Do people sometimes just regret getting married?

Photo of attorney Melinda L. Singer

You may not have a big event that tells you that you need to get divorced. You may not come home to catch your spouse cheating on you or discover that he or she has an addiction that is costing the family money every month. Instead, you may just generally regret getting married on a daily basis. 

There is some evidence that modern Americans regret marriage more than previous generations. For instance, a study carried out in 1960 looks at young adults who had gotten divorced. A full 72% of those in the study had split up and then gotten married again. When the same study was carried out in 2013, it found that a mere 42% of these young adults had married for a second time. 

Some of this may have to do with the age at which people get married. Those young adults may have just been putting it off and waiting until they were older to try again. But it could also suggest that they had regretted getting married. When they got out of that marriage, they had no desire to rush back into another one. They wanted to be single. They used divorce to rectify a mistake, and they weren’t interested in making the same mistake again. 

The world is also different today than it was in 1960. Many people felt a lot of cultural pressure to be married, and many women who couldn’t work needed financial support. That cultural pressure has shifted and women have become far more independent and involved in the workforce, so it could be that they don’t feel like they have to get remarried unless they really want to. 

No matter why you get divorced, it can be helpful to have an experienced legal team on your side. 

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