Identification and Assessment of the Emotional Divorce Drivers among Tehranian Couples Based on the Experts’ Views Using a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) Approach

As the most basic social institution and an emotional unit, the family plays a significant role in the social health of any countries. Efforts to strengthen the couple's bond and the relationships within this system provide moral health and general prosperity. However, this relationship has undergone various changes over time and the ups and downs of life, which leave major results. One of the most important results is marital conflict. After a long period of conflict, couples face the stage of hatred and then the state of indifference, which is the last stage of emotional relationships between men and women, and ultimately leads to emotional divorce. This type of divorce refers to a situation, in which the emotional relationship, support, passion, warmth, attention, love, and intimacy between the couple decrease. Emotional divorce is one of the most important family injuries that cause personal, family, and social collapse so that the effects of this tense situation sometimes remain for a long time. Despite the frequency of emotional divorce, this type of divorce is still an unknown phenomenon and it is referred to as the temporary stage of official divorce in many scientific studies. In recent years, official reports and statistics have indicated an increase in the divorce rate in Tehran. According to experts, the share of emotional divorce is more than official divorce. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct research on the drivers of emotional divorce between couples. In this regard, this study aimed to provide a framework for identifying and evaluating the drivers of emotional divorce among Tehranian couples based on the experts’ views. 

This research was an applied research in terms of purpose and a descriptive survey based on the nature of data collection. Besides, was cross-sectional based on the time horizon. The expert panel of this research included sociologists, experts in the field of social sciences, and experienced counselors of family, as well as couple therapists with at least 10 years of work experience in Tehran, who dealt with a variety of couples suffering from emotional divorce. In this research, the required information was available to a special group of experts, who were selected through the snowball method. The data collection was done by two methods library studies and field investigation. Two researcher-made questionnaires were designed to survey the experts in monitoring, screening, and final localization of the factors affecting the emotional divorce among Tehranian couples, as well as their weighting and prioritization. In this research, to analyze the data and identify the final drivers affecting the emotional divorce among Tehranian couples and weighting and prioritizing them, the one-sample t-test and the Group Analytic Hierarchy Process (G-AHP) were respectively used in SPSS and Super Decision software. The group decision-making strategy prevented the bias results and increased the accuracy of decision-making and the results by obeying collective wisdom. 

The results of this research indicated identification of 29 drivers of emotional divorce among Tehranian couples, which were organized into the four dimensions of life skills, personality and behavior, social and sociological aspects, and fields. According to the experts, the social and sociological dimension with a weight of 0.35 had the highest importance among them and contributed more to the emotional divorce among Tehranian couples. It was also observed that among the drivers of emotional divorce, "weakness of communication skills" with a weight of 0.0548 among the dimension of life skills, "betrayal and extramarital affairs" in the behavioral and personality dimension with a weight of 0.0482, "lack of Kefoit and matching of spouse" in the social and sociological dimension with a weight of 0.0545, and "individual’s economic position" in the land dimension with a weight of 0.0546 were assigned the highest degrees of importance. Therefore, it was concluded that the experts and institutions in charge had to use intellectual, financial, and infrastructural capitals in the face of priority drivers. Finally, some appropriate solutions and corrective actions were provided for facing these drivers.