summary of divorce essay

Persuasive & Argumentative Essays about Divorce: Free Tips

A divorce is a life-changing experience that affects spouses and their children (if there are any). Since divorce rates are relatively high in modern society, more and more people face this problem nowadays.

When you are assigned to compose an argumentative essay about divorce, you should be as careful as possible. Remember that the split-up of marriage can be a painful experience for everyone involved.

The article will give you useful advice on how to write an outstanding paper on the topic. Learn the essential features of the following types:

• persuasive essay about divorce,
• for and against essay,
• causes and effects of divorce essay,

Check tips from Custom-writing.org below and write the best paper!

• 💍 How to Write It
• 📂 Essays by Type
• ✒ Causes and Effects

✍️ Divorce Essay Topics

💍 how to write a divorce essay.

The general structure of essays on divorce is quite common:

• introduction;
• conclusion.

Yet, there are some variations of what info to include in the body, depending on the essay type. The following structure is applicable for divorce argumentative essay. To learn about the features of other types, keep on reading our article.

Argumentative divorce essays are composed according to the standard structure:

1. Thesis Statement about Divorce

A divorce essay introduction isn’t anything extraordinary as you have to introduce your topic and position.

• You should always give broad information about the issue and state the main problems you will discuss in your writing.
• Make a general statement about the consequences of divorce or the common divorce effects on people.
• Then write your thesis statement on divorce. Clearly explain to the audience the topic you’re going to discuss and your position on that topic. In case you find this task difficult, try using a thesis generator for argumentative essay . This will save you some time.

That’s it! Now your divorce essay introduction is ready.

What’s next?

2. Main Body

This section presents all of your ideas and arguments related to the topic of divorce.

• Here you can write about the adverse effects of divorce on children or the most common reasons people divorce.
• Use compelling arguments and support your ideas with examples.

There are tons of surveys and statistics about divorce on the internet, so it won’t be too challenging to gather the information you need.

3. Conclusion

In the last paragraph, you have to sum up your paper and leave a final expression.

• Summarize every idea presented in your divorce essay.
• Restate your thesis statement on divorce, relying on your reasoning.
• Then list your concluding thoughts on this topic.

Make your sentences clear and easy to follow. Use synonyms to improve your writing style. Such an approach will help you convince the readers and express your thoughts better.

📂 Divorce Essays by Type

The content and reasoning of each paper on divorce depend primarily on the type of essay . See the following sections to understand how to write each of them.

Here are a few types you can consider:

Argumentative Essay about Divorce

When it comes to divorce, there are many disputable topics—for example, the reasons people separate or its impact on children. It’s easy to find support and statistics for both issues. And you’ll need them as facts are a crucial part of a divorce argumentative essay.

As a starting point:

Research your idea and choose a side to support. Make sure that among all argumentative essay topics about divorce, you selected the most interesting for yourself. In your thesis statement, concisely express your position, so the reader can quickly get it.

Then, start writing the entire essay. Regardless of what type of paper you are writing—anti or pro divorce argumentative essay—your writing should meet these requirements:

• Base your points on logic;
• Present both sides of the arguments, but support only one;
• Take into consideration counterclaims;
• Support all the arguments by valid evidence;
• Use a calm, informative tone.

Don’t forget to incorporate quotes and figures to convince your readers.

Persuasive Essay about Divorce

What is the goal of writing persuasive essays ? It’s to convince your reader that your position on a particular problem is true.

Therefore, writing this paper means that you should identify an individual problem related to the topic. In the introduction of your persuasive essay about divorce, you should choose your side and deliver it to the reader.

Crucial note:

Similarly to an argumentative essay, you have to provide credible facts to support your position. Yet here, you use them to back up your opinion and persuade your reader.

While composing your persuasive essay about the legalization of divorce, remember its distinctive features:

• Based on emotions;
• Presents only one side of the argument;
• Ignores counterclaims;
• The tone is dynamic, emotionally-charged, and aggressive to some extent.

Cause and Effect Essay on Divorce

Whether it concerns old parents or a young couple, divorce typically has the same causes and effects. You can often see them clearly, even in books or movies.

The essay outline for the causes and effects of divorce essay is quite common:

• Introduction.

In your divorce essay introduction, provide a general background and compose a clear thesis statement. For example, your thesis might look like this:

A divorce, caused by the spouses’ expectations mismatch, results in a lack of communication between children and one of the parents.

In this part of your essay, investigate the cause and effect of divorce, you stated before.

For the given thesis, the main points would be the following:

The primary cause of divorce is the mismatch in the spouses’ expectations from the marriage.

The divorce often results in a lack of children’s interactions with one of the parents.

• Conclusion.

Synthesize all of your arguments and give your audience a space for a further investigation of your issue.

Narrative Essay about Divorce

If your assignment is to write a family essay, you can choose from a wide range of topics. For this purpose, a marriage essay or a divorce essay would be perfect.

In a short paper about your family, it isn’t easy to cover many topics. So choose only one.

Look through some narrative essay topics and select the one you like:

• The story of my divorce: how did I decide to break up with my spouse?
• My life completely changed after my parents divorced.
• How my life looked like before the divorce with my wife/husband and how it looks now.
• The way divorce destroys healthy communication between children and parents in my family.

For and Against Divorce Essay

As you know, both the negative and positive effects of divorce are disputable, making them appealing to discuss. There are many recent studies and relevant statistical data on the topic to help you write such an essay.

This topic would also be great for a speech on divorce.

Wondering what are the for and against divorce arguments? Take a look at the following:

✒ Divorce: Causes and Effects

We have a pleasant bonus for you! Below, you can find useful arguments and insightful ideas that you can use in your papers on divorce. Apply our concepts in any type of essay, adjusting them to your topic.

Divorce essays can cover the following issues:

Generally Known Facts on Divorces

When covering this issue in your persuasive essay on divorce, you will have to cover the problem altogether. Include the common marriage problems that psychologists all over the world study. Use their statistical data on divorces when crafting your argument.

Divorce is quite a broad topic, and you may want to narrow it down. With so much information available, you could write a research paper on divorce without any difficulty.

Statistical Data on Divorces

Good divorce essays should include enough statistical data. It will add more scientific value and reveal your research abilities. Besides, facts and figures present many exciting topics to comment on.

For example:

You can do significant research concerning divorce causes and consequences. Draw a contrast between divorce in several countries, or examine the age and education of people who officially separate more often.

Reasons for Divorces

What does an essay on divorce mean without discussion of its reasons?

Find out different sociologists’ viewpoints on the reasons for divorces. Then underline the cause you consider to be the most truthful one.

You can also provide your own theory on the grounds for divorces in your persuasive essay on divorce. The key point is to prove the accuracy of your statement.

Divorce Prevention Ideas

If there is a problem, there must be some solution. So, think of the possible ways to make a marriage work.

Investigate divorce causes from a scientific point of view. Examine the primary studies that reveal why people actually break up. Also, discuss the precautions that can help married couples avoid significant conflicts.

Effects of Divorce on Children

Parents sometimes forget that their divorce isn’t only about them but also about their children. It causes psychological problems for kids, which you can classify in your paper. Don’t forget to add some statistical data on divorce to support your arguments.

Every child reacts differently to their parents’ breakup. It’s a rare case when divorce consequences are positive, making the effects on kids an urgent topic to discuss.

Positive Effects of Divorce

Sometimes divorce isn’t a catastrophe but rather the only way to heal wounds and begin a new life. Often, people don’t recognize that they need to change their lives for the better. This situation is primarily related to abusive marriages or those with regular cheating.

In these cases, the positive effects of divorce may seem easy to understand. However, psychologists have to make great efforts to persuade people to end their relationships. Write a paper making this same argument.

• Negative outcomes of divorce on children.  
• Connection between divorce and antisocial behavior of children.
• Family crises and the issue it causes: divorce, remarriage, stepparents, adoption. 
• Effect of divorce on teenagers ’ academic performance.
• Causes and consequences of divorce .
• What can be done to decrease divorce rates in America ?
• Does parental divorce affect the rates of juvenile delinquency ?
• The most widespread reasons for divorce .
• Analyze marital success factors and Gottman’s predictors of divorce.
• Impact of divorce on child’s mental health .
• Change of divorce law throughout history.
• Positive and negative changes in children’s behavior after divorce.
• Divorce : a disaster or a benefit?
• Is cheating one of the main reasons of divorce?
• Gender stratification impact on divorce trends.
• Effect of divorce on family relationship .
• Do divorced parents change their child-rearing styles ?
• List of factors typically associated with higher divorce rates .
• The support required for all the members of divorced and single-parent families .
• Analyze the reasons for high divorce rates .
• Does divorce only impact adolescent in a bad way?
• Effect of poverty on divorce rates.
• Specifics of divorce in the UAE .
• Does divorce lead to depression?  
• Family therapy and its role in decreasing divorce rates.
• The impact of divorce on children-parents relationship.
• Evaluation of child custody in divorce proceedings.
• How to manage the stress of divorce.   
• Effect of divorce on children’s self-esteem.
• How to minimize the devastating consequences of divorce .
• Addiction as the reason for divorce.
• Effective communication in marriage and its role in preventing divorce.
• Divorce as the only way out of an abusive relationship.
• Financial issues of divorce and how to overcome them.
• Parental support is the best way to help children to go through divorce.
• How do adolescents adjust to parental divorce?
• Do boys and girls react to the parental divorce the same way?
• Social media can destroy relationship and lead to divorce.
• Can Christian counseling help couples to resolve their issues and avoid divorce?
• Poverty among divorced women.
• Young marriage has more chances to break-up.
• Respect is the best way to get marriage satisfaction and avoid divorce.
• Is interfaith marriage doomed to divorce?
• Why a successful marriage may end in divorce?
• Marriage contract will help to facilitate the legal side of divorce process.
• Reduction of the number of divorces.
• Personal development after divorce.
• How family relationships influence future marriage and divorce chances of children.
• Child support in case of marriage divorce.
• Will lack of family and work balance definitely result in divorce?

