Can divorce be good for a relationship? I think that in some cases only a serious failure can help us better understand our actions and their consequences.
Hi, I’m Dan Ariely. I do research in behavioral economics and try to describe it in plain language. These findings have enriched my life, and my hope is that they will do the same for you.
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But that’s assuming that divorce is the only form of feedback in a relationship. That seems a little bit of overkill!
Your typed preface to the video says a great deal… “in some cases only”…. Granted this is a bit out of context, but in some cases serious personal failure can lead to reflection and course correction. In some cases, we can learn from others’ mistakes. In some cases we make the same mistakes over and over and over again without seeming to learn as we go.
Perhaps without “serious failure” we have no idea of what is at stake, but I do not agree that “serious failure” is a requirement or prerequisite for “serious relationships” – or for successful relationships, either.
To expand just a bit on Susan’s point, it is not the divorce which is important, but the learning and application of same.
She points out that it is not at all uncommon for people to divorce, find someone who might as well be the clone of the first relationship, and either divorce or break up for very-much the same reasons.
Even self-knowledge is not enough. Knowing you are making a mistake will not prevent you from making it. Heck…your book illustrates this fact over and over, Dan!
So, my reason for commenting is to point out that learning the lesson is only half the key. The other half is to apply the lesson to the appropriate events in one’s life.
Could it suffice that one (or both) partner(s) be the child of divorced parents? Would it be contingent upon the age of the individual when their parents divorced or the severity (nastiness) of the divorce?
I’m in agreement with Susan. Statistics also suggest that second marriages fail even more often than first ones, so the education is clearly not compulsory.
People’s extrapolation from failure is not reliably accurate, and I suspect there’s a cognitive skew toward exonerating oneself. Even if somebody avoids blaming the other person, there’s a tendency to classify the failure as the result of something inevitable or inherent (the “growing apart” or “never should have gotten married” assessment).
I submit that exposure to reality is very different from having an understanding of it.
Are you assuming that being married and not getting divorced is “better” or the “goal” of being happier? To achieve the goal or a happier status, it is better to have divorced at least once in order to avoid divorce?
In business, failure is actually not a bad thing (as long as it didn’t kill ya) in order to achieve the next success. But, sustaining success is even harder to do. Lessons learned from the past is actually good, but is marriage applied to the same rule? I wonder if there is stats to back your thought. Maybe marriage is harder and more complex than running a business. Does the reward of a marriage out weight the effort to have one and maintain it? I would love to believe so;-)
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