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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.
If by "fixing the marriage" you mean "making unilateral demands" I can buy it. Otherwise I've literally never heard of a single story of this ever in my entire life. I've never had a friend, man or woman, relate one two me. I've never heard one second hand. I've never seen it written in any sort of blog/editorial. By all means, if you've got anything you can show me, any anecdote no matter how poorly sourced, so show this has happened to anyone ever and been documented, please share.
I'm surprised by this. In every couple I have known that ended up getting divorced, it was the wife who was putting in more effort in order to try and repair the relationship. Now that is only perhaps 5 or 6 couples, and of course I am an outsider, so it's possible things looked different from inside the marriage, but from the outside this was the appearance at least. It was pretty evenly split as to which partner was the one I was talking to, but pretty unilaterally the wife was the one pushing for counselling etc. As far as I know none of them were ended by cheating, but form the "grown apart" perspective. Of those, I think the wife was the one who filed for divorce in one and the husband in another and I am not sure on the rest.
In every experience I have personally had, the woman has always been the one doing the most to maintain the relationship, though, so I think it's likely from the repair perspective as well, which makes sense. Maintaining and repairing a relationship is emotional work which is much more likely to be feminine coded.
Where the wife is having an affair I can see this changing however as the emotional target of their work may well be the other guy. But where the wife maintains an emotional attachment to the husband it seems highly likely she will be the one working most to fix it.
Describe this effort. Was she sucking his dick more? Giving him more space for his hobbies? Encouraging him to spend more time with his friends? Noticing he needed another beer? Offered to watch his favorite show with him and not ask a million questions because she wasn't paying attention on her phone?
Or was she dragging him to couples therapy so she and the therapist could harangue him that he needs to whittle away even further at the 15 minutes he gets to himself in the shower to hear his own thoughts to fulfill her needs more.
In every relationship/marriage I know of, the man is working more hours doing 50% of the housework, watching the kids, keeping the budget and investing. Their wives are consistently reducing their hours or quitting entirely to be stay at home moms, while still expecting their husbands to go 50/50 on housework and childcare, and still complaining that their "needs" aren't being met.
The number of things their husbands do that "don't count" is astronomical. Only female coded housework like cooking, cleaning and laundry goes on their mental tally. Yardwork, repair, maintenance is all invisible. I rebuilt the wall of our garage that was rotting out and my wife complained that I didn't do anything that weekend. It's a ubiquitous experience among the men I know.
My wife got chickens. She tells everyone she does all the work. I let them out, I feed them, I top off their water, I get their eggs, I put them up at night. I even built their coup and set up the fence for their pen. Lately she's been wanting them to free range, but I've gotten stuck with letting them out, putting them back up, and checking on them from time to time.
Once or twice a month she cleans the chicken crap out of the coup. Now she wants a dog and promises she'll do all the work. My reticence is causing her to invoke a lot of therapy language about her "needs".
A buddy of mine's wife constantly complains that he's not doing enough, when he changed jobs out of his dream career so she could be a stay at home mom, with the house she wanted, and the new car she wants. He moved across the country like she wanted so they could be closer to her family. He sucked it up and had more kids than he wanted because of how she felt. And it all amounts to zilch to her. It's just expected. The bare minimum.
The only world where a man isn't putting in enough effort is a world in which all his contributions are profoundly devalued or ignored. As is often the case I see around me.
Jesus, dude, the marriages you say represent every relationship/marriage you know of sound positively miserable.
I have known of relationships like those you describe, even been in at least one with a woman who would probably fit your personal model of all women (i.e., unreasonable, harrowing, emasculating Void) but I have personally been in, and seen many other, relationships that do not follow that model at all. And yes, I've also seen relationships that fell apart because the woman was putting in the effort and the man had checked out.
That you think "Putting in the effort" means "sucking his dick more and bringing him beer" tells me the problem may not be exactly what you think it is.
If your couples therapist is ganging up with your wife to tell you to cut down on your shower time, you have a truly crappy therapist.
This is kinda antagonistic and unworthy of you.
This whole series of exchanges reminds me that everyone, myself included, is reasoning from first principles that we derive from our own lives and relationships. Check, as it were, our privilege; and set aside our resentments.
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