If you are stuck on writing, you can always ask us for help! Whether you need a persuasive essay on divorce or any other paper, we are here and ready to assist.

Thanks for reading the article! Share it with friends who may need our tips or assistance.

Further reading:

• Top Ideas for Argumentative or Persuasive Essay Topics
• Best Argumentative Research Paper Topics
• 197 Inspirational & Motivational Argumentative Essay Topics
• Gun Control Essay: How-to Guide + Argumentative Topics
• Proposal Essay Topics and Ideas – Easy and Interesting
• Free Exemplification Essay Examples

🔗 References

• Essay Introductions
• Transitional Words and Phrases
• Argumentative Paper Format
• The Writing Process
• Divorce Argument Essay: Bartleby
• Cause and Effect Essay: The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Roane State Community College and UNC at Chapel Hill Writing Center
• Counterargument: Gordon Harvey, the Writing Center at Harvard University
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Essays About Divorce: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Essays about divorce can be challenging to write; read on to see our top essay examples and writing prompts to help you get started.

Divorce is the legal termination of a marriage. It can be a messy affair, especially if it includes children. Dividing the couple’s assets also often causes chaos when divorce proceedings are in session. 

Divorce also touches and considers religion and tradition. Therefore, laws are formed depending on the country’s history, culture, and belief system.

To help you choose what you want to talk about regarding this topic, here are examples you can read to get an idea of what kind of essay you want to write.

1. Divorce Should Be Legalized in the Philippines by Ernestine Montgomery

2. to divorce or not to divorce by mark ghantous, 3. what if you mess up by manis friedman, 4. divorce: a life-changing experience by writer louie, 5. divorce’s effects on early adult relationships by percy massey, 1. the major reasons for divorce, 2. why i support divorce, 3. my divorce experience, 4. how to avoid divorce, 5. divorce and its effects on my family, 6. the consequences of divorce, 7. divorce laws around the world.

“What we need is a divorce law that defines clearly and unequivocally the grounds and terms for terminating a marriage… Divorce is a choice and we all should have the freedom to make choices… in cases where a union is more harmful than beneficial, a divorce can be benevolent and less hurtful way of severing ties with your partner.”

As the title suggests, Montgomery and his other colleagues discuss why the Philippines, a predominantly Catholic country, needs to allow divorce. Then, to strengthen his argument, he mentions that Spain, the root of Christianity, and Italy, where the Vatican City is, administer divorce. 

He also mentions bills, relevant figures, and statistics to make his case in favor of divorce more compelling. Montgomery adds that people who want a divorce don’t necessarily mean they want to marry again, citing other motives such as abuse and marital failure.

“Divorce, being the final step in a detrimental marriage, brings upon the gruesome decision as to whether a married couple wishes to end that once made commitment they had for each other. As opposed to the present, divorce was rare in ancient times…”

Ghantous starts his essay with what divorce means, as not only an end of a commitment but also the termination of legal duties and other obligations of the couple to each other. He then talks about divorce in ancient times, when men had superior control over women and their children. He also mentions Caroline Norton, who fought with English family law that was clearly against women.

“So even though G‑d has rules,… laws,… divine commandments, when you sin, He tells you: ‘You messed up? Try again.’ That’s exactly how you should be married — by treating your spouse the way G‑d treats you. With that much mercy and compassion, that much kindness and consideration.”

Friedman’s essay discusses how the Torah sees marriage and divorce and explains it by recounting a scene with his daughters where they couldn’t follow a recipe. He includes good treatment and forgiveness necessary in spouses. But he also explains that God understands and doesn’t want people in a failed marriage to continue hurting. You might also be interested in these essays about commitment .

“Depending on the reasons that led up to the divorce the effects can vary… I was fourteen years old and the one child that suffered the most emotional damage… My parents did not discuss their reasons for the divorce with me, they didn’t have to, and I knew the reasons.”

The author starts the essay by citing the famous marital promise: “For better or worse, for richer or poorer,” before going in-depth regarding the divorce rate among Americans. He further expounds on how common divorce is, including its legalities. Although divorce has established legal grounds, it doesn’t consider the emotional trauma it will cause, especially for children.

Louie recounts how his life changed when his dad moved out, listing why his parents divorced. He ends the essay by saying society is at fault for commercializing divorce as if it’s the only option.

“With divorce becoming more prevalent, many researchers have taken it upon themselves to explore many aspects of this topic such as evolving attitudes, what causes divorce, and how it effects the outcome of children’s lives.”

Massey examines the causes of divorce and how it impacts children’s well-being by citing many relevant research studies. Some of the things he mentions are the connection between the child’s mental health, behavioral issues, and future relationships. Another is the trauma a child can endure during the divorce proceedings.

He also mentions that some children who had a broken family put marriage on a pedestal. As a result, they do their best to create a better future family and treat their children better.

Top 7 Prompts on Essays About Divorce

After adding to your knowledge about the subject, you’re better prepared to write essays about divorce.

There are many causes of the dissolution of marriage, and many essays have already discussed these reasons. However, you can explain these reasons differently. For example, you can focus on domestic abuse, constant fighting, infidelity, financial issues, etc.

If you want to make your piece stand out, you can include your personal experience, but only if you’re comfortable sharing your story with others. 

If you believe divorce offers a better life for all parties involved, list these benefits and explain them. Then, you can focus on a specific pro of legalizing divorce, such as getting out of an abusive relationship. 

If you want to write an essay to argue against the negative effects of divorce, here’s an excellent guide on how to write an argumentative essay .

This prompt is not only for anyone who has no or sole guardian. If you want to write about the experiences of a child raised by other people or who lives with a single parent, you can interview a friend or anyone willing to talk about their struggles and triumphs even if they didn’t have a set of parents.

Aside from reasons for divorce, you can talk about what makes these reasons more probable. Then, analyze what steps couples can take to avoid it. Such as taking couples’ therapy, weekly family get-together, etc. To make your essay more valuable, weigh in on what makes these tips effective.

Divorce is diverse and has varying effects. There are many elements to its results, and no two sets of factors are precisely the same for two families. 

If you have an intimate experience of how your immediate and extended family dynamic had been affected by divorce, narrate those affairs. Include what it made you and the others around you feel. You might also be interested in these essays about conflict .

This is a broad prompt, but you can narrow it down by focusing on an experience you or a close friend had. You can also interview someone closely related to a divorce case, such as a lawyer, reporter, or researcher. 

If you don’t have any experience with divorce, do not know anyone who had to go through it, or is more interested in its legal aspects, compiles different divorce laws for each country. You can even add a brief history for each law to make the readers understand how they came about.

Are you looking for other topics to write on? Check out our general resource of essay writing topics .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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The Lure of Divorce

Seven years into my marriage, i hit a breaking point — and had to decide whether life would be better without my husband in it..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

In the summer of 2022, I lost my mind. At first, it seemed I was simply overwhelmed because life had become very difficult, and I needed to — had every right to — blow off some steam. Our family was losing its apartment and had to find another one, fast, in a rental market gone so wild that people were offering over the asking price on rent. My husband, Keith, was preparing to publish a book, Raising Raffi, about our son, a book he’d written with my support and permission but that, as publication loomed, I began to have mixed feelings about. To cope with the stress, I asked my psychiatrist to increase the dosage of the antidepressant I’d been on for years. Sometime around then, I started talking too fast and drinking a lot.

I felt invincibly alive, powerful, and self-assured, troubled only by impatience with how slowly everyone around me was moving and thinking. Drinking felt necessary because it slightly calmed my racing brain. Some days, I’d have drinks with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which I ate at restaurants so the drink order didn’t seem too unusual. Who doesn’t have an Aperol spritz on the way home from the gym in the morning? The restaurant meals cost money, as did the gym, as did all the other random things I bought, spending money we didn’t really have on ill-fitting lingerie from Instagram and workout clothes and lots of planters from Etsy. I grew distant and impatient with Keith as the book’s publication approached, even as I planned a giant party to celebrate its launch. At the party, everyone got COVID. I handed out cigarettes from a giant salad bowl — I had gone from smoking once or twice a day to chain-smoking whenever I could get away with it. When well-meaning friends tried to point out what was going on, I screamed at them and pointed out everything that was wrong in their lives. And most crucially, I became convinced that my marriage was over and had been over for years.

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I built a case against my husband in my mind. This book of his was simply the culmination of a pattern: He had always put his career before mine; while I had tended to our children during the pandemic, he had written a book about parenting. I tried to balance writing my own novel with drop-offs, pickups, sick days, and planning meals and shopping and cooking, most of which had always been my primary responsibility since I was a freelancer and Keith had a full-time job teaching journalism. We were incompatible in every way, except that we could talk to each other as we could to no one else, but that seemed beside the point. More relevant: I spent money like it was water, never budgeting, leaving Keith to make sure we made rent every month. Every few months, we’d have a fight about this and I’d vow to change; some system would be put in place, but it never stuck. We were headed for disaster, and finally it came.

