Newsletter #68: Beware of the Contagiousness of Divorce

Divorce spreads through social networks

Divorce is contagious.

Like many things, such as having children or even committing suicide, divorce appears to have an element of social contagion to it. As Pew wrote about a study on this:

McDermott and her colleagues found that study participants were 75% more likely to become divorced if a friend is divorced and 33% more likely to end their marriage if a friend of a friend is divorced.

So divorce is contagious…and you can catch the divorce bug from your friends—even from a friend of a friend? “Approaching the epidemiology of divorce from the perspective of an epidemic may be apt in more ways than one,” McDermott and her colleagues wrote in a forthcoming article in the journal Social Forces. “The contagion of divorce can spread through a social network like a rumor, affecting friends up to two degrees removed.” Sociologists call the phenomenon “social contagion”—the spread of information, attitudes and behaviors through friends, families and other social networks. [emphasis added]

What this means practically for you if you are married is that you need to keep an eye on the people in your own social circle, as well as your spouse’s social circle, looking for divorces.

When Your Spouses’ Friends Get Divorced

It’s said that you are the average of your five closest friends. What I’ve noticed is that people who are heading for divorce often have shifts in their friend network such that either a) their friends start getting a divorce, or b) they make some new friends who already are divorced.

In the latter case, perhaps divorce is not so much a matter of social contagion as it is that a spouse who is unhappy in marriage will gravitate towards people who are divorced and will validate those feelings. Hence I think that it is an even stronger signal that things are going wrong.

Regardless, if you see your spouse’s friends getting divorced or see your spouse start palling around with divorced people, you should treat this as a 911 emergency.

This is one of the many signals that people give off that their marriage or relationship might be in trouble. My wife is incredibly good at being able to deduce from people’s Instagram accounts whether they are heading for divorce. Presumably the major social media companies already have algorithms that pretty much know when divorce is happening.

Now, what do you do if you see this happening to your spouse’s friend network? That’s a good question I can’t begin answer. But you should definitely treat it as a potentially serious problem.

One suggestion I once gave someone in this scenario was to make sure his wife stayed engaged with her friends who were still long term happily married. Potentially, making sure you are ramping up your socializing with other married couples would be helpful as well.

Mind Your Own Friend Network

I tell you to keep your eye out for an increase in divorces in your spouse’s friend network, but don’t forget to also be sure to keep a close eye on your own network as well. We can be affected by our friends and associates in powerful ways that we aren’t even aware of.

I believe a lot of so-called political “radicalization” happens this way. That’s why I make an explicit point to read sources and associate with people from a range of perspectives. I don’t want to end up in a ghetto and adopt beliefs that would not have adopted if I had only maintained more diversity of inputs. Someone asked a question to a panel I was on the other day about what are good alternative sources of news to the mainstream media. I said that I do read alternative media – but I also very much subscribe and regularly read the mainstream media as well. I don’t want to just get all my inputs from one source, or from a group of sources that all think alike.

In the case of marriage, I want to be hanging out and being friends with lots of married people. I want that to be the norm for my social experience. If a friend does get divorced, I want to be there for him, and certainly not cut him off. But I’m attuned to who I surround myself with here.

Unfortunately, in today’s world we can’t just rely on the social structures, laws and conventions of yesteryear to keep us on track. In my grandparents’ generation, when lifelong marriage was the norm and divorce uncommon, and sometimes scandalous, you didn’t necessarily need to do much to stay on the straight and narrow.

In today’s world, where the culture encourages self-sabotaging behavior and the guardrails are gone, we have to be super-intentional to make sure we are not exposing ourself to negative or dangerous inputs.

That’s why it’s a good idea today to keep an eye on your own friend network, and also on your spouses’ network to keep an eye out for divorce contagion.

By the way, while I’ve traditionally written mostly for men, this applicable to married people of both sexes.

Coda

On a summer excursion to Murray Bay in Quebec, [Learned] Hand met a young woman who, he thought, might rescue him from his unsatisfactory bachelorhood. The problem was that Frances Fincke, the girl in question, had been educated at Bryn Mawr. The college had been founded, in 1885, as a WASP experiment in extending the advantages of liberal education to young women who would otherwise have been condemned to finishing school, and it was a good deal more academically rigorous than Harvard or Yale at the time. Its president, Martha Cary Thomas, part visionary, part ogress, was determined that nothing should stand in the way of her girls’ realization. Among the obstacles she had in mind were husbands. “Our failures only marry,” she said.

- Michael Knox Beran, WASPS

Cover image credit: Jennifer Pahlka/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0