Every cloud has a silver lining, and the one for a failed, contentious marriage has been found by new research coming out of U.T. Austin. According to their paper, '"How Good for Children is the "Good Divorce"?', the daughters born of marriages that ended "badly"—basically a divorce with openly hostile actions—have a higher success rate for a happy first marriage than those who had to endure a "good" divorce.
The "good" divorces are those where the parents keep their anger away from the children and attempt to keep up appearances. Through studying the children of these divorces, researchers found that the children carried "heavy emotional scars into adulthood." These scars are what impede them from having a great time with their own marriages. Psychologists find that these scenarios confuse children, putting them through the agony of the divorce while continuing being nice to them.
However, the girls raised in houses where their soon-to-be-divorced parents are yelling and have obvious displays of anger toward each other, have a much better chance at finding happiness the first time around. While the exact reasoning is still being researched, the initial thoughts are that those outward displays of anger burn into the memories of the girls, who turn into women who don't want to repeat those mistakes. They blame the parents individually instead of the institution of marriage, which they eventually try hard at making work.
Two other key pieces of data that the researchers found were that boys' future marriage outcomes were not affected by whether they went through "good" or "bad" marriages. Also, children's scholastic results weren't effected by the type of divorce their parents went through.