Why are women more likely to initiate divorce than men?

Last updated on: October 21, 2015 at 10:48 am by Jane the Actuary

Why are women more likely to initiate divorce than men? 2015-10-21T10:48:31-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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The Tribune has a tendency, especially in the “Health & Family” section, to feature somewhat oldish syndicated articles, and today it was this piece, “Women are more likely to initiate divorce,” from the Washington Post.

The key bits: our expectations for marriage, or, more specifically, women’s expectations, have grown dramatically — men are no longer simply supposed to be good providers, but to provide emotional support, to be fun to be with, to meet a long wish list of traits. And as a result:

According to research that Rosenfeld presented at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting last week, these heightened expectations can leave women feeling worse off in marriage than men. In a survey of 2,262 adults in heterosexual partnerships over the course of five years, Rosenfeld found that women initiate divorces 69 percent of the time. . . .

Scientists have known for decades that wives are usually the ones asking for a divorce. But Rosenfeld’s study also surveyed people in non-marital romantic relationships, from casual flings to couples who had lived together for several years; in those relationships, women and men initiated breakups at equal rates. So there’s something about marriage that makes it harder on women.

Which reminds me of a recurring theme at Ann Althouse’s blog (sometimes directly in her posts, other times playing out in the comments): whenever there’s a difference identified between men and women, it’s always interpreted, in the media, as reflecting favorably upon women, or explained by an injustice perpetrated against them — because in this article we’re meant to understand that when a woman divorces a man, it’s always to be understood as the man’s fault for being a bad husband, leaving all the housework to her, for instance. Reverse the situation, of course, and it’s also the man’s fault, for failing to stay true to his commitment.

Here’s the paper itself, and the abstract:

Women initiate most divorces in the US, yet the reasons why women are more likely to initiate divorce are poorly understood. In this paper, I use a new longitudinal study of relationships and breakups in the US, the How Couples Meet and Stay Together surveys. The data examine the gender of who wanted the breakup for both marital and nonmarital relationships for the first time. The results show that only in marriages are the majority of breakups wanted by the female partner. Men and women in nonmarital heterosexual relationships in the US are equally likely to want to break up. Furthermore, wives report lower relationship quality than husbands, while men and women in nonmarital relationships report equal relationship quality. The results are consistent with a feminist critique of heterosexual marriage as a gendered institution in which wives find less satisfaction than husbands do.

But do men truly pull their weight while living together, and only once they’ve tied the knot, start refusing to wash the dishes? Or do women have higher expectations for their husbands’ behavior than they do of a boyfriend, so that it takes more to feel satisfied? The paper speaks of men being “controlling” and of there being “power imbalances” but my quick skim doesn’t provide specific details of exactly what men do that so upsets women.

Anyway, I’ve only just skimmed the paper, and it is an interesting observation that women are the predominant initiators only of divorce, not other sorts of break ups.

Standard cop-out concluding thought: what do you think?

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