How divorce has changed since the 1980s

Nathan Newman wanted a quieter marriage than the one his parents had. His father was a screenwriter, and his mother was a novelist. They stayed together, but things could get volatile.

"Our home was kind of [_Who's Afraid of_] _Virginia Woolf_-y," he says. Newman, 57, got hitched right out of college at the University of Michigan in 1981. He and his

Midwestern bride arrived in Manhattan, unpacked their new VCR and went to their jobs, planning to save money before having kids. Unfortunately, Nathan's wife fell in love with her boss.

And at 25, Newman found himself single again. Reentering the dating scene, he became a serial monogamist, drifting from girlfriend to girlfriend and job to job. "I often wonder now if

I'd have been more successful if I'd have just stayed put at something," he says. "But that was sort of the thing in the 1980s, to always be looking for the next great

opportunity." For restless boomers like him, finding love in the '80s was hard work and an industry with its own nomenclature emerged to assist. "That was when the whole

concept and industry of marriage counseling took off," says Kristin Celello, associate professor of history at Queens College in New York and author of _Making Marriage Work._

"That's when people first start working on their relationships." It was also when the term "soul mate" entered the modern vernacular, she adds, and the pursuit of

these elusive creatures made many couples second-guess their own choice of partners. Now, your wife or husband wasn't just expected to be "good enough" — they had to be The

One. During the late '60s and '70s, a spate of feel-good self-help books — _The Courage to Divorce; I'm OK, You're OK; Looking Out for No. 1 _— encouraged troubled

couples to fearlessly split and find their joy — even if that risked traumatizing the children. Lydia (not her real name) got married in 1959 at age 18. During the '60s, she taught at a

junior college; she worked part time and raised their two kids, including a son who would be later be diagnosed with severe autism. She knew her husband was seeing other women. Sometimes he

didn't even come home. She was lonely, miserable and financially trapped in her marriage. "I had this child who was going to be a child the rest of his life, and my husband was

the only earner," she says. She didn't know how she could provide for her kids in what many then called a broken home. As the divorce rate crested, the term "broken home"

was supplanted by the less-catastrophizing phrase "single-parent home," which better reflected the shifting zeitgeist on failed marriages. "There was this feeling that kids

are resilient. 'They'll be OK no matter what, so you should be happy!'" Coontz says. "But then came the backlash: 'If you get divorced, your kids will be

damaged. Forever!'" That was one of takeaways of psychologist Judith Wallerstein's 25-year California Children of Divorce Study, a groundbreaking longitudinal study she began

in 1971. In the book_ Second Chances,_ published in 1989, she reported that more than half of children raised in divorced homes are so damaged they never marry themselves. The conclusions of

Wallerstein, who died in 2012, remain controversial. Coontz argues there is little agreement in the data on the impact of divorce on children, except for research consistently showing that

moving children in the middle of the school year is very difficult. The other numbers are all over the place. One study found that 24 percent of children saw their reading scores decline

after divorce, but 19 percent saw their scores increase. Another study found that bullying and aggressive behavior increased in 18 percent of kids of divorced parents, and decreased in 14

percent. "What we have learned is that divorce is very painful, but not necessarily a tragedy," the historian says. "It's part of an ongoing process." Lydia agonized

over that process until 1981, when she separated from her husband. Her daughter was 12. "She'd been through so much. I was like, 'Oh, this child is going to be miserable and

angry with me. But I sat her down and explained, and she said, 'Good.'"