We can try to find a multitude of different reasons why this is happening, across the multitude of scenarios (hetero marriages, same sex marriages, marriages today vs marriages fifty years ago)
Or just maybe there is a single unifying reason, namely that there is something in the OP’s observation about women and their happiness trajectory in LTRs.
FWIW, my assumption is that it’s a combination: some case by case reasons, plus some overarching reason.
I don’t see why you would think that the social-norm reasons I’m talking about and the “overarching” “happiness trajectory of women” reason that you and the OP are focusing on are necessarily different things.
Obviously, if gender-norm expectations in marriage do in fact tend to be relatively more onerous for women and more beneficial for men, then we would naturally expect that women’s happiness would decrease over time in marriage while men’s would increase.
That doesn’t necessarily have to be the only overarching reason.
Anecdotally, from friends and family (and popular media) women seem to remember past grievances longer and stronger than men do, on average. If that is true, then if two partners live together then the one who remembers grievances longer will slowly accumulate more and more of them, until it becomes untenable to continue living with the other person.
That’s an interesting notion. It doesn’t have to be gendered, but if one party accumulates grievances forever and the other doesn’t, at some point it’s completely untenable, for reasons not really fathomable to the other party - they worked it out, let it go, and the other person simply couldn’t. Repeat for years.
By “overarching reason” or “unifying reason” you seem to mean “some factor causing women’s greater dissatisfaction in marriage that is innate in women’s nature even when men are doing nothing wrong and that men couldn’t do anything to remedy even if they tried”.
There certainly might be some such factor at work, but I think Ockham’s razor would suggest that we don’t need to postulate it in order to explain the phenomenon of women’s greater dissatisfaction in marriage.
I think that’s more a result of uneven power dynamics. Whenever there is a stronger and weaker member of a relationship, it’s the weaker side - or at least, the side that perceives itself as being weaker - who tends to hold grievances, while the more powerful side can afford to be magnanimous. It’s something you see not just between individuals, but also between groups of people, or even nations.
It’s not always about power dynamics
According to the report, women use more and different brain regions than men do when experiencing or remembering intense emotional experiences, resulting in more vivid recollections.
Hmmm.
I mean it depends. How many complaints about you leaving the toilet seat up, working late, and hogging the blankets equate to her fucking some other dude?
I know it may not be popular to say on this board, but IMHO while men and women (and everyone in between) deserve equal rights and opportunities, men and women don’t think or behave the same way. (Or if you prefer, there are male and female dominated traits, depending on how one identifies.)
What I mean to say is that, anecdotally, I think women tend to have a much more idealized picture of what their life should be like. And it’s usually some amalgamation of Sheryl Sandberg and Carrie Bradshaw. And I think if they don’t achieve this, they tend to project those shortcomings onto their husband. Even if they do achieve everything they desire, then they often look at their husband like “I deserve more”. There’s an element of “bitches never happy”.
I think men suffer from “not living up to expectations” more than women do. At the very least, I rarely hear men talking about marriage as something they expect to make them “happy” in the same fairy tale manner that women do.
And I’m going to take a wild guess that they were all from similar cultures.
Anectodally, I don’t know any women who expect a life remotely like that; and I doubt I know any who would want one.
What kind of fairy tales? Bluebeard?
If what you mean by “fairy tale manner” is what I think you mean: I’ve never heard grown women talk about marriage like that. Young girls, sometimes. They get fed a lot of sanitized fairy tales, after all.
There are patterns. They’re often emphasized and exaggerated by cultural factors. They don’t say jack shit about individuals.
Men are on average taller than women. No question. That tells you nothing about whether any individual woman is taller than any individual man. Almost all women are taller than some men; and some women are taller than most men. And, as with almost anything else, some people care how tall their partner is, and other people don’t care and often don’t understand why anybody would care.
Thank you to all who responded.
As far as financial considerations, I’m not sure how that plays into divorces, because ultimately the women are choosing to leave the men, sooner or later. If they never left, men would be filing more than women. That’s not the case.
In my particular case, I now have considerably poorer finances than my ex. In my state, remarriage does not affect child support. So she has access to two incomes. Ex is a SAHM. I did face the accusations of not doing enough housework, which were bullshit. I regularly emptied the dishwasher and laundry, also always did my own laundry. Plus she was and is a SAHM, maybe she should be doing a bit more? Oh yeah, we had (and she still has) a cleaning service. So since I worked and she didn’t, I’m really paying for that (still am for their household I suppose) so I was really doing more of the housework.
There were other things like the home improvements she was always requesting in order to get the house “just so” before she got bored with me and it and proceeded on her way.
All I am trying to do is assess the difficulty of a LTR with any prospective woman and her ability to be happy with me and the LTR. And how hard I’ll try again, or even if I have the skills to make it happen. My personal opinion is that it’s more difficult that I originally thought (despite my belief in myself as a legitimately good person with empathy and skills) and that the mutual effort and willingness to work together is rarer than I might have hoped. I think we are all allowed to be who we want to be, I’m just trying to figure out how everyone is likely to act.
I think that’s the problem, because “any prospective woman” doesn’t exist.
Certainly there are, as many posters here have been saying, general socialized behavior patterns that men and women feel varying degrees of pressure to conform to, depending on their individual personalities and outlooks. But ultimately, no analysis of general trends can reliably tell you anything about some particular individual.
For what it’s worth, on average women are more negatively impacted financially by divorce than men, as recently reconfirmed by this 2018 study:
But as noted, no such study of general trends can tell us jack shit about the financial impacts of any particular divorce between two real-life individuals. In some cases, as you point out, a divorced woman becomes more affluent than her ex-husband. And as previously discussed, women are generally happier post-divorce than men are.
