As the poster at right suggests, marriage success is not a 50/50 coin flip. In fact, contrary to the urban myth, nearly"70% of all marriages last as long as you both shall live". (The 50% myth is a result of misunderstanding Census Bureau marriage statistics) The research into unhappy marriages has found that unhappiness in most marriages is temporary--two years after reporting that their marriage was "very unhappy", 80% of those same couples now reported that they were "very happy" in their marriages. Most couples find a way to work things out and stay married. Divorce is not inevitable when couples are going through a difficult period in their lives; the best advice for most couples is to wait and persevere. I will cover the exceptions to these general guidelines later in this series.
When couples can't make it, those couples in the "neglect" group of divorcing spouses report that they "just drifted apart" and about 60% of men and 40% of the women report to resorting to extramarital affairs as a solution feeling neglected. For most of these people, the affair is short lived and contrary to popular belief, an affair is NOT a guarantee that the marriage will end in divorce. More than 2/3 of couples who have had to confront the issue of infidelity in their marriage find a way to forgive each other and move on without divorcing. Nonetheless, given this high rate of infidelity, not asking about extramarital affairs of your client and of their spouse is less than competent representation in a divorce case.
For the 30% of marriages which eventually end in divorce, the research has found that more than 2/3 of these divorces can be characterized as "low conflict". These "low conflict" spouses eventually mutually agree that the relationship has died and one or both of them are ready to let go and move on. However that awareness rarely happens at the same time for both parties. For the partner filing for divorce, that decision to file usually takes about a year to come to actual execution. During that time, a substantial amount of anticipatory grieving occurs for the filing spouse, while the other spouse is usually unaware that this period of relative peace in the home is a prelude to divorce. Hence, one partner is experiencing the shock and denial of early phases of grief, while the filing partner may appear relatively emotionally disconnected. For these couples, though, the emotional conflict and feelings of grief do NOT escalate into protracted litigation, as their self control and generally good judgment prevail.
When these couples have children, disagreements over child raising are frequently a contributing cause to the divorce, especially when the children reach school age (5-7 years after the date of marriage is a peak time for divorce). Low conflict couples usually find a way to co-parent after divorce and protracted litigation is not in their future. Disagreements will be resolved or ignored but not litigated.
As clients, these low conflict couples are easy to represent. They do their homework, produce documents on time, rarely call in for "emergencies", and while admittedly sad and disappointed, they are not angry, demanding, needy, emotionally-draining clients. Very few have mental health or substance abuse histories, and most have stable careers and good extended family support.
If you have been doing the math, we have now covered about 90% of all divorcing couples. These numbers are consistent with the overall findings that more than 90% of all divorces end in settlement (either through negotiation or mediation) but NOT litigation. The remaining 10% of divorces are the high conflict, headline-making, protracted and expensive, nasty divorces that make family law lawyers resort to adult beverages. These cases are subject of the next note in this series.
And yes narcissism is a major player in these high conflict cases....Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment