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From the archives:
- "What We Owe,"
(February, 1997)
An online interview in which Barbara
Dafoe Whitehead discusses her book,
The Divorce Culture.
- "Dan Quayle Was
Right," by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead (April,
1993)
"Family diversity in the form of increasing numbers of
single-parent and stepparent families does not strengthen the
social fabric but, rather, dramatically weakens and undermines
society."
- "The Moral State of Marriage," by
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead (September,
1995)
A book review of The Best is Yet to Come: Coping With
Divorce and Enjoying Life Again by Ivana Trump and of The
Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts by Judith S. Wallerstein
and Sandra Blakeslee.
- "Divorce and the
Family in America," by Christopher Lasch (November,
1966)
"Most reformers, when confronted with particular cases, admit
that divorce is better than trying to save a bad marriage. Yet many
of them shy away from the conclusion toward which these sentiments
seem to point."
- "Is Marriage Holy?" by Henry James
(March, 1875)
"What attitude of mind does a perception
of the inward holiness or religious sanctity of marriage enjoin
upon those who suffer from [adultery]? -- a vindictive attitude or
a forgiving one?"
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THE bride-to-be, a graphic designer, was forty years
old and about to be married for the first time, to a businessman.
At her pastor's suggestion, she and her fiancé filled out a
questionnaire to measure the strengths and weaknesses of their
relationship -- 165 questions on their personalities, backgrounds,
values, and aspirations. How did you answer this question, she
asked him in the car afterward. And this? And this? Before the ride
home ended, they had broken their engagement.
Whenever Mike
McManus, a religion columnist and the founder of Marriage
Savers, an organization that works with churches to strengthen
marriages, tells this story, audiences roar approval. This is a
success story, he says, and the kind of thing we need more of: a
process that will reveal any likelihood of long-term
incompatibility, and thus spare would-be marriage partners the pain
and expense of a seemingly inevitable divorce. Some others making
war on the divorce rate do not favor such a test, but fervently
endorse teaching basic marriage skills to all engaged
couples.
The emotional, health, social, and economic costs associated with
marital conflict and family dissolution -- including delinquency,
depression, poverty, and crime, and especially the devastating harm
done to children -- have been well documented. For some, the
solution is to close the doors tighter on marriage through stricter
divorce laws, as Louisiana has recently done by legislating
"covenant" marriage as an option. Yet study after study indicates
that children are damaged less by divorce per se than by exposure
to intense conflict, whether their families are intact, dissolving,
or broken.
The divorce crisis has thrown a spotlight on the field of marital
research and education, which attacks domestic instability and
unhappiness at its beginnings, before marriages deteriorate, or
even before they start -- though some programs can be used later to
repair troubled marriages. The premarital questionnaire that broke
up the graphic designer's engagement is just one tool in a
psycho-educational arsenal that includes courses on communication,
conflict resolution, and marriage enhancement. These tools are
piquing the imagination of policymakers here and abroad. In the
past year legislators in at least eleven states have considered
whether such programs should be legally required or encouraged
before marriage licenses are granted. The U.S. military is strongly
encouraging married enlistees to attend marriage-education classes,
and many members of the clergy nationwide are urging other pastors
to use systematic premarital education for all engaged
couples.
Over the past two decades government-funded researchers have
declared that they can predict with about 90 percent accuracy which
engaged couples will divorce. Other researchers have developed
programs that, they say, can significantly change the odds for
marriages that appear doomed. Since the advent of videotaping, in
the 1970s, these social scientists have been able to observe and
measure couples' interactions in the laboratory with greater and
greater precision. The first university studies to emerge from this
work compared distressed and nondistressed couples. The results
demonstrated that the two groups communicated differently.
Longitudinal studies followed, in which couples were observed
regularly over a number of years to determine which behaviors were
most predictive of divorce. An early researcher in the field --
regarded by many as its reigning genius -- is John Gottman, who
presides over a high-tech couples lab at the University of
Washington at Seattle.
As a professor at Indiana University in the 1970s, Gottman began
studying couples in his lab while they talked casually, discussed
difficult issues, or tried to solve problems. Video cameras
recorded every facial expression, gesture, and change of tone.
Gottman was able to play back the videos for his subjects and ask
them what they were feeling at particular moments.
Gottman has followed 658 couples, some for as long as fourteen
years, some with more-intensive observation that monitors shifts in
their heart rate and stress indicators in their blood and urine.
Studying marriages in such minute detail, Gottman has been able to
chart the effects of small gestures. Fairly early he discovered
that when a spouse -- particularly the wife -- rolls her eyes while
the other is talking, the marital EXIT sign is blinking fiercely.
In fact, Gottman found that contempt, which is indicated by
eye-rolling, is one of the four strongest divorce predictors --
together with criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Gottman
calls them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In study after
study these behaviors identified those who would divorce with a
remarkable accuracy of greater than 90 percent.
