This week, I’m going to give you guys a little inside look as to how marketing works at companies like ours. Every day, I—and other people in positions like mine—get dozens of emails and pitches from companies that exist solely to produce (and push) a variety of sales materials. And this week, I got pitched by several different companies looking to dump a bunch of slick, eight-page flyers on divorce, and things retirees need to know when going through a divorce.
First of all, if you’ve worked with us on any level, you know we don’t rely on sales materials, least of all overly slick sales materials prepared by a company that doesn’t know us and the people we work with. Second of all, are divorces really so prevalent that they’ve necessitated this glut of sales materials?! Are we finally seeing the statistics to back up the early pandemic predictions that forcing a bunch of married folks to stay home with each other for months on end would produce a lot of divorces?
To figure this out, first, I halfway Googled the issue. Lo-and-behold, there were a lot of articles talking about the increasing divorce rate amongst retirees. But after reading a few of them, I noticed two things. One, their logic and evidence wasn’t all that sound. It was more anecdotal than anything. Second, the vast majority were blog posts on divorce attorney websites.
Now, from a financial standpoint, who is the one party guaranteed to profit in a divorce? The attorneys. So, who stands to benefit from making it appear like divorces are commonplace? The attorneys! There is a heavy suggestion here that these attorneys want the public to believe divorces are commonplace so that any couple on the fence might be peer pressured into going through with it. Sad logic, but there are plenty of unscrupulous attorneys out there. (It’s the same reason I believe all those ads for cheap lingerie and costume jewelry that pop up around Valentine’s Day are actually complicated business generation strategies by divorce attorneys. Anyone who has actually bought cheap, trashy lingerie or junk jewelry for Valentine’s Day and lived to tell the tale, let me know!)
Anyway, this realization encouraged me research pandemic divorces nationwide across all subsets of the population in earnest. And the most legitimate sources I found showed that divorces decreased during 2020. There was an estimated shortfall—by more than 300,000—in actual divorces in 2020 against the March & April 2020 predictions.
When you look at why, though, opinions split. There are the optimists who chalk it up to couples waiting to get married. Folks are entering marriages when they’re older, wiser/more educated, and established in their careers… so the traditional marital wedges of money, careers, and kids have presumably already been discussed, screamed about, hammered out, and agreed to. And they also point to the social acceptance of long-term partnerships, free from the connotations (and legal ramifications) of marriage, as a contributor. Pessimists, however, attribute the shortfall to courthouses being closed, finances being stressed by the pandemic, and there being a dearth of affordable homes and rental properties for a former spouse to move away to. As backup, they point to studies showing rising discontent and domestic violence during COVID-19 quarantines.
So… in summary. We don’t use sales materials as a practice, and we don’t buy slickly produced sales flyers to try and steer you one way or the other. There has been a smaller number of divorces for 2020 than originally predicted. And the reason for this reduction in divorces is anyone’s guess, but likely due to a number of positive and negative factors.