DIVORCEoccupational commitments, and lower fertility ex-
pectations; not a rejection of marriage per se.
Rather, increasing divorce rates reflect the fact
that marriage is increasingly evaluated as an en-
tirely emotional relationship between two per-
sons. Marital breakdown, or the failure of mar-
riage to fulfill emotional expectations, has come
increasingly to be a cause for divorce. Since the
1970s, our laws have explicitly recognized this as
justification for terminating a marriage—the best
evidence we have that love and emotional close-
ness are the sine qua non of modern American
marriage. Contemporary divorce rates thus signal
a growing unwillingness to tolerate an unsatisfying
emotional conjugal relationship.
The consequences of divorce for children are
difficult to disentangle from the predictable changes
in household structure. Whether the long-term
consequences are produced by the single-parent
situation typically experienced for five to ten years,
or from the other circumstances surrounding di-
vorce is not clear. It is quite apparent, however,
that divorce occasions significant instabilities in
children’s and mothers’ lives.
Our knowledge about the consequences of
divorce for individuals is limited at this time by the
absence of controlled studies that compare the
divorced to the nondivorced. Virtually all research
done to date follows the lives of divorced individu-
als without comparing them to a comparable group
of individuals who have not divorced. A related
concern is whether the consequences of divorce
reflect the experience itself, or whether they re-
flect various selection effects. That is, are people
who divorce different from others to begin with?
Are their experiences the results of their divorce,
or of antecedent factors?
When almost half of all marriages are predict-
ed to end in divorce, it is clear that marital disrup-
tion is a conspicuous feature of our family and
kinship system. Divorce creates new varieties of
kin not traditionally incorporated in our domi-
nant institutions. The rights and obligations at-
tached to such kinship positions as spouse of the
noncustodial father are ambiguous—itself a source
of problems. The social institution of the family is
redefined as a consequence of divorce. Entering
marriage, for example, is less commonly the begin-
ning of adult responsibilities. Ending marriage is
less commonly the consequence of death. Parents
are not necessarily co-residents with their child-
ren. And new categories of ‘‘quasi’’ kin are invent-
ed to accommodate the complex connections
among previously married spouses and their new
spouses and children. In many ways, divorce itself
has become a dominant institution in American
society. It is, however, significantly less structured
by consensual normative beliefs than the family
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