Sudden Divorce Syndrome - part 1

[inferno]

One in four men who will get divorced this year don't have any clue that it's coming. Here's how to avoid that surprise.

By: John Sedgwick; Photographs: Matthu Placek

Like every husband who suddenly turns into an ex, Martin Paul, a pleasant, unassuming 51-year-old, knows exactly where he was when it happened. He was sitting on the back porch of his pricey hilltop house in the Boston suburbs one sunny Saturday morning, relaxing over coffee.

http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/uploads/1/1207TPC_divorce_inline1.jpg

Paul is a professional collector, primarily of coins, but of other rare objects as well: Sonny Liston's ring belt; a submarine that appeared in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. It wasn't easy to build up his collecting business, but he had finally got it humming, and he was pulling down close to seven figures a year. Plus, the oldest of his three sons had suffered a frightening brain injury, but after two years of treatment, he had finally recovered enough to go to college. For the first time in a very long while, life was good.

And so, that Saturday, he wanted to tell his wife he was thinking about finally easing off a little. They'd started going on expensive vacations in Europe and Hawaii, and he figured she'd be pleased at the prospect of taking more trips together, or at least at the prospect of seeing him around the house a little more, and not buried in his basement office. He had met her in graduate school over a quarter century ago, and they'd had their ups and downs, but he was still crazy about her. And he thought that, with a little more time together, she'd be crazy about him again too.

But no. She scarcely listened to any talk of retirement, or of vacations, or of anything he had to say. She had plans of her own.

"I want a divorce," she said.

Paul was so stunned that he thought he must have misheard her. But her face told him otherwise. "She looked like the enemy," he says. He started to think about everything he'd built: the thriving business, the wonderful family, the nice life in the suburbs. And he thought of her, and how much he still loved her. And then, right in front of her, he started to cry.

That night, he found a bottle of whiskey, and he didn't stop drinking it until he nearly passed out.

Things turned sh---- very fast. His wife took out a temporary restraining order, accusing him of attempting to kidnap their youngest son. The claim was never proved in court. Then, with the aid of some high-priced lawyers, she extracted from him a whopping $50,000 a month — a full 75 percent of his monthly income. Barred from the house, he was not allowed regular access to the office he used to generate that income. (On the few times he was permitted inside, his wife did not let him use the bathroom. She insisted that he go outside in the woods.) "My lawyer kept telling her lawyers, 'You're killing the Golden Goose,'" recalls Paul. "But they didn't care."

Crushed by the payments, and unable to work, he soon faced such a severe cash-flow crisis that he had to declare bankruptcy. His wife still did not relent. She charged that Paul had been abusive toward one of their sons. Paul says the charge is absurd, but it did its work, limiting his visitation rights.

Paul was sleepless and nerve wracked; his spirits plunged. He still missed his old life with his family. He missed the sound of it — the bustle of all the activity, the life. "I can't stand the silence," he says. "I miss hearing my wife breathe as she lay in bed beside me." In his desperation, he twice overdosed on prescription medication, but managed to call 911 each time before the drugs took full effect, and medics rushed him to the hospital in time. "I don't want to die," he says wearily. "I want to live. But I can't live with this torture." He did manage to keep a few mementos of his former life. Pictures, mostly. But also the kids' baby shoes. "I was always the emotional one," he says. "But that's all I have — the shoes, a few pictures. That's all. I used to be jovial, happy. But not now. I'm a broken man."

Sudden Divorce Syndrome. You won't find it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that bible of psychiatric illnesses, but you will find it in life. In a 2004 poll by the AARP, one in four men who were divorces in the previous year said they "never saw it coming." (Only 14 percent of divorced women said they experienced the same unexpected broadside.) And few events in a man's life can be as devastating to his physical, mental, and financial health.
"I meet men all the time who are going through breakups, and it's very common for them to say it caught them by surprise," says Los Angeles-based sex therapist Lori Buckley, PsyD, host of "On the Minds of Men," a weekly relationship podcast on iTunes.

