Poll: Little Help During a Divorce

    
    Carol McCulloch found herself creeping through the snow on a wintery night spying on her friend’s husband as he went to hotels with his mistress, and she was glad to do it.           
    
She was the chief emotional support system to a friend who was preparing to go through a divorce. Her friend, eight months pregnant, turned to McCulloch to not only to observe her husband, but also to talk about the emotional crisis she was experiencing.          

“It was practical support and emotional support, both,”  McCulloch, a former divorce attorney from Maryland, said.          

McCulloch’s friend did not want to lean on her family because they had warned her against marrying him, and she did not want to lean on other friends because they knew her husband.             

“She mainly depended on me,” McCulloch said.          
       
McCulloch’s story is familiar to many people going through divorce, according to some poll results from GFK Roper.  

Divorced Americans tend to turn to their families and friends, rather than to professionals, when dealing with their divorces, according to the results. The poll showed that overall, men and women both turned to those familiar with them more than 60 percent of the time. Among men, they leaned on family and friends evenly, at 26 percent and 25 percent respectively. But women tended to choose family 45 percent of the time and friends 25 percent of the time. 
          
Poll respondents chose religious or spiritual institutions 7 percent of the time; professional advisers, such as lawyers, accountants or financial planners, 7 percent of the time;  therapists 5 percent of the time;  and support groups 4 percent of the time. Men were more likely than women to lean on their professional advisors for help.
 
GFK Roper conducted the poll, commissioned by Divorce360.com, in September by telephoning more than 1,500 people.  Those who had been divorced responded to questions about with whom they sought help. The margin of error for the study, in its entirety, is plus- or minus-2.6 percent.  

The results matched McCulloch’s perception of the issue as a former divorce attorney. She said that before she recently stopped practicing law, her clients relied heavily on the emotional support provided by family and friends.