I can only answer this one indirectly, as the daughter of the “better man,” the “better father.” I really don’t know much about my grandfather, he died when I was two and he and my grandmother separated when my father was 7 and his sister was 9. My grandfather’s basic problem was that he was a drunk and lost his job with the railroad because of his drinking, the final straw was him running his train into another train … but I suspect there was more going on than than that, more to the break up of the marriage than that. I don’t think there was necessarily physical abuse and my grandmother was a straight up woman who didn’t put up with a lot of crap, but still, it was 1930 in a small town in West Virginia and it usually took more than your husband being a drunk and a man who couldn’t keep a job to make you walk away from a marriage.
When my grandparents separated my grandmother moved back home to a household that included her father, an unmarried older sister and brother and eventually another sister and brother so my father and his sister were essentially raised by his mother and his aunts and uncles. He didn’t talk much about his father, it was very painful for him, I think. I think that environment helped him be a better man, a better husband and a better father than his father ever was but I also think that he made a conscious decision to be a better man, a better husband and a better father than his father was but he was. My father was certainly not a man without flaws, but I couldn’t have asked for a better father than him and I couldn’t have asked for a better model of what a “good man” is than him, but, well, this daddy’s girl to the very end might be a little biased, I don’t know. He died in 2007 and I still miss him every day.
I can only say that not having a good father isn’t the end of the world and as this question points to can sometimes motivate someone to be a better man and father than otherwise but I am and always will be grateful that my parents remained married and that I had a good father who was an extremely important element in my life. I was lucky to have the father I had and to have the relationship with him that I had. My wish would be that every child, every person could have that but I won’t go as far as to say it is an absolute necessity and certainly, divorce isn’t the end of the world, sometimes it is what’s best, I just can’t imagine my life any other way than the way it played out and that was with two good, though certainly not perfect, parents who managed to have a good relationship, a good marriage, though not without it’s ups and downs, for 47 years, which is how long they had been married when my mother died.