I Want a Divorce
The two major reasons all divorces happen. (Ying and Yang Part 1)
The divorce rate is getting less, now hovering around 40% in America. However, the marriage rate is also decreasing, meaning younger generations of people are slower to get married or not getting married at all.
And, I mean, can you blame them? Conventional wisdom seems to always state that the divorce rate is 50%. Why would anyone get married if they knew that they only had a 50% chance of getting divorced?
In some cases, a 50/50 shot is fantastic odds. The dealer at the casino won’t even give you those odds because he knows if he did the casino would go bankrupt. At the casino, if you bet with a small hand, the stakes are low. You might lose some money you were planning on losing anyway or win a bunch more if something statistically improbably happens.
In marriage, if you win, you have a friend and lover with you until you die. You have someone to care for you when you’re sick. You have someone to travel with. You have someone to support you when you take a risk. And you have someone to build a family with.
Unfortunately, these types of happy marriages usually only happen 30% of the time. The other 70% of marriages are stable but mediocre. With couples happier than divorcees but not thriving. Then, about half the time, people get divorced. Which is this soul sucking, money depleting, heinous crime of the heart that tears families apart and destroys the lives of not only the people in the marriage but also of the lives of the people around them.
That means the odds are that 15% of the time you’ll wind up quite happy, 35% of the time you’ll wind up happy enough to say you don’t hate your life, and 50% of the time your life is going to be torn apart, your heart is going to get ripped out, and your money is going to be lit on fire.
What the heck kind of proposition is that?
You might respond with something trite like “love works in mysterious ways.” When things are about love, we lose perspective on rationality. So, let me give you an example not directly tied to love so that we can examine a similarly bad proposition.
Let’s say I’m a used car salesman. One day, you walked into my dealership, and I tried to sell you a used truck. You tell me if you think my sales pitch would work on you:
“Hey there! I’m glad you stopped in today. You’re looking for a truck? Perfect! I think I have just the thing for you. We have this beautiful, lightly used CarFactory Truckmaster 1500 that just got traded in from their old owner. Come over here and check it out. *Slaps hood of truck* The old owner told us that the truck was a good truck, just not the truck for them. You see, it wasn’t the truck’s fault that it got traded in. It’s just that the owner’s friends and mechanic saw things in the truck that the owner couldn’t see and convinced him to trade it in. Anyway, you don’t care about all of that. I know you’re going to like this truck. Actually, that’s not true. I’m about 50% sure you’re going to like this truck. You see, CarFactory trucks are notorious for being unreliable. When they don’t work, they really don’t work. Blown engines. Transmission issues. Leaky oil lines. The works. Just miserable. Some people have even died owning these Truckmasters due to faulty brake calipers. The other half of the time, these trucks are fairly stable. You’ll have minor annoyances with them. But they’ll be good enough so that you won’t want to risk losing something decent for something far worse. I’m sure your friends have told you their own horror stories with their trucks, haha! But, if you’re really lucky, I’ve seen a small percentage of Truckmaster owners say they simply can’t live without them. They’ve even said their truck completes them. I can’t verify their claims for myself, seeing as my own Truckmaster is just an average one, but they say it’s true! So, what do you say, want to take it for a test drive?”
That’s probably one of the worst sales pitches you’ve ever heard. But that is literally the outlook you have for marriage. However, in the real world, trucks aren’t just randomly unreliable 50% of the time. They either came out of the factory with a defect or they weren’t maintained well.
And marriages are the exact same way.
The Reasons for Divorce
I speak to a lot of people about the things you’re not supposed to ask about. It’s one of my quirks. I know who the people around me voted for president. I know the age of every woman I spend any significant time with. I even know how much they weigh.
And if they are divorced, I know why.
There are too many taboos around topics we find sensitive. I was told from a young age not to talk about money, religion, or politics. But barring people from having these conversations creates knowledge silos. Those that learn something, whether it is a clever strategy on how to invest their money, an important moral framework from their religious text, or a flaw in a governmental policy that should be corrected, decide they can’t discuss it with others because it is too “personal” to share.
Divorce is one of those taboo topics. Sure, people vent to their close friends about how much they hated their ex. But they don’t tell their friends the deeper causes of their divorce. And their friends don’t ask the probing questions that might create some insight into what actually happened for fear that the quest for knowledge will be taken as offensive.
I don’t care about these formalities or being seen as offensive. I’ve asked divorced people a ton of questions that would make an etiquette coach squirm. Some examples of those uncomfortable questions are:
Why did you get a divorce?
How long had it been since you last had sex with your partner before getting the divorce?
Why did you get married to that person in the first place?
When you got married originally, did it feel like the right decision?
How did you handle your finances when you were married?
Through asking these deep, probing, and awkward questions, I’ve found the two core reasons for why people get divorced. And the two fundamental reasons for divorce are: a Selection Issue or a Communication Issue.