Our last fight happened after a long day spent at a wedding upstate. I’d been drinking, first spiked lemonade at lunch alone and then boxed wine during the wedding reception, where I couldn’t eat any of the food — it all contained wheat, and I have celiac disease. When we got back, late, to the house where we were staying, I ordered takeout and demanded he go pick it up for me. Calling from the restaurant, he was incensed. Did I know how much my takeout order had cost? I hadn’t paid attention as I checked boxes in the app, nor had I realized that our bank account was perilously low — I never looked at receipts or opened statements. Not knowing this, I felt like he was actually denying me food, basic sustenance. It was the last straw. I packed a bag as the kids played happily with their cousins downstairs, then waited by the side of the road for a friend who lived nearby to come pick me up, even as Keith stood there begging me to stay. But his words washed over me; I was made of stone. I said it was over — really over. This was it, the definitive moment I’d been waiting for. I had a concrete reason to leave.

A few days later, still upstate at my friend’s house, I had a Zoom call with my therapist and my psychiatrist, who both urged me in no uncertain terms to check myself into a psychiatric hospital. Even I couldn’t ignore a message that clear. My friend drove me to the city, stopping for burgers along the way — I should have relished the burger more, as it was some of the last noninstitutional food I would eat for a long time — and helped me check into NYU Langone. My bags were searched, and anything that could be used as a weapon was removed, including my mascara. I spent my first night there in a gown in a cold holding room with no phone, nothing but my thoughts. Eventually, a bed upstairs became free and I was brought to the psych ward, where I was introduced to a roommate, had blood drawn, and was given the first of many pills that would help me stop feeling so irrepressibly energetic and angry. They started me on lithium right away. In a meeting with a team of psychiatrists, they broke the news: I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; they weren’t sure which kind yet. They gave me a nicotine patch every few hours plus Klonopin and Seroquel and lithium.

I wasn’t being held involuntarily, which meant I could write letters on an official form explaining why I ought to be released, which the psychiatrists then had three days to consider. I attached extra notebook pages to the letters explaining that I was divorcing my husband and was terrified I would never be able to see my kids again if I was declared unfit because I was insane. These letters did not result in my release; if anything, they prolonged my stay. I got my phone back — it would soon be revoked again, wisely — but in that brief interim, I sent out a newsletter to my hundreds of subscribers declaring that I was getting a divorce and asking them to Venmo me money for the custody battle I foresaw. In this newsletter, I also referenced Shakespeare. The drugs clearly had not kicked in yet. I cycled through three different roommates, all of whom were lovely, though I preferred the depressed one to the borderline ones. We amused ourselves during the day by going to art therapy, music therapy, and meetings with our psychiatrists. I made a lot of beaded bracelets.

In the meetings with the shrinks, I steadfastly maintained that I was sane and that my main problem was the ending of my marriage. I put Keith, and my mother, on a list of people who weren’t allowed to visit me. Undaunted, Keith brought me gluten-free egg sandwiches in the morning, which I grudgingly ate — anything for a break from the hospital food. My parents came up from D.C. and helped Keith take care of our children. I was in the hospital for a little more than three weeks, almost the entire month of October, longer than I’d ever been away from my kids before in their lives. I celebrated my 41st birthday in the hospital and received a lot of very creative cards that my fellow crazies had decorated during art therapy. Eventually, the drugs began to work: I could tell they were working because instead of feeling energetic, I suddenly couldn’t stop crying. The tears came involuntarily, like vomit. I cried continuously for hours and had to be given gabapentin in order to sleep.

On the day I was released, I didn’t let anyone pick me up. I expected the superhuman strength I’d felt for months to carry me, but it was gone, lithiumed away. Instead, I felt almost paralyzed as I carried my bags to a cab. When I arrived at my apartment, I couldn’t figure out where I should sleep. It didn’t feel like my home anymore. We couldn’t afford to live separately, even temporarily, but the one thing that our somewhat decrepit, inconveniently located new apartment had in its favor was two small attic bedrooms and one larger bedroom downstairs. I claimed this downstairs room for myself and began to live there alone, coming into contact with Keith only when we had to be together with our children.

You might assume that my fixation on divorce would have subsided now that my mental health had stabilized and I was on strong antipsychotic medication. But I still did not want to stay in my marriage. If anything, I felt a newfound clarity: Keith and I had fundamentally incompatible selves. Our marriage had been built on a flaw. My husband was older, more established and successful in his career. These were the facts, so it had to be my job to do more of the work at home. Unless, of course, I decided to take myself and my work as seriously as he took his. But that was unappealing; I had managed to publish three books before turning 40, but I didn’t want to work all the time, like he does.

I wondered if my marriage would always feel like a competition and if the only way to call the competition a draw would be to end it.

We picked the kids up from school and dropped them off, or really mostly Keith did. I appeared at meals and tried to act normal. I was at a loss for what to do much of the time. I attended AA meetings and the DBT meetings required by the hospital outpatient program, and I read. I read books about insanity: Darkness Visible, The Bell Jar, An Unquiet Mind, Postcards From the Edge. I tried to understand what was happening to me, but nothing seemed to resonate until I began to read books about divorce. I felt I was preparing myself for what was coming. The first book I read was Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, which has become the go-to literary divorce bible since its 2012 publication. In it, Cusk describes the way her life shattered and recomposed after the dissolution of her marriage, when her daughters were still very young. She makes the case for the untenability of her relationship by explaining that men and women are fundamentally unequal. She posits that men and women who marry and have children are perpetually fighting separate battles, lost to each other: “The baby can seem like something her husband has given her as a substitute for himself, a kind of transitional object, like a doll, for her to hold so that he can return to the world. And he does, he leaves her, returning to work, setting sail for Troy. He is free, for in the baby the romance of man and woman has been concluded: each can now do without the other.”

At our relationship’s lowest moments, this metaphor had barely been a metaphor. I remembered, the previous winter, Keith going off on a reporting trip to Ukraine at the very beginning of the war, leaving me and the kids with very little assurance of his safety. I had felt okay for the first couple of days until I heard on the news of bombing very close to where he was staying. After that, I went and bummed a cigarette from a neighbor, leaving the kids sleeping in their beds in order to do so. It was my first cigarette in 15 years. Though that had been the winter before my mania began, I believe the first seeds of it were sown then: leaving the children, smoking the cigarette, resenting Keith for putting himself in harm’s way and going out into the greater world while I tended to lunches, homework, and laundry as though everything were normal.

In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, as in Aftermath, I found an airtight case for divorce. The husband was the villain and the wife the wronged party, and the inevitable result was splitting up. I felt an echo of this later on when I read Lyz Lenz’s polemic This American Ex-Wife, out this month, marketed as “a deeply validating manifesto on the gender politics of marriage (bad) and divorce (actually pretty good!).” The book begins by detailing how Lenz’s husband rarely did household chores and hid belongings of hers that he didn’t like — e.g., a mug that said WRITE LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER — in a box in the basement. “I didn’t want to waste my one wild and precious life telling a grown man where to find the ketchup,” Lenz writes. “What was compelling about my marriage wasn’t its evils or its villains, but its commonplace horror.”

This was not quite the way I felt. Even though I could not stand to see my husband’s face or hear his voice, even though I still felt the same simmering resentment I had since I entered the hospital, I also found myself feeling pangs of sympathy for him. After all, he was going through this too. When we were inevitably together, at mealtimes that were silent unless the children spoke, I could see how wounded he was, how he was barely keeping it together. His clothes hung off his gaunt frame. And at night, when we passed in the kitchen making cups of tea that we would take to our respective rooms, he sometimes asked me for a hug, just a hug. One time I gave in and felt his ribs through his T-shirt. He must have lost at least 15 pounds.

It began to seem like I only ever talked to friends who had been through divorces or were contemplating them. One friend who didn’t know whether to split up with her husband thought opening their marriage might be the answer. Another friend described the ease of sharing custody of his young daughter, then admitted that he and his ex-wife still had sex most weekends. In my chronically undecided state, I admired both of these friends who had found, or might have found, a way to split the difference. Maybe it was possible to break up and remain friends with an ex, something that had never happened to me before in my entire life. Maybe it was possible to be married and not married at the same time. Then I went a little further in my imagination, and the idea of someone else having sex with my husband made me want to gag with jealousy. Maybe that meant something. I was so confused, and the confusion seemed to have no end.

I read more books about divorce. I received an early copy of Sarah Manguso’s Liars, marketed as “a searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all.” In it, John, a creative dilettante, and Jane, a writer, meet and soon decide to marry. Liars describes their marriage from beginning to end, a span of almost 15 years, and is narrated by Jane. The beginning of their relationship is delirious: “I tried to explain that first ferocious hunger and couldn’t. It came from somewhere beyond reason.” But the opening of that book also contains a warning. “Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.” I felt perversely reassured that I was merely adding another story to the 10 billion. It made it seem less like it was my fault.

The beginning of my relationship with my husband wasn’t that dramatic or definitive. I thought I was getting into something casual with someone I didn’t even know if I particularly liked, much less loved, but was still oddly fascinated by. I wanted to see the way he lived, to see if I could emulate it and become more like him. He lived with roommates in his 30s — well, that was the price you paid if you wanted to do nothing but write. I wanted what he had, his seriousness about his work. We went on dates where we both sat with our laptops in a café, writing, and this was somehow the most romantic thing I’d ever experienced. On our third date, we went to his father’s home on Cape Cod to dog-sit for a weekend, and it was awkward in the car until we realized we were both thinking about the same Mary Gaitskill story, “A Romantic Weekend,” in which a couple with dramatically mismatched needs learn the truth about each other through painful trial and error. Our weekend was awkward, too, but not nearly as awkward as the one in the story. On the way home, I remember admiring Keith’s driving, effortless yet masterful. I trusted him in the car completely. A whisper of a thought: He would make a good father.

