Group suggests 1-year wait to get divorced

SALT LAKE CITY — New research shows that a "surprising" number of people in the throes of a divorce might be amenable to reconciliation if they could slow things down and address some troubling issues in their marriage. Now a national organization has released a three-point proposal to do just that, aimed at state legislatures.

Their proposal, called the "Second Chance Act," would create a yearlong waiting period before a divorce could be finalized. In that time, the party seeking divorce could choose to use an early notification letter to let the spouse know a divorce was wanted, without filing for divorce.

"New research shows that a lot more divorces are preventable than we had thought before," William J. Doherty, professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota and director of the Couples on the Brink Project, who co-wrote the report, told the Deseret News. "We know a lot about average marriages that fall apart and they are not the toxic war zones we tend to associate with divorce.... New research shows that even after someone files for divorce, there's a lot of ambivalence about whether divorce is the right thing to do."

"Second Chances: A Proposal to Reduce Unnecessary Divorce," released Friday by the Institute for American Values, says that — contrary to popular belief — couples don't typically divorce after miserable and conflict-filled marriages. Research suggests that there's little difference between broken and intact marriages, in fact. Most divorced couples "report average happiness and low levels of conflict" in the years before the divorce, said Doherty and co-principal investigator Leah Ward Sears, partner at Schiff Hardin LLP and a former Georgia Supreme Court chief justice.

Well into the divorce process, they found, about 40 percent of American couples had one or both parties open to the possibility of reconciliation. They told Jennifer Lai of the Huffington Post that one-third of men and one-fifth of women felt their marriages could be saved with hard work. They also found that even a "modest reduction" in divorce would benefit 400,000 American children and provide significant savings in terms of tax dollars.

The cooling-off period the "Second Chance Act" would mandate is very different from modern practice, Doherty said. Once divorce paperwork is filed, "in most states the whole infrastructure is designed to move things through as quickly as possible.

During that year, the couple could work on the terms of the divorce, such as custody, division of assets and more. But they could also choose to work on saving the marriage.