Will This Marriage Last? – Who Wants Out And Why?

From Ash:

When we hear a couple is splitting up, we don't say, "Well, they are poor, Protestant couple who live in the West Coast: the odds are against them." Instead, we ask, "What happened?" We want to know why. We want to know who or what was to blame, and who decided to leave.

Which means that it came as a surprise to me that – while there are hordes of studies on socioeconomic and other demographic factors influencing divorce – there are comparatively few studies focusing the actual reasons couples give for divorcing. But what these find, I think, are an equally fascinating glimpse into marriages and divorces that I can't skip over.

"Honey, we need to talk."

All right, if you're like me and hear the text outloud in your head, then I'm willing to bet that you heard a female voice say that sentence. And if you think that tells you the answer to who usually wants the divorce, you're right.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Paula England, a member of the Council on Contemporary Families and a sociology professor at Stanford University. Dr. England's been involved with some of my more favorite studies, and she's now examining who initates divorce.

Dr. England explained to me that a previous study had found that about 2/3 of divorce petitions are filed by the wife, but that doesn't necessarily show who wanted the divorce. There could be a myriad of reasons why it was more convenient to divorce under the wife's name.

But comparing that data to survey responses of couples after their divorce, women were the ones who were saying that they wanted the divorce more than their husband wanted it.

How often was it that many more of women wanted the divorce more than the men?

2/3. The same as the amount responsible for divorce filings. And yet another study of divorced couples found that the majority of divorced wives and husbands both agreed it was the wife who wanted out.

So it does seem to be that it's the women who want the divorce.

The harder question is why.

Dr. England's still working on that, but there are two major theories. First, it could be that, while divorce generally is harder on the women than the men, that marriage, too, is just a worse deal for the women: men get more out of it than women.

But the theory that Dr. England prefers is that women expect more out of a marriage, emotionally, in particular, and that they therefore are more sensitive to when problems arise. Women are, as she put it, taking the temperature of the relationship, regularly checking to see how it is doing.

And that idea is supported in the studies that have found men often don't even know why it is that they got divorced: one study found that about 10% of divorced husbands claimed to be at a loss as to the reason their marriages ended. None of the women said they didn't know why they'd divorced.

According to a 2003 study, the most common reasons for divorce for both men and women were infidelity and incompatibility. But the majority of women said they'd left because of claims of spousal infidelity, incompatibility, physical abuse, and drug and alcohol abuse. Men, on the other hand, said that they'd more often divorced because of: infidelity, incompatibility, and communication and personality problems. That doesn't disprove the theory of the woman as the one monitoring of the health of the marriage: the study authors attributed the men's explanations as being easier for the men to admit (to others and themselves) than to see their own failings in the marriage.

(For both men and women, the majority say the divorce was the other spouses' fault.)

I wrote earlier this week about how women with more financial resources, specifically those women who contribute more than half of the family's income, have an increased risk of divorce.

What's interesting is that women's socio-economic backgrounds seem to change not just the likelihood of divorce, but why the women leave.

Women from lower socio-economic backgrounds tend to divorce because of domestic violence, drug and alcohol problems (their own or their spouses). Women from wealthier backgrounds tend to leave more for emotional reasons – failure to communicate, personality conflicts, etc. The trick here is that we can't tell if the difference between these groups is because of different life-events in those communities (e.g., domestic violence, drug abuse are more prevalent in families with lower socio-economic backgrounds), or if the women really do value their marriages in different ways.

Reasons for divorce also seem to change over the course of a marriage, but the studies are inconsistent as to how these play out. Some studies say that personality conflicts are more likely to split couples that have been married for a shorter period of time, while those long-time marrieds are more likely to divorce because of problems arising out of an event (e.g., a partner's affair). There are also studies that say couples younger in age are more likely to be divorcing because of drug and alcohol abuse.

To me, the most fascinating thing in all of these reports is that, many commentators blame the rise of divorce on "no-fault" divorce laws (and they largely ignore that the rate of divorce has leveled off), but time after time, sociologists have found out that, regardless the legal claim made, most people are divorcing because of real problems within the marriage – the same sorts of claims that could have been made under the "fault" legal regime.

In other words, the evidence doesn't support any idea that we now conceive of marriage as disposable. In fact, it's quite the contrary.