In Liars, cracks begin to form almost immediately, even before John and Jane get engaged; she is accepted to a prestigious fellowship and he isn’t, and he is forthright about his fear that she will become more successful than he is: “A moment later he said he didn’t want to be the unsuccessful partner of the successful person. Then he apologized and said that he’d just wanted to be honest. I said, It was brave and considerate to tell me. ”

Through the next few years, so gradually that it’s almost imperceptible, John makes it impossible for Jane to succeed. He launches tech companies that require cross-country moves, forcing Jane to bounce between adjunct-teaching gigs. And then, of course, they have a baby. The problem with the baby is that Jane wants everything to be perfect for him and throws herself into creating a tidy home and an ideal child-development scenario, whereas John works more and more, moving the family again as one start-up fails and another flourishes. Jane begins to wonder whether she has created a prison for herself but pacifies herself with the thought that her situation is normal: “No married woman I knew was better off, so I determined to carry on. After all, I was a control freak, a neat freak, a crazy person.” The story John tells her about herself becomes her own story for a while. For a while, it’s impossible to know whose story is the truth.

I thought about Keith’s side of the story when I read Liars. Maybe it was the lack of alcohol’s blur that enabled me to see this clearly for the first time — I began to see how burdened he had been, had always been, with a partner who refused to plan for the future and who took on, without being asked, household chores that could just as easily have been distributed evenly. Our situation had never been as clear-cut as it was for Lyz Lenz; Keith had never refused to take out the trash or hidden my favorite mug. But he worked more and later hours, and my intermittent book advances and freelance income could not be counted on to pay our rent. As soon as we’d had a child, he had been shunted into the role of breadwinner without choosing it or claiming it. At first, I did all the cooking because I liked cooking and then, when I stopped liking cooking, I did it anyway out of habit. For our marriage to change, we would have needed to consciously decide to change it, insofar as our essential natures and our financial situation would allow. But when were we supposed to have found the time to do that? It was maddening that the root of our fracture was so commonplace and clichéd — and that even though the problem was ordinary, I still couldn’t think my way out of it.

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison , is in some ways the successor to Aftermath — the latest divorce book by a literary superstar. It is mostly an account of Jamison’s passionate marriage to a fellow writer, C., and the way that marriage fell apart after her career accelerated and they had a child together. It then details her first months of life as a single mother and her forays into dating. In it, she is strenuously fair to C., taking much of the blame for the dissolution of their marriage. But she can’t avoid describing his anger that her book merits an extensive tour, while his novel — based on his relationship with his first wife, who had died of leukemia — fails commercially. “It didn’t get the reception he had hoped for,” Jamison writes, and now, “I could feel him struggling. He wanted to support me, but there was a thorn in every interview.” C. grows distant, refusing to publicly perform the charming self that Jamison fell in love with. “I wished there was a way to say, Your work matters, that didn’t involve muting my own,” Jamison writes.

For all my marriage’s faults, we never fought in public. Friends encouraged us to reconcile, saying, “You always seemed so good together.” (As if there were another way to seem! Standing next to each other at a party, it had always been easy to relax because we couldn’t fight.) And we never did anything but praise each other’s work. Until this last book of my husband’s, that is. I had read Raising Raffi for the first time six months before it was published, while I was out of town for the weekend. I had, at that time, enjoyed reading it — it was refreshing, in a way, to see someone else’s perspective on a part of my own life. I even felt a certain relief that my child’s early years, in all their specificity and cuteness, had been recorded. This work had been accomplished, and I hadn’t had to do it! There had been only a slight pang in the background of that feeling that I hadn’t been the one to do it. But as publication drew nearer, the pang turned into outright anger . The opening chapter described my giving birth to our first son, and I didn’t realize how violated I felt by that until it was vetted by The New Yorker ’s fact-checker after that section was selected as an excerpt for its website. Had a geyser of blood shot out of my vagina? I didn’t actually know. I had been busy at the time. I hung up on the fact-checker who called me, asking her to please call my husband instead. (In case you’re wondering, Keith has read this essay and suggested minimal changes.)

I related to the writers in Splinters trying to love each other despite the underlying thrum of competing ambitions. But most of all, Jamison’s book made me even more terrified about sharing custody. “There was only one time I got on my knees and begged. It happened in our living room, where I knelt beside the wooden coffee table and pleaded not to be away from her for two nights each week,” she writes. Envisioning a future in which we shared custody of our children made me cringe with horror. It seemed like absolute hell. At the time we separated, our younger son was only 4 years old and required stories and cuddles to get to bed. Missing a night of those stories seemed like a punishment neither of us deserved, and yet we would have to sacrifice time with our kids if we were going to escape each other, which seemed like the only possible solution to our problem. Thanksgiving rolled around, and I cooked a festive meal that we ate without looking at each other. Whenever I looked at Keith, I started to cry.

We decided to enter divorce mediation at the beginning of December. On Sixth Avenue, heading to the therapist’s office, we passed the hospital where I’d once been rushed for an emergency fetal EKG when I was pregnant with our first son. His heart had turned out to be fine. But as we passed that spot, I sensed correctly that we were both thinking of that moment, of a time when we had felt so connected in our panic and desperate hope, and now the invisible cord that had bound us had been, if not severed, shredded and torn. For a moment on the sidewalk there, we allowed ourselves to hold hands, remembering.

The therapist was a small older woman with short curly reddish hair. She seemed wise, like she’d seen it all and seen worse. I was the one who talked the most in that session, blaming Keith for making me go crazy, even though I knew this wasn’t technically true or possible: I had gone crazy from a combination of sky-high stress and a too-high SSRI prescription and a latent crazy that had been in me, part of me, since long before Keith married me, since I was born. Still, I blamed his job, his book, his ambition and workaholism, which always surpassed my own efforts. I cried throughout the session; I think we both did. I confessed that I was not the primary wronged person in these negotiations, and to be fair I have to talk about why. Sometime post–Last Fight and pre-hospitalization, I had managed to cheat on my husband. I had been so sure we were basically already divorced that I justified the act to myself; I couldn’t have done it any other way. I had thought I might panic at the last minute or even throw up or faint, but I had gone through with it thanks to the delusional state I was in. There aren’t many more details anyone needs to know. It was just one time, and it was like a drug I used to keep myself from feeling sad about what was really happening. Anyway, there’s a yoga retreat center I’ll never be able to go to again in my life.

At the end of the session, we decided to continue with the therapist but in couples therapy instead of divorce mediation. It was a service she also provided, and as a bonus, it was $100 cheaper per session. She didn’t say why she made this recommendation, but maybe it was our palpable shared grief that convinced her that our marriage was salvageable. Or maybe it was that, despite everything I had told her in that session, she could see that, even in my profound sadness and anger, I looked toward Keith to complete my sentences when I was searching for the right word and that he did the same thing with me. As broken as we were, we were still pieces of one once-whole thing.

My husband would have to forgive me for cheating and wasting our money. I would have to forgive him for treading on my literary territory: our family’s life, my own life. My husband would have to forgive me for having a mental breakdown, leaving him to take care of our family on his own for a month, costing us thousands of uninsured dollars in hospital bills. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted, for years, that I would be available on a sick day or to do an early pickup or to watch the baby while he wrote about our elder son. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted that there would always be dinner on the table without his having to think about how it got there. He would have to forgive me for never taking out the recycling and never learning how to drive so that I could move the car during alternate-side parking. I would have to forgive him for usurping the time and energy and brain space with which I might have written a better book than his. Could the therapist help us overcome what I knew to be true: that we’d gone into marriage already aware that we were destined for constant conflict just because of who we are? The therapist couldn’t help me ask him to do more if I didn’t feel like I deserved it, if I couldn’t bring myself to ask him myself. I had to learn how to ask.

No one asked anything or forgave anything that day in the couples therapist’s office. After what felt like months but was probably only a few days, I was watching Ramy on my laptop in my downstairs-bedroom cave after the kids’ bedtime when some moment struck me as something Keith would love. Acting purely on impulse, I left my room and found him sitting on the couch, drinking tea. I told him I’d been watching this show I thought was funny and that he would really like it. Soon, we were sitting side by side on the couch, watching Ramy together. We went back to our respective rooms afterward, but still, we’d made progress.

After a few more weeks and a season’s worth of shared episodes of Ramy, I ventured for the first time upstairs to Keith’s attic room. It smelled alien to me, and I recognized that this was the pure smell of Keith, not the shared smell of the bedrooms in every apartment we’d lived in together. I lay down next to him in the mess of his bed. He made room for me. We didn’t touch, not yet. But we slept, that night, together. The next night, we went back to sleeping alone.

Pickups and drop-offs became evenly divided among me and Keith and a sitter. Keith learned to make spaghetti with meat sauce. He could even improvise other dishes, with somewhat less success, but he was improving. I made a conscious effort not to tidy the house after the children left for school. I made myself focus on my work even when there was chaos around me. Slowly, I began to be able to make eye contact with Keith again. At couples therapy, we still clutched tissue boxes in our hands, but we used them less. Our separate chairs inched closer together in the room.

