Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else Is Doing It Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years

Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected. The research was supported by National Institute on Aging Grants P01AG031093 and R01AG24448. Address correspondence to Rose McDermott, Department of Political Science, 36 Prospect St., Providence, RI 02912, [email protected]; James H. Fowler, Department of Political Science, and Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at CALIT2, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093, [email protected]; or Nicholas A. Christakis, Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, and Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, [email protected]. Social Network Effects on Divorce 1 According to the Census Bureau (National Vital Statistics Reports, 2008), roughly 50% of marriages will end in divorce within the first 15 years, and, as of 2007, the annual incidence of divorce stands at 36 per 1,000 (National Vital Statistics Reports, 2007). Moreover, remarriage, while common, tends to be even less successful than first marriage, resulting in higher rates of divorce with each successive trip down the aisle (Krieder & Fields 2002). These numbers matter because the individual health and welfare consequences for those who get divorced and because the influence of divorce on subsequent child development can be significant. But they also raise questions about whether there is an “epidemic” of divorce and, if so, whether there is a role of social contagion in this “epidemic.” Here, we examine the effect of divorce among one’s peers, and even among others farther away in the social network, on one’s own divorce risk. One possibility is that people who get divorced promote divorce in others by demonstrating that it is personally beneficial (or at least tolerable) or by providing support that allows an individual to contemplate and endure a rupture in their primary relationship. People in an unhappy relationship may be happier either on their own, embedded in a wider network of friends, or with a different partner. Another possibility is that people who get divorced inhibit divorce in others by demonstrating that it may be more personally costly than expected. People who watch the painful process of divorce may decide that their own unhappiness is worth bearing in order to avoid the cost of breaking up on themselves or their children. If the inhibitory effect of divorce is weaker than the promotion effect, then divorce might spread through a social network via a process of social contagion (involving a variety of mechanisms) from person to person to person. Past work on social connections and divorce has generally focused on the costs and benefits of social support for health, economic well-being, and marital stability. One area of research, for example, suggests that social networks and other emotionally supportive social ties can provide protective inoculation from severe social stressors and even disease (Durkheim, 1992; Berkman & Syme, 1979). Other work has shown that people receiving help experienced less distress (though the effect was reversed when the aid came with advice) (Kitson 1992). As Berkman (1995) writes, “For social support to be health promoting, it must provide both a sense of belonging and intimacy and must help people to be more competent and self-efficacious.” (245). Hence, the question is whether outside forms of social support can reinforce a decision by unhappy spouses to stay in suboptimal relationships, or whether deeply engaged friends instead potentiate fissure in such relationships, in part by providing more effective forms of support. More broadly, little is known about whether person-to-person connections affect divorce, and prior literature has not explored the wider effects of the person-to-person-to-person effects of divorce, although the logic of such investigation seems clear. If one person’s divorce affects another’s likelihood of initiating marital disruption, why wouldn’t such effects diffuse through society in a more widespread manner? There are two issues here, two distinct ways that social networks might affect divorce risk. First, the structure of the network in which one is embedded can itself affect risk of divorce. For example, the more friends a husband and wife have in common, the lower their risk of divorce. Or, the greater the transitivity of the network around them (the more their friends are friends with each other), the lower their risk of divorce (similar, for example, to the effect Bearman and Moody found with respect to suicide risk in adolescent girls (2004)). Or, possibly, 1 Anyone with an intrusive parent can understand the psychological dynamic underlying this