While there are a variety of reasons and causes for divorce, all of which should concern us, my work with couples considering divorce over the last several years leads me to believe the primary cause for a majority of divorces is a decline in love, hope and work.
In a healthy marriage, these three primary, interrelated concepts of love, hope and work combine to keep the "marriage flywheel" turning. However, in failing marriages, we see decreasing levels of all three of these which ultimately bring the marriage flywheel to a grinding halt. Here's how they work together.
Love is a notion that most of us think we understand. And while most couples believe, when they get married, that they have enough love for a lifetime, the reality is that they may not actually have enough of the right kind of love to sustain the marriage. Let me explain what I mean. In recent years, researchers have been actively seeking to discover factors that might predict whether a marriage will ultimately end in divorce. So far, the only factor they've discovered that helps us understand when a marriage might be in trouble has do with the ratio of positive to negative comments exchanged by the couple. Generally, researchers believe now that any marriage in which the ratio of negative to positive comments exceeds 5 to 1 (in other words there are 5 or more negative comments for every one positive comment) is in trouble.
This helps us craft a better definition of what we mean by love for purposes of marriage. What we ultimately say is simply an overflow of what we're thinking and feeling on the inside. Couples who express more negative than positive comments are showing us that, rather than valuing each other, they actual devalue each other in their thoughts and feelings. Therefore, for purposes of marriage, we can more accurately say that the love necessary to sustain a marriage is that which chooses to value rather than devalue your spouse. When couples begin to think and feel in ways that devalue their spouse more frequently than in ways that value their spouse, we know the marriage flywheel is beginning to slow down.
Certainly there a number of factors that contribute to couples moving towards devaluing and away from valuing each other. That will have to be a topic for another article. For now, let's move to looking at how this failure of love (devaluing rather than valuing) contributes to the next component of the flywheel, hope. When couples get married they believe (have hope) that their marriage will not only last but will be satisfying. But as the couple slides into the area of devaluing each other, satisfaction with the relationship diminishes. And as the satisfaction diminishes, one or both partners begin to lose hope in the marriage.
At this point, with hope failing, the one or both partners begin to entertain thoughts of how life might be with someone else, or at the least without their spouse. Unfortunately, once they reach this point, it is very difficult (though not impossible) to reverse the process. Maintaining a life-long relationship requires a great deal of hope in the future because there are going to be plenty of difficult or even bad circumstances. The only way to get through the difficult times is to believe that things will get better. This is the hope necessary to sustain a marriage. And when a couples love decreases (they begin to devalue more than value) that hope is hard to hold on to.
And finally, as the hope begins to fade, the final component of the flywheel, work, is impacted. Work is a necessary component of any system in our universe. In essence, the second law of thermodynamics tells us that in the absence of energy (work) being applied to a system, it will decay. The same applies to marriages. They take work. And when work is not present, the marriage decays, even falls apart. But in a relationship where love has diminished (more devaluing than valuing) leading to a loss of hope that the relationship can be satisfying and long-lasting, there is little motivation to work at the marriage. And in the absence of work, the marriage will fail. At this point, the marriage flywheel has ground to a halt and divorce is likely.
Marriages are complicated. Causes for divorce are therefore complicated as well. But at the risk of being overly-simplistic, I have seen the general principles identified above at work as the primary cause for many divorces. Love diminishes (the couple moves from valuing to devaluing each other in thought, word and deed) thereby causing one or both partners to begin losing hope that the marriage can be satisfying and life-long, thus ultimately draining them of the motivation to engage in the work necessary to sustain the marriage. The flywheel grinds to a halt thus causing divorce.
As a final word, there is hope in this analysis. I have discovered in my work with couples that if we can begin to get even one of the partners to choose to value rather than devalue his or her partner, the hope can begin to increase and motivation to work at the marriage returns. The flywheel begins to move, at first slowly, but gradually picking up speed, to the point that marriages can be saved.