There is a scene in the Netflix series House of Cards that exemplifies the traditional idea of what leads to divorce. The couple, Frank and Claire Underwood, engage in an aggressive argument one evening, and the next morning, Claire informs her husband that she is leaving him. Typical scenario, right? The spouses fight and one of them decides they’ve had enough. According to Psychology professor, E. Mavis Hetherington at the University of Virginia, however, most marriages don’t end in a bang. Instead, an “emotional divorce” often takes place long before a spouse asks for one. In an emotional divorce, one of the spouses, usually the wife, checks out of the marriage without any formal notice that she has done so. Instead of a climactic declaration of divorce after a huge fight, as with the Underwoods in House of Cards, the declaration often comes after a period of apparent calm.
Hearing that a wife wants a divorce often comes as a shock to the husband. One reason for the surprise is that, during the emotional divorce, fighting seems to stop. This calm leads the husband to believe that the marriage is healing when, in fact, apathy is settling into the marriage. Oddly, bickering and arguing can indicate that a marriage is still alive because the spouses are invested enough in the relationship to fight for it. On the other hand, when the emotion and love finally leave the marriage, distance and detachment fill the vacuum. When one spouse no longer cares enough to argue, the marriage is dead. The emotional divorce decree, so to speak, has been entered.
So, if a spouse has gone through an emotional divorce why does the spouse often prolong the big reveal? A number of factors influence this decision. An important one is financial dependence. If a spouse relies on the other spouse’s income, the spouse may need to take time to get all of his or her financial ducks in a row before seeking an actual divorce. Living arrangements, everyday expenses, and career concerns all need to be considered. A second factor has to do with children. In order to protect children, spouses sometimes hang around in a dead marriage until their children are old enough to handle it. Finally, simple procrastination can causes delays. The anticipated unpleasantness of a divorce can cause spouses to put off the inevitable for months or even years.
The biggest way to avoid the emotional divorce is, believe it or not, to engage in disagreements. Engaging in small skirmishes with civil, honest communication may very well save a marriage from reaching the unexpected emotional divorce. The purpose of the disagreements, however, must be to resolve disputes and not to injure the other spouse with insults and shouting. Repeated marital conflict without resolution ultimately turns into a death spiral which ends with one or both of the spouses simply giving up. The quiet that results from giving up is the calm before divorce.