Divorcé's Guide to Marriage

Study Reveals Five Common Themes Underlie Most Divorces

• By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

photo: Getty Images

Sometimes it takes going through a bad marriage to figure out what makes a good marriage. Five strategies for a successful, happy marriage from divorced people who learned these lessons the hard way. Elizabeth Bernstein has details on Lunch Break.

Want great marriage advice? Ask a divorced person.

People who lose the most important relationship of their life tend to spend some time thinking about what went wrong. If they are at all self-reflective, this means they will acknowledge their own mistakes, not just their ex's blunders. And if they want to be lucky in love next time, they'll try to learn from these mistakes.

Research shows that most divorced people identify the same top five regrets—behaviors they believe contributed to their marriage's demise and that they resolve to change next time. "Divorced individuals who step back and say, 'This is what I've done wrong and this is what I will change,' have something powerful to teach others," says Terri Orbuch, a psychologist, research professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and author of the new book "Finding Love Again: 6 Simple Steps to a New and Happy Relationship." "This is marriage advice learned the hard way," she says

Dr. Orbuch has been conducting a longitudinal study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, collecting data periodically from 373 same-race couples who were between the ages of 25 and 37 and in their first year of marriage in 1986, the year the study began. Over the continuing study's 25 years so far, 46% of the couples divorced—a rate in line with the Census and other national data. Dr. Orbuch followed many of the divorced individuals into new relationships and asked 210 of them what they had learned from their mistakes. (Of these 210, 71% found new partners, including 44% who remarried.) This is their hard-earned advice.

Boost your spouse's mood

Of the divorced people, 15% said they would give their spouse more of what Dr. Orbuch calls "affective affirmation," including compliments, cuddling and kissing, hand-holding, saying "I love you," and emotional support. "By expressing love and caring you build trust," Dr. Orbuch says.
She says there are four components of displays of affection that divorced people said were important: How often the spouse showed love; how often the spouse made them feel good about the kind of person they are; how often the spouse made them feel good about having their own ideas and ways of doing things; and how often the spouse made life interesting or exciting.

The divorced individuals didn't specifically identify sex as something they would have approached differently, although Dr. Orbuch says it is certainly one aspect of demonstrating love and affection.
Men seem to need nonsexual affirmation even more than women do, Dr. Orbuch says. In her study, when the husband reported that his wife didn't show love and affection, the couple was almost twice as likely to divorce as when the man said he felt cared for and appreciated. The reverse didn't hold true, though. Couples where women felt a lack of affection weren't more likely to divorce.
Do something to demonstrate that your partner is noticed and appreciated every single day, Dr. Orbuch says. It can be as small as saying, "I love you," or "You're a great parent." It can be an action rather than words: Turn on the coffee pot in the morning. Bring in the paper. Warm up the car. Make a favorite dessert. Give a hug.

Talk more about money

Photo Illustrations by Stephen Webster

Money was the No. 1 point of conflict in the majority of marriages, good or bad, that Dr. Orbuch studied. And 49% of divorced people from her study said they fought so much over money with their spouse—whether it was different spending styles, lies about spending, one person making more money and trying to control the other—that they anticipate money will be a problem in their next relationship, too.

There isn't a single financial fix for all couples. Dr. Orbuch says each person needs to examine his or her own approach to money. What did money mean when you were growing up? How do you approach spending and saving now? What are your financial goals?
Partners need to discuss their individual money styles and devise a plan they both can live with. They might decide to pool their money, or keep separate accounts. They might want a joint account for family expenses. In the study, six out of 10 divorced individuals who began a new relationship chose not to combine finances.

"Talk money more often—not just when it's tax time, when you have high debt, when bills come along," Dr. Orbuch says. Set ground rules and expectations and stick to them.

Get over the past

Photo Illustrations by Stephen Webster

To engage in a healthy way with your partner, you need to let go of the past, Dr. Orbuch says.
This includes getting over jealousy of your partner's past relationships, irritation at how your mother-in-law treats you, something from your own childhood that makes it hard for you to trust, a spat you had with your spouse six months ago.

