The Three Reasons That Women Initiate 69% of Divorce
By: Elle Beau
Tags: Elle Beau, Divorce, Love, Relationships, Marriage

Marriage hasn’t really caught up with modern life

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If you surveyed a cross-section of Americans asking them who is most interested in relationships and marriage, you’d probably get an overwhelming response saying that it is women. After all, women have been told their whole lives that they aren’t really complete people until they’ve found somebody to “settle down with” and have a child or three. Not only do single women overwhelmingly believe this; pretty much everyone believes it.

I read a story this morning about how 6 married therapists, 5 of them women, realized that they had an unconscious bias around their female client's relationship and marital status. “Mental health professionals are swimming in the same pool of stereotypes and mythologies and ideologies as everyone else, so it is not altogether surprising that some of them absorb the prevailing prejudices. Fortunately, there are also a few who realize that there may be something wrong with the way they are thinking and decide to do something about it.”

“The therapists were surprised and distressed to realize the extent to which they had unthinkingly accepted derogatory ways of thinking about single people. Looking back at their experiences growing up, they realized that their family members pitied single women.” While it’s true that many women just want to be in a loving committed relationship with someone they care deeply about, just as many men, and non-binary people do, there does seem to be more pressure on women to tie the knot with somebody.

But, what women who marry men often discover later on is that the institution of marriage hasn’t really kept up with modern life. Michael Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University and author of a 2015 American Sociological Association study on divorce stated, “I think that marriage as an institution has been a little bit slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality. Wives still take their husbands’ surnames, and are sometimes pressured to do so. Husbands still expect their wives to do the bulk of the housework and the bulk of the childcare.”

Although non-marital breakups were found to be 50/50, overwhelmingly, it’s women who file for divorce. Here are three of the main reasons why:

Women make up a little over half of the workforce, but still overwhelmingly are responsible for the care of the home and the children.

Married women, even those without children, do the bulk of the housework even when they work outside the home. In fact, the more a woman earns, the higher the percentage of chores she will typically perform. “The more economically dependent men are on their wives, the less housework they do. Even women with unemployed husbands spend considerably more time on household chores than their spouses.” It’s a not-so-subtle way of asserting, “But, I’m still the man!”

“In addition, women often find that their husbands are not supportive when they are highly successful in their careers. In a 2019 study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, which included over 6,000 American heterosexual couples over 15 years, many men experienced “physchological distress” if their wives made more than 40% of the household income in a marriage.”

“So if a woman has high expectations and responsibilities from her career, high expectations and responsibilities at home, and does not have support from her husband on career advancement, she may not find the marriage to be in her best interest anymore.”

2. Patriarchal gender norms discourage men from learning how to process and communicate emotions in favor of letting women do that for them.

Married women may discover that they are responsible for not just the emotional labor related to making the home run smoothly, but the support and emotional well-being of the entire family. If the husband is not providing emotional support to his wife sufficient to account for this, she may feel that she’s alone anyway, so why not have the autonomy that goes with that?

3. When women were more economically dependent on men, they had to sometimes put up with abusive or negligent behavior that they are less willing to tolerate in this day and age.

“Dori Schwartz, a divorce mediator and coach says, ‘Today’s modern woman is more unlikely to put up with infidelity. Once the honeymoon period is over, some men drastically change their behavior from romantic to controlling and emotionally abusive. Unfortunately, this happens in many marriages, and women don’t want to take it anymore.’”

Although patriarchal expectations that haven’t quite emerged from the 1950s may be much to blame for this imbalance, a 2017 report from the UK said that 78% of same-sex marriages that dissolved were between women. Perhaps women have a higher expectation of what marriage is supposed to be like, in part due to all the fairytale aspects they are fed their entire lives, from Disney to rom-coms.

In addition, gay men are much more likely to engage in open relationships or monogamish pairings than lesbians, who frequently go for a more conventional marriage style. A story in the Washington Blade on this pervasive dynamic among gay men says this: “Questioning our penchant for casual sex while we are coupled is also seen as a challenge to the inspirational (to some) narrative that gay men, free of the constraints of history and tradition, are constructing a fresh, vibrant model of relationships that decouples the unnecessary, pesky, and troublesome bond between emotional fidelity and sexual exclusivity.”

My take-away from all this is that marriage isn’t necessarily the issue, but patriarchal style marriage is. I think that people can still be monogamous and not have a patriarchal style relationship, but that it’s very rare. Also, a marriage that is ethically non-monogamous can do a lot to challenge patriarchal style unions. From my experiences trying to deprogram from that, I’ve found it was quite deeply and subconsciously wired for us both. Undoing that mindset can be challenging for both partners, although we both found it be very rewarding to do so.

Although my husband and I have gone a long way towards unhooking from that cultural training, there are still vestiges in place in our relationship. Becoming polyamorous was what forced us to truly confront many of the patriarchal aspects of our marriage that we didn’t really recognize as being so until we challenged them. But even so, it’s hard to buck the system. James has come a long, long way, and so have I — and we started from a fairly egalitarian place — but if he were to die, I’m not at all sure that I would ever marry again. It would take a very special person for me to ever consider marriage with someone else. There’s still just way too much patriarchal mindset out there related to marriage, which is why the vast majority of divorces are initiated by women.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020

Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.

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