Splitsville News

This article states that a British mathematician has figured out a formula to predict whether couples are likely to stay together or divorce.  In the piece, Oxford University professor James Murray is quoted as saying “some couples might as well get divorce right away”.  He claims that his formula has a 94% accuracy rate based on his study of 700 newly-married couples.

To arrive at his conclusion, Murray filmed newlywed couples discussing contentious issues and analyzed how they behaved.  In Murray’s study, the researchers categorized statements as either being positive (having humor or affection) or being negative (showing defensiveness or anger).  Murray assigned scores to both kinds of statements, and used those figures for his analysis.

I was struck by the similarity of Murray’s data collection approach and that of University of Washington’s Professor John Gottman.  A relationship expert, Gottman is a psychologist who runs a “Love Lab” and has previously claimed a 90+% accuracy rate in determining whether a couple will stay together or split up.  (An excerpt of Malcolm Gladwell’s description of Gottman’s work is here, and it describes the clues that Gottman’s team gathers for their analysis.)

Looking at the Murray’s (or Gottman’s findings), I can see how someone might be tempted to say that incompatible couples might as well go ahead and end the marriage.  As a divorce attorney, I think I see a lot of those couples in my office after five, ten or fifteen years of marriage.  However, even though couples do call it quits eventually, I think it can oversimplify things to say that they might as well get divorce right away.  Rarely is a marriage that ends in divorce or separation all bad, and–even though it might be tough to quantify–good things can come out of a marriage that ends in divorce.