If there’s hope for marriage in Hollywood, maybe things are looking up for the rest of the country. News came last week that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner have reportedly called off their divorce.
Two years after the star couple separated, a source told People magazine that they “are giving things another try.” They love each other, said another source, and they “really, really love their kids, and those kids love their parents.”
For many couples, though, this isn’t enough. Though the divorce rate has decreased since the high point of Baby Boomer splits in the 1980s, it’s still almost 35 percent for couples who married in the ’90s. And frankly, it’s only that low because more and more Americans don’t bother to marry at all. (Cohabiting couples have an even higher rate of splitting up.)
There are surprisingly powerful forces in the modern world that push men and women to conclude that divorce is the best way to resolve differences in a marriage. We’re surrounded by a culture that trivializes marriage and normalizes divorce. Not only is divorce seen as the first step to self-actualization in shows like HBO’s “Divorce” or Bravo’s “Untying the Knot,” many husbands and wives also have the impression that it will be easy to find someone else. All of the dating apps fool people into thinking there’s a pool of people just waiting for them to jump in.
Diane Medved, a clinical psychologist and author of the new book, “Don’t Divorce: Powerful Arguments for Saving and Revitalizing Your Marriage,” warns about what she calls “the divorce industry.”
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of professionals to help make divorce faster and easier. It’s not just lawyers offering their services. There are now self-described divorce planners, as well as financial planners to help you figure out the money after you split. There are life coaches, whose job, Medved explains, “is to be a cheerleader for whatever you say. If you say I’m having trouble, and my marriage is the problem, they say you’re right.”
Even trained psychologists and psychiatrists can often encourage these splits. Their goal is to serve their own client.
Unless they’re marriage counselors, Medved says, they won’t try to get the other side of the story. They see their job as helping a patient to “work through their feelings.” They’ll say people shouldn’t tolerate being treated badly and they’ll cheer on a patient for gaining independence.
But these professionals are often steering their clients in exactly the wrong direction. A recent study from the Marriage Foundation in England found that couples with newborns who were unhappy in their marriage but who stayed together were actually likely to be happy a few years later.
The authors write that of the unhappiest parents — “those scoring 1 or 2 on a 7-point scale — only 7 percent of these said they were still unhappy 10 years later, regardless of whether they stayed together or split up. Two thirds said they were happy or very happy, scoring 6 or 7.”
There have been similar conclusions from previous studies in the United States and Canada. And it’s not surprising. Most divorces happen in “low-conflict” marriages.
Indeed, the level of conflict is so low that children of these couples are completely shocked their parents are getting divorced at all; they thought they lived in happy homes. (These kids are often the ones most harmed by divorce and reluctant to get married later in life because they worry they would not know how to pick a partner to avoid divorce themselves.)
It’s not that there’s never a reason for divorce, of course. It’s just that in low-conflict marriages, the problems are often temporary or situational (we’re not talking about, say, physical abuse). And though it may sound old-fashioned, Medved notes that “time — even without any kind of intervention — can often heal problems in marriages.”
Sometimes it’s a particularly stressful time at work. Or a child is going through a difficult stage.
So why do people run for the exits so quickly? For one thing, they’re often not aware that their unhappiness is probably temporary or that things are likely to turn out better in the end. Ben and Jen might have figured that out. Now it’s time for the rest of us.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.