In guten wie in schlechten Tagen?

In this contribution the model of frame-selection as an approach to integrate “normative” and “rational” action is being used for the explanation of divorce, operationalized and empirically tested with data of the Mannheim Divorce Study. Not only the evident effect of the “framing” of marriage at the beginning on the subsequent stability of marriage is shown, even after introducing control variables, but also a non-trivial interaction that is predicted by the model and that can be regarded as a “hard” test of it, namely the interaction of the framing of marriage with the belonging to a certain marriage cohort. At the same time this contribution is also discussing possibilities and advantages of a “general” theory of action for the social sciences in general.