The warning signs are usually there, claims Buckley, but the male mind is simply not very adept at recognizing them. "When women make up their mind that the relationship is over, they stop talking about the relationship," she says. "Men interpret a woman"s lack of complaining as satisfaction. But more often, it's because she's simply given up."

To understand how common this scenario is, consider figures provided by John Guidubaldi, a former member of the U.S. Commission on Child and Family Welfare. Nationwide, Guidubaldi reports, wives are the ones to file for divorce 66 percent of the time, and, in some years, that figure has soared to nearly 75 percent. "It is easier to end a marriage than it is to fire an employee," says Guidubaldi. If she wants out, it's over. "You can get a dissolution of marriage on the basis of nothing."

Oftentimes, men have a divorce sprung on them in midlife, when their kids are more self-sufficient and they've finally started to think they were over the hump. Like Martin Paul, they could start to relax. But that's exactly the time of life when the instance of divorce begins to swell (another occurs shortly after marriage). Joe Cordell, of the law firm Cordell and Cordell, which specializes in representing men in domestic cases, attributes this to wives deciding as they approach age 40 that it's now or never for getting back into the marriage market. It's the same phenomenon as rich guys trading in their long-time partners for trophy wives. Only it's the women who are shedding men.

source: http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/sex-relationships/Sudden_Divorce_Syndrome.shtml

[inferno]

It didn’t used to be this way. While divorce has been legal for nearly two centuries, it was long a topic of such mortification that it was considered a last, desperate resort. The 1960s changed all that. The free-love decade both increased the inclination to divorce and dropped the social resistance to it. The rising financial independence of women began to free them from a need to stay in a stultifying or abusive marriage. As a result, divorce soared, doubling by most measures. But the stereotypical divorce story—man marries, starts a family, meets a younger women, and leaves his wife—just isn’t as common as we are led to believe.

“Marriage changes men more pervasively and more profoundly than it changes women,” explains sociologist Steven Nock, author of Marriage in Men’s Lives. “The best way to put it is, marriage is for men what motherhood is for women.” Marriage makes men grow up. Nock observes that many men before marriage are indifferent workers, and, after hours, are likely to be found in bars or zoned out in front of a TV. After marriage, they are solid wage earners, frequent churchgoers, maybe members of a neighborhood protection association. But divorce takes that underpinning away, leaving men strangely infantilized and unsure of their place in the world. They feel like interlopers in the stands at their children’s soccer games or in the auditorium for their school plays.

Compounding this pain, men find the deck is stacked against them. The divorce system tends to award wives custody of the children, substantial child support, the marital home, half the couple’s assets, and, often, heavy alimony payments.

This may come as startling news to a public that has been led to believe that women are the ones who suffer financially postdivorce, not men. But the data show otherwise, according to an exhaustive study of the subject by Sanford L. Braver, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University and author of Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths. “The man is in a lot poorer condition than the popular media portray,” he says. “This idea of the swinging, happy-go-lucky, no-worries single guy in a bar…that’s just not it at all.” The misconception was fueled by Harvard professor Lenore Weitzman’s widely cited book, The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America.

Weitzman’s 1985 tome claimed that postdivorce women and children suffer on average a 73 percent drop in their standard of living, while the divorced men’s standard of living increased by 42 percent. Years later, Weitzman acknowledged a math error; the actual difference was 27 percent and 10 percent, respectively. But Braver says even that figure is based on severely flawed calculations. Weitzman and other social scientists ignored men’s expenses—the tab for replacing everything from the bed to the TV to the house—as well as the routine costs of helping to raise the children, beyond child support. Even the tax code favors women: Not only is child support not tax deductible for fathers, but a custodial mother can take a $1,000 per child tax credit; the father cannot, even if he’s paying. As “head of the household,” the mother gets a lower tax rate and can claim the children as exemptions. If the ex-wife remarries, she is still entitled to child support, even if she marries a billionaire. Indeed, every year men are actually thrown in jail for failing to meet their child-support obligations. In the state of Michigan alone, nearly 3,000 men were locked up for that offense in 2005.

