August 16, 2009
Now I know I’m starting off negative but … Divorce doesn’t work. Divorced people are seldom happier, wealthier or more successful as a result of getting divorced. Divorced families seldom become more functional and the children of divorced parents would generally prefer that their parents stayed together
Where am I coming from? Apart for lots of study, I have been divorced and I have worked with plenty of divorcing people. People almost always get divorced looking for greater happiness and a better life … and they hardly ever find it. With a bit of luck, they can get it as good as they would have had it anyway had they known how not to get divorced
Relationship Breakdown means heartache, despair, depression, family dysfunction, loss of income, loss of wealth and emotional frustration, with quite a lot of emotional and psychological abuse for good measure. Simply put … life generally sucks for quite a while!!
I read the other day that 90% of the kids of parents who are breaking up see their parents being physically violent with each other at least once. And most of those people have never been violent before and are never violent again. Yep, emotions run high when relationships break down and some pretty crap decisions get made.
About 1-in-3 first marriages and 2-in-3 second marriages end in divorce so it’s just as popular as it has ever been (around 50% of marriages on average).
Lots of divorcing parents try to convince us that in the long run the kids are better off. Overall the kids don’t think so.
So how come after spending all those billions of dollars and billions of hours counselling people in relationship breakdown the rate of divorce remains unchanged, and has even risen. To state the obvious … something is not working and the result is both very costly and very painful.
Well relationships breakdown because people go about it all the wrong way. I reckon that only about 10% of people should divorce. The other 40% that do divorce just need to do it differently and they can end up better off than ever.
It’s all in the knowing how and once you know how, you can be in for an exciting ride and one you wouldn’t want to miss for anything … so stay tuned.
