What are they doing? A national survey of help‐seeking and relationship‐repair behavior of individuals who are thinking about divorce

Guided by the Stages of Change (SOC) model, we explored relationship‐repair behaviors among those thinking about divorce, employing a recent national longitudinal survey of married individuals (N = 745). Person‐centered analyses explored whether there were distinct typologies of relationship‐repair behaviors. We found four distinct classes: Intense Seekers (6%), who engaged at high levels of all kinds of repair behaviors, including professional services; Moderate‐fading Seekers (14%), who engaged in moderate levels of various repair behaviors, including professional services, but did not sustain that behavior over a year; and Minimal‐private Seekers (42%) and Private‐sustained Seekers (38%), who eschewed professional services and engaged in low‐to‐moderate personal and private repair behaviors. We discuss possible applications of the SOC model to the divorce decision‐making process and conclude with implications for practice, including the need to allocate greater attention to personal and self‐help interventions that match the way most people try to repair their relationships.