Why We Get Divorced

I spend an awful lot of time contemplating divorce From a business prospective and from a sociological view, divorce occupies a great deal of my waking time. How we get together, why we split apart, it alternately fascinates and horrifies me. I guess it is hazard of my chosen profession, but, as an Atlanta Divorce Attorney, their are very real implications that need to be explored. In surfing the net recently, I stumbled across a posting on another website that contained an article citing a study from the Center for Disease Control that indicates that Forty-Three Percent Of First Marriages Break-Up Within 15 Years. It also indicated that that one in three first marriages end within ten years and one in five end within five years. While the findings are based on data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, a study of 10,847 women 15-44 years of age and are of questionable timeliness, it did get me thinking about how our society views marriage, and subsequently divorce. (To read the entire article click here )

After practicing for nearly fifteen years and having gone through my own divorce ten years ago, my observational opinion is that two specific factors have led to the increase in the divorce rate is the rise of the two income homes and the increase in our life expectancy.

The first cause, the increase in two income homes, is really just another way of saying that our lives have grown increasingly complicated and hectic and failures to communicate (even if it is just that you do not have the time to communicate) are a sure fire way to end up in front of me, or one of my brethren of the bar. With both parents working, time to talk and parent comes at a premium and often take a back seat to the pressures of modern life.

Secondly, I think our concept of "until death do we part" was coined and incorporated into our national psyche generations ago, when the average person did not expect to easily live to over 77 years of age.

Today, I often get clients in my law office that are 50+ years old, have been married for in excess of 25 years and feel that they have 25-30 "good" years left and they want to find some new happiness. I truly believe that this is one of the root causes of what appears to be disposable marriages.

Of course, this is just my opinion. I could be wrong ;-)