Marriage Losers

                                                                                                                  Vol. VIII, No. 6, June/July 1995

[Reprinted from the Washington Post, 12 February 1995, p. C5.]

Divorce statistics confirm that opposites attract, but not for long. Now there’s new evidence that poorly matched couples who eventually divorce often end up marrying the same kind of person who was exactly wrong for them the first time around.

“People who enter first marriages with high probabilities of divorce ... are more likely to repeat that pattern in remarriage than are people who marry more conventionally the first time,” wrote Steven Nock, a sociologist at the University of Virginia in a new study of divorce and remarriage. “This tendency to repeat ‘risky’ marriage patterns helps explain the high divorce rate in remarriages.”

Among the most frequently repeated marriage “mistakes”: marrying a man without a steady job, marrying a person who has been divorced, or marrying someone with children.

Nock also discovered that people who married (and divorced) people outside their religious faith as well as those whose spouses had substantially different amounts of education were likely to “persist in such choices in their second marriages.”

“Perhaps it makes sense to refer to such people as ‘marital losers,’” he wrote. “Spouses with different religious and/or educational backgrounds may find it difficult to craft a life of shared assumptions about both existential and transcendental reality.”