Now, you might be thinking there are more reasons. But first, let me try to convince you otherwise. Because I believe that these two fundamental reasons are the bedrock upon which all other reasons for divorce are built. Explore these examples below. These are common marriage complaints that I’ve heard from others that led to their divorce.
“I loved Sharon when we got married but she just became crazy after having kids.”
“Steve was so ambitious in college but once we got married, he couldn’t get off the couch.”
“I thought I was enough for Hector, but he just wouldn’t stop cheating on me.”
Let’s be real, each of these complaints have a big picture reality behind them. Like, seriously, we all knew Sharon was crazy when you met her. But she had enormous cans. So, you let it go when she “accidentally” lit your cat on fire. Steve was lazy in college when you fell in love with him. But you didn’t care to notice because you were too busy tanning yourself on the beach at his parents’ home on Martha’s Vineyard and never realized that all he ever did was golf and drink with his buddies. And Hector would literally slap the butt of random girls that he would walk past while holding your hand but you thought he would “grow out of it.”
My argument is that these issues that “caused the divorce” were ever present. These were issues of Selection. And when you dig deeper into why someone got married to their ex in the first place, often you will realize that sometimes there was some external pressure that caused this person to marry the one they are complaining about. And that, from the beginning, these two individuals had traits that were not compatible with one another.
These external pressures can minimize the faults these two people see in one another. Maybe they were getting older and they didn’t want to be the only one of their friend groups to not be married. Maybe their parents convinced them that this was the right person, and they would be stupid to let them go. Maybe the person they married was manipulative and persistent and broke them down to the point of just saying yes.
Other times, there was something special about this person that made them overlook the things that clearly weren’t going to work in perpetuity. A common Special Blinding Quality (SBQ) is amazing sex or some sexual appeal that they think they would be lost without. Another SBQ is that the person makes a lot of money or person’s family has a lot of money. Another might be that the person seemed like they would be a good future parent and was “good enough” to marry (a real reason I’ve heard.)
If you don’t believe me that the types of issues I mentioned above, and the similar ones that you have heard in the past (or lived through yourself personally) are Selection Issues, it’s important to ask if the issues that ended the relationship were there at the beginning. If the answer is yes, there were signs of the issue beforehand, then it is certainly a Selection Issue.
The second reason for divorce, The Communication Issue, is more complex and can often just be a Selection Issue disguised as a Communication Issue. Below, I’m going to give you common Communication Issues and their potential Selection Issue counterpart:
“We went broke because he couldn’t stop spending money and getting us into debt!”
More likely: You never established clear guidelines for a budget that applied to the two of you and then kept reinforcing it. (Selection Issue: He was a massive spender before you got married and you chose to ignore it.)
“She just wouldn’t have sex with me, so I gave up.”
More likely: You never asked her about the type of sex she likes to have, made it all about yourself, and she got bored. (Selection Issue: The sex was always mediocre due to sexual incompatibility, and you thought it would get better with time.)
“We had two completely different styles of parenting, and I couldn’t take being undermined anymore.”
More likely: you never discussed how you would parent your children and come up with a strategy together. Then, when you noticed a divide, you wallowed in it instead of bringing it up to your husband/wife. (Selection Issue: There were clear signs that they were going to parent in a way that was antithetical to your value system and you hoped they would “change” after having kids.)
When you ask people who have successful marriages why they are still together, they usually have short, simple phrases for their success. Or literally just one word. One of them is usually “respect.” Another, which is most cited in my experience, is “communication.” People have respect for their partner because they chose to marry a person they admire. People communicate well in a relationship because they worked hard at creating an environment where communication was allowed and encouraged.
Yet, divorcees will quote a million little complaints about their ex instead of just saying the truth, which is “we didn’t communicate well enough,” or “I chose the wrong person.” Admitting these distillations of their complaints means they must also admit one reality they cannot face, which is that they were wrong. They either chose the wrong person, or they didn’t facilitate a happy relationship through communicating their issues.
Communication is actually simpler than people think. People hire marriage counselors (which I don’t condemn, and think can be great) so that they can sit next to their partner and literally just talk to them about the things that are bothering them. But that’s all it is. When something bothers you or you think you and your partner aren’t aligned, say something. Don’t table it for the right moment. Don’t wait until it becomes an actual issue. Talk right now.
My wife and I just had an argument about which preschool we are going to send our kids to. We don’t have any kids yet and are a couple of years away from even trying. But I sensed that there was a difference of opinion on a particular issue, and I decided to get it figured out right there. Now, that might sound exhausting to you, and if it does, good luck in your relationship. Because I’m pretty confident that effort is a requirement of having a happy marriage.
In summation: communication is easy to understand but hard to execute. However, choosing the right person is incredibly hard to understand and then even harder to execute.
So, how do you do it?
Part 2 of Ying and Yang is about how to find the perfect person to marry. It will come out soon ((or, already has if you’re reading this in the year 2054) or, hasn’t, if I died before next Sunday)).
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