In her master's thesis, the author researches how parental divorce can mark an individual's life, and especially his or her relationships with significant others. The theoretical part begins with the definition of divorce, and then presents divorce as a process in which each stage brings its own challenges or tasks. In the following, the author focuses primarily on children and their experiences of parental divorce and provides a rich overview of the short and long-term consequences that these children may face in their lives. Close attention is given to the consequences of parental divorce to adult intimate relationships. In the second half of the theoretical part, the author provides an overview of the findings from local and foreign literature on the three components of the intimate romantic relationship (trust, commitment and conflict resolution), which are essential for maintaining an intimate romantic relationship and its stability. The empirical part presents the results of a quantitative survey which involved 392 participants, including 59 men and 333 women between the ages of 17 and 66 who were married or in a committed relationship (or have been in one in recent past). There were 61 participants with experience of parental divorce and 331 participants who came from intact families and have not had such experience. The results of the survey showed some differences between individuals with experience of parental divorce and individuals without such experience in certain aspects, such as trust and commitment to partner or intimate romantic relationship as well as satisfaction with the relationship. People with experience of parental divorce were showing a lower level of trust and commitment to intimate romantic relationship and lower satisfaction with the relationship than those without such experience. However, these results were not statistically significant. Similarly, there were certain differences between the groups in conflict resolution techniques, but the results did not reach statistical significance. The only exception is the conflict resolution technique of separation, where we were able to confirm a statistically significant difference between the groups. Surprisingly, these results revealed that individuals with experience of parental divorce were more likely to use separation as the conflict resolution technique than those without such experience. When examining the differences between men and women with the experience of parental divorce, some differences were indicated in trust, commitment, conflict resolution and gender satisfaction, but we were not able to statistically confirm these differences.
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