Chapter 8
Building Social Relationships: Intimacy and Families
Divorce
as a Personal Experience
While
scholars, politicians, and pundits argue over what to do about our high divorce rate,
several million people continue to experience the ending of a marriage each year.
Despite the
fact that it's so common, divorce is not the sort of experience that we prepare or train
for. Prenuptial agreements may spell out in advance the settlement conditions if a
marriage ends, but they address only the economic and legal facets of breakupsónot the
emotional, interpersonal, and social ones.
The
"spoiling" of a close relationship can be emotionally devastating. It can create
deep wounds akin to those associated with the death of a loved one.1 We may
experience a wide range of emotions, including anger, bitterness, sadness, self-pity,
self-doubt, guilt, and shame.
In addition,
when a relationship ends, so do the benefits that came with it. We lose the partner on
whom we came to depend, and we lose contact with friends and acquaintances whom we came to
know through that partner.
Perhaps most
unsettling is the transformation of identity initiated by the ending of a relationship.
Becoming an ex-spouse or ex-lover means exiting one social role and entering another.2
People whose relationships have ended must remove themselves from the norms and
expectations associated with the old role and learn new ones. They must begin to see the
world from a single person's perspective and not a couple's perspective.
In addition,
the entire history of the relationship requires redefinition. Those once-pleasant rituals,
in retrospect, become annoying habits. The good times get reinterpreted as bad; the bad
times are seen as more typical, indicative of the eventual breakup.
Further
complicating the process of role exit is the social stigma associated with the termination
of an intimate relationship. Like most things in our achievement-oriented society,
relationshipsóparticularly marriagesótend to be viewed in success/failure terms.
Although studies consistently show a clear decline in disapproval of divorce as a general
category, disapproval of divorced individuals continues.3
Divorced
families are still characterized as "broken," "weak,"
"fragile," "split," or "fragmented." Divorcing individuals
may come to feel demoralized and rejected by married friends and experience diminishing
self-esteem. Friends, relatives, co-workers and other interested parties typically want to
know who's to blame, who to help, and whose side to take. These stigmatizing effects of
divorce illustrate, again, the social nature of intimate relationships.
The failure
of a marriage has broader societal implications as well, because it threatens the cultural
ideal of love and romance.4 A divorce calls into question the entire moral code
of intimacy. Friends may begin to question the stability of their own relationships. Thus
the disengaging couple is socially obligated to inform others that although commitment to
this particular relationship has deteriorated, commitment to the idea of relationships has
not.
Such
commitment is reflected in the fact that an estimated 90% or more of young adults will
marry at some point in their lives.5 It is also reflected in the high
percentage of people who remarry after divorce, despite the personal pain they have
experienced.
1McCall, G. J. 1982. "Becoming unrelated:
The management of bond dissolution." In S. Duck (Ed.), Personal relationships 4:
Dissolving personal relationships. London: Academic Press.
2Ebaugh, H. R. F. 1988, Becoming an ex.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
3Gertsel, N. 1987. "Divorce and
stigma." Social Problems, 34, 172-186.
4Blumstein, P., & Kollock, P. 1988.
"Personal relationships." Annual Review of Sociology, 14, 467-490.
5Norton, A. J. 1987. "Families and
children in the year 2000." Children Today, July/August, 6-9.
David Newman and Rebecca Smith.
(Created October 7, 1999). Copyright Pine Forge Press.
http://www.pineforge.com/newman. |