As a psychologist who has been studying the American family for most of my professional life, I have observed many changes in relationships between men and women and in society's attitudes about marriage and children. In 1980 I founded a large research and clinical center in the San Francisco Bay Area, where my colleagues and I have seen thousands of men, women, and children from families going through first or second divorces. Presently I am conducting a twenty-five-year follow-up of sixty couples who underwent divorce in 1971, with an emphasis on the lives of their 131 children, who are now grown and involved in their own marriages and divorces.
These young men and women, whom I have been interviewing at regular intervals as part of the longest study ever done on divorce, provide unique insights into its long-term effects on the American family. I have seen a great many children who, ten and fifteen years after their parents' divorce, are still struggling with unhappiness. On the threshold of adulthood, they are still in the shadow of that event. I am poignantly aware of how unfamiliar these children are with the kinds of relationships that exist in a happy family. Many tell me that they have never seen a good marriage.
I'm also concerned about the many men and women who remain lonely and sad years after a divorce. I'm doubly worried about the high divorce rate in second marriages with children, which compounds the suffering for everyone. I am sometimes criticized for being overly pessimistic about the long-term effects of divorce, but my observations are drawn from the real world. Only if you see the children and parents of divorce day in and day out can you understand what the statistics mean in human terms.
I want to make it clear that I am not against divorce. I am deeply aware of how wretched a bad marriage can be and of the need for the remedy of divorce. But divorce by itself does not improve the institution of marriage. Some people learn from sad experience to choose more carefully the second time around. Others do not. Many never get a true second chance.
In the past twenty years, marriage in America has undergone a profound, irrevocable transformation, driven by changes in women's roles and the heightened expectations of both men and women. Without realizing it, we have crossed a marital Rubicon. For the first time in our history, the decision to stay married is purely voluntary. Anyone can choose to leave at any time—and everyone knows it, including the children. There used to be only two legal routes out of marriage —adultery and abandonment. Today one partner simply has to say,
for whatever reason, I want out." Divorce is as simple as a trip to the nearest courthouse.
Each year two million adults and a million children in this country are newly affected by divorce. One in two American marriages ends in divorce, and one in three children can expect to experience their parents' divorce. This situation has powerful ripple effects that touch us all. The sense that relationships are unstable affects the family next door, the people down the block, the other children in the classroom. Feelings of intense anxiety about marriage permeate the consciousness of all young men and women on the threshold of adulthood. At every wedding the guests wonder, privately, will this marriage last? The bride and groom themselves may question why they should marry, since it's likely to break up.
To understand how our social fabric has been transformed, think of marriage as an institution acted upon by centripetal forces pulling inward and centrifugal forces pulling outward. In times past the centripetal forces—law, tradition, religion, parental influence—exceeded those that could pull a marriage apart, such as infidelity, abuse, financial disaster, failed expectations, or the lure of the frontier. Nowadays the balance has changed. The weakened centripetal forces no longer exceed those that tug marriages apart.
In today's marriages, in which people work long hours, travel extensively, and juggle careers with family, more forces tug at the relationship than ever before. Modern marriages are battered by the demands of her workplace as well as his, by changing community values, by anxiety about making ends meet each month, by geographical moves, by unemployment and recession, by the vicissitudes of child care, and by a host of other issues.
