This is the season for stress—when Christmas is celebrated, or Hanukkah, and New Years and all the shopping holidays and preparations, parties, eating and drinking.
But is it also the season for divorce?
A study released last August revealed that divorce filings generally peak twice in year—in August, and March—and suggested that the trend was linked to the end of summer and end of winter.
Here is the ominous Batman-shaped trend:
But the study authors confirm what is common knowledge amongst family lawyers: the winter holiday season itself is often the death blow to a relationship:
[H]olidays are culturally sacred times for families, [Associate sociology professor Julie] Brines said, when filing for divorce is considered inappropriate, even taboo.
“People tend to face the holidays with rising expectations, despite what disappointments they might have had in years past,” Brines said. “They represent periods in the year when there’s the anticipation or the opportunity for a new beginning, a new start, something different, a transition into a new period of life. …”
But holidays are also emotionally charged and stressful for many couples and can expose fissures in a marriage. The consistent pattern in filings, the researchers believe, reflects the disillusionment unhappy spouses feel when the holidays don’t live up to expectations.
The time between the holiday season and the first uptick in March may reflect a period of decision-making, grieving, finding and consulting a lawyer, and determining your best path forward before engaging the court procedure.
But the process starts much sooner. As Global News reported last year, the first Monday back to work after the holidays has been dubbed “Divorce Day” in Great Britain by family lawyers who had observed a marked increase in calls on that day.
The Washington study authors also noted that the first peak on their graph coincides with the springtime peak for suicides. Is there a connection? Maybe not.
However, if increased time or intense togetherness with your family is giving you a special case of holiday blues, be safe and consider this: in the western world divorce has replaced death as the most common endpoint of marriage. As one blogger put it:
Four or five hundred years ago in England the words “until death do us part” became a piece of the standard marriage vow. We still say it and mean it when we marry. But today when two young people who can reasonably expect to live another fifty to seventy years get married, the old vow takes on a meaning that was unheard of when the vow was introduced.
Still, there can be a lot of shame around ending a marriage. Another blogger challenges the common assumption:
If every divorce is a “failed” marriage then by that same reasoning, a loveless, sexless, contemptuous and alcoholic marriage that lasts until one spouse kicks over would be a “successful” marriage….
This year, “Divorce Day” falls on Monday, January 2, 2017.