That Christmas, we rented a tiny Airbnb near his dad’s house in Falmouth. It had only two bedrooms, one with bunk beds for the kids and one with a king-size bed that took up almost the entirety of the small room. We would have to share a bed for the duration of the trip. The decision I made to reach across the giant bed toward Keith on one of the last nights of the trip felt, again, impulsive. But there were years of information and habit guiding my impulse. Sex felt, paradoxically, completely comfortable and completely new, like losing my virginity. It felt like sleeping with a different person and also like sleeping with the same person, which made sense, in a way. We had become different people while somehow staying the same people we’d always been.

Slowly, over the course of the next months, I moved most of my things upstairs to his room, now our room. We still see the therapist twice a month. We talk about how to make things more equal in our marriage, how not to revert to old patterns. I have, for instance, mostly given up on making dinner, doing it only when it makes more sense in the schedule of our shared day or when I actually want to cook. It turns out that pretty much anyone can throw some spaghetti sauce on some pasta; it also turns out that the kids won’t eat dinner no matter who cooks it, and now we get to experience that frustration equally. Keith’s work is still more stable and prestigious than mine, but we conspire to pretend that this isn’t the case, making sure to leave space for my potential and my leisure. We check in to make sure we’re not bowing to the overwhelming pressure to cede our whole lives to the physical and financial demands, not to mention the fervently expressed wants, of our children. It’s the work that we’d never found time to do before, and it is work. The difference is that we now understand what can happen when we don’t do it. I’m always surprised by how much I initially don’t want to go to therapy and then by how much lighter I feel afterward. For now, those sessions are a convenient container for our marriage’s intractable defects so that we get to spend the rest of our time together focusing on what’s not wrong with us.

The downstairs bedroom is now dormant, a place for occasional guests to stay or for our elder son to lie in bed as he plays video games. Some of my clothes from a year earlier still fill the drawers, but none of it seems like mine. I never go into that room if I can help it. It was the room of my exile from my marriage, from my family. If I could magically disappear it from our apartment, I would do it in a heartbeat. And in the attic bedroom, we are together, not as we were before but as we are now.

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The Main Causes of Divorce

This essay will discuss the primary causes of divorce in contemporary society. It will explore factors such as communication breakdown, financial issues, infidelity, and differences in values or goals. The piece will analyze how these factors contribute to marital dissolution and the impact of divorce on families. More free essay examples are accessible at PapersOwl about Divorce.

How it works

Married with someone is an important decision of everyone life, so most people think carefully before they get married, and they all expect they will have a longevity married. However, some couples could not maintain their relationship after living together anymore, so they get a divorce which is one of the way to solve the problems between wife and husband. There are many reasons lead to couples’ divorce, but in my opinion, there are three main causes of divorce are infidelity, weak communication skill, and unrealistic expectations.

The first significant cause of divorce is infidelity which is the act of being unfaithful to a wife or husband by having other special relationship. As everyone knows, marriage is a relationship based on faith, belief and feelings for each other. When a spouse betrays this trust, it causes pain and suffering to the other partner. In addition, no one wants to share a wife or husband to another person. It is unacceptable to some people, so they could not forgive to their wife or husband if their spouse cheat on them. Due to the pain and the unacceptable when the partner are not faithful, couples decide to divorce to escape each other. This is why infidelity becomes one of the leading factors cause to divorce.

Another cause of divorce is communication skill. Communication is essential for healthy and lasting relationships, so when couples are lack of communication, it can make them boring and misunderstanding. For example, after more than five years together, my ant and her husband found their marriage on the brink because my ant used of the silent treatment whenever problems arose or whenever she was not satisfied with her husband. She admitted that her poor communication made her husband confuse what she wanted or what she did not want him to do for her, and the distance about feeling between them slowly become bigger. Consequently, they decided to divorce. In contrast, too much arguing is also destroying a marrige. In fact, arguing is a nomal action in the family life because arguing helps to solve the problem, but some people do not think that. They argue with their spouse just because they want to become a winner eventhough their reason do not make any sense. Then their little problems expand to big problems, resulting in divorce. Therefore, either too talkative or too quiet can lead to divorce.

Beside the infidelity and communication skill lead to divorce, the unrealistic expectations to spouses is the third cause of divorce. Men and women both have a lot of expectation from their marriage. Some expectations are important such as the respect, the honesty, or the kindness, but some are unrealistic. For instance, men expect their spouse can keep the nice body shape like the day they first date, or women hope their man have a lot of money to buy them expensive stuffs. However, the reality is not like they expect. Indeed, women after give birth they will have more work to do, so they do not have much time to take care of themselves like before, so they will gain their weight or they are getting older. Man are the same situation, they will have more thing to spend their money such as their children stuffs or their house expenses, so their wife will be no more gotten the luxury gift from them. These expectations can put a lot of strain on the other partners, and leaving the spouse feeling disappointed; as a result, that can ruin the marriage relationship.

No marriage is easy, and to keep the healthy and longevity relationship is even more difficult. I believe that cheating on spouse, having bad communication skill, and expecting too high on spouse are cause to the divorce. Divorce is painful, so people need to think more carefully before they are getting maried, and getting divorce as well. 

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• Summary and Default Divorce

Summary and default divorce fall under the category of uncontested divorce . In an uncontested divorce, spouses are able to come to an agreement on all the major issues without much court involvement. Uncontested divorces can be advantageous because they tend to take less time and ultimately cost less money than contested divorces. Summary and default divorces in particular demand limited court filings or appearances and in many cases can be completed without a lawyer.

Justia provides a comprehensive 50-state survey on uncontested divorce, including forms and resources for each state. Note that terms vary by jurisdiction, but all states offer some form of uncontested divorce.

Summary Divorce

Spouses married for only a few years (usually less than five) with no significant assets or debts may be eligible for a summary divorce, or “dissolution.” Many states offer summary divorce as a less time-consuming and costly alternative to contested divorce. The exact requirements for summary divorce vary by state, but states may require that spouses do not own significant property, like a home, that they do not have children from the marriage, or that they will not ask for spousal support. Essentially, spouses who qualify for a summary divorce will have little entanglement.

If a divorcing couple meets the requirements for a summary divorce in their state, they may file the forms required by the court (usually available on the court’s website; Justia’s 50-state survey, above, has links to these forms as well). The court will require a filing fee and most likely a waiting period. After fulfilling all the requirements, the spouses will ask the court to file an order granting the divorce. This final step may or may not be included in the fillable forms on the court’s website, so read carefully. A divorce is not complete until the final divorce order is signed by a judge.

Be sure to obtain your own signed and dated copy of your final divorce order and keep it safe. Many courts find it easiest if you include a self-addressed, stamped envelope with your request.

Summary divorce is relatively inexpensive. Most summary divorces will not require hiring a lawyer, but you can hire a lawyer at any time, even if just to review documents or offer advice. A divorce lawyer can help evaluate your options according to your specific situation.

Default Divorce

A default divorce describes an uncontested divorce in which only one spouse participates in divorce proceedings. Usually, this means that the other spouse is unreachable, but some states allow spouses to agree to a default divorce.

In the instance of an unreachable spouse, a default divorce will begin after one spouse files for divorce, makes a genuine but unsuccessful effort to serve the other spouse with the divorce papers, and then asks the court to enter a default divorce. A court will probably not enter a default divorce until the filing spouse certifies that they have made reasonable efforts to locate and serve their spouse. The specific requirements of service vary by jurisdiction. A court will likely ask the filing spouse to detail their efforts and give the other spouse a reasonable amount of time to respond. The filing spouse should also be aware that if the other spouse makes an appearance within a set amount of time, they have the right to intervene or ask the court to overturn the default judgment if it has already been entered.

In some states, spouses can obtain a default divorce by agreement. In this case, the spouses agree on all the major issues, but only one spouse files for divorce, and the other does not respond. The filing spouse then asks the court to sign the final judgment of divorce. Spouses using this option benefit from minimal court fees. An agreed default divorce may also be the best avenue when neither spouse contests the divorce, but one spouse wants no part in the process. Each spouse may still seek a lawyer’s advice if they pursue an agreed default divorce.

A spouse who chooses not to participate in a default divorce should be aware that they are giving up any right to contest the order and should make sure that they fully understand everything to which they are agreeing in the divorce.

A summary or default divorce may be the best option for eligible divorcing spouses hoping to keep costs low and court involvement minimal. Most courts accommodate spouses seeking an uncontested divorce with little to no lawyer involvement. Some even offer self-help services with clerks who can assist in the process.

Last reviewed July 2023

Divorce Law Center Contents   

• Divorce Law Center
• First Steps for Divorce & Legal Tips
• Alternatives to Divorce & Your Legal Options
• No Fault vs. Fault Divorce
• Contested vs. Uncontested Divorce
• Cost of Divorce & Legal Options
• Residency Requirements in Divorce
• Serving and Answering a Divorce Petition
• Collaborative Divorce & The Legal Process
• Divorce Arbitration
• Divorce Mediation
• Divorce Settlements
• Divorce Trials and Appeals
• Special Legal Issues in Divorce
• Property Division Law in Divorce
• How Divorce Affects Your Legal Rights
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Uncontested Divorce Laws and Forms: 50-State Survey
• Alimony Laws and Forms: 50-State Survey
• Legal Separation in Divorce: 50-State Survey
• Find a Divorce Lawyer

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Causes and Effects of Divorce

Introduction, effects of divorce, works cited.

