Divorce Perspectives

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I gave you two approaches and several opinions. Of course, you can accept or reject them, but you must deal with them one way or another. How you want to evaluate or use these works is entirely up to you. I just gave you a few ideas.

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Discuss two different divorce perspectives and how they may impact families as well as examples to support the analysis. Can these perspectives be compared and defended?

The Crisis-Stress Model of Divorce (CSMD) is very common. It is fairly popular because it shows divorce as a long and often drawn out process. The process begins with estrangement, a sense of isolation. Within this is renegotiation, when the expectations of marriage are brought to more realistic and manageable levels. Often, within this process, one partner does not want to the divorce, the other does. The latter sees stress at the beginning, while the former, always holding out hope, only stresses when the legal decree is final. Of course, this is not the end. Children, economic issues, settlement and legal issues, proximity and other factors continue to increase stress as time goes on. One important variable here is to "get on" with things: how long does it take to get involved with someone else so as to dull the pain? (Guttman, 2008).

Within this are two sub-models: the Crisis and the Chronic Strain model. These both take from the above, but end up in very different places. The Crisis sub-model says that once the above process is largely complete and two new lives have begun, soon, depending on many factors, psychological functioning will return to baseline. This is highly optimistic and depends on one's support structure, ability to connect with a mate fairly soon after divorce, and financial resources. Chronic Strain argues that divorce is never really over. Children, residual disagreements, remarriage, single parenting, negative effects on children, bad memories, proximity to one's ex and many other things continue to haunt both partners. These will not go away: they may change form and intensity, but they put causal chains into action that no one can realistically stop (Guttman, ...