But for many men, the real pain isn’t financial, it’s emotional: “Men depend on women for their social support and connections,” says Buckley. “When marriages end, men can find themselves far more alone than they ever expected.” In a large-scale Canadian survey, 19 percent of men reported a significant drop in social support postdivorce. Women are customarily the keepers of the social calendars, and all that is implied by that, providing for what University of Texas sociologist Norval D. Glenn calls the fartz“intangibles” that can create much of a man’s sense of place in the world. More often than not, wives send out the Christmas cards; they stitched that cute Halloween costume their daughter wore in second grade; they recall the names of the neighbors who used to live two houses down. The men who bear all these unexpected burdens do so alone, in a strange place, while their ex-wives and children live in the houses that used to be theirs. For an ex-husband to enter that house can feel like trespassing, even though it was paid for with his own money, or sometimes, built with his own hands.


Long before his wife came along, a frame-store owner named Jordan Appel, 55, had built a fine house for himself atop West Newton Hill in one of the fancier Boston suburbs. He loved bringing in a wife and then adding two children. “It felt so wonderful to say ‘my wife’ and ‘my children’ and feel part of a community.” He volunteered for the preschool’s yard sale; his wife took up with a lover. Sometimes she slept with him in Appel’s own house; in time, she decided to divorce Appel. As these things go, he was obliged to leave the house, and, as it happened, the community too. Money was so tight that he ended up sleeping in a storage room above his frame shop two towns away. His ex-wife works part-time on the strength of Appel’s child custody and alimony payments, and spends time with her boyfriend in Appel’s former house. She lives rather well, and he has to make $100,000 a year to support her and the children, which amounts to 70-hour workweeks. One day, he went back to his house and discovered many of his belongings out on the sidewalk with the trash. “My body feels like it’s dissolving in anger,” he says. “I’m in an absolute rage every single day.”

“What are five of the biggest stressors a human being can face?” asks Ned Holstein, MD, executive director of Fathers and Families, a Massachusetts-based reform group for divorced dads. “One: the death of a child. Two: the loss of a spouse. Three: the loss of a home. Four: a serious financial reversal. And five: losing a relationship with a child. All of these except the first are combined in a father’s experience of divorce. People always think the man is a lone wolf and he can take care of himself. Well, he’s also a human being, and people don’t think through what that means for men.”

source: http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/sex-relationships/Sudden_Divorce_Syndrome_3.shtml

[inferno]

As hard as such deprivations are on the psyche, they can be devastating to a man’s health. Recently divorced men are nearly nine times more likely to commit suicide than their female counterparts, according to a study by sociologist Augustine Kposowa. “It’s not so much the loss of money,” he says, “but the loss of children that propels men to suicide.” Or it could be a combination. Infuriated by his obligation to pay child support for three children he rarely saw, Perry Manley snuck a hand grenade inside a federal courthouse in Seattle last year and was shot to death by security personnel after they spotted it. The death was termed “suicide by cop.” Kposowa has also detected an increased incidence of motor-vehicle accidents among divorced men, either due to a lack of concentration, sleeplessness, or, more darkly, suicide “cloaked as an accident,” he says.

Compared with married or single men, divorced men are nine times as likely to be admitted to the hospital, to report difficulties at work, or to suffer significant depression. According to a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, they suffer the effects of divorce with the intensity that their wives experience the death of a close friend. And they suffer physical maladies. “Their blood pressure goes up, and so does their cholesterol, and that drives up hypertension, heart disease, coronary artery disease, and peripheral vascular disease,” says psychiatrist Arnold Robbins, associate editor of the Journal of Men’s Health & Gender. Researchers at the Texas Heart Institute have noted that emotional stress can lead to a dangerous ballooning of the left ventricle, which they term “broken heart syndrome.” Says Dr. Robbins: “A lot of metabolic syndromes kick in too, like borderline and type 2 diabetes. There’s cirrhosis of the liver from too much drinking. Even prostate problems. It’s not a pretty picture.”