It isn't good advice just for those with broken hearts, she adds.

In Dr. Orbuch's study, divorced individuals who held on to strong emotions for their ex-spouse—whether love or hate—were less healthy than those people who had moved on emotionally.
Having trouble letting go of anger, longing, sadness or grief about the past? Keep a journal. Exercise. Talk to a friend (but not endlessly) about it.

Or try writing to the person who has upset you to explain your feelings: "Dear Mother-in-Law. It's about time you treated me like a full-fledged member of this family and stopped second-guessing my parenting decisions."

Then take the excellent advice Abraham Lincoln is said to have given his secretary of war, who had written an emotional missive to one of his generals.
"Put it in the stove," Lincoln said. "That's what I do when I've written a letter when I am angry."
"This is an exercise for you, to get all the emotions out on paper so you can release them," Dr. Orbuch says.

Blame the relationship

Photo Illustrations by Stephen Webster

The divorced individuals in the study who blamed ex-spouses, or even themselves, had more anxiety, depression and sleep disorders than individuals who blamed the way that they and their partners interacted. Those who held on to anger were less likely to move on, build a strong new relationship and address future problems in a positive, proactive manner.

It's hard not to blame. In the study, 65% of divorced individuals blamed their ex-spouses, with more women blaming an ex-husband (80%) than men blaming an ex-wife (47%). And 16% of men blamed themselves, compared with only 4% of women. Dr. Orbuch says the men may simply accept their ex's view of the breakup. More men than women admitted to an extramarital affair.

How do you blame in a healthy way? Say "we," not "you" or "I." Say, "We are both so tired lately," not "You are so crabby." When you remove blame, it's easier to come up with a solution.
Ask your partner for his or her view of a problem. Say, "Why do you think we aren't getting along?"
"There are multiple ways of seeing a problem," Dr. Orbuch says. "By getting your partner's perspective, and marrying it with your perspective, you get the relationship perspective."

Reveal more about yourself

 

Communication style is the No. 1 thing the study's divorced individuals said they would change in the next relationship (41% said they would communicate differently).

Spouses need to speak in a calm and caring voice. They should learn to argue in a way that produces a solution, not just more anger.

They have to practice "active listening," where they try to hear what the other person is saying, repeating back what they just heard and asking if they understood correctly.
To communicate well, partners need to reveal more about themselves, not just do "maintenance communication."

"It doesn't have to be emotional," Dr. Orbuch says. "But it should be about issues where you learn about what makes each other tick." Such topics help your partner understand you better.
Dr. Orbuch suggests a 10-minute rule: Every day, for 10 minutes, the couple should talk alone about something other than work, the family and children, the household, the relationship. No problems. No scheduling. No logistics.

"You need to tell each other about your lives and see what makes you each tick," Dr. Orbuch says.

Flummoxed by Failure—or Focused?

It's not about being smart. The key to getting past unsuccessful moments is a flexible view of learning

By KEN BAIN

Many people think of intelligence as static: you are born with lots of brains, very few, or somewhere in between, and that quantum of intelligence largely determines how well you do in school and in life.

Where do helpless students get the notion that intelligence is fixed? In part from our culture, which bombards them with the idea that IQ tests measure how bright they are.

The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has never liked this view. "I hardly ever use the word intelligence," says Mr. Tyson, who directs the Hayden Planetarium in New York. "I think of people as either wanting to learn, ambivalent about learning or rejecting learning." He speaks from experience: As a young man, he was booted from one doctoral program but managed to get into another and complete his Ph.D.

Over the past 25 years, social scientists have produced some key insights into how successful people overcome their unsuccessful moments—and they have found that attitudes toward learning play a large role from a young age.
In a 1978 study, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and a colleague gave a series of puzzles to children, all of them about 10 years old. The first eight problems required some careful thought, but none was too demanding. The next four, however, were far too hard for anyone that age to solve in the allotted time. On the first eight, all of the youngsters solved the exercises and appeared to enjoy them. But everything changed with the impossible second set.

