There is a genre of headline that surfaces every few years: divorce is as bad for you as smoking. It is an exaggeration, but not a wild one, and the research underneath it is more interesting — and considerably more useful — than the headline suggests.
The mortality finding
In 2011, psychologist David Sbarra and colleagues published a meta-analysis in Perspectives on Psychological Science synthesizing 32 prospective studies covering more than 6.5 million people, 160,000 deaths, and over 755,000 divorces across 11 countries. Separated and divorced adults showed a significantly elevated risk of early death compared with married adults — an overall hazard ratio of 1.23, meaning roughly a 23 percent greater risk of dying in any given follow-up period.1
The risk was not evenly distributed. Divorced men showed substantially greater elevation (HR = 1.31) than divorced women (HR = 1.13), and younger adults more than older ones.1 Reviewing this literature the following year, Sbarra’s team noted that the magnitude of the association rivals that of many well-established public health factors.
That is the alarming version. Here is the essential correction.
Most people are fine
Sbarra, Hasselmo, and Bourassa later argued that the field had been reading its own averages badly. Two findings in the literature look contradictory — that most people do well following marital separation, and that separation raises the risk of poor outcomes — and they are reconciled by recognizing that the bulk of the risk is carried by a minority of people.
This is the single most important thing a person going through a divorce can know. The average conceals two populations: a majority who experience real distress and then recover, and a smaller group who do not. The research question — and the personal one — is which group you are in, and whether that is modifiable.
What appears to move the needle
The proposed mechanisms in this literature are not mystical. They are chronic psychological distress, disrupted health behaviors (sleep, alcohol, exercise, medical follow-up), and the loss of resources — financial, social, and practical — that a household provides.
Which suggests that the health story and the practical story are the same story. A divorce that destroys your savings, isolates you from your former social network, and keeps you in a state of adversarial vigilance for eighteen months is operating on every one of those mechanisms at once. A divorce that resolves in six months, preserves your retirement account, and leaves you able to speak to your co-parent is not.
There is also evidence about how people relate to themselves during separation. In one study, observational ratings of self-compassion in how recently separated adults spoke about their marriage predicted the course of their emotional recovery months later. Not self-esteem. Not blame assignment. The capacity to describe a painful thing without turning it into a verdict on oneself.
“I can usually tell in the first session who is going to have a hard year. It is not the people with the most complicated finances. It is the people who need the process to prove something about who was right.”
— Attorney Julia Rueschemeyer Divorce Mediation, Massachusetts
The process is a health variable
It sounds self-serving for anyone in the dispute-resolution world to say that the manner of divorcing affects wellbeing. But the strongest evidence here does not come from advocates; it comes from a randomized trial.
Robert Emery and colleagues at the University of Virginia randomly assigned families in contested custody disputes — families already in litigation — either to continue litigating or to attend roughly five hours of mediation. Twelve years later, the differences were substantial: parents who had mediated remained far more involved in their children’s lives, without an increase in co-parenting conflict. Because assignment was random, the process itself caused the difference.
Sustained interpersonal conflict is not a neutral background condition. It is the exposure. Reviewing decades of research on divorce and adjustment, Kelly and Emery identified conflict as central to how families fare afterward — for children, and by extension for the adults living inside the same conflict.
What this implies, practically
If the mechanisms are distress, disrupted health behavior, and resource loss, then the interventions are unglamorous and specific:
- Shorten the exposure. A divorce that takes eighteen months is eighteen months of elevated stress physiology. In Massachusetts, couples who reach a full agreement file a joint petition and finish in months; a contested filing cannot even be heard for six.
- Protect sleep, alcohol, and medical follow-up first. These are the pathways the research keeps identifying, and they are the first things to go.
- Do not liquidate your social world. Resource disruption includes people, not just money.
- Separate the legal question from the moral one. A court cannot adjudicate who behaved worse, and trying to make it do so is expensive in every currency.
Confidentiality helps here in a way that is easy to overlook. Under Massachusetts law, communications made in the course of mediation before a qualified mediator are confidential and not subject to disclosure in a judicial proceeding — which means the process does not require you to build a documented case against the other parent of your children. Mediators such as Attorney Julia Rueschemeyer Divorce Mediation work within that framework across the Commonwealth for exactly this reason.
The honest summary
Divorce is a genuine health stressor, and the mortality literature should not be waved away. But the same research that establishes the risk also establishes that most people absorb it and recover, and points fairly clearly at what distinguishes the minority who do not: prolonged conflict, collapsed resources, and distress that never gets metabolized.
Those are not fixed features of divorce. They are, to a meaningful degree, choices about how it is conducted.
Endnotes
- Sbarra, D. A., Law, R. W., & Portley, R. M. (2011). Divorce and death: A meta-analysis and research agenda for clinical, social, and health psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(5), 454–474.
- Sbarra, D. A., Hasselmo, K., & Nojopranoto, W. (2012). Divorce and death: A case study for health psychology. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(12), 905–919.
- Sbarra, D. A., Hasselmo, K., & Bourassa, K. J. (2015). Divorce and health: Beyond individual differences. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(2), 109–113.
- Sbarra, D. A., Smith, H. L., & Mehl, M. R. (2012). When leaving your ex, love yourself: Observational ratings of self-compassion predict the course of emotional recovery following marital separation. Psychological Science, 23(3), 261–269.
- Emery, R. E., Laumann-Billings, L., Waldron, M. C., Sbarra, D. A., & Dillon, P. (2001). Child custody mediation and litigation: Custody, contact, and coparenting 12 years after initial dispute resolution. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 69(2), 323–332.
- Kelly, J. B., & Emery, R. E. (2003). Children’s adjustment following divorce: Risk and resilience perspectives. Family Relations, 52(4), 352–362.
- Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 208, §§ 1A, 1B.
- Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 233, § 23C.
About the expert quoted: Julia Rueschemeyer is a Massachusetts attorney and divorce mediator who works with couples throughout the Commonwealth on separation agreements, parenting plans, and support.