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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.
Indeed, I'd be in favor of rejecting such a person from polite society entirely.
Right. But I feel it is fair to ask the question:
If you were not coerced into the marriage, it wasn't an arranged marriage, you had other options around you, and you had adequate time to 'vet' the person...
Why'd you commit to a long term relationship with them?
Note that I'm perfectly prepared to accept explanations such as:
A) He/she had some mental health break or injury that completely shifted his/her behavior from the norm.
B) He/she was utterly sociopathic and hid all his/her flaws from me until it was too late.
I'm less inclined to accept:
C) I folded due to social pressure.
As a real excuse, if you live in a Western Country.
But I think most of these situations are well-explained by basic human irrationality. "I never thought he'd hit me," or "I believed she would mature/change/grow with time." The classic "well they're fine 99% of the time and I just tolerate the horrific 1%" (especially if 1% is more like 10%)
Honestly, for the vast majority of history, pairings between humans, marital or not, were just based on convenience rather than anything like compatibility. We're in a rare and perhaps unstable period where we're able to choose mates from a large pool, and I'd argue our basic instincts are not up to the task.
I would never imply that fault is always perfectly 50-50 (no point in even attempting the calculation, imho) but so much of it can be attributed to "why am I putting up with [minor inconvenience] when I could just find something better?" And then simply never addressing or fixing the inconveniences as they pile up over time, so blame is very hard to ascribe.
Note that in cisHajnal cultures the novel thing is the "large pool". Arranged marriages were an exclusively aristocratic thing, with working and middle class young adults choosing their own partners .
The other thing that has changed, in my view for the worse, is the institution of the boyfriend/girlfriend. Pre sexual revolution, even people choosing a spouse for themselves knew they were choosing a spouse, and acted accordingly. Now people start by choosing someone to have a semi-casual fun-orientated relationship with, and only evaluating them as a spouse if that works out. If you know you want a spouse in the end, this is stupid. But "no matter how much you like your boy/girlfriend, if you wouldn't marry them you should dump them yesterday" is profoundly countercultural advice.
Seems like these two things would be intrinsically related.
If your pool of potential spouses were like a couple dozen large at most, you'd be expecting to get married on the 'first try' and thus you'd focus on picking a spouse from that pool at the start.
If you've got 100+ 'potential' mates, a more casual approach makes some sense as a way to 'test drive' the available options before committing to a purchase, since your odds of getting 'the one' on the first try are small.
What IS definitely different and problematic is the fact that relationships seem to advance at a glacial pace. People are BF/GF for a year, then they move in, then MAYBE they get engaged after another year, and the engagement lasts a year.
A lot of time spent in that interstitial space where technically either side can leave for another partner scott-free.
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