Reactions differed enormously. One group of students said things like, "I can't solve these problems. I'm not smart enough." They wilted in the face of failure. Children in the other group took a different approach: They kept telling themselves that they could solve the difficult problems with more effort.
Dr. Dweck and other psychologists have assigned labels to these two types of students. Students of the first sort are called "helpless" because they develop the idea that they just can't do something. If they continue to believe that they are generally smart, they still often become helpless because they are afraid to try anything new for fear that failure will undermine their self-image as "one of the bright ones."

Kids of the second sort, however, are said to have a mind-set of "mastery" or "growth." They believe that they can expand their abilities if they try. If they don't succeed, they look for new strategies rather than giving up.

Are these students just smarter than their "helpless" peers? Not according to Dr. Dweck. She has found that children in the two groups have roughly the same natural abilities. In fact, sometimes the "helpless" ones demonstrate greater native powers.

Brian Stauffer

Social scientists have found that attitudes toward learning play a large role from a young age.

Where do helpless students get the notion that intelligence is fixed? In part from our culture, which bombards them with the idea that IQ tests measure how bright they are. Even well-meaning parents and teachers can foster this view. Melissa Kamins, who worked with Dr. Dweck, discovered that children who primarily receive personal praise ("how smart you are") rather than kudos for their efforts are more likely to develop fixed views of intelligence.

A growth mind-set can be learned. In a 2007 study by psychologists from Columbia and Stanford, nearly 100 seventh graders (most of them struggling in math) participated in an eight-week workshop on studying. The subjects were secretly divided into two large groups. Both groups received instruction on how to use their study time most effectively and how to organize and remember new material.

But then came the difference: One of the groups read aloud an article titled "You Can Grow Your Intelligence." It explained research on how nerve cells in the brain make stronger connections after we learn something new. Students in the other group spent that time reading an article about how memory works and learning new strategies for recalling material.

Most of the students went into the sessions generally believing that intelligence was fixed for life, but the group that read about the brain's growth emerged from the experience with much stronger notions about improving intelligence with effort. That group generally showed greater motivation to do well in math class in the weeks and months after the experience.

As the researchers noted, someone's theory about intelligence may not make much difference when times are easy. But when failures accumulate, those who believe that they can improve their basic abilities are far more likely to weather the storm.
—Adapted from Dr. Bain's new book, "What The Best College Students Do" (Harvard University Press).

A version of this article appeared July 14, 2012, on page C3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Flummoxed by Failure—or Focused?.

"Is That Allowed?" "It Is Here."

Three immigrant stories that illustrate what makes our country great.

By Peggy Noonan:

     There's something Haley Barbour reminded me of called the Gate Rule. The former Mississippi governor said it's the first thing you should think of when you think about immigration. People are either lined up at the gate trying to get out of a country, or lined up trying to get in.
     It says something about the health of a nation when they're lined up to get in, as they are, still, with America. It says, of course, that compared with a lot of the rest of the world, America's economy isn't in such bad shape. But it says more than that. People don't want to come to a place when they know they'll be treated badly. They don't want to call your home their home unless they know you'll make room for them in more than economic ways.
     And so this July 4, a small tribute to American friendliness, openness, and lack of—what to call it? The old hatreds. They dissipate here. In Ireland, Catholics and Protestants could be at each other's throats for centuries, but the minute they moved here, they were in the Kiwanis Club together. The Mideast is a cauldron, but when its residents move here, they wind up on the same PTA committee. It sounds sentimental, but this is part of the magic of America, and the world still knows it even if we, in our arguments, especially about immigration, forget.
     So, three stories of American friendliness, openness and lack of the old hatreds.
     There was a teenager who came here with his parents and younger brother. They arrived in New York and got an apartment on 181st Street and Broadway. He spoke little English but went right into public school. The family needed money, so when he was 16, he transferred to night school and got a day job at a shaving-brush factory. He wore big, heavy rubber gloves and squeezed bleaching acid out of the bristles. Soon he went part time to City College, and then he entered the U.S. Army.

