Divorce is Not A Quick Fix

This week in class we talked about divorce and the "blending" of new families. I believe that divorce has become too easy to access and has become the number one solution to marital problems when it should be the last resort.

There are 6 stations of divorce. Many people think of the contract one, where you by law are divorced but there are many other. The 6 stations include:

1- Emotional divorce: involves a loss of trust, respect, and affection for each other.
2- Legal divorce: when the court officially brings the marriage to an end.
3- Economic divorce: settlement of the property.
4- Co-parental divorce: occurs when the couple has children- decisions need to be made about custody, visitation rights, and continuing parental responsibilities.
5- Community divorce: the friends of the previous couple become "divorced" as well and are sometimes forced to choose sides.
6- Psychic divorce: the individual must accept the disruption of their relationship and regain a sense of being an individual rather than being in a marriage relationship.
*(All of these are directly from Lauer and Lauer's book "Marriage & Family: The Quest for Intimacy")

The main reasons reported for divorce are finances, children, communication, sex, and falling out of love. People need to understand that getting a divorce isn’t going to fix these problems, but just intensify them even more. Especially if the couple have children, figuring out how to divide them up is a lot harder than you would think and can cause a lot of problems. Learning how to deal with blended families isn’t easy, with the rate of divorces we need to learn ways on how to make these situations more effective. The way to get to the root of the problem is preventing divorce before it even happens and learning how to create healthy, happy and loving marriages.