People say money is the root of all evil, and it turns out that that sentiment may extend to the marital arena. A study from Kansas State University found that couples fighting about money turned out to be a strong predictor of their marriage's strength. Interestingly, the strength of this predictor has nothing to do with the couple's well-being. Regardless of whether the couple is carrying loads of credit card debt or living in a mansion, couples who fight over money see an increase in their divorce risk as compared to couples who do not.

The Study In Question

The study's authors conducted their research using data from the National Survey of Families and Households. That survey is managed by the University of Wisconsin, and collected sociological data for thousands of families over a nearly 20-year span. The Kansas State researchers examined the data from that study for over 4,500 couples to see if they reported fighting over money issues. The researchers then compared the couples who fought over money with those who did not, making sure to only compare couples with similar yearly incomes, debt loads, and net worth. The results showed a significant increase in divorce risk for people who had monetary fights. Interestingly, the effect was limited to fights over money. Couples who fought over children or sex or other issues did not show the same level of increased risk.

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One of the most difficult parts of divorce for many couples is broaching the subject in the first place. Sometimes it is a mutual decision, but often one spouse will decide it is time before the other realizes it. Revealing these feelings can often shock the other spouse, and it can make a divorce more emotionally charged. Now, there is a new type of marriage counseling that may make bringing up divorce easier, and it may help couples avoid it altogether. This new type of counseling is known as discernment counseling.

Understanding Discernment Counseling

The idea behind discernment counseling is that it helps couples “discern” whether divorce is really the right choice for them. Some research suggests that at least some fraction of divorces occur despite the fact that both couples would be open to patching up the marriage. The problem is that once the possibility of divorce enters the equation, it can be difficult for many couples to walk back from that.

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Marital relationships are uniquely personal, but there are still trends and commonalities that run between all of them. Many people going through or considering a divorce begin to get curious about this sort of common ground. It is not unusual to wonder whether there are other couples whose divorce was predicated on the same sort of problem.

Over the years, numerous studies have been conducted to examine what sorts of things were the most commonly reported causes of divorce. Naturally, the lists differ from study to study. However, psychologists at the University of Iowa conducted a review of multiple studies in an attempt to bring all their research together. They succeeded in creating a list of the most commonly reported reasons for divorce, and also broke the complaints down along gender lines.

Top Ten Overall

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“Fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce.” That statistic is a piece of common knowledge. It appears on TV, on the internet, and in conversations with friends. However, like most commonly known statistics, it seems to be wrong, or at the very least out of date by a few decades. The New York Times recently examined data on marriage and divorce rates and discovered some surprising trends. In a nutshell, the rate of both marriages and divorces are dropping, resulting in fewer, longer-lasting marriages. The analysis presents a variety of surprising findings that may cause people to reexamine the way that they look at divorce in the modern age.

What the Researchers Found

The researchers at the New York Times compared divorce rates decade by decade to examine whether the divorce rate really is increasing. The statistics that they found are quite surprising. The divorce high point is not the current decade, but appears to be in the 1970s and 1980s. By way of comparison, only 65 percent of marriages in the 70s and 80s made it to their 15-year mark. For the 1990s, that figure increases to 70 percent. While data for the 15th anniversary is not yet available for the 2000s, the data that is published shows an even lower set of divorce rates for the 1990s.

Possible Explanations

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Property division is one of the most important aspects of any divorce process, and probably the most important in marriages without children. Consequently, it leads to a lot of people wondering about how things get divided. All too often, people ask that question of how courts divide property before they ask a more fundamental question: “What does the court divide?” At a high level, the answer to that is simple. Marital property gets divided, and spouses get to keep their non-marital property for themselves. Answering the question of which property is marital and which property is not can become a bit more complicated.

What Is and Is Not Marital Property

The easiest place to start when discussing marital versus non-marital property is with a definition of marital property. Illinois law defines marital property as “all property acquired by either spouse subsequent to the marriage.” This means that things the spouses bring into the marriage are non-marital property and things they get afterward are marital property.

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