Causes Of Divorce

There’s No “One Size Fits All”
The first thing to keep in mind is that there’s no one reason why divorce happens. Some ignorant people will try to analyze you and tell you where your relationship went wrong, based on hearsay and old wives’ tales. Most of the time these people are completely wrong, so don’t pay attention to uneducated views that blame your divorce on your upbringing, IQ, or some other blanket cause.

The Difference Between Reasons and Trigger Events
It’s also important to understand the difference between the underlying reasons a marriage breaks up and the trigger event that leads to the final breakdown. Consider a couple who are married for ten years and fight constantly. One day, the husband comes home late from work drunk. The wife decides, after this trigger event, that she has put up with enough and wants a divorce.

In this instance, the husband coming home late is a trigger event. But the underlying cause for the divorce – the grinding of the two spouses’ personalities – has been building up for years. This can help you understand why an apparently trivial event can lead to divorce proceedings – there may be underlying causes, and the trigger event is the “straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

Real Causes of Divorce
Now that you understand there’s not one single cause that leads to divorce, it’s important to highlight the causes that pop up again and again in many cases.

Unfortunately, it’s true that financial difficulties are one major reason for marriages falling apart. If a couple meets when they are both relatively well-off financially, they are able to enjoy each other in peace and harmony. If that financial stability falls apart, however, a whole lot of new stress is introduced to the relationship. The relationship may then be tested to an extreme it has never been put through before, and many marriages don’t survive that test.

Plain incompatibility is another big cause of divorce. Incompatibility can take many forms. For instance, a couple may be incompatible sexually – they simply can’t enjoy sex together. This is a particularly common problem amongst people who wait until marriage to have sex for the first time, only to find they are incompatible with their chosen partner. Incompatibility can also be intellectual or spiritual – differences in intelligence or religious beliefs between couples that simply can’t be put aside.

Abuse is another major cause of divorce. Again, abuse can take many forms. It can be drug or alcohol abuse on the part of one or both spouses, which makes them unable to function properly as part of a marriage unit. On the other hand it may be physical or sexual abuse which causes direct harm to the other spouse.

But not surprisingly, one of the biggest problems that leads to divorce is a lack of communication between spouses. In many scenarios, people are not completely honest with each other about who they are or what they expect before marriage. Some couples get so caught up in the thought of getting married that they idealize the other person in the relationship. This is a recipe for disaster, as in time everyone will show their true colors.

Other Trends Relating to the Causes of Divorce
Another important trend to note is that people who marry while they are teenagers have a higher divorce rate. This is due to the fact that teens typically haven’t fully developed a sense of self and their ideas about what they want in a relationship may change radically within five to ten years.

Here’s another interesting fact that raises questions around some of the common wisdom about marriage: people who live together before they get married have a higher divorce rate than people who don’t. It’s not exactly clear why this is, but it may be due to the fact that living together makes some people feel they “ought” to get married, even if their relationship isn’t working even before the marriage.

Communication is Key
Bear in mind that none of these causes of divorce is a surefire sign your relationship will end badly. Obviously, if you’re being abused by your spouse then the best thing you can do is seek help and remove yourself from the situation immediately. In the vast majority of cases, hoping your spouse will eventually change abusive habits is a complete fantasy.

However, if your marriage is suffering from smaller problems, talking through them is the best way to deal with it. As mentioned above, people often aren’t honest with each other about what they want in a marriage. This is the first step to determining whether your problems can be resolved. If you’re both totally open and honest about what you expect from each other, you can clearly see if the marriage can work in the long term.

SBI!