While divorce is nothing new in this country, when I read about long-term marriages coming to an end, ala the Gore’s, the Schwarzenegger’s, and the Edward’s, I start to wonder if it is even possible to stay married forever anymore. I hear a lot about the “old days’, but I have a lot of grandparents due to multiple re-marriages. My great-grandparents remained together, but one spouse died long before the other. So maybe those that stay married forever over a real long time period are the anomalies. Maybe now that we live longer and more women are able to support themselves the chance of life-long marriages occurring decreases.
Long ago a woman could not divorce her husband without going into poverty and suffering social stigma. It was not until the 1970’s that marriages ended in divorce more often than in death, and the rate of divorce was half of what it is now. But today’s world is different. Couples are being pulled in all different directions; some couples are married but living separate lives. Seeing marriages blowing up in the news made me wonder about the impact on mental health.
Back in 2009, a report was released from the University of Otago about the impact of marriage and divorce on mental health. The report was based on international data with a very large sample size. The results? Marriages ending, whether through death, separation, or divorce, increased the risk of a variety of mental health disorders. That might seem like a no-brainer, but there were some interesting results in this study that contradicted earlier ones. This study found that both women and men received a positive mental health benefit from marriage, not just men as previously reported. They found some differences in specific disorders, but the overall positive impact of marriage on mental health was very strong.
The findings of this study and others have shown over the long run that married people are less depressed and live longer than unmarried people, and that people with the highest rates of mental disorders are the divorced and separated. One has to wonder why anyone would ever divorce when it clearly is beneficial to be married.
The answer, of course, is unhappy marriages. One synthesis of the research indicated that unhappy marriages can have many health and mental health related consequences, including heart disease and psychosis. So what can we do to protect ourselves and our marriages?
There are a lot of advice columns and blogs out there on how to have a happy marriage. Families.com has a whole section on marriage. Marriage counselors typically focus on how to listen and talk to each other. But one expert breaks it down in simple terms: be nice. Seem too easy? It really comes down to positive reinforcement, a basic behavioral technique used to change behavior. The more you can do nice things for your partner, the more likely you will have nice things done for you. While pretty basic, it is far from easy since you need a 5 to 1 ratio of positive to negative to keep things up. That should make you stop and think if the negative is worth all of the positive reinforcement you will need to do to make up for it. Ask yourself, “Is it really that bad that he left his socks on the floor?”