• 03
  • February
    2011

If asked to identify some of the causes of divorce, it's highly likely that most people would point to extramarital affairs, growing emotional distances between couples or the inability to get along as the primary culprits.

Regarding this last potential cause, most people would also likely believe that those couples who have the most explosive fights would be the most likely to divorce or that men engage in far more destructive behavior than women do when it comes to marital spats.

As it turns out, this is not true.

Over the past 16 years, researchers at the University of Michigan studied exactly 373 married couples in an attempt to correlate the rate of divorce with certain types/styles of fighting.

The results were rather intriguing.

Styles of Fighting

As previously stated, most people naturally assume that those couples who have the most explosive fights (yelling, throwing objects, etc.) would be the most likely to divorce.

Researchers actually discovered that the couples who engage in arguments where one spouse attempts to empathize with the other's viewpoint or engage them in conversation while the other spouse simply withdraws are the most likely to divorce.

Not surprisingly, those couples who were both willing to engage in a constructive dialogue had the lowest divorce rate.

Fighting in the First Year of Marriage

Interestingly, researchers found that whether or not a newly married couple engaged in quarrels during the first year of marriage had relatively little impact on their chances of divorcing.

In fact, the study found that while only 21 percent of wives and 29 percent of husbands reported no fighting during the first year of marriage, 46 percent of these couples were ultimately divorced after 16 years.

Fighting among Men and Women

Perhaps most interesting of all, the study determined that women generally engage in more destructive methods of fighting than men. However, it also determined that over the course of time, women's use of these destructive methods deteriorates while men's use of destructive methods remains relatively static.

"The problems that cause wives to withdraw or use destructive behaviors early in a marriage may be resolved over time," said Kira Birditt, one of the study's primary researchers.

Birditt explained that women tend to be more introspective about relationships and are therefore more likely to realize how destructive behavior can jeopardize their marriage.

Stay tuned for more from our Denver family law blog ...

If you have exhausted all of your options and would like to learn more about dissolution of marriage, you should strongly consider speaking with an experienced legal professional.

This post is provided for informational purposes only and is not to be construed as legal advice.

Related Resources:

Study: It's your fight style, not the fight, that may lead to divorce (The Kansas City Star)