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Notes -
The "better deal" is to take all the joint assets and most of any of his future income in a divorce, using his failure as the reason he should take nothing.
The point still remains that he’s much more likely to be able to find another partner than she is (not, like, a hot 25 year old obviously, but someone a few years younger and also divorced). In my experience middle aged women who initiate divorce are usually pretty desperate. The reason women initiate most divorces is because men are often perfectly content checking out of the relationship, maybe fucking around or having affairs, spending money on other women, then returning home to a wife who looks after the kids, probably does most domestic chores etc. This can go on for years before she finally decides to accept the humiliation of divorce. The only time it’s usually “worth it” for a man to initiate divorce in my experience is if he finds out she’s cheating, at which point masculine hatred of the idea of being sexually humiliated typically leads to an instant divorce. But provided there’s no (known) infidelity on her part, men tend not to divorce their wives because even if they dislike her, she’s a good deal.
This fundamental disparity leads to a lot of the discourse on divorce that argues women are screwing over men. In reality, it’s just that a bad marriage is today usually a much better deal for men than women.
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