Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: Sometimes, I hear from wives who are at their wit’s end.  They aren’t happy in their marriage and this is affecting other areas of their lives.  They worry that their unhappiness is affecting their children, their job, their friendships, and their own sense of well being. 

And many don’t know how much longer they can take being so unhappy.  Many hoped and thought that their marriage would last forever and they do not believe in divorce.  But, they can’t deny that they no longer want to live this way.  I often hear comments like:

“Would I be happier divorced?”

“Would I be more content as a single person?”

“I’m starting to think being a divorced single mother would be easier and more healthy for me and my kids than being a miserable married woman. 

I’m starting to think I’d be happier and better off divorced.”

Of course, I can not make this call for anyone.  This is a decision that every one has to weigh and make for themselves.  However, I can tell you what clinical studies tell us about whether people are happier when they get a divorce.  I will go over these statistics in the following article.

The study I’m referencing came from scholars out of the University of Chicago.  They followed unhappy couples for five years and then checked back and compared happiness levels for those who went ahead and got a divorce and those that didn’t.

If you had to guess the findings were, what would you assume?  From the emails that I get, I think most people would assume that the individuals who responded to an unhappy marriage with a divorce ended up being happier because they were supposefly able to rid themselves or all of the drama and the conflict from their life. 

Many actually hope that once they are divorced, they will turn around and find someone else and eventually be happily married again (but this time to someone else.)  You know what? The statistics actually do not back this up.

In this aforementioned study, many of the divorced people in the study were still pretty unhappy.  And, this was true for the people who divorced and even those who got remarried.   Those who went ahead and ended their marriages and (even those who found another spouse) didn’t report being any happier and in fact, some even reported being equally as or more unhappy.

Here’s another interesting statistic from that same study.  Two of of three of the unhappy marriages that were “saved” actually described themselves as happy five years later.  So what does this tell us?  Well it’s probably not the best idea to make assumptions.  But it looks to me like it’s certainly possible that the majority of people who are able and willing to “stick it out” and work through their issues fared better than those who thought that changing their marital status (by itself) was going to miraculously make them happy.

If Divorce Doesn’t Make You Happy, What Does?:  As I said, we don’t know that much about the couples in the study.  However, the study did mention that many of the couples who chose to save their marriage did so by waiting it out.  Basically, they were too stubborn to give in and get a divorce and were determined to save their marriage at all costs.  And guess what?  Many of them were actually more happy after 5 years.

Why? Well, we can’t say for sure.  But from my own experience and from the correspondence that I get, I actually have the theory that those who commit to saving their marriages are much more willing to work on all of the things that might be affecting their marriage or making them unhappy.  They are being proactive.  Rather than believing that some external factor is going to magically make them happy, they dive in and take responsibility for this themselves.

I have corresponded with people who were sure that their spouse or their marriage is the problem.  They suspected (and were virtuously all but certain) that if they can just shed the “dead weight” or the “downer” that is their spouse, then a huge weight will be removed from their shoulders and they will suddenly have much more contentment as a single person.

But I have to tell you that this certainly does not always happen.  Because very often, they do not look at what contributed to their divorce.  They don’t examine their own tendencies and behaviors.  So they continue to repeat those same things that damaged their marriage in the first place and these same things continue to cause them to be unhappy – and this is true whether they are divorced or single.

As I said, I truly can’t help you decide if you would  be better off single or divorced.  You must make that choice and you will often need to weigh many factors.  But I can tell you that statistics show that getting divorced doesn’t necessarily make people happier.  But staying married sometimes can, especially if you commit to figuring out what is going wrong and fixing that.

I very strongly feel that it often isn’t your spouse or even your marriage that is flawed.  It is your perceptions about, reactions towards, and behaviors in relationship to those things. 

Change your outlook, change your behaviors, examine your role, and often you will come up with startling changes and improvements and this is more likely to make you happier (at least in my opinion) than getting rid of the symptom rather than the core problem.

Honestly, I’m so glad now that I didn’t get a divorce.  Years ago, I was bitterly unhappy.  I think my husband might have thought he would be happier without me at that time.  But than goodness I fought for my marriage.  Because I am so much happier now than I was then.  It was work, but it was so worth it.  Our marriage is fufilling to both of us in a way that it wasn’t before.  You read my story at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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