Can this divorce be saved? Marital mavens and their irreconcilable differences.(Critical Essay)

It's late at night, and I'm reading E. Mavis Hetherington's "For Better or for Worse" (Norton; $26.95) -- billed as "The Most Comprehensive Study of Divorce in America" -- trying to figure out where and how I fit into the book's madly taxonomic universe. Lost in a sea of nomenclature, infinitely titrated statistics, and "points to remember," I feel my identity slowly slipping away from me. I'm a divorced woman who has not remarried and is the mother of a twelve-year-old daughter. What does that say about me? And, more important, what does my divorced state, this closely studied yet elusive condition, augur for my daughter?

Hetherington, a professor emerita of psychology at the University of Virginia, who has conducted interviews and gathered data for the past three decades, clearly knows her material. She launched her research project, called the Virginia Longitudinal Study, in 1972, as a way of exploring "postnuclear family pathways." And she set about answering a basic question: "Was there a unique developmental dynamic -- perhaps even a uniquely harmful dynamic -- in divorced families?"

To this end, she scrutinized nearly fourteen hundred families, including more than twenty-five hundred children, from every angle possible; her team of investigators used standard tools such as questionnaires and tests, but they also observed the families in their homes "as they solved problems, as they chatted over dinner, and in the hours between the child's arrival at home and bedtime." A designated "target child" in each family was assessed at the playground, in school, and in the eponymous Hetherington Laboratory. The parents in the study kept diaries, where they jotted down the intimate details of their daily lives at half-hour intervals three days a week. Finally, Hetherington worked all the data into a paint-by-numbers typology, which is where things get sticky.

For starters, I'm having trouble determining what kind of marriage -- there are five models to choose from -- I had before I got divorced: was it the Pursuer-Distancer Marriage? (It's "the most common type," Hetherington observes, and "also the most divorce-prone.") Or was it the Disengaged Marriage? Such marriages, which have a high failure rate, may drift along for years before finally ending, "with a whimper rather than a bang." I suppose the description of the Operatic Marriage comes closest, given a certain volatility of temperament that my ex-husband and I shared, but, unlike Hetherington's sample couple, we never smashed shiny new kitchen cabinets with a hammer, screaming, "I'll show you ugly!," and then went on to have explosive sex. ("For Operatics, quarreling is often a trigger for sex. Indeed, passionate lovemaking follows furious fighting . . . routinely.") I glimpse ingredients of my marriage everywhere, not excluding a dash of the Cohesive/Individuated Marriage (the cultural ideal for baby boomers, combining "gender equity" and old-fashioned intimacy) and two level teaspoons of the Traditional Marriage (breadwinner man and homemaker woman -- which turns out, disconcertingly, to be the stablest arrangement of them all).

Even worse, I seem unable to locate myself on the continuum of "postdivorce adaptive styles." Once again, there are a number of floor models to choose from. I study Hetherington's six categories closely, hoping to place somewhere not too inglorious between the "divorce winners" (also referred to as "successful changers") and the abject losers. Front and center are the Enhancers; members of this group, mostly women, actually thrive after their marriages collapse, taking on a previously unsuspected aura of authority and competence -- "a quiet gravitas." Then, there are the Good Enoughs, who are the most typical among the divorced; though "less resilient" than Enhancers, they stumble along as well as they can. Two other categories -- the Seekers and the Libertines -- are, as you might guess, predominantly male. Seekers are made uneasy by the single life; without a wife to "supply validation," they exhibit sexual problems and signs of depression. (Hetherington intrepidly tails her subjects right up to the bedroom keyhole, noting that, "after divorce, a number of men in the group became vulnerable to erectile dysfunction for the first time.") Seekers nudge everyone they know to fix them up, and tend to remarry ...