David Gothard

This is a classic immigrant story. It could be about anyone. But the teenager went on to become an American secretary of state, and his name is Henry Kissinger. Here is another part of the story that is classic: how Americans treated him. The workers at the factory were older than he, mostly Italian-American, some second-generation. They wanted to help make him part of things, so they started taking him to baseball games.
     "It was the summer of 1939. . . . I didn't know anything about baseball," he remembered this week. Now here he was in the roaring stands at Yankee Stadium. About the people in the bleachers, he said, "the most striking thing was the enormous friendliness, the bantering." In Hitler's Germany, "I saw crowds, I'd go to the other side of the street." Here, no sense of looming threat. "That I would say was a very American part of my experience."
     He was "enchanted" by the game—"the subtlety, the little nuances—you can watch what the strategy is and how they judge what the opponent is likely to do by the way the fielders position themselves. . . . It is a game that combines leisure with highly dramatic moments!"
     And there was the man called Joe DiMaggio. The factory workers would sort of say, "If you take a look at Joe DiMaggio," you will learn something about this country. DiMaggio was "infinitely graceful" as a fielder, "he would sort of lope towards the ball . . . nothing dramatic, he didn't tumble, he didn't strut, and he made it look effortless." He didn't "stand there wagging his bat. . . . He would just stand there with his bat raised. . . . He was all concentration."
     Years later they met, and Mr. Kissinger, faced with his boyhood idol, that symbol of those early years, was awed. It was like being a kid and meeting a movie star: "I didn't know exactly what to say to him." They became friends. "He had a fierce kind of integrity."
     So Henry Kissinger learned some things about Americans, and America, thanks to a bunch of Italian guys in a brush factory downtown. They were good to him. They were welcoming. Probably when they or their people were new here, someone was good to them.
     That is American friendliness. Here is American openness—meaning if you are open to it, it will be open to you. Mary Dorian was an uneducated Irish farm girl with no family to speak of and no prospects. She came to America on her own, around 1920. She wrote to the one girl she knew, a distant cousin in Brooklyn, to ask that she meet her at the ship. She landed at Ellis Island, went to the agreed-upon spot, and the cousin wasn't there. She had forgotten. Mary, my grandmother, spent her first night in America alone on a park bench in lower Manhattan.
She went on to find Brooklyn and settle in. She joined an Irish club and a step-dancing club. They didn't have anything like that back home.
     We make a mistake when we worry that sometimes immigrants come here and burrow more into their old nationality than their new one. It's not a rejection of America, just a way of not being lonely, of still being connected to something. She met her husband in an Irish club, and she got a job hanging up coats in a restaurant. Then she became a bathroom attendant at Abraham & Strauss on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn. When she died in 1960, a lot of black people came to the funeral. This, in a Brooklyn broken up into separate ethnic enclaves, was surprising, but it wouldn't have been to her. They were her coworkers from A&S, all the girls who worked in the ladies room, and their families. They loved her.
     When she died, Mary Dorian had a job, a family and friends. She had come here with none of those things. She trusted America, and it came through.
     As for the old hatreds:
     There was a 7-year-old boy who came over from Germany on the SS Bremen. He was travelling with his younger brother—they too were fleeing the Nazis—and a steward. The Bremen anchored on Manhattan's west side on May 4, 1939, and the children were joined by their father, who was already in New York. They stood on deck watching the bustle of disembarking, and then the boy saw something. "Across the street from where we were, and visible from the boat, was a delicatessen which had its name in neon with Hebrew letters," he remembered this week.
He was startled. Something with Hebrew letters—that was impossible back home. He asked his father, "Is that allowed?"
And his father said, "It is here."
It is here.
     The little boy was Mike Nichols, the great film and stage director, who went on to do brilliant things with the freedom he was given here.
     Sometimes we think our problems are so big we have to remake ourselves to meet them. But maybe we don't. Maybe we just have to remember who we are—open, friendly, welcoming and free.
Happy Fourth of July to this tender little country, to the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

A version of this article appeared July 7, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: 'Is That Allowed?' 'It Is Here.'