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The research does not show these positive outcomes for long-term cohabiting relationships. "When people marry, when they commit to the relationship," Waite found, "that person's well-being and the other person's well-being become inextricably linked, so it is in their best interest to see their spouse do well." Waite's explanation illuminates the "one-flesh" ideal, which doesn't emerge with such clarity in more individualistic cohabiting relationships.

Why does marriage benefit us so? "I think, biologically, it's the way we're constructed," Waite says. "We're group animals who function best when we're a member of a cohesive group, and in our society; what that means mostly is that you have a spouse." Or to translate it into another system, it is because men and women are created in the image of the Trinity, which is intrinsically intimate and relationally exclusive.

The word unexpected in the title is key. As divorce began to grow more common in this country in the 1970s, it did so on the widespread assumption that divorce was no longer a social ill but rather a personal good. As Barbara Dafoe Whitehead explains in The Divorce Culture, "Once the last and least desirable remedy for a failed marriage, divorce now became the psychologically healthy response to marital dissatisfaction."

As Wallerstein explained in an interview with CT, "We were really flying blind back then. We thought the hardest part of divorce would be at the time of the breakup." Accordingly, Wallerstein originally set out to study these children for five years, thinking that time would be sufficient to capture the effects of divorce. She had to continue extending her study because the problems were not going away. As her subtitle suggests, the study lasted 25 years. "We now know that the most powerful impact from divorce occurs in the early 20s, when man and woman relationships come center stage," she says. "That's when all the ghosts of their parents' divorce become very powerful and exercise a major influence on the young; it is here that the effects of divorce crescendo."

Her study tells us a lot—not just about divorce, but about children themselves. For the quarter of all adults younger than 44 who saw their parents divorce, the experience was a childhood-ending experience. The children of divorce are not comforted that so many around them are going through the same things. They go through the pain alone.

A central finding in Wallerstein's research is that "children identify not only with their mother and father as separate individuals, but with the relationship between them." Although Wallerstein doesn't put it quite this way, children see mom and dad the way Christians see the members of the Trinity. The comparison is more than illustrative. Like Waite, Wallerstein unwittingly illustrates a significant Christian truth. Children see their parents as God sees them: as one flesh, an indistinguishable unit.

Nor are children comforted by the well-intentioned drivel offered by the likes of Sesame Street and Barney the Dinosaur that divorced families are just like intact families except that mom and dad live apart. Wallerstein tells us families of divorce are "a different kind of family" and "mothers and fathers who share beds with different people are not the same [as] mothers and fathers living under the same roof." As Charles Williams said, "Divorce is bad metaphysics" because it forever changes the unchangeable basic material and substance of family life.

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February 5 2001, Vol. 45, No. 2