If you can read this, you know where I’m going to be next week and what I’m going to be doing. I will be indeed be leaving for Brazil this Sunday the 6th, returning on Monday the 14th.
I will try and post from South America, and my now-regular columns at the Good Men Project and Healthy is the New Skinny will appear as scheduled on Tuesday and Thursday, respectively.
Speaking of the Good Men Project, I’m pleased that my most recent piece was picked up by Alternet. One key thing got left on the cutting room floor: I know that by far the biggest reasons women are more likely to leave heterosexual marriages than men are (in no particular order): domestic violence, infidelity, and an uneven physical and emotional distribution of household duties. My point in the post was that even if we take all of those things off the table (and there are marriages where there is no hitting, no name-calling, no cheating, and a roughly egalitarian approach to housework), women are still more likely to leave. As it stands, it looks as if I’m ignoring some key issues, and that needed clarifying.
See ya on the other side.
In order to understand the power of women’s decisions, you have to look at the power of women. In a world where women have more power, and more economic self-sufficiency, you’ll have women not settling. And in all those divorce statistics, we still often don’t know the truth. We don’t know that they might seem like ok marriages on the outside, but from a woman’s point of view, the situation is terrible.
We will only know what true love and commitment is when women have complete power, freedom and economic control in the world. We will know what women really feel when women have actual legal agency, and can write the lion’s share of the laws. When women are all nine justices on the supreme court, and the vast majority of congress, when women are presidents, when women run fortune 500 corporations in record numbers. We will know what is real when women don’t need men at all, but can choose to be with men. And only when men are forced by social pressure to be as socially adept as women, where they do the lion’s share of the listening, where they learn to never insult women or belittle the accomplishments of women. That world will be very uncomfortable for the sex class in power known as men. Men are surprised when a divorce comes at them, precisely because they are ignorant of the woman living with them. And since men see women as objects, servants, wives… and that is how men see women, they won’t know.
If you have a world where women don’t have access to careers and education, or where they might be socially punished for divorcing, then you don’t have a real portrait of marriage. Right now, marriage is not an equal situation, men opt out emotionally, or they have little interest in marriage — the long work hours, the extensive travel…the indifference to children.
I think this huge disparity of divorce between men and women simply indicates that men really know very little about women, even the women they are married to. And again, men seem surprised that women aren’t happy. I notice this all the time with male colleagues who have no clue they are being offensive sexist idiots– no clue at all. That they can’t see their behavior at all speaks volumes, because they can’t see their behavior in marriage as well. Someone once told me that the greatest number of divorces occur when women get into their 50s–after the children leave the home. Men go into retirement mode at the very time when women become more alive and vibrant. And women finally realize that they deserve a real life, not one with a withdrawn man, a man who isn’t interested in life. Ever met men who are socially incompetant? Who can’t even carry on a conversation? Can’t even ask women questions and listen to answers? Women facilitate men’s social incompetance all the time, and at some point, just get sick of it. That women are initiating divorce in such large numbers is a good thing..it means women are finally deciding that they are worth it, and that they won’t settle. I think marriage is an incredibly bad idea for women anyway, and studies have shown that men need marriage more than women, and it is this truth that will rule the day with women’s increased economic power, women’s increased access to making laws… the more legal power, the more jobs, the more agency, the less marriage can mean to a woman. Men take note.
^^^ MRA troll, or just an idiot?
I think you underestimate the extent to which men passive aggressively force women out of the marriage. They may not cheat, but they know that there’s only so much chore dereliction and emotional stonewalling a woman will put up with before she’s out. That way, the woman’s the “bad guy,” and the man can feel sorry for himself — while getting bonus sympathy points on all his future dates.
No women should ever marry a divorced men, that goes without saying.
Okay, it’s a troll. Thanks for clarifying.
“even if we take all of those things off the table (and there are marriages where there is no hitting, no name-calling, no cheating, and a roughly egalitarian approach to housework), women are still more likely to leave.”
As I said over at GMP, how can you possibly know this? Has anyone ever looked at who initiated the divorce specifically amongst couples where there was no hitting, no name-calling, no cheating, and a roughly egalitarian approach to housework? If there is, I’d be really interested in seeing how they identified those couples.
@Janey K.
“Someone once told me that the greatest number of divorces occur when women get into their 50s–after the children leave the home. Men go into retirement mode at the very time when women become more alive and vibrant.”
I was listening to a phone-in show where a woman was talking about why she divorced her husband after 30 years. He had always justified dumping the housework/childcare on her by saying he was the primary breadwinner, and so the work allocation was fair. That’s kind of hard to argue. But then the kids left home and he retired, and he expected her to do things for him like she’d always had. So it was all a big lie. The domestic responsibilities weren’t hers because he brought home the (bigger) paycheque; they were hers because she was a woman. Women are considered responsible for housework and childcare regardless of their financial contribution:
“Sociologists predicted they’d see the effect of an “exchange theory” in families: The more money a wife contributed to the family till, the more unpaid household and childcare work she could “buy” out of. They long believed that exchange theory would eventually be the undoing of gender roles. They were wrong. Some husbands of breadwinner wives have embraced their role as keeper of the hearth and home, but they are few and far between.
Exchange theory works to a point. Men increased their housework by a maximum of 2.5 hours a week (to 20 hours) when their wives’ contribution to family income rose from zero percent to 50 percent, according to a study . . . But even when they earned 50 percent of the household income, wives in this study group did 40 hours of housework a week, double what their husbands did at their peak housework performance. . .
The same study showed that when women start contributing more than 50 percent to the family income, the amount of housework the husband does actually begins to fall and continues to fall as the wife’s earnings climb. And here’s the really depressing part: The study also reported that when a wife becomes a family’s sole provider, she often does even more housework than when she contributes half the income.”
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/03/11/the_job_without_benefits/
So the divorce may not be because the woman is becoming more “alive and vibrant”, but because she finds out her marriage was a sham. Her husband was not her partner after all. He thought she was there to serve him.