Since 1860 when the United States Bureau of statistics started keeping records of divorces, the frequency of divorce cases has continued to increase based on the same reasons. Reasons have remained relatively the same in comparison to the ever-increasing rise in cases. Studies have also highlighted that the reasons are as complex as extramarital affairs to mediocre reasons such as irritating small behaviors of the partner. It is widely accepted that divorce is part of life and separation between two persons is bound to continue (Wallerstein, p. 85). However, there have been some misinterpretations of the findings collected by current researchers. It is important to note that these findings are based on earlier conclusions based on research that was most likely liable to errors and mistakes. Such research findings and papers have been assumed as true thus setting the precedence of misinformation. It is thus the purpose of this paper to clarify earlier findings in order for us to present the true picture of the causes and effects of divorces.

Reasons for divorce have always remained sketchy as the real reasons can only be known by the two couples. However the most common forms of reasons that have led to the separation of couples include:

Money : This reason has always remained an emotive issue among couples as this is clearly manifested by ninety percent of the couples who surveyed, responded that they may have fought over money at least once during their relationship. 30% of respondents admitted to separating over other issues which were compounded by lack of money.

Sexual Problems : This reason in most cases has always been denied by couples as physical conditions or sexual malfunctions are considered to be uncommon (Wallerstein 101). Sexual problems are largely contributed to preconceived notions and ideas that are based on unacceptable attitudes towards sex. It was difficult for the couples to approach the topic of sex. Over fifty percent of couples admitted that a sexual problem was the root cause of infidelity within their marriages.

Immaturity: Many couples separated from each other after the couples exhibited behavior that the partner saw as inappropriate and childish. Such behaviors later behavior are then seen as intolerable making life difficult for both as there exists a lack of understanding between the couples.

Alcohol and substance abuse: This is also one of the most commonly cited issues among separating couples. Although data on abuse is not conclusive, many couples have often cited substance abuse as one of the reasons that lead to violent abuse that have even led to injuries and fatalities in worse-case scenarios.

In-laws: This is a prevalent reason used by young couples as meddling from external members and excessive hassles from external members of family.

Respect : Respect among couples is imperative as both come from different backgrounds. Having a different background often means that the couples have to come up with ways of living together and tolerating each other. Disrespect is manifested through physical and verbal attacks.

The above-mentioned reasons are just some of the most prevalent. It is also very difficult to establish the main reasons that couples may separate. We may never have a definite reason as to why the rate of divorce keeps on increasing but it may be easier to conclude on the effects divorce brings to society. This is because effects are much more profound in families, hence making it simpler to track. The family unit is facing numerous issues today as the effects of divorce are having a direct impact on the lives of children and how they will relate with others in the future. Research conducted by Lenor Weitzman confirmed that men were shown to heal faster and do well economically after separation. It was also found out that as opposed to the common belief that fathers were less interested in their families after separation, the research found out that fathers continued to be loving towards their kids and family (Wallerstein, p. 101).

Research also found out that both couples underwent intense emotional periods while seeking closure on the whole issue of separation. Depending on the number of years that they have been together, the couple may have to resolve all the underlying issues that may have led to the separations.

Wallerstein, Judith. The California Children of Divorce Study. California: University Of Southern California, 1999.

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The Great Divorce

C. s. lewis, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

An unnamed Narrator finds himself in a Grey Town , waiting for a bus. He boards the bus, along with a small number of other people, and the bus proceeds to fly over the grey town. The Narrator then talks with some of the other people on the bus, some of whom remember dying in various ways. One man, Ikey , tells the Narrator that the grey town is always getting bigger as more and more people enter it. Some of these people get closer to the bus stop, so that one day they can drive away. Others drift farther from the bus stop—indeed, some people in grey town must be millions of miles from the bus stop by now.

The bus lands on a huge cliff, and the Narrator and the other passengers get out. They find that they’ve landed by a beautiful river, surrounded by grass and trees. However, the Narrator quickly discovers that everything in this place is motionless—even the blades of grass are rigid and hard. This makes walking around very painful. The Narrator also realizes that he no longer has a solid body—he and his peers are ghosts. The Narrator slowly realizes that he’s in the afterlife. As he realizes this, he sees a group of Spirits approaching the ghosts. The Spirits are bright and have solid bodies—they’ve come to try to convince the ghosts to come with them toward the beautiful, majestic mountains in the distance. But most of the ghosts refuse to do so. One, the Big Ghost , notices that one of the spirits is Len , a man he knew while they were both alive. Len killed a man, and yet has become a Spirit, while the Big Ghost has led a supposedly virtuous life, and yet was sent to the dreary Grey Town. Len tries to convince the Big Ghost to “love,” but the Big Ghost refuses, and walks back to the bus, eager to return to the Grey Town.

The Narrator witnesses other spirits trying to convince the ghosts to stay by the river, regain their solid bodies, and eventually climb to the top of the mountain. Each time, however, the ghosts refuse to stay, and walk back to the bus. Ikey, who’s eager to make “a tidy profit” in the Grey Town, picks golden apples from a tree and carries them back to the bus, causing himself great pain in the process. Another ghost, the Hard-Bitten Ghost , tells the Narrator to be careful, and argues that “the same people” must control the river, the mountains, and the grey town. The Hard-Bitten Ghost’s words fill the Narrator with despair.

Just as the Narrator is thinking of returning to the bus, he sees the Spirit of one of his favorite authors, George MacDonald . MacDonald greets the Narrator cheerfully and promises to show him around. He explains that the Narrator has come on a “vacation” from Hell, the Grey Town, to the “Valley of the Shadow of Life.” There are many people in the Grey Town who visit the Valley and then return to the Town forever. For these people, the Grey Town is Hell. But there are others who stay in the Valley instead of returning to the Grey Town—for these people, the Grey Town is merely Purgatory; a place for them to exist before they “climb” up to Heaven. The people who are too stubborn to go to the mountains and love God, MacDonald explains, are like stubborn children who would rather be miserable than humble.

For the rest of the book, MacDonald carries the Narrator around the Valley, showing him conversations between Spirits and ghosts. In the first conversation, the Narrator sees a Spirit trying to convince the ghost of a famous Artist to remain in the Valley and go to Heaven. The Artist arrogantly refuses, claiming that he couldn’t stand to live in a place without personal property, where his painting wouldn’t be appreciated.

MacDonald shows the Narrator a female ghost who complains so much about her husband that she eventually disappears entirely—she’s so consumed by pettiness and fussiness that she no longer has a soul. Another female ghost, Pam , argues with the Spirit of her brother, Reginald , about her love for her dead child, Michael . Pam claims to love Michael so much that she couldn’t love anyone else during her lifetime. Reginald argues that Pam must surrender her love for Michael in order to love God completely—and afterwards, Pam will be reunited with Michael in Heaven forever. Pam refuses to give up her love for her son, though, claiming that Reginald is being cruel.

Another ghost carries a tiny lizard on his shoulder—MacDonald explains to the Narrator that this lizard is Lust. Reluctantly, the ghost allows an angel to crush the lizard, freeing the ghost from his burden to sexual desire. To the Narrator’s amazement, the lizard transforms into a beautiful horse, who gallops away with the ghost, now a new-born man, toward the mountains. MacDonald explains that by surrendering our earthly desire—even for our loved ones—humans can become more beautiful, more powerful, and more loving than they ever thought possible.

In the final chapters of the novel, MacDonald shows the Narrator a beautiful Spirit, Sarah Smith . Sarah reunites with a man she once knew, Frank . Frank has become so embittered and self-hating that he’s separated into two ghosts: a tall “Tragedian” ghost and a small “Dwarf” ghost. The Small Ghost—a bitter, self-hating being—uses a heavy chain to control the Tall Ghost—an overdramatic being who overreacts whenever Sarah does something even mildly offensive. Sarah, speaking to the Small Ghost, tries to tell Frank that he doesn’t have to hate himself anymore—he’s in a place of boundless love. The Small Ghost is almost ready to laugh along with Sarah and stay in the Valley. But instead, he pulls his chain, and the Tall Ghost rages theatrically, accusing Sarah of having never loved him. The Small Ghost shrinks until he’s no longer visible at all. Then, the Tall Ghost disappears, too. MacDonald explains to the Narrator that Frank was trying to manipulate Sarah’s pity and concern in order to pass along some of his own self-hatred to Sarah. While it might seem cruel for Sarah to be happy in the Valley, rather than spending her time pitying Frank, MacDonald insists that the saved should rejoice in their own salvation, rather than pitying the damned. If it were otherwise, he argues, then people in Hell would be able to “blackmail” people in Heaven into feeling miserable.

The Narrator asks MacDonald if the people in Hell will remain in Hell for all eternity, or if one day, God will free them and bring them to Heaven. MacDonald says that Heaven is open to all those who truly desire it. However, the Narrator must not ask questions about what will happen to human beings in the future. It is the nature of human beings to live in time, uncertain about their future possibilities. For a human being to learn the mysteries of salvation would involve that human being standing “outside of time” and seeing the future—in other words, ceasing to be a human being. MacDonald illustrates this concept by taking the Narrator to a huge chessboard , across which chess pieces move rapidly.

The Narrator suddenly wakes up—he’s been sleeping in his study.

Effects of Divorce on Children: Essay Example

Negative effects of divorce on children: essay introduction, the effect of divorce on child: essay body, conclusion about divorce, reference list.

Want to know about the negative effects of divorce on children? Essay sample below is what you need! Learn here about the causes and bad consequences of divorce on children’s future family life. Whether you need ideas, inspiration, or an example of a conclusion for divorce essay, you will find it here.

Divorce is the act of dissolving or terminating a marriage between two people before the death of one partner thus rendering the marriage null and void. Divorce frees one of legal responsibilities and duties that he/she was previously bound to by the union of marriage. It also frees one of marriage with another person. Divorce in the society happens for different reasons depending on the individual cases.