While Gottman was working from observed interactions, the social
scientist David Olson and his colleagues at the University of
Minnesota were developing a written survey of couples' attitudes,
backgrounds, and behavior styles. With this tool Olson could
predict which couples would divorce with almost the same accuracy
as Gottman. And statistical analysis of demographic data also
uncovered factors associated with a high divorce rate, including
marriage at an early age, education deficiency, low economic
status, religious differences, and parental divorce.
While Gottman and his followers worked backward from the negative
side, Olson reported positive but similar findings. Couples who
stayed happily married, he found, scored higher in such categories
as realistic expectations, communication, conflict resolution, and
compatibility.
Some of the researchers differentiated between "static" factors,
those they couldn't expect to modify, such as age and economic
status, and "dynamic" factors, such as communication patterns, and
they zeroed in on the latter. If they could change the predictors,
could they also change the prediction? They thought so. And they
hoped that if they could change patterns that people had learned
from their families, they might even raise the odds for those who
had experienced a parental divorce or a previous divorce of their
own. Thus the stage was set for research-based marriage
education.
Olson developed a program called PREPARE as a counseling tool for
engaged couples, and, later, ENRICH, for married couples. Couples
indicate agreement on a scale of one to five with 165 statements
like the following: "I expect some of our romantic love will fade
after marriage." "I can easily share my positive and negative
feelings with my partner." "I have some concerns about how my
partner will be as a parent."
PREPARE has grown in popularity with family counselors and in
churches, where older "mentor couples" as well as the clergy are
often trained to use it. The counselor gives the couple the written
questionnaire, has it computer-scored in Minnesota, and then
reviews the detailed report with the couple. During a few follow-up
sessions the counselor uses prescribed exercises to help the couple
develop skills in the categories in which their scores are low. If
their scores are very low, they are gently urged to have additional
counseling -- and by some counselors to delay marriage. Olson is
proud of the fact that, like the graphic designer and her fiancé,
10 to 15 percent of those who take PREPARE break their
engagements.
While Olson was developing his questionnaire, Howard Markman, a
graduate student working with Gottman in Indiana, was doing his own
prediction studies and discovering other "danger signs" -- for
example, the tendency to escalate a conflict. Based on this
research, Markman and Scott Stanley, now at the University of
Denver, along with others developed PREP -- the
Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program. (Markman and
Stanley, with Susan Blumberg, are the authors of
Fighting for Your Marriage, first published in 1994.) PREP
is a short course, usually given over one full day and two
evenings, that provides tools for talking about important
relationship issues without fighting. It also teaches skills for
preserving the positive elements in a relationship, such as making
sure that time is available for friendship and fun, when problems
are not discussed.
 PREP is only one of dozens of
relationship-enhancement programs created in the past forty years.
Relationship Enhancement, developed by Bernard Guerney Jr., a
clinical psychologist and family therapist, had its beginnings in
the late 1950s. This program and many others that grew up afterward
-- most notably PAIRS,
developed by Lori Gordon, a marriage and family therapist, and the
Couple Communication Program, developed by Sherod Miller, at the
University of Minnesota -- claim significant results and large
followings. The programs differ in length and presentation --
teaching is sometimes for individual couples but most often in a
group or classroom setting. They range from eight to 120 hours, in
a variety of formats. But they have similar goals and teach similar
skills. Most use neither questionnaires nor tests.
All these programs teach some version of "active listening" to help
couples discuss difficult issues. Spouses take turns speaking, and
must stick to one topic and express feelings without assigning
blame or name-calling. The listener paraphrases what has just been
said until the speaker agrees that he or she has been understood.
Either can call a time out, and a specific time is set to continue.
This technique seems to have the power to transform a couple's
communication.
BUT what is the evidence that these programs
really prevent divorce? The most complete government-funded
research has been done on PREP. In one large-scale study in Denver
12 percent of couples who had taken PREP had broken up, separated,
or divorced after five years, as had 36 percent of couples who had
not taken it. In a recent study in Germany only four percent of
PREP couples had separated or divorced after five years, as
compared with 24 percent of couples who received traditional
counseling or no preparation at all. These and other studies also
indicate that in the first five years after marriage PREP couples
reported more marital satisfaction, less negative and more positive
communication, and lower levels of physical aggression. After
twelve years, however (the longest time that any of these programs
has been studied), the Denver PREP group had a separation or
divorce rate of 19 percent and the control group had a rate of 28
percent -- a difference that the researchers regarded as not
statistically significant.
Nevertheless, those who have seen the devastation of divorce
firsthand -- researchers, marriage educators, therapists, and
members of the clergy -- are increasingly eager to deliver their
insights to the millions of couples they see as being at risk.