Scientists have recently come to some possible conclusions as to why this might be so. It may be as simple as a loss of being touched. James Coan, PhD, a psychologist in the departments of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Virginia, found that, for a husband, just holding his wife’s hand is enough to reduce the stress associated with the anticipation of pain. Regular sex helps insulate a man from chronic stress, and that can pay off in increased longevity: In a study of 1,000 middle-aged men by researchers at Queen’s University in Belfast, men who had sex at least three times a week had half the risk of heart attack or stroke of men who had sex less frequently.

Distressed by such facts, men’s groups are springing up around the country. “Think of it,” says Stephen Baskerville, president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, in Washington, D.C. “A father could be sitting in his own home, not agreeing to a divorce, not unfaithful to his marriage vows, and not abusive, and the next thing he knows, the court has taken his house, his children, and a lot of his money, and then forced him to pay his wife’s legal fees and even her psychologist’s fees. And he can be threatened with jail time if he resists.”


So, how to avoid Sudden Divorce Syndrome? One way, of course, is to avoid marriage. Another way is by working on your marriage when it can still be salvaged. Statistically, end-stage marriage counseling is rarely effective, despite what the counselors might say. Instead, husbands might be wise to pay attention to the essential ratio that—according to John Gottman, PhD, a world-renowned researcher of marriage stability—governs marital success or failure: five to one. That means husbands (and wives) should direct at least five positive remarks or actions to their spouses for every negative one. Any less and the marriage is in trouble. Or, following the much-admired work of Howard Markman, PhD, who holds couples workshops (loveyourrelationship.com), husbands should attune themselves to their wives’ “bids”—for attention, for affection, for all the things that sustain a relationship—and do their best to provide for them. In truth, husbands are not built for the demands that wives often place on them; they are less inclined to talk things out or to display emotion. But then, marriage isn’t easy for either party. When a wife wants out, it is usually not out of selfishness or senseless cruelty. Sometimes the love simply runs out. Husbands should do what they can to keep that love alive. That way, they might hang on to the many delights that marriage affords and spare themselves the countless horrors that divorce can bring.

But such advice comes too late for the many men like Martin Paul and Jordan Appel, who have already fallen victim to the syndrome. For them, the best, and perhaps only, cure will be time—time to forge a new relationship that can undo the ravages of the previous one. After all, most divorced men, like most divorced women, do remarry. A second marriage is a triumph of hope over experience, yes, but it’s the best chance to restore the health and security that so cruelly has been taken away. Even without remarriage, the overwhelming sense of upheaval will gradually fade if the men can only persevere. And, in time, the experience will evolve into a memory that, however bitter, yields a gift of wisdom.

source: http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/sex-relationships/Sudden_Divorce_Syndrome_4.shtml

[kwak76]

So from reading that article divorce has more of a negative consequence for men than for women.

There has to be some underlying reason why all of a sudden a woman would want to divorce a man. Something that was not notice before. In any case marriage does not have the same weight it used to.

[nottyboy]

So from reading that article divorce has more of a negative consequence for men than for women.

There has to be some underlying reason why all of a sudden a woman would want to divorce a man. Something that was not notice before. In any case marriage does not have the same weight it used to.

The reasons for a divorce can be hard to quantify because there can be so many, and also because people may not be completely candid in giving you a motive.

People can change too, down the line, and it's relatively easy to divorce now witht he "no-fault" laws. Women, specifically, don't have to put up with a man anymore because they can support themselves. Guys, as long as they have money to waste, can just as easily leave their wives if they don't mind paying alimony.

[nskripchun]

I wonder if the recent death of Heath Ledger was a suicide in relation to the break-up of him and his long-time GF, who also happens to be the mother of his 2-year old daughter.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1705981,00.html

[nightshade]

I wonder if the recent death of Heath Ledger was a suicide in relation to the break-up of him and his long-time GF, who also happens to be the mother of his 2-year old daughter.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1705981,00.html

Dude! There is speculation that he died in Mary Kate Olsen's apartment. WTF.

