[dijit]

Let's tone down the aggressive comments please.

One large barrier to breakup is how much damage a breakup will do and how much effort it entails.

If a break up is very easy then small insults will lead to break up.

A marriage contract is.. a legal contract; thereby it can be a barrier to a break up.

I have considered breaking up with my girlfriend before yet the effort of splitting our things and ensuring that she has a nice continuation of a place to live comfortably has caused me to reevaluate if the reasons I want to break up are good enough. That's all the parent was suggesting. Does the marriage contract have any bearing on keeping people together.

[jncfhnb]

The effect you describe could be sufficiently studied by comparing married partners to unmarried long term partners.

Not the ridiculous idea of people who thought they were married but were apparently not due to some technicality or bureaucratic error which they were not aware of.

[withinboredom]

In the US, only marriages are registered with the government. So you can’t really count long-term relationships or even common-law marriages.

That’s probably why that’s all they’re looking at. It’s the only thing that can be measured as a proxy for stable relationships.