This research challenges the belief that a specific event is a crisis. The major purpose was to determine whether unusually high levels of stress precede the decision to divorce or to remarry. The divorced were tested for the 12 months prior to the decision to divorce; the remarried were tested for the 12 months prior to the decision to remarry; and the currently married to their first spouse were tested for the 12 months prior to participation in the study. A second major purpose was to test two major assumptions in crisis theory: (a) What is a crisis for one person will not be a crisis for another, and (b) after a crisis, an individual may approach, but not exceed, the level of organization at which one was functioning before the crisis occurred. The purposive sample consisted of 90 subjects. Sixty had experienced divorce and 30 were still married to their first spouse. Twenty of the 60 divorced subjects were remarried and tested as such. The Life Events Inventory (L.E.I.) by Cochrane and Robertson (1973) was the instrument used to determine amounts of accumulated stress during designated 12-month periods. The instrument has a reliability factor of 0.89