[RebelAzn]

Dude! There is speculation that he died in Mary Kate Olsen's apartment. WTF.

I thought they lived in the same building?

This article did not exactly paint a very nice picture of marriage. I think the laws are screwed in favor of women these days. The case where the wife dumped the husband and brought the BF into their house and forced the husband to pay for their monthly bills is just too much. With these stats, why would any man want to get married these days?

[nightshade]

I thought they lived in the same building?

Turns out the misinformation happened because the person who found HL dead called Mary Kate before calling 911. He was indeed in his own apartment.

[Synthetic]

divorce is to be expected in this day and age. i heard about this study that said 1 in 4 women would divorce their husband TODAY if they could, however, given the cirumstances of family and money, they don't. even though it sounds really really really bad to say, the more successful countries get in terms of equality among men and women, the less focus there is on family.

i mean...

woman goes to college to live a successful life....gets a good job.
man goes to college to live a successful life....gets a good job.

successful woman decides to marry successful man and move to the suburbs and start a family...they do.

kids are born, woman goes back to work.
kids are born, man has always been at work.

...18 years later, successful man and successful woman have grown apart, no longer love each other, and get divorced.

there's not really a place for traditional family "roles" anymore...family these days is more of an associative relationship that just happens on the typical blueprint of life that we think we're all supposed to be living; and the sad thing is, we all raise our kids to do the same drone-ish thing. go to school, get a good job, start a family, provide for the family, blah blah.

it's like we're incapable of viewing the modern day family from a third person perspective. it's all rather lame, in my opinion.

[maogirl]

naw, dude, obviously, it's KIDS that are the problem! so send me your kids and i'll eat them and we'll be rid of the problem!

i'm also ambivalent about marriage, but then i'm not the best person to speak on it as i've got serious commitment issues. the only way i was able to stay in a long-term relationship was because the dude and i were very detached from each other, and it was more of a companionship than anything else.

being single for the past year or so has been a real blessing for me. i'm really not sure if i could sustain a real relationship...fortunately, no dude has been crazy enough to try, heh. i can't really blame them, though...i mean, i'm narcissistic enough to think i'm a great partner, but i can see why dudes would back away and then run while i'm distracted.

[Dirac]

Hmm, I think marriage can survive and prosper even when the husband and wife have non-traditional roles. My mother always worked and enjoyed her job and the circle of people she associated with. She suits working much more than my father who took early retirement and has mellowed out so much since he doesn't have work stress. It suited me and my family very well, although I can appreciate it wouldn't work for everyone, especially if the children / husband / wife felt neglected. I think, as Synthetic said, we should stop trying to live according to a blueprint and instead try and find what lifestyle actually suits us.

[kwak76]

I think marriage can work but it has to be sustained with constant work. This is where people fall apart. They either get lazy or want the easy way out.

[Senkeh]

I think marriage can work but it has to be sustained with constant work. This is where people fall apart. They either get lazy or want the easy way out.

I gotta agree with this one. In that first story, I couldn't help but notice that the woman "didn't want to hear" anything--no making up, no trying to fall back in love, no going on expensive vacations to be pampered by a loving husband.

[Synthetic]

yeah, but marriage and love aren't as simple as just saying, "as long as we keep trying and forcing it, it'll work out."....i think with relationships you have to rely more on gut and natural feelings. otherwise, at the end of the day, 40 years from now, both parties will just look back with resentment, not even being able to remember the last time they loved the other person. one can only beat a dead horse for so long.

[Hater Depot]

i think with relationships you have to rely more on gut and natural feelings.

But if that were true, then why don't arranged marriages fail more often than love marriages? One of my sister's friend's parents had an arranged marriage in India and they grew to love each other.

[Dirac]

Maybe it's expectations vs. reality?

Divorce also carries more of a stigma in India than it does in England although this is changing.

[grumblebum]

The only reason some people divorce these days is because it's too easy. Don't like your partner anymore, divorce them. They are annoying you now, divorce them. They have changed, divorce them.