Nearly 700 of these believers gathered last May at the first
conference of the Coalition
for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, where marriage
educators were to teach their skills to other professionals and to
the public.
THE ballroom of the Sheraton National Hotel,
in Arlington, Virginia, was packed as Diane Sollee, a former
marital therapist and the conference organizer, welcomed the
attendees.
All the presenters and many of the attendees knew how fervently
Sollee has worked for her cause -- for couples education to stop
marital unhappiness before as well as after it becomes corrosive.
Sollee favors the "not"therapy: not expensive, not intrusive, not
threatening, not stigmatizing -- teaching skills primarily in a
group or classroom setting. Research shows, Sollee points out, that
most couples wait six years after sensing a problem before they
enter therapy. By then only 20 percent of them can be helped in any
lasting way. And most couples won't go for therapy at all.
Howard Markman, PREP's founder, gave the first night's address.
Rallying the crowd about the pressing need for communication and
conflict-management skills, he asserted, "Mismanaged conflict
predicts both marital distress and negative effects for children."
Though other factors can also predict divorce, he asserted,
destructive conflict is both the most predictive and the most
changeable, and over time destructive behavior patterns become more
and more damaging.
The next morning John Gottman gave a much-anticipated speech.
Declaring him "the rock upon which we build," Sollee reeled off
some of Gottman's publications, accomplishments, and awards: more
than twenty books, nearly a hundred papers, the NIMH Merit Award,
the Distinguished Research Scientist award of the American
Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and on and on.
Taking the podium, Gottman announced that he had re-examined the
body of his work and had discovered something that had shaken him
to his foundations. "Interventions" -- the programs used by every
expert present -- haven't done a good enough job of helping
couples. Knowing what is dysfunctional in a marriage just isn't
enough. Researchers must also study what works well in successful
marriages.
Most popular interventions, he continued, rest on the premise that
marital happiness depends on the way couples solve problems and
resolve conflicts through good communication. "Wrong," he
declared. In his firsthand observations of couples, they never do
solve their problems. Happy couples have problems, and they tend to
have exactly the same problems several years later. In the lab they
seem as if they've just changed their hairstyles and clothes and
come back into the same conversation. What distinguishes them from
unhappy couples is that they develop a "dialogue" about their
perpetual problems, trying to effect what change they can with
humor and affection while at the same time accepting their partners
as they are.
Especially wrongheaded, Gottman said, is the focus on empathy and
active listening in resolving conflicts -- the model that "forms
the basis of most complex multi-component marital treatments of
all theoretical orientations, including behavior therapy,
systems approaches, and object-relations theory." For more than
twenty years Gottman has watched happy couples interact. His
finding? They do not employ active listening and empathy during
conflict.
The active-listening model might work if people could really do it,
but, Gottman said, shaking his head, it's just too hard to be an
empathic, active listener when somebody is criticizing or attacking
you. "I have seen the Dalai Lama do this," he joked, "and I am sure
that Jesus and the Buddha did this, and that Moses did not do
this."
Gottman's presentation frustrated many at the conference, who point
out that he himself has never tested any marriage program. And,
Markman says, Gottman is wrong in asserting that active listening
is the cornerstone of programs like PREP. "In PREP," he
says, "active listening is only one of four or five cornerstones
and is designed to counteract the danger signs that predict divorce
and marital distress." In dismissing active listening, Gottman
seemed to be challenging a major foundation of the work of nearly
every expert at the conference, including Markman, whom he refers
to as his former "student" ("collaborator," Markman says). In fact,
in several conversations with me Gottman appeared to be
unacquainted with the specifics of several major programs.
Moreover, his own work indicates that happy couples have less
negative communication.
I appealed to Gottman after his presentation, when we talked in the
lobby of the Sheraton National: "The research says these programs
work, right?" "The research sucks," Gottman replied. "The sampling
is inadequate and unscientific. It's skewed because the people who
took PREP, for example, were different from those who refused
it."
Yet the PREP research, government-funded and highly regarded, like
Gottman's own, found PREP to be associated with significantly lower
divorce rates and greater marital satisfaction after five years.
"Every program does better than the control group," Gottman
insisted. The five major programs studied, he said, all show that
after two years 30 to 50 percent of the couples in the program had
significantly greater marital satisfaction than those in the
control group.
But if 30 to 50 percent of couples can be helped ... ? "It's a
placebo effect," Gottman said. Surely these programs go beyond a
placebo? In all of them couples do something together, invest in it
together, and communicate in some constructive way. Maybe that's
what improves their marriages. "No," Gottman said flatly. One of
these programs teaches a kind of quid-pro-quo trading that has been
associated with the most dysfunctional marriages, he said. Yes,
bitter couples do tote up competing tabs. But what if this
bartering system is introduced to a happy couple? Can't it be an
effective method for learning each other's needs? "Yes," Gottman
concedes. "This could be right."
