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The issue of modern divorce was discussed here last week in the context of yet another round of wider discussion about the Sexual Revolution. (It's pretty much becoming tiresome at this point, but anyway.) Everyone who bothered to chime in seemed to agree with the notion that divorce is usually a net negative for the wife, both romantically and economically. It appeared to me that there's mostly a consensus about that here.
Fair enough. However, I've seen online data indicating that a) roughly 40% of all marriages end in divorce b) roughly 80% of divorces are initiated by the wives c) in cases where the wife is college-educated, that figure is 90%. In other words, in cases of marriages that fail, modern women are more likely than not to voluntarily put themselves in a disadvantageous life situation.
So...what gives? Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?
Relationship therapist Esther Perel has a famous line that "The victim of the affair isn't necessarily the victim of the marriage." In the same way, the person that initiates the divorce isn't necessarily the person that ended the marriage. For a variety of reasons, I speculate that is more likely for men to "quiet quit" on a marriage, in a way that is less possible/likely for a woman. The woman might be the one who files the divorce papers, but in a lot of cases the man checked out a long time ago and has been, sometimes willfully sometimes passive-aggressively, baiting her into filing.
Rarely are divorces truly "out of nowhere," more normally divorce filings formalize the death of a marriage that has already broken down completely. Long processes of fights, counseling (secular or religious), compromises, deals, fights, betrayals, and failures precede the actual legal process. The actual filing often reflects a situation where there is no marriage going.
A man will stop doing anything around the house when he checks out of his marriage. Men typically do fewer chores around the house to start with, and have a greater tolerance for mess/disorder/eating trash. Absent any care for his wife's feelings, most men will have no real interest in doing laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning the bathrooms. Often this extends to kids: he's not scheduling doctors appointments, buying them clothes, keeping track of their schooling.
In my own marriage (which is great and nowhere near divorce), my wife and I have a regular fight about chores that goes something like: she thinks I don't do enough chores around the house, I think that I would totally do them if she would stop doing them first. She's home more than I am for a variety of work reasons, and she has a lower tolerance for seeing dishes in the sink, for seeing a full laundry bin, etc. I'm at work later, left to my own devices I will happily spend a few hours doing all that, but I won't reflexively do it when I get home from work, while she will sit there during the day working and see the dishes and they will bug her and she'll do them.
Because I'm out of the house more for work, as is typical for men, I could also just do another common thing men do and just...stop coming home after work. I'd be perfectly happy eating three dollar egg sandwiches from the local store, spending my time out drinking with friends, showing up back at ten or eleven at night and going to sleep before leaving in the morning.
Keep in mind that men typically control more of the finances. Both in terms of assets and income, and servicing debts and taxes. I would have vastly more ability to mess with marital assets than my wife would: I make more money, I know where the assets are, I would know how to move them around.
This is before we get into things like Exit Affairs, when an extramarital relationship is just a tripwire to make her file, or physical abuse.
So the dynamic is often that a man stops doing anything around the house, stops substantively being a husband, and then a wife files. So the decision these women are making when filing isn't "Happily Married Woman vs. Divorced Woman" it's "Abandoned, but legally married woman with no legal tools to control her spouse's use of marital assets, still expecting divorce vs. Divorced woman, with legal tools to control spouse's disposal of marital assets."
This is going to be very hard to quantify because I'd wager it's always a slow spiral that eventually takes such a sharp downturn that one party finally pulls the chute. Who pulled away first? What was the first defection? I don't think you can draw a strong conclusion as to who pulled away from whom, especially from the outside.
Is it the man 'checking out' of marriage for entirely internal reasons, or is it partially a response to the wife being less sexually available, or putting less effort into housework (esp. if housework is shared,), or has the wife become openly and constantly critical of him even if not directly abusive?
I would sincerely believe that if two people spent 10 years or more together, the ultimate destruction of the relationship is due to the two parties each reciprocating in small wounds which go untended and thus slowly kill the coupling rather than one side unilaterally having changed feelings out of the blue.
What I would guess is that the man is the one who more often wants to fix it rather than throwing it out and buying a new one, vs. a woman seeing no reason to repair what is damaged when it's easy enough to find a replacement.
I would also guess that the woman puts more effort into fixing the marriage in the first round or two of counseling then concludes it can’t be fixed because her husband won’t put in the effort.
I wonder how much of this dynamic is the systemic fault of counseling being female-coded: highly subjective, no rules allowed for assigning blame except the “yes, dear” dynamic, no logical framework undergirding the conversations, etc.
Once I discovered a mental health paradigm which worked due to being the opposite of the above, I dove in with both feet and have never regretted it.
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