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Researchers followed a group of people who said their marriage was really unhappy. Almost 8 out of 10 who didn't get divorced said they were happily married five years later. The ones who did get divorced weren't any happier for it. This was a University of Chicago team led by sociologist Linda Waite, working off a national survey of more than 5,000 married adults. 645 of them said they were unhappily married. The researchers checked back five years later to see how the people who left were doing compared to the people who stayed. Across the whole unhappy group, about two-thirds of the ones who stuck it out were happy in their marriage again. And the couples in the worst shape at the start had the biggest turnarounds, which is about the opposite of what most people would guess. The divorce group never came out ahead on any of the 12 measures of well-being the researchers tracked, including depression and self-esteem. Getting out took care of some stress and piled on new kinds, mostly custody fights and money problems. Here's the number that makes sense of it. In three out of four of these unhappy marriages, the other spouse was happy with the marriage. So most of the time it's one person going through it, and a lot of what makes someone miserable in year seven, a job going sideways, depression, a brutal couple of years with little kids, either passes on its own or follows them into the next relationship. That's pretty much what couples told the researchers when they interviewed 55 who had turned things around. Plenty of their problems just ran their course. Some put real work in. And some stopped waiting on their spouse to make them happy, went and built that for themselves, and the marriage got better along the way. To be fair to the two women in that clip, wives do have a real complaint here. Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld found women initiate about 69% of divorces, but when unmarried couples break up it's close to 50/50 who ends it. Something about being a wife specifically wears on people, and that's worth taking seriously. Abuse is a completely separate situation too, and 86% of the unhappy spouses in Waite's data said there was no violence in the marriage at all. These were regular people having regular bad years. Telling a woman the answer is always yes means comparing her husband at his worst to a guy who doesn't exist yet, and the five-year numbers say most of those marriages came back.