Your marriage is in a mess. (No, don't be alarmed. I wasn't talking about you - merely creating a hypothetical situation.) It's worse than a mess. You've come to loathe your spouse, and that feeling is entirely reciprocated. Moreover, since the two of you came apart, you've fallen in love with someone else, and this someone else is... well, just lovely in every possible respect.
Do you dissolve the marriage? Or do you keep it going because you've read a study appearing to show that second marriages, on average, are no more successful than first marriages? Please suit yourself in how you choose here.
My question is prompted by this article from Psychology Today, which quotes Professor Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania as follows:
If you want to maximize your subjective well-being, you should stop at one child...This is based on the finding that one child makes you happier, but two or three children make you less happy than one child does. I don't know where to begin with it. One thing (that I've said in a different way before) is that it may be children that you want when you decide to have them, rather than 'subjective well-being'. You may not think about the issue quite in this way:
Why do people keep having kids? After all, children cost their parents more in food and college tuition than they bring in by, say, working the family farm...You may value being part of a parent-child relationship for its own sake and in a non-monetized way, or because you reckon it's likely that you'll love your children, or because of some thought you have about how it links you to the world or to the future. Then, your decision about a second child and/or a third one may be based on what your actual experience of having had an earlier child or children is like, rather than on a statistical generalization. How many people treat decisions of this kind as if they were calculating the odds in a casino?Conventional wisdom dictates that people become parents because children bring joy. But do they really?