Pursuing Happiness - Blankenhorn - Fall 99

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from: Smart Marriages


Pursuing Happiness
David Blankenhorn

In a divorce-friendly society, unhappily married people are more likely to
divorce. That much is obvious. But what is obvious apparently captures 
only
part of the truth, and therein hangs a modest but revealing tale.

Eight years ago, in a paper for our Council on Families and also in the
Journal of Marriage and the Family, Norval Glenn of the University of 
Texas
theorized that a decline in the ideal of marital permanence had probably 
led
to an increase of marital unhappiness, therefore at least partly 
explaining
the rise in divorce. He frankly admitted that he could not (yet) prove the
point. It was only a theory. But it nevertheless struck many of us at the
time as a remarkable insight. For Glenn was warning us: In a culture that 
is
increasingly accepting of divorce, not only are unhappy marriages more
likely to end in divorce, but more and more marriages are likely to become
unhappy. Now, there's a critique - a potentially devastating challenge to
the core rationale and inner logic of the divorce culture.

A number of scholars begged to differ with Glenn. For example, here is
Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University arguing against the Glenn
hypothesis as it was developed by Richard Gill in The Public Interest: 
"The
claim here is that in a high-divorce-rate society spouses feel freer to
argue because they know divorce is an option if they can't resolve their
differences. The opposite position could, of course, be argued: that in a
high-divorce-rate society there is less conflict in marriages because
couples that can't get along divorce." Yet Cherlin conceded that the whole
question remained "open" since there was no "hard evidence" on either 
side.

Now there is hard evidence. Earlier this year in the Journal of Family
Issues, Paul R. Amato and Stacy J. Rogers of the University of Nebraska
presented their analysis of the responses of 2,033 married persons who 
were
interviewed by phone in 1980, 1983, and 1988 about their marriages and 
about
their attitudes toward marriage and divorce. Using statistical methods 
that
I won't even pretend to understand ("structural equation models"), Amato 
and
Rogers find little evidence to support the hypothesis that "changes in
marital quality affect people's attitudes toward divorce." However, they 
do
conclude that "shifts in prodivorce attitudes had a significant impact on
marital happiness." Specifically, "the belief that an unrewarding marriage
should be jettisoned may lead some people to invest less time in their
marriages and make fewer attempts to resolve marital disagreements."
Therefore: "Ironically, by adopting attitudes that provide greater freedom
to leave unsatisfying marriages, people may be increasing the likelihood
that their marriages will become unsatisfying in the long run." This 
study,
the authors report, "is the first to provide empirical support for this
idea."

The remarkable intellectual optimism that accompanied the divorce 
revolution
of the 1970s was largely anchored, as Cherlin suggests, in the hope that
more acceptance of divorce would make marriages happier by encouraging
unhappy spouses to dissolve their unions. But now we have "hard evidence"
that, on the contrary, the divorce culture feeds on itself, creating a
one-way downward spiral of marital dissatisfaction and failure. More
acceptance of divorce generate more unhappy marriages, which in turn
generates more divorce. Norval Glenn was right.

Sources: Norval D. Glenn, "Values, Attitudes, and the State of American
Marriage," Working Paper No. 7 (New York: Institute for American Values,
1991), later published in David Popenoe, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and David
Blankenhorn (eds.), Promises To Keep: Decline and Renewal of Marriage in
America (Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield, 1996), 15-33; and Glenn, "The
Recent Trend in Marital Success in the United States," Journal of Marriage
and the Family 53 (May 1991): 261-270. Andrew J. Cherlin, "Nostalgia as
family policy," The Public Interest (Winter 1993): 77-84. Paul R. Amato 
and
Stacy J. Rogers, "Do Attitudes Toward Divorce Affect Marital Quality?",
Journal of Family Issues 20, no. 1 (January 1999): 69-86.

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