Will the Kids and I Ever Be Happy Again After Divorce?

Even if you were the abandoned spouse, the one who got left behind when your spouse filed, this applies to you too.

One of the leading researchers on divorce, Dr. Mavis Hetherington, wrote,

“In the early period, the ‘left’ spouses were the most unhappy and resentful, but by the end of the second year, there were few differences between those left and the ‘leavers’… [In] the second year there was an upsurge in emotional wellbeing as people began to adapt to their new life situation.” —Hetherington and Kelly, For Better or For Worse, p. 150-151

REMARRIAGE AFTER DIVORCE ENDING A LONG DESTRUCTIVE MARRIAGE

As for remarriage? It turns out that if you had a chronically miserable marriage and chose to divorce, there's a good chance you will be happier. Dr. Linda Waite, the noted researcher who found that 2 in 3 unhappy marriages became happier within 5 years, ALSO found that 8 in 10 of the people in her study who divorced and remarried were happier too. Is that a guarantee? No, but odds are that if you stayed a long time in an unhappy marriage, the problem isn't you.

The same good news about happier remarriages after a long miserable marriage was found in a larger, more comprehensive study by Drs Hawkins and Booth:

"Remaining unhappily married is associated with significantly lower levels of overall happiness, life satisfaction, self-esteem and overall health along with elevated levels of psychological distress compared to remaining otherwise continuously married. There is also some evidence that staying unhappily married is more detrimental than divorcing, as people in low-quality marriages are less happy than individuals who divorce and remarry. They also have lower levels of life satisfaction, self-esteem and overall health than individuals who divorce and remain unmarried. Unhappily married people may have greater odds of improving their well-being by dissolving their low-quality unions as there is no evidence that they are better off in any aspect of overall well-being than those who divorce." —Daniel N. Hawkins and Alan Booth, Unhappily Ever after: Effects of Long-Term, Low-Quality Marriages on Well-Being, Social Forces, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Sep., 2005), pp. 451-471, from the abstract

So basically they found that people in 12-year-long (or longer) marriages that had been miserable, were happier after divorce (on average), whether they remarried or stayed single.

According to decades of research, none of the fear-bombing is true for the vast majority of people who need to escape from long destructive or unfaithful marriages. There is research showing that you are likely to be happier if you leave a long destructive marriage.