This is a difficult question for couples who are considering divorce to answer.   Most couples who have divorced report that they wish they had slowed things down a bit and considered their options.  Dr Doherty says that his occurs because “You start to tell the other person to change, and the biggest thing is to tell them to change in ways they can’t change, like do a personality overhaul,” explained Doherty. “They become more defensive and withdraw, you have more conflict and in a year or two, you can kill a marriage that was reasonably good.”

In A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval, scholars Paul Amato and Alan Booth found that divorces fall into a couple categories: Two-thirds are unhappy, but low-conflict marriages. The other third are high-conflict, “war zone” partnerships.  In these war zone marriages children benifit from a divorce.  In the two-thirds catoraogy it is the children who end up paying the heavest cost of divorce.  This outcome was supported by Elizabeth Marquardt in her 2005 book, Between Two Worlds—the Inner Lives of Children of Divorce.

You can read more about this here.