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Fascinating stuff from a new study, entitled "Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everybody Else is Doing It Too":
To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study.
We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network ... Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one's friends' marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one's own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.
There's a profound conservative insight here, I think, about the social consequences of what can seem like purely individual choices. No-fault divorce laws were ushered in, in part, on the understandable theory that they would make it easier to end the small minority of marriages that were miserable shams or abusive hells, without affecting happier, more stable couples. And that theory endures today: In her recent Times op-ed on New York's decision to join the rest of America in allowing no-fault divorce, for instance, Stephanie Coontz attributes the 1970s surge in marital dissolutions primarily to "pent-up demand for divorces" finally being met by a more accommodating legal system.
Source: New York Times | Ross Douthat
