Some of us are lucky. My lovely wife, Kathy, and I are set to celebrate our 20th anniversary this year (hello, Key West!). Given how prevalent divorce is all around us—as well as how deeply divisive and troublesome divorce can be, I consider us beyond fortunate to be where we are today. Divorce wreaks havoc on individuals and on family systems. It can be a traumatic experience for multiple parties—having long-lasting adverse emotional, social, and familial effects.

When there’s a big problem that we see in our modern world, it’s often helpful to raise questions of evolutionary mismatch. Based on the past work that looks into ancestral mating systems, it seems that the idea of “divorce” in the modern American sense is, in fact, yet another product of our modern worlds that leads to major problems as a function of the fact that we humans were not shaped by evolutionary forces to run into this stuff. Much work has focused on the fact that monogamy may not be evolutionarily natural. Perhaps future work by behavioral scientists can focus on a downstream product related to this point: Divorce, in all its unpleasant ugliness, is not something that our hominid ancestors experienced the way that people in modern times do. This is the case for divorce as a major example of evolutionary mismatch.

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