Texila International Journal of Public Health ISSN: 2520-3134 DOI: 10.21522/TIJPH.2013.09.01.Art001 *Corresponding Author: arisdobel@yahoo.com Effects of Divorce on Women and Children Adaora Isabella Odis Department of Public Health, Texila American University, Nigeria Abstract Divorce is a legal separation of husband and wife, leaving each other free to remarry. It is also to break off a marriage legally. Marriage is a state of being legally joined as husband and wife. A family's social support is one of the major ways that family positively impacts health. Marriage is associated with physical health, psychological well-being, and low mortality. Marriage in particular has been studied in the way it affects health. Marriage is thought to protect well-being by providing companionship, emotional support, and economic security. It was also revealed that divorce has psychological and emotional effects on women. This article review discovered that divorced women and children experience more social isolation, which makes them end up producing greater feelings of loneliness, unhappiness, and lower self-esteem. Some psychological and emotional effects of divorce on women which include factors like; low appetite, reduced physical energy and strength, chest pain, severe pressure in chest difficulty in hearing, eye pain, digestive problem, lower abdomen pain, back pain headache, sleeping disturbance, worthless, suicidal attempt, decreased level of confidence, shocked, feeling of shame, feeling of sorrow in her heart, worried, anxious, irritated towards her life, suppressed problem, feeling bad, upset, feeling of miserable life, among other things as the major emotional and psychological effects of divorce on women. Keywords: Children, Divorce, Marriage, Mental health, Women. Introduction Divorce is a legal separation of husband and wife, leaving each other free to remarry. It is also to break off a marriage legally. Marriage is a state of being legally joined as husband and wife. Family is a group of people who are closely related, especially father, mother and their children. Infidelity means disloyalty or a state of being unfaithful to the husband or wife’s sexuality out matrimonial home. Couple simply means two married people, especially a husband and wife. Youngster is a young person or young boys and girls yet to marry. Early marriage is a situation where either of the spouses is not ripe enough for marriage before getting married. Universal escape means of regaining freedom from tensions of marriage. Family goals are the aims which a family strive to achieve for better living. Cultural expectations define appropriate potential marriage partners. Cultural rules emphasizing the need to marry within a cultural group are known as endogamy. People are sometimes expected to marry within religious communities, to marry someone who is ethnically or racially similar or who comes from a similar economic or educational background. These are endogamous marriages: marriages within a group. Cultural expectations for marriage outside a particular group are called exogamy. Many cultures require that individuals should marry only outside their own kinship groups. For instance, In the United States laws prevent marriage between close relatives such as first cousins. There was a time in the not-so-distant past, however, when it was culturally preferred for Europeans and Euro- Americans to marry first cousins. Royalty and aristocrats betrothed their children to relatives, often cousins. Charles Darwin, who was British, married his first cousin Emma. This was often done to keep property and wealth in the family [1]. Arranged marriages were typical in many cultures around the world in the past, including in the United States. Marriages are arranged by families for many reasons: because the families have something in common, for financial reasons, to match people with others from the 1