A Proposal to Reduce Unnecessary Divorce - Razorplanet

not, they believed. Rather than rely on expert opinion on either side of the question,
Doherty, Willoughby, and Peterson decided to conduct empirical research to learn
about divorcing couples’ hopes for their marriages.
16. Doherty, Willoughby, and Peterson, “Interest in Marital Reconciliation.”
17. These findings were consistent across most demographic and marital history
factors.
18. Furthermore, the results provide evidence that the original finding of the degree
of openness to alternatives to divorce was not dependent on the wording of the
questions in the survey. It is possible that the study’s results were inflated by the fact
that the parents had just completed a course in parenting through divorce. Perhaps
they were especially attuned to the problems their children faced and more likely to
express ambivalence about the divorce. However, similar results have emerged from
surveys mailed to newly filing couples, most of whom had not yet taken a parenting
class.
19. A limitation of Professor Doherty and his colleagues’ research is that it was a
survey of interest in reconciliation at one point in time without any information about
whether these couples could actually succeed in restoring their marriages to health.
In fact, outside of clinical treatment studies and demographic studies of couples who
separate, there has been little research on what happens to couples whose marriages
are in trouble but decide to stay together. While there has been a lot of research on
unhappy couples who go on to divorce, and some research on unhappy couples who
stay together unhappily, there has been a gap in research on “marital turnarounds”—
in other words, couples who were once unhappy and then become happy again.
20. The contact person for the Family Law Marital Reconciliation Option Project is
attorney Louise Livesay (louise@livesaylawoffice.com).
21. Jared R. Anderson, Mark J. Van Ryzin, and William J. Doherty, “Developmental
Trajectories of Marital Happiness in Continuously Married Individuals: A Group Modeling
Approach,” Journal of Family Psychology 24, no. 5 (October 2010): 587–96.
22. Interestingly, this turnaround was confined to people who had earlier experienced
a happy marriage; thus the turnaround can be seen as a recovery. For individuals
who started with low levels of marital happiness, the chances of a turnaround
were more limited. The researchers speculated that the experience of having had a
happy marriage at an earlier point may create a shared goal during tough times. In
contrast, couples whose marriages are initially not happy may be less able to envision
being happy together, or they may simply lack the skills to negotiate the emotional
challenges of marriage.
23. Colin Camerer et al., “Regulation for Conservatives: Behavioral Economics and
the Case for ‘Asymmetrical Paternalism,’” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 151,
no. 3 (January 2003): 1211–54.
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