Marriage as learned behavior: Can divorce be foretold?

It may sound like a conservative's marriage manifesto: Pick a partner with a similar background, don't shack up without an engagement ring and stick with even a lifeless marriage for your kids' sake.

But following that creed could avert divorce, which, statistics show, can be perilous to your health.

Researchers have persuasively linked certain demographic and socioeconomic factors — many of which you can't control — with higher odds of marital breakup. Your race, occupation, income, age at first wedding, the length of courtship and whether you have children from previous relationships all can preordain the success of your marriage even before the "I dos."

Did your parents divorce? Your own marriage is twice as likely to end that way than if you grew up in an intact family. Do you and your spouse practice different religions? Chances are your marriage won't endure as well as those of couples who worship together.

Divorce's toll on body, mind

About 40 percent of American marriages end in a divorce. Marital disruptions strain child-parent bonds (particularly between fathers and children), plunge many women into financial hardship and can show human nature at its nastiest.

Divorce ahead?

Factors that put you at a higher risk of divorce:

• Having divorced parents

• Marrying young

• Living together before engagement

• Being previously divorced or marrying a divorced partner

• Having a child before marriage (and, to a lesser extent, getting pregnant before the wedding)

• Being much older or younger than your spouse

• Marrying someone of a different race

• Following different religions or no religion

• Having low education levels

Source: Seattle Times research

Divorce also is hard on the body and mind. Divorced people suffer more health problems, are more depressed and tend to drink and smoke more heavily than people who are married or have partners. A 2003 study by researchers at San Diego State University and the University of Pittsburgh found that happily married women have lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and are thinner than females who are divorced, single, widowed or stuck in unhappy marriages.

For some people, divorce can be lethal. Divorced men are twice as likely to kill themselves as men with spouses or live-in partners, according to a 2000 analysis of U.S. mortality data by Augustine Kposowa, a sociologist at the University of California, Riverside.

Kposowa found that being white and living on the West Coast elevated the risk of suicide. But divorce or separation were the most significant contributors to risk of suicide in men. Being single or widowed did not increase the risk.

The health effects of divorce on children depend partly on the degree of civility between the parents. Though children generally are better off in two-parent households, marriages marked by open contempt, constant criticism and vicious arguments can exact a huge psychological toll on them. Numerous studies show that such children can develop mental-health problems, ranging from lowered self-esteem to depression and anxiety to greater aggression. In such cases, the children's mental and emotional well-being actually improves after the couple parts ways.

Why not just give up?

With the stakes so high, how could anyone handicapped by demographics and family history hazard marrying?

"If you want to be rational, you might want to interview your dating partner" for divorce risks, joked Nicholas Wolfinger, author of "Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in Their Own Marriages" (Cambridge University Press), published this year.

Wolfinger analyzed data on 33,000 Americans from two major national household surveys to calculate how divorces recur through generations. His conclusion: Having divorced parents greatly jeopardizes the odds of keeping one's marriage intact and heightens the likelihood of multiple divorces.

Wolfinger found that when both husband and wife come from families of divorce, they are nearly three times more likely to split up than couples whose parents stayed married. If a parent was divorced at least twice, the odds that an offspring's marriage will survive are only one in three.

Wolfinger attributed the phenomenon partly to learned behavior. Having seen their parents give up on a marriage, people are more likely to bail when their own relationships turn turbulent.

Another cause is that, statistically, children of divorce become sexually active earlier and marry younger than others, said Wolfinger, associate professor in the University of Utah's Department of Family and Consumer Studies.

Various researchers have found a strong correlation between age at time of marriage and elevated divorce risk. In fact, Scott Stanley, co-director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver, regards teen marriages as the most vulnerable of unions.

"My belief is young age at marriage would trump everything else" as a divorce predictor, Stanley said. "People getting married at 18 are at such high risk."

Stanley says people who marry young lack the maturity and coping skills to sustain long-term relationships. They also choose ill-suited mates. "If they had married at 22, they would have married a different person," Stanley said.

Living together: a risky trial

Contrary to what many people believe, "test driving" a relationship by living together before marriage also reduces the odds of success. The exact reasons are unclear. It may be that couples make riskier picks with a live-in partner than they would with a potential spouse. Or couples who defer marriage and opt to live together first may do so because they have trouble with commitment.

After they move in together, some couples eventually walk down the aisle as a result of inertia, not love. Undoing the entanglements of a live-in relationship can be a hassle, especially if the couple has children, Stanley said.

Sliding into marriage becomes "a transition without a decision," Stanley said. "For a lot of young people, it's not a real deliberative thing. They're not really thinking, 'Are you the one?' 'Am I the one?' "

A 2002 analysis by Jay Teachman, a sociologist at Western Washington University, found that living together increases the risk of divorce by 35 percent when those couples eventually marry.

According to Teachman, Americans are less likely to divorce if they are Catholic, have high education levels, marry someone close to their own age and don't have children before wedlock. For instance, the chances of divorce for a woman who is five or more years older than her husband is 88 percent greater than for couples without the age gap. Teachman based his calculations on more than two decades' worth of data from the National Survey of Family Growth.

Addressing the risks

So, is your marriage destined for doom if you are, say, a Presbyterian who got his Jewish, college-freshman girlfriend pregnant and married her after merely three months of dating? Not if you steer clear of the pitfalls associated with the risk factors, according to Stanley, the marital researcher.

Couples who possess many "fixed" risk factors can work to overcome them, said Stanley, who also is a developer of PREP (Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program), a couples-counseling program used throughout the United States. Spouses with different religions, for instance, could discuss how they might handle their children's faith before it becomes an issue.

Stanley said couples should cultivate a long-term view of marriage, understanding that even the strongest relationships sometimes will be buffeted by trials. Commitment, he said, stems from making the marriage a high priority. Spouses should resist fleeing at the first hint of major trouble, even if they stay mainly because they don't want to divide up the house or avoid the embarrassment of a divorce, Stanley said.

"Without constraints, even average marriages will fall apart," Stanley said. "Constraint keeps us from doing some stupid things in the short term."

For the sake of the kids?

Couples in distressed marriages may feel compelled to remain together if they have children, said Paul Amato, professor of sociology and demography at Penn State University. And in many cases, children benefit from that choice. Even if the spouses are miserable, Amato said, children tend to be better adjusted and achieve more in a two-parent home.

Sometimes parents use the children to justify divorce. "Parents think, 'If I'm happier, my children will be happier.' That's not necessarily true. Children want access to both parents," Amato said. Divorce involving children "is not a private issue any more. It's a public issue."

But Amato said that does not hold for couples whose relationship has turned toxic, marked by constant fighting, hostility and verbal or physical attacks. "A lot of kids would be better off if the parents split," Amato said.

For the same reason, Wolfinger, the divorce-cycle researcher, opposes toughening divorce laws. Making divorces more difficult to obtain will mean that only the very worst marriages will be dissolved, he said. That means children in these marriages will suffer more.

If divorces run in cycles, so, too, it seems, do marriages. Research shows that some marriages can survive if the couples simply hang tight.

"With some couples, if they get through the bad patch, things just get better," Amato said. "After three, five or 10 years, they grow closer together."

To Stanley, even the most seemingly disastrous unions have a shot at lasting matrimonial bliss.

"It doesn't necessarily doom you," Stanley said. "It's more hopeful than one would think."

Kyung Song: 206-464-2423 or ksong@seattletimes.com