Divorce is contagious. You catch it from your friends. At least that’s the opinion of experts Mick heard recently on the radio. We were talking about this among other things in the car yesterday after listening to a sermon from our minister about the way marriage should operate and the biblical view of marriage.
But back to divorce being catching among friends. Mick and I began to wonder why this should be so. No it doesn’t necessarily mean the reason is that the couples in a group of friends are having affairs with each other and that’s why divorce results, though that could be the case at times. But it’s interesting to speculate about why when one coupe in a group of friends divorce others follow suit.
It could be then that once one couple gets divorced others in their circle of friends start looking at their own marriages and picking fault with their partners. As we’ve mentioned at other times the more you go looking for faults the more likely you are to find them. So suddenly you are looking at your spouse with super critical eyes expecting to find things wrong instead of looking for their good points.
It could be a case of ‘Yes, so and so. Used to do that and now they’re divorced. My spouse does too.’ So they start to entertain the idea of divorce. Instead of tying to work on their marriage it’s like it makes them more amenable to the idea of divorce.
As we considered our friends I noted most are in long standing marriages. Yes, we have some friends that are divorced and remarried. In each case that was before we met them.
Only once had we had close friends divorce while we knew them. That was when we were young and it rocked us at the time, to think we’d spent so much time together and hadn’t seen anything wrong.
What that did though was make us more determined that we would not join the divorce statistics but would continue to work on our marriage.
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