Different authorities that have a legal authority to allow the dissolution of the marriage (Isle, 2012, Para. 4) carry out the process. These authorities might be religious, government arms, or traditional settings depending on the laws of marriage to which the partners subscribed. As the paper reveals, regardless of the reason behind any divorce case, the children of the divorced parents feel a remarkable effect.

The effects that children have after a divorce may be psychological, social, and or emotional because each divorce case tends to be unique in its own way though divorces can be grouped into different broad categories: at fault divorce, no fault divorce, summary divorce, uncontested divorce, collaborative divorce, and mediated divorce.

Specific reasons that might come under the above broad groups may include unfaithfulness in marriage, lack of commitment in marriage by one or both partners, irreconcilable differences, abusive marriage, distance, and a partner developing interest in getting married to a different person (Amato, 2003, p. 605).

At the end of the day, divorce has its own effects towards the divorcing couples and the people around them especially their families and children.

When a divorce happens to a couple who have children, it stops being an issue concerning two people only. It becomes an issue concerning them and their children because, in society, children’s interest and wellbeing are paramount and hence a responsibility of any person with a legal age.

When a divorce happens between a married couple with children, the interest of the children have to be secured as provided for by the law so that they do not end up suffering as a consequence of the divorce.

Though the wellbeing of children seem secured, in case of a divorce, children tend to be affected in different ways both negatively and positively because it always has psychological effects on them. The extent of the impact of a break up on a kid will at times relate with the age of the kids at the time of the separation.

For instance, though a toddler may not comprehend the issues going on then, they tend to sense it within their parents, “as their parents’ energy levels and mood tend to shift” (Douglas, 2005, p.49). This leads to the infants’ reaction in different ways based on their instincts that may be observed. There might be a change in the sleeping patterns of the baby as well as their eating habits.

The baby might become so fussy with lots of mood swings, which were unusual to the baby before. Regression can also be viewed in the baby with the baby unlearning the skills it had acquired before. Either the baby may become slow in gaining weight, cutting the gained weight, or stagnating. The baby may also be slow in development (Douglas, 2005, p.50).

For the best welfare of the child, the parents should try as much as possible to maintain the previous routine between them and the child so as not to upset the balance in the child’s life.

Divorce happening to parents with pre-school children tends to affect the children in such a way that they will always feel it as if it their mistake led to their parents’ moving apart. This leads to their feeling insecure by always wanting to be around an adult and not wanting to be left alone.

They have the fear that they might be abandoned. They develop a friendly nature. They also tend to become angered by small things, which can be attributed to mood swings. In some instances, kids who had stopped wetting beds will start again (Temke, 2006, p. 2). All these are psychological, and are often due to their searching for the answer as to why daddy no longer lives with mummy.

A divorce occurring when a child is an adolescent or a teen usually leaves him/her with lots of mental torture. The teenagers in this case feel embarrassed at the prospect of belonging to a broken family because societal norms advocate for a complete continuous family. This makes them frustrated and angry thus making them resort to activities that would give them solace.

Some might indulge in drugs while others might indulge actively in sports as a way of ventilating their frustrations to release some pent up energies. Teens tend to be affected a lot because they understand the reasons for their parents’ divorce. This is worse off because they are so helpless to stop the divorce thus ending up frustrated. Divorce comes with divisions in the family.

At times, they are forced to lay blame on one party whom they believe is the cause of the divorce (Elizabeth, 2006, p. 19). This leads to their division as to which side they should take. At the same time, it also comes with new responsibilities for teenagers who might be forced to cope with the different changes happening in their lives on their own on issues like sexual feelings.

The teenagers might also grow up to dislike the institution of marriage by growing doubts on whether they will ever want to get married or whether they could stay in a marriage. A good example of a divorce victim is the musician Enrique Iglesias who feels that there is no point of getting married because, at some point, the marriage might break up. Enrique’s dad had so many marriages, which kept on breaking up.

This informed his decision not to get married. In general, divorce might have lifelong effects to children when it happens as they witness it. Children who grow up in a divorced marriage tend to develop manipulative behaviors. This case happens when there is competition between the two parents when one wants the children to see him/her as being better than the other.

They will therefore shower their kids with favors as a way of winning them over. The moment the kids come to discover what their parents are up to, they will start making demands besides playing the parents against each other. At the back of their minds, they have the knowledge that one parent will definitely give them what the other has refused to give.

This might go on into their adult lives thus giving them undesirable characters. Children growing up in a divorced family might not have a lot of respect for the institution of marriage. They would easily walk out of a marriage in the future with the belief that, after all, their parents’ marriage did not work.

The psychological impact that always afflicts children when they have to attend court sessions to hear out the differences between their parents can be great (Chase, 2010, p.211). This leads to lose of self-esteem in children because they will always be embarrassed by the courtroom drama and the prospect of the news becoming public among their peers.

In many cases, children wish that they were not there to face the situation thus preferring to move away from the area they are staying to a new place where people do not know about their skeletons in the closet.

The children would also ask that they change schools and their complete social setting just to run away from what has happened to their parents. Some children would always wish that their parents got back together. They would do everything in their power to push or convince their parents to come back together.

In conclusion, divorce affects children in the family psychologically and in a negative way. It is in very few instances that one would find a child who was not negatively affected even though it was the only thing that would guarantee them peace and survival. There is always that thought in the children that things should have worked out differently.

Therefore, to save the children on the effects of divorce, there is the need for parents to cultivate some good relations by nurturing everything that strengthens their love bond besides involving their children in matters that convince them positively that marriage is the best institution that every person ought to join when time comes.

Amato, P. (2003). People’s Reasons for divorcing. Journal of Family issues, 24 (5), 602- 626.

Chase, K. (2010). Dicken and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition. Victorian Institute Journal, 38 (1), 211-214.

Douglas, L. (2005). The Binuclear Family Boom. Library Journal, 130 (14), 49-50.

Elizabeth, M. (2006). No Good Divorce. Christian Century, 123 (3), 18-23.

Isle, I. (2012). Legal Separation Grounds for Divorce: The Legal Process. Retrieved from http://www.divorceaid.co.uk/legal/process.htm

Temke, M. (2006). The Effect of Divorce On Children, Family & Consumer Resources. Hampshire: University of Hampshire Cooperative Extension.

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Why Are Divorce Memoirs Still Stuck in the 1960s?

Recent best sellers have reached for a familiar feminist credo, one that renounces domestic life for career success.

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By Sarah Menkedick

Sarah Menkedick’s most recent book is “Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America.”

“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own,” Betty Friedan wrote in “ The Feminine Mystique ,” in 1963. Taking a new role as a productive worker is “the way out of the trap,” she added. “There is no other way.”

On the final page of “ This American Ex-Wife ,” her 2024 memoir and study of divorce, Lyz Lenz writes: “I wanted to remove myself from the martyr’s pyre and instead sacrifice the roles I had been assigned at birth: mother, wife, daughter. I wanted to see what else I could be.”

More than 60 years after Friedan’s landmark text, there remains only one way for women to gain freedom and selfhood: rejecting the traditionally female realm, and achieving career and creative success.

Friedan’s once-provocative declaration resounds again in a popular subgenre of autobiography loosely referred to as the divorce memoir, several of which have hit best-seller lists in the past year or two. These writers’ candid, raw and moving exposés of their divorces are framed as a new frontier of women’s liberation, even as they reach for a familiar white feminist ideology that has prevailed since “The Problem That Has No Name,” through “Eat, Pray, Love” and “I’m With Her” and “Lean In”: a version of second-wave feminism that remains tightly shackled to American capitalism and its values.

Lenz, for example, spends much of her book detailing her struggle to “get free,” but never feels she needs to define freedom. It is taken as a given that freedom still means the law firm partner in heels, the self-made woman with an independent business, the best-selling author on book tour — the woman who has shed any residue of the domestic and has finally come to shine with capitalist achievement.

It is not the freedom for a woman to stay home with her child for a year, or five. The freedom to stop working after a lifetime toiling in low-wage jobs. The freedom for a Filipina nanny to watch her own children instead of those of her “liberated” American boss. The freedom to start a farm or a homestead or engage in the kind of unpaid work ignored by an economy that still values above all else the white-collar professional labor long dominated by men — and in fact mostly fails to recognize other labor as valuable at all.

One of the paradoxes the divorce memoir highlights is that women’s work is made invisible by a society that disparages it, and the only way it becomes visible is through the triumphant narrative of a woman’s escape from it — which only reinforces its undesirability and invisibility.

In Maggie Smith’s 2023 memoir “ You Could Make This Place Beautiful ,” Smith details the critical inflection point when her poem “ Good Bones ” goes viral, her career takes off and her marriage begins to implode. She tells a reporter from The Columbus Dispatch: “I feel like I go into a phone booth and I turn into a poet sometimes. Most of the other time, I’m just Maggie who pushes the stroller.”

Nothing threatening, nothing meaningful. Just a mom pushing the stroller in the meager labor of women — until she slips into the phone booth and transforms into an achieving superhero.

This is not to diminish Smith’s work, a unique and highly refined series of linked essays that build into an emotional symphony about marital breakdown. Her intention is not, like Lenz’s, to condemn the institution of marriage or to rejoice in her release from hers, which is complicated, excruciating and tender. Her depictions of divorce clearly resonate with readers and offer solace and insight into a common experience of heartbreak. But it’s worth asking what exactly is being celebrated in the huge cultural reception her memoir, and other popular divorce memoirs, have received.

