Eye-opening new study on the harms of divorce

[Anonymous]

I mostly agree that it’s a wash.

No one (as far as I can tell) disputes that kids whose parents are in a loving, functional, supportive, safe, and respectful marriages are better off than kids where something is fundamentally wrong in the marriage. Things can be dangerously wrong in a marriage, or wrong in ways that are emotionally unsafe, and in about a million other ways too (obligatory Tolstoy quote about happy/unhappy families here).

To actually measure the impact of divorce — as opposed to the impact of having something so wrong in the marriage and by extension the family dynamic that divorce is on the table— you’d first need a way to compare *only* those where the likelihood of divorce is essentially a tossup. So filter out functional and also filter out extreme dysfunction. Otherwise you are comparing function to dysfunction, which is a useless statistic (because again, we all agree that function > dysfunction). You would also need a way to adjust for financial circumstances, as we probably also agree that not having financial strain > financial strain. To my knowledge, these studies haven’t been done, nor has anyone suggested how these might be done.

I don’t see anyone here saying “divorce is always good.” I do see people saying “divorce is (at least almost) always bad.” The anecdata is valuable insofar as it presents a counter to these kinds of binary, blanket-statements.