This tweet, now making the rounds, commenting on the Astronomer CEO caught cheating at a Coldplay concert tells us that if Andy’s affair leads to divorce, his children are:
- 2x more likely to drop out of school
- 3x more likely to experience violence or instability
- 4x more likely to suffer from mental illness
And then comes the punchline:
“They didn’t choose any of this… But they’ll live with the consequences.”
It’s emotional. It’s provocative. And it’s statistically… meaningless.
Let’s talk about why.
“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
This famous quote—often misattributed to Mark Twain—perfectly captures the problem with using raw statistics without context. Even if those numbers are technically accurate, they tell us nothing without asking: why?
Divorce is often a symptom, not the cause.
Let’s consider the obvious: many divorces don’t happen out of nowhere. If a marriage ends because one partner is unstable, abusive, or simply emotionally unavailable, then it’s not the divorce that introduces hardship into a child’s life—it’s the environment that led to the divorce in the first place.
Framing divorce as the root cause of these outcomes completely ignores the likelihood that children in these homes were already struggling long before papers were filed.
No control group, no credibility.
What about kids in households where the parents never get divorced—but scream, fight, and emotionally destroy each other for years? Do they fare better? There’s no comparison here. No discussion of whether staying together “for the kids” might actually be worse in many situations.
By focusing only on the correlation between divorce and negative outcomes, without comparing it to the alternatives, this post uses statistics to tell a simplistic and potentially harmful story.
It’s hard to be married.
Marriage is difficult. And this kind of messaging shames people—especially parents—who are in impossible situations. It encourages people to stay in unhealthy marriages out of guilt, not love. And that’s not noble. That’s dangerous. I’ve been married for 24 years. Sometimes people ask me what the secret is, and I say “there’s no secret. It’s work.” And if you’re in a relationship with a partner who won’t work or you can’t work together, it’s better to split. My wife and I fight every now and then. It helps that we both loved Jonathan Richman and were aware of his sage advice. But we like to work together and than brings it all back. But it’s because we’re compatible. Not everyone is.
I want to salute my friends who have made the RIGHT choice to separate and/or get divorced. It’s not easy, but you did what you thought was best. No one knows how to make two people work, because those two people have never been together before. You find it out by trial and error and informed judgement. Ain’t none of us truly great at relationships — some of us just got lucky and and had good examples from our parents and met the right people.
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