Leslie Jamison’s book “ Splinters ,” published the same day as “This American Ex-Wife,” is an exquisite, textured and precise articulation of the collapse of her marriage, all nuance and interiority where Lenz’s writing is blunt and political. But here, too, we get a female narrator for whom freedom and acceptance ultimately signify professional success. Jamison is much more vexed about this formula, but in the end she settles for lightly querying rather than assailing it. She jokes about how her editor is stressed about book sales while she’s stressed about her baby sleeping on airplanes, and mocks this as a “humblebrag”: “ I don’t care about ambition! I only care about baby carriers! ” She rushes to clarify in the next sentence, “Of course I cared about book sales, too.”

Herein lies the ultimate paradigm, the space no woman wants to explore: What if the modern woman didn’t actually care about book sales? About making partner? About building a successful brand? That would be unthinkable. Embarrassing. Mealy, mushy, female.

But later in “Splinters,” Jamison skewers the cult of male, capitalist achievement: “My notion of divinity was gradually turning its gaze away from the appraising, tally-keeping, pseudo-father in the sky who would give me enough gold stars if I did enough good things, and toward the mother who’d been here all along,” she writes. I felt an electric optimism reading this. If feminism wants to tackle patriarchy, it needs to start with that pseudo-father and his metrics of a person’s worth.

Jamison struggles toward this in “Splinters.” She wants so badly to be remarkable. To banter about the Russian G.D.P. while she spoon-feeds her toddler, or to impress arrogant lovers who critique her conversation as only “85 percent as good as it could be.” At the same time, she yearns “to experience the sort of love that could liberate everyone involved from their hamster wheels of self-performance,” a love that will “involve all your tedious moments.”

Yes , I found myself saying, I want to read about this love . A mother love that is radical, creative, affirming, even and especially in its difficulty and tedium. Jamison almost gets there, but returns ultimately to the affirmation that it’s OK to want more: “quiet mornings at my laptop, tap-tap-tapping at my keyboard.”

It is certainly OK, and natural, to want more. But what I find most exhilarating in this beautiful book is the possibility that it’s also OK to let go of wanting. It’s OK to not write a best seller, to not hold a prestigious title, to not start your own brand. It’s OK, even, to not try to find yourself, that most American of quests.

Divorce, sure. Ditch the toxic men, strike out on your own. But there’s nothing new or radical there. The radical is in a feminism that examines care as profound, powerful work and centers rather than marginalizes mothering, as both a lived act and a metaphor. We must let go of this half-century-old notion that the self can be “found” only after the roles of “mother, wife, daughter” have been rejected.

With friends, Jamison recounts lively anecdotes from a trip to Oslo with her daughter in order to prove that her life had not “‘gotten small,’ a phrase I put in quotes in my mind, though I did not know whom I was quoting.” Yet in this phrase lies another way of living: letting things get small, in a world that sees and celebrates mostly superlatives, and getting down to the level of the local, the intimate, the granular, the home.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Divorce — The Main Causes Of Divorce

Overview of The Main Causes of Divorce

• Categories: Divorce Relationship

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Published: Mar 18, 2021

Words: 2043 | Pages: 4 | 11 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, major causes of divorce, causes of divorce: essay conclusion, works cited.

• Amato, P. R. (2010). Research on divorce: Continuing trends and new developments. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72(3), 650-666.
• Cobb, N., & Boivin, J. (2019). “It takes two to tango”: Communication and trust as predictors of marital satisfaction. The Family Journal, 27(1), 68-74.
• Feldman, B. N., & Broussard, C. A. (2006). Men’s adjustment to their wives’ breast cancer: A problem-solving perspective. Journal of Family Psychology, 20(1), 1-7.
• Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (2015). The seven principles for making marriage work: A practical guide from the country’s foremost relationship expert. Harmony.
• Hawkins, A. J., Blanchard, V. L., Baldwin, S. A., & Fawcett, E. B. (2008). Does marriage and relationship education work? A meta-analytic study. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 76(5), 723-734.
• Johnson, M. D., & Anderson, J. R. (2015). The evolution of divorce ideology in the United States. Journal of Marriage and Family, 77(2), 347-360.
• Karney, B. R., & Bradbury, T. N. (1995). The longitudinal course of marital quality and stability: A review of theory, method, and research. Psychological Bulletin, 118(1), 3-34.
• Markman, H. J., Stanley, S. M., & Blumberg, S. L. (2010). Fighting for your marriage: Positive steps for preventing divorce and preserving a lasting love. John Wiley & Sons.
• Sassler, S., Addo, F. R., & Lichter, D. T. (2012). The tempo of sexual activity and later relationship quality. Journal of Marriage and Family, 74(4), 708-725.
• Snyder, D. K., Castellani, A. M., & Whisman, M. A. (2006). Current status and future directions in couple therapy. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 317-344.

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The Great Divorce

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Q: How much will it take to get divorce papers through email or regular mail

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A: Just whatever they cost plus the shipping if you’re seeking fill in the blank legal documents. It will then cost $16–$18 to have them served by mail upon the opposing party.

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Ashlyn Harris' Divorce Proceedings Give More Insight Into Her Dating Timeline With Sophia Bush

Less than a month ago, Sophia Bush cleared the air when she spoke out for the first time about her unexpected romance with soccer star Ashlyn Harris . In her candid essay for  Glamour , the One Tree Hill star talked about the end of her previous marriage, how she met Harris, and how their romance blossomed from a friendship to much more.

Now, with more details coming out about Harris and her ex-wife Ali Krieger's divorce proceedings, fans will be shining a light on their timeline all over again.

According to Us Weekly , Krieger, who had been married to Harris since 2019, secretly filed for divorce in a separate legal action in New Jersey on December 1, 2023. Three months prior, on September 19, 2023, Harris had filed for divorce first, but in Florida, not in their residing state of New Jersey.

Given their lack of residence there, Harris' file was deemed incorrect, and Krieger's suit will be the one moving forward.

In Krieger's filing, she asked the court to implement a "legal and residential custody arrangement and parenting time that protects the best interests of their two children." The soccer stars share their daughter Sloane, 3, and son Ocean, 1.

Krieger, who cited "irreconcilable differences" as their reason for splitting, is also asking for Harris to pay her child support and legal fees as well as dividing their assets and liabilities equally.

So while it's hard to understand why Harris would file in the incorrect state, it's safe to say she might've been in a rush to take legal action. After all, it's reported that she and Bush started dating in October.

But, before we make too many speculations about timelines potentially overlapping, Bush did address these rumors in her essay.

According to Bush, her friendship with Harris blossomed specifically because they were both going through breakups at the same time. "Ashlyn [Harris], whom I'd first met in 2019 and who was in the process of figuring out her own split from her wife," Bush wrote. "She'd been such a kind ear for those of us who opened up about our problems during a shared weekend of speaking engagements at a fancy conference in Cannes, and soon it became clear that she needed our ears too."

The same goes for any overlap accusations for Bush's ex, Grant Hughes. "There were accusations of being a home-wrecker," she wrote. "The ones who said I'd left my ex because I suddenly realized I wanted to be with women-my partners have known what I'm into for as long as I have (so that's not it, y'all, sorry!)."

Before you go, click here to see our favorite lesbian couples in Hollywood. 

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Rory McIlroy Files for Divorce from Wife Erica Stoll After 7 Years of Marriage

The pro-golfer filed for divorce on May 13 in Palm Beach County, Florida, according to court documents obtained by PEOPLE

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Rory McIlroy is divorcing wife Erica Stoll after seven years of marriage.

The 35-year-old pro-golfer filed for divorce from Stoll, 36, according to court documents filed in Florida, and obtained by PEOPLE. McIlroy filed the petition to dissolve the marriage on May 13.

Stoll and McIlroy share one daughter, Poppy , who they welcomed in 2020.

McIlroy and Stoll married on April 22, 2017, during a lavish ceremony at Ashford Castle in County Mayo, Ireland. According to E! News , the wedding had very tight security and included several A-list celebrity guests from  Stevie Wonder  to actor  Jamie Dornan .

Over the course of their relationship, Stoll had been a supportive figure for McIlroy at his tournaments, from caddying for him at the 2023 Masters Par 3 contest to cheering him on at the Ryder Cup in Italy.

Stoll, a former employee of the PGA of America, met McIlroy in 2012 at the Ryder Cup where she had been working as a transport official. After McIlroy overslept because of a time zone mixup and nearly missed his tee time, Stoll got him a police escort to the course in Medinah, Illinois.

However, the couple didn't become romantically involved until years later in 2014. McIlroy had been dating tennis player  Caroline Wozniacki  when he first met Stoll.  McIlroy and Wozniacki got engaged  on New Year's Eve in 2013 but  he broke things off a few months later .

McIlory recalled his first time meeting Stoll during an interview on the  Golf Channel .

"Erica that week was always the one that was checking us in and out. She was there at transportation, so she was always in the car park over there. But yeah, it's still cool to look around and think about that week, and obviously everything that's happened since then. It's pretty cool," he said.

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Stoll and McIlroy officially started dating in late 2014, but kept their relationship quiet and didn't make many public appearances as a couple at the start.

In May 2015, about six months into dating, McIlroy  spoke to the  Times of London  about his relationship with Stoll. "I am very happy in my love life. We haven't really been putting it out there. She is from America, which is why I like to spend time in Palm Beach … The past six or seven months have been really nice. That part of my life is going great," McIlroy said.

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