CHAPTER 7
BUILDING SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS:
INTIMACY AND FAMILIES

Macro-Micro Connections

Divorce as a Personal Experience

While scholars, politicians, and pundits argue over what to do about our high divorce rate, several million people continue to experience the ending of a marriage each year.

Despite the fact that it's so common, divorce is not the sort of experience that we prepare or train for. Prenuptial agreements may spell out in advance the settlement conditions if a marriage ends, but they address only the economic and legal facets of breakupsónot the emotional, interpersonal, and social ones.

The "spoiling" of a close relationship can be emotionally devastating. It can create deep wounds akin to those associated with the death of a loved one. 1 We may experience a wide range of emotions, including anger, bitterness, sadness, self-pity, self-doubt, guilt, and shame.

In addition, when a relationship ends, so do the benefits that came with it. We lose the partner on whom we came to depend, and we lose contact with friends and acquaintances whom we came to know through that partner.

Perhaps most unsettling is the transformation of identity initiated by the ending of a relationship. Becoming an ex-spouse or ex-lover means exiting one social role and entering another.2 People whose relationships have ended must remove themselves from the norms and expectations associated with the old role and learn new ones. They must begin to see the world from a single person's perspective and not a couple's perspective.

In addition, the entire history of the relationship requires redefinition. Those once-pleasant rituals, in retrospect, become annoying habits. The good times get reinterpreted as bad; the bad times are seen as more typical, indicative of the eventual breakup.

Further complicating the process of role exit is the social stigma associated with the termination of an intimate relationship. Like most things in our achievement-oriented society, relationshipsóparticularly marriagesótend to be viewed in success/failure terms. Although studies consistently show a clear decline in disapproval of divorce as a general category, disapproval of divorced individuals continues.3

Divorced families are still characterized as "broken," "weak," "fragile," "split," or "fragmented." Divorcing individuals may come to feel demoralized and rejected by married friends and experience diminishing self-esteem. Friends, relatives, co-workers and other interested parties typically want to know who's to blame, who to help, and whose side to take. These stigmatizing effects of divorce illustrate, again, the social nature of intimate relationships.

The failure of a marriage has broader societal implications as well, because it threatens the cultural ideal of love and romance.4 A divorce calls into question the entire moral code of intimacy. Friends may begin to question the stability of their own relationships. Thus the disengaging couple is socially obligated to inform others that although commitment to this particular relationship has deteriorated, commitment to the idea of relationships has not.

Such commitment is reflected in the fact that an estimated 90% or more of young adults will marry at some point in their lives.5 It is also reflected in the high percentage of people who remarry after divorce, despite the personal pain they have experienced.

1 McCall, G. J. 1982. "Becoming unrelated: The management of bond dissolution." In S. Duck (Ed.), Personal relationships 4: Dissolving personal relationships. London: Academic Press.
2 Ebaugh, H. R. F. 1988, Becoming an ex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
3 Gertsel, N. 1987. "Divorce and stigma." Social Problems, 34, 172-186.
4 Blumstein, P., & Kollock, P. 1988. "Personal relationships." Annual Review of Sociology, 14, 467-490.
5 Norton, A. J. 1987. "Families and children in the year 2000." Children Today, July/August, 6-9.