Divorce Attorney Reveals What Married Couples Fight About Most Often That Ultimately Leads To Divorce
The little things always add up.
Tempura from Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro All couples have arguments. Knowing how to fight in a healthy way is key to having a stable relationship. Yet when fighting replaces other forms of communication, it could signify that splitting up is the right decision to make.
According to a divorce attorney, not all arguments carry the same weight, however. For the majority of her clients, there's a common thread in the discontent that ultimately leads to the dissolution of their marriages.
A divorce attorney shared her take on the common married couple fight that most often leads to divorce.
Kristen Farris, a divorce lawyer, shared that the most common topic she sees soon-to-be exes fighting about is the division of childcare duties in the family.
“Who does everything? Who does the little things? People take for granted the little things that have to be done for your kids,” Farris explained.
She listed off some of those little things, like “Medication refills, cleaning up the closets, and sizing up the clothes.”
The dynamic that Farris sees is fairly common. One parent does everything or feels like they do everything, and the other parent coasts by until the default parent’s resentment builds to a breaking point.
“They’re nit-picking on who’s doing all those things,” she said. “The wife thinks she’s the only one doing it. The husband doesn’t give [expletive] about it. And guess what? It turns into war.”
The divorce attorney noted that little things add up to major disagreements, which can cause divorce.
“The wife gets resentful, the husband doesn’t care,” Farris said. “And here you go, you’re in my office.”
It would be simple to take what Farris is saying and come to the conclusion that having kids causes couples to get divorced, but the reality is more nuanced than that.
It’s not that having kids leads to divorce; it’s that an uneven division of labor around raising kids creates distance between partners.
According to a 2020 Gallup poll, moms end up doing more housework than their husbands, even when both parents work outside the home.
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Women are 52% more likely to do laundry than their male partners. They’re 49% more likely to be responsible for cleaning the house and doing the grocery shopping. They’re 45% more likely to be in charge of preparing meals and 42% more likely to care for their kids on a daily basis.
The conclusion could easily be that moms are exhausted, and they need their partners to show up and shoulder more household responsibilities.
Farris further explained the issues that lead to divorce, noting that most of the time, one partner’s resentment is based on their being the default parent.
“Do you want to know who’s coming into my office the most for divorce?” she asked. “The default parents.”
She described default parents as “the ones who are doing it all — the ones who are taking care of the kids, taking care of the house, and doing all the extracurricular activities.”
Farris noted that default parents ask for divorce because they’re deeply annoyed that their spouse isn’t pulling their weight.
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“They’re tired of hearing all the nagging and the whining from both their kids and their spouses, and they don’t want to do it anymore,” she concluded.
“They want a partner. They don’t want to be the default parent,” Farris declared. “They want somebody who’s going to step up and help them.”
Divorce can often come down to who says what, as Farris makes clear. An imbalanced division of child-rearing labor results in one parent feeling like they carry the world while their partner just coasts.
The smaller issues will likely take root, and those roots harden along with one partner’s disappointment in the other until divorce seems like par for the course.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers social issues, pop culture, and all things to do with the entertainment industry.