It is not like what it used to be. In our parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc etc. eras, divorce was unheard of. If you get annoyed at your wife/husband, if you realised they have changed, if cracks start to appear. You didn't just shout "Divorce" and throw in the towel, you actually both worked hard on the marriage to try and fix it, not just go "oh its getting a little too hard, lets just quit". That is why in this day and age, there are a high percentage of divorce, couples don't believe in forevers anymore, they only believe what is right now or will be in the next 2-4 yrs, until they think something else better comes along.

That is why, I think, if you are not going to even try and work hard and be committed in a marriage, don't get married. It's as simple as that. You will be just wasting everyone's time.

Obviously, there are some incidents which divorce is a must, i.e. it has become an abusive relationship.

In relation to the article, it is sad to read that after building and working hard for their families, their spouses could do something so harsh and cruel to them. These spouses seem to be heartless people.

[Anarchrist]

That was quite an eye-opener. Admittedly, I was always under the assumption that if one spouse has evidence of another's infidelity they could be relatively shielded in case of divorce. Looking at Appel I guess that's not the case anymore.

[valleydude]

I had to chime in -- I see a lot of focus here on values and society, but we're ignoring one important aspect -- science.

Anyone notice the age ranges quoted in the article were all around 50-60? As men and women grow older, hormonal changes occur. This is especially pronounced in women when they hit menopause, as certain key hormones that foster nurturing emotions (critical to getting a woman to bond with her children and care for them) get drastically reduced, leading to a skyrocketing divorce rate at that age. Divorces just didn't happen as much historically because they were harder to obtain (and social pressures made it hard to go out on one's own as a woman)

I actually heard something to this exact effect on the Podcast of Kelter's Psychology of Emotion class at Berkeley (available online).

Btw, socially, I don't think this is great. Clearly laws are far too much in women's favor right now, a result of the overly PC 80s and 90s. There needs to be balance. Ironic that this issue of inequity can be solved by just not marrying anyone and having any kids you want out of wedlock (in which case I believe you are just making payments on the children you actually had, though this system too is rife with inequities). Is this what the government or society wants?

[cattygurl]

A lot of women tend to divorce at older ages- because many wait until their kids are settled into their adult lives. A lot of women don't want to stress the kids out while they're still in school,college, or just starting in their career they often wait until the kids are a bit more stable. Many also talk about worrying financially- many women that are now 50-60 didn't have a career they could fall on to support the family when they were 20/30. I remember reading a study where the majority of women who waited for divorce in their 50's and 60's would have divorced decades earlier had they felt it would not affect finances/kids drastically. I would bet that ppl "waiting to divorce" will reduce when my generation (and slightly older) hits our 40's-60's.

There's a lot of paranoia about divorce, but it's not as most ppl keep divorcing for the rest of their lives. The majority have enduring marriages the second or third time around. The Elizabeth Taylors are the minority, not the majority.

As much as ppl talk of divorce, a lot of divorce is not just "annyoing- let's get rid" mentality. A lot of divorce stems from situations- people go to school longer, dual career pulls people in different directions. People want to postpone/speed up having kids/change their mind about kids (many ppl get divorced over this) or have kids too early without thinking. Hell, I was in a 5 year relationship that crumbled partially due to work taking my partner to the other end of the state while I had obligations here that wouldn't allow me to pick up and move along, among other things. If we had been married (which we had discussed and postponed, thankfully), I would be looking at divorce right now. The fact is that people do change dramatically between 20-mid 30.

Also, obviously divorce rates are higher for ppl that get married young, for ppl that get married soon after meeting their partner, and also for ppl that have kids immediately after marriage. divorce rates for ppl in their teens and early 20's are pretty high, but people that get married for the first time in their 30's who have known their spouses for several years and postponed having kids several years after marriage have very low divorce rates, and it really makes sense as to why if you think about it. People that also have second marriages in their 30's tend to have enduring marraiges. I think most people, professionally, really don't "settle down" until their 30's, especially with the number of people needing to graduate school for the career of choice, getting second degrees, etc increasing.