 No system, however, works for everybody,
Gottman said. Antisocial or borderline personalities, chronic
depressives, psychotics, incest and child-abuse survivors, all
require different methods. What we need is to test different kinds
of interventions with larger, more inclusive, more scientific
samples. "My hunch," Gottman said, "is that seventy percent of
couples could be helped in some way, so that they wouldn't divorce
but would be meaningfully improved in marital satisfaction -- move
up from unhappy to at least okay." He took out a ruled pad and
scrawled down figures. He would need 10,000 couples, varying in
ethnic, racial, educational, and economic background, and in degree
of pathology. He would do a matching random survey of couples who
did not volunteer, paying them for their responses over time. The
study would be administered at five or six major universities
around the United States by the best researchers in the marital
field. He began listing them, and after a pause he jotted down at
the bottom "Markman."
Gottman would divide the couples into groups and test programs that
varied in time and expense. In one, perhaps, he would teach only
active listening. After two years he would measure lasting change
or relapse. For those who had relapsed or experienced no change, he
would test different kinds of marital therapy and possibly booster
sessions for skills. Other couples would receive skills training or
therapy at major marital stress points: when a first child was
three months old, after the birth of a second child, when the first
reached the teen years.
Howard Markman spotted us in the lobby and sat down at our table.
Though I had heard that these two do not speak, they now exchanged
small talk. Markman asked Gottman for a colleague's phone number
and whipped out a computer address book in which to enter it.
Gottman, obliging, thumbed through his tiny, taped-up,
scratched-over leatherette book.
Markman threw himself into helping to design the model study under
discussion. For national clinical trials with 10,000 couples, the
men agreed, they would need $10 million a year for five years. Of
course they were enthusiastic.
Can one realistically expect the federal government to fund a $50
million, five-year study to test marriage interventions? The
Administration currently spends $33 million a year on another kind
of model intervention program -- Community-Based Resource Centers,
under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services,
which test interventions to help children at risk of abuse. This
program directly assists families while it helps the government to
discover the best interventions. Another program, Head Start, started
small more than thirty years ago and demonstrated its ability to
mitigate the effects of poverty on children. It is now funded at $4
billion annually.
With the costs of divorce now estimated to be in the billions
annually, doesn't a modest investment in divorce reduction make
sense? The British government is financing a small pilot program,
which began this year, to test a variety of marriage-strengthening
programs -- from skills education to psychotherapy to telephone hot
lines. Backed by a campaign to increase both public awareness of
and access to marriage-support programs, it is also trying to
encourage participation by churches, schools, health organizations,
and employers. Though at $800,000 its cost is low, the program
represents a clear stand by the government.
EVEN where our state legislators have taken
a clear stand, they've been undemanding, asking couples only to
learn a few relationship skills that take less time than a course
in driver's ed. Most of their bills are innocuous. In Maryland and
Michigan proposed laws prescribe a delay in granting licenses to
couples who are unwilling to take marriage-skills classes. Alaska
and Kansas are considering reducing the fee for a license as an
inducement to take such classes. A bill in Missouri for an outright
mandate died in committee earlier this year. So far no bill has
beaten back the forces of opposition: conservative Christians,
civil libertarians, even many leaders of the psycho-education
movement themselves. These last worry that a government bureaucracy
is a poor delivery vehicle for their precious cargo. In addition,
many who favor premarital education are members of the clergy.
Marriage is religion's turf, they say: government, keep out. Scott
Stanley, who has developed a Christian version of PREP, says, "I
can easily imagine the eventual development of a state board that
would govern the practice of premarital education, ultimately
dictating what messages couples are to receive."
Stanley believes that churches
should do any mandating. He favors programs like Mike McManus's
Marriage Savers, which enlists members of the clergy and officials
in a given community to support marriage in a variety of ways,
including training older mentor couples to give premarital
education to engaged couples. McManus offers statistics to show
that these initiatives have reduced divorce significantly in seven
out of eight cities that have adopted them and for which numbers
are available.
The emphasis on prevention that has
influenced so much thinking about modern medicine is now making
more and more sense in the social sciences. Preventing unhappy,
destructive marriages is much cheaper -- in dollars and in human
misery -- than attempts to clean up the toxic waste that follows
them.
What is it worth spending to make 30 percent of marriages happier?
Or 50 percent? Or even 70 percent? Researchers may continue to
quibble over statistics and theory, but for every child born in a
successful marriage, statistically one more adult enters the
marriage pool with a behavioral advantage. That child, multiplied
again and again, can begin to reduce the dimensions of our divorce
crisis.
Francine Russo writes frequently on human behavior and law.
Her work has appreared in The New York Times Magazine and
other national publications.
Illustrations by Cornel Rubino
Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly
Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; October 1997; Can the Government Prevent
Divorce?; Volume 280, No. 4; pages 28-42.
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