On reading a post by a cheater-hating blogger, several things occurred to me. She’s a fan of dumping the cheater and speaks negatively about what she calls the “Reconciliation Industrial Complex“.
She sincerely believes people’s lives are improved after jettisoning the cheater. For proof, she cites a study from 2016. The study involved over 5000 people.
What she forgot to mention is that many of the people participating in the study had a history of multiple relationship break-ups. Using a study of people with frequent break-ups to prove that break-ups improve your life sounds biased to me. For a real comparison, they need a comparison of couples who worked things out compared to the break-up couples.
Although the longitudinal study focused on grief and breaking up, the blogger uses it as her basis of saying your life will be better without your spouse. She preaches the need to dump the cheater with reassurances of how your life will improve based on…the study.
Before you jettison your spouse based on the what the press says about a study, consider the source. One of the main authors of the study is an ‘expert’ on break-ups. His main attention is on how people break-up. This is only one study of many he’s done.
Rather than ‘discovering’ new truths about affairs, he instead focuses on ways life improves after break ups.
Does it surprise you that he claims people’s lives are better after breaking up? He also views breaking-up as part of human ‘evolutionary’ development.
Going into a study with a predetermined agenda raises concerns for me with his findings. Predetermined agendas don’t make good research for me. When researchers have biases, they tend to find more evidence of their bias rather than facts.
Although affairs are related to break-ups, surveying a group of people prone to break-ups only tells me more about people who like to break-up.
One of the problems with affair studies that look at quality of life is that what you consider a positive quality. Is it about happiness, wealth, security or raising a healthy family?
What you consider as good quality shapes whether or not getting rid of your spouse is a good thing.
What I do know is that when an affair happens, each of you suffers. The distance created by what happened interferes with how each of you think and feel. It changes how you solve problems, your ability to focus and how you handle your emotions.
Breaking up changes you. The more you do it, the greater the likelihood it’ll happen again. Consider that research finds that second marriages where cheaters marry the lover have a 75% divorce rate.
The gamble is whether breaking up is for the better.
One of the findings of the break-up study worth noting is that the real problem behind the break-ups was communication. ‘Lack of communication’ was identified as the problem at double the rate that infidelity was.
One thing I can tell you is that breaking up isn’t going to improve your ability to communicate with your spouse. If anything it reduces or eliminates the communication.
This puzzles me. When you shut down communication, how does that improve the quality of your life? You’re now further apart from the very person you wanted communication with.
If you want help in knowing how and what you can do, you’re in the right place. If you’re wanting to jettison your spouse, there are other sites better suited for your wants.
In the event you want better communication with your spouse, consider subscribing to my “30 Days to a Better Marriage Program”. It guides you through ways of improving your connection with your spouse.
Improving the communication in your marriage won’t fix all the problems, but it will make finding solutions easier.
Click and sign up today.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