The general trends play a role in how much vetting I need to do. One thing I need to do is to discount initial enthusiasm, because of the trend of women being progressively less happy. That exact scenario played out in my marriage. To be fair, there are men who do this too, the “always falling in love” serial adulterer types. And not all women have the issue my ex did, at least to that degree. I wouldn’t say it was at zero with my GF, but it was reduced a lot. Despite all of the issues we had (some of which I had plenty of contributions of my own) that relationship still had more potential viability than my marriage ever did.
I already steer clear of women whose relationship history consists of a series of 5-6 year relationships that end for superficial reasons. I suppose all I can do is vet more.
You seem to think women are cars. You wish there was a Consumer Reports for women, so you could just shop the reliable brands. It couldn’t be less appealing a quality in a prospective mate.
I could make suggestions for improving your chances but since they all involve changing your attitude, I won’t bother. You don’t seem ready for that.
About me: Female, no children. Separated from my husband in 2018, divorce was finalized in 2019. Been with my current boyfriend for about two years.
You can also be honest about what you’re ready for. I spent the first year after my separation casually dating and being very honest that I was still emotionally messed up. The next year I was in a casual, long-distance relationship where I felt less of a need to get super emotionally invested or committed. After that, I got into a LTR with a man who was in the process of divorcing his wife, because his relationship status made me feel less rushed. (I mean, also because he was attractive and a good match for me, but his relationship status was unquestionably one of the things that made me feel safe with him initially.)
As others have said, you don’t need to think in generalities. If you meet someone you think could be a potential long-term partner, talk with her about what she feels is important behavior in a relationship. Her opinion is much more relevant than the “majority female opinion.”
Because people have been talking about women initiating divorces: If “initiate” means “first one to file for divorce,” I initiated my divorce. It was because my husband was in love with another woman, had moved out of the house seven months earlier, impregnated her, and stopped talking to me, but had not yet filed for divorce. Maybe women just procrastinate less than men and are better at tackling pesky administrative tasks like filing for divorce.
My future wife and I were in a long-distance relationship for two years before we were in the same city and could finally live together; we got married less than a year after that. We certainly had our ups and downs while we were apart, but our love deepened and we were, and are, very happy together.
I don’t think men are responsible for women’s happiness or unhappiness, but rather that both individuals in a loving relationship should do their best, within the bounds of the law and to the extent the other person actually wants them to do so, to make each other happy. There are innate differences between men and women, and I am in many ways a romantic/chivalric person at heart, but I wholly accept the equality of the sexes. Ensuring happiness is a mutual responsibility, or should be, I believe.
I was married 25 years and divorced and then sent 25 years with someone who passed away. I saw some changes that I had to make after my first divorce. Example, if she depends on me to keep up the property and that’s important to her I need to give that some priority. I would consider that a reasonable expectation. Now if she expects me to sit and talk to her all night I don’t consider that a reasonable expectation. Sex is a little more complicated but it helps if other areas of your relationship are in good order. I think it is very important that she knows you like who she is and you value her thoughts and feelings.
Oh wow. And you have multiple kids?? I’m… just gonna say that if I were a SAHM (I’m not) and all my husband did was empty the dishwasher and laundry, and did his own laundry, and when I said he wasn’t doing enough housework his attitude was “I empty the dishwasher and laundry, and do my own laundry, that’s bullshit,” I’d… be strongly thinking about divorce too. (My husband is great and would never even think such a thing.)
Kids are a LOT of work. Heck, just cleaning up after kids is a lot of work. I don’t know how old your kids are, but the dishwasher is the least of it. Once the kids are school-aged or so, the sheer amount of drudgery housework is less (less random poop to clean up, less random food splatters), okay, but there’s more stuff like “kid is doing a project and needs straws,” etc. The part where you don’t list any child-centric tasks in the list of things you did around the house – well, maybe you think that goes in a different category, but it gives me pause. I 100% think that working is easier than being a SAHM (which is why I’m not a SAHM and stopped at two kids).
As a human being who has been socialized as a woman, I’d say that the very LEAST I’d expect from a spouse (or, heck, a close friend) is someone who would, when I complained about an inequity in our relationship, try to understand where I was coming from. Now of course I’m not hearing the whole story from a few posts on a message board, and it’s possible that, as you’ve implied, your wife was the one who wasn’t able to understand your point of view. But the way you’ve talked about this makes me wonder if it was truly one-sided.
(And also, I wonder what the statistics are on divorce with kids vs. divorce without kids. Most of the people I know who have divorced have kids, but I don’t really know a representative cross-section.)
Let me expand. I was SPECIFICALLY accused of not emptying the dishwasher enough and not doing enough laundry. Those were not the only ways I helped out.
There was no talk about that during the marriage, only after she had started cheating and was looking for rationalizations. Those were the only two SPECIFIC things she brought up. She was wrong, and I told her she was full of it. Which she was.
I also mowed the lawn, shoveled and blew the driveway, raked the leaves. I cleaned out the gutters until she went behind my back and paid for gutter guards I did not want. She wanted to pay for other people to do these things. I wanted to do them myself to be and feel useful.
We also lived close to my work so I could come home on lunch hour and give stroller rides to the kids. Which I did basically every day.
Also took the kids on library and other outings on weekends. And more.
She calls me a great father now. She’s with the other dude because she loves him more than she did me. That has nothing to do with my qualities as a person or what I contributed to the relationship. She wanted him, not me. Like some new CEO firing all of the old upper echelon so they can install “their people”, their buddies from some other place. Has nothing to do with the personal qualities of the old staff. My ex wants who she’s with now more than she ever wanted me, she always did. I was just useful to her as a paycheck and help with the kids until he decided he could settle down. Then she was done with me.