Was Your Marriage Over Before It Began?

Is divorce a dramatic reveal or a predictable path?

It is often no secret to friends and loved ones when a marriage is going through a rough spot or two. And, according to a 2016 study divorce is often fairly predictable:

More often than not, the problems that lead to the end of the marriage were apparent—at least from the wive's perspective—from the very beginning.

Does a woman's instinct include predicting her own divorce?

Source: Habib Hosseini / Pexels

This study by Williamson, Bradbury, Nguyen, and Karney sampled newlywed couples in their first marriage who lived in low-income neighborhoods. They further selected couples where both partners were of the same ethnicity.

Although 431 couples participated in all five interviews conducted over five years, remember that the question posed here only applies to those couples who were divorced or separated by the end of those five years.

Under these parameters, only 40 people (23 women and 17 men) qualified as subjects for the study based on the fact that (a) they were no longer married and (b) one or both partners responded to the survey.

Participants were given a list of 28 different problems and asked throughout the study to rate how much of an issue each problem posed in their marriage. Problem topics included communication, willingness to work on the relationship, plans for the future, and quality of time spent together.

The participants who ended up divorced or separated were then asked to rate to what extent each of these 28 problems had contributed to the end of their marriage: not at all, a little bit, or a lot.

Why did they divorce?

Women most commonly stated having divorced because of poor communication (70 percent) and a lack of willingness to work on the relationship (70 percent). Women also cited trust issues (61 percent), jealousy/infidelity (56 percent), and mood/temper (56 percent).

Men most commonly reported divorce had been due to their wife's mood/temper (65 percent), communication (59 percent), trust (53 percent), and money management (41 percent).

Can we predict divorce?

Sorta. Kinda.

Amongst the husbands who participated in this study, those who divorced rated "plans for the future" as three times more difficult at the beginning of their marriage than those who said that plans for the future did not contribute to their divorce.

In other words, for the men in this study, the problem of "plans for the future" was a seed that had been planted since day one, and the issue only continued to grow and to have a negative effect on the marriage.

For the women, "management of money" had the equivalent negative effect on their marriage. Wives who reported that management of money contributed to their divorce had rated money management as twice as difficult at the beginning of the marriage compared to those who said that money management had not contributed to their divorce.

Can women predict divorce better than men?

Overall, men were able to identify that "plans for the future" was problematic at the beginning of their marriage and reported after the marriage ended that plans for the future had in some way contributed to the marriage ending.

The women in this study did a significantly better job than the men in that they were able to identify nine problems that contributed to the divorce: money management, quality time spent together, communication style, problem-solving skills, unrealistic expectations, plans for the future, personality characteristics of one or both parties, trust, and willingness to work on the relationship.

Were these problems there from the beginning or did they suddenly appear?

Well, it depends on who you ask.

Women were able to identify 7 of the 13 problems that they would later identify as contributing factors to their divorce. Men, however, only identified one of these 13 factors.

It seems that women are more sensitive to relationship issues such as communication, infidelity, and trust. This sensitivity allows them to earlier identify problems that exist in the marriage and to notice these problems getting worse over time.

This supports the idea of the "emergent distress model" of marriage, which states that new problems will arise and potentially get worse during the course of a relationship.

The "enduring dynamics model" on the other hand, states that the qualities and interactions that may eventually end a marriage were present from the start of the marriage itself.

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In other words, people don't change all that much.

And this makes it difficult to stop repeating the same unhealthy patterns of behavior.