours that will have messed up someone’s grandparents’, parents’ and their own chances of marital bliss are being jealous, domineering, angry, critical, moody and not talking to their spouse. These behaviours upset their children, who grow up without learning that couples should support each other and resolve issues in an amicable fashion. These studies do take into account how the children are parented: you can be a better parent than you are a spouse (but conflict in relationships doesn’t do much for children). But it seems that children copy how their parents got on with each other, rather than how they were nurtured themselves. The children of parents who fought their way to the divorce courts, grow up, not surprisingly, to be pessimistic about lifelong relationships and fairly enthusiastic about divorce once the honeymoon period is over. They are less likely to trust and commit to relationships. They will not have seen their parents get over the bad times, or handle conflict in constructive ways. The divorce is actually incidental: the research suggests that it’s the damage done beforehand that affects the adult relationships of the children involved.

Even amicable divorces increase the risk of children from these families getting divorced. It’s not clear if children who

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