SciFiSam, thanks for your perspective as a lesbian.
Actually, it’s not entirely about marriage. Women in every possible case are more likely to initiate a breakup than a man. From the paper posted upthread, married or not, living together or not, women are most likely to end any hetero relationship.
I am trying to take a break. The breakup with GF took about 5 months to resolve, I chilled for a couple of months. Have a life coach now. Made some good inroads for a while, now it’s getting tougher, which is probably not surprising. I will need to resume dating at some point. Can’t wait until I’m done with the kids, life is too short, physical needs and all of that. Right now, a relationship would be a rebound of a rebound and that’s not enough.
The ex actually offered to co-file for divorce. I refused to do that. So I’m not sure how much paperwork was involved. I don’t agree with what she did.
I am a good father to my kids but it is taking a toll on me. The ex is trying to reconnect a bit, asking about my mother and family. Probably feels guilty I suppose.
If I am looking for positive examples, one of my female cousins has a decades long LTR with a divorced man, who had his own kids. They have never married or had any kids of their own. My takeaway there is maybe I have to be with someone who understands that about me and accepts me that way, because I don’t think I can get it to work any other way. I do think relationships are often not 50-50, that sometimes one partner has to take some of the burden off the other in one particular area, and that would probably be something I need. With my GF we had both been cheated on and there was no one to step forward sometimes. Seems to work better if one of the partners can cover particular bases rather than having neither be able to.
Yes. There’s been a bit of uncertainty in this thread about whether the finding “women initiate divorce more than men do” could mean simply that women are more likely to be the ones to file the actual papers, whether or not they’re the ones who want the divorce.
But the linked study is unambiguous that women are more likely to initiate divorces because women are more likely to want divorces:
Instigating the break-up is also part of emotional labour.
Not to get off track, but I don’t interpret the philosophy of Ayn Rand as “everyone for themselves” (at least how her philosophy is presented in Atlas Shrugged). The characters in the book certainly cooperated together, often in ways that they believed to be altruistic for the greater good and often at the expense of their own careers or personal fortunes.
What Ayn Rand was promoting was that people should be free to enter into honest agreements based on their own enlightened self interest. It seemed to me her believe was that institutions such as governments or companies start promoting the idea of “the greater good” or notions of “altruism” in order to coerce people to act against their own interests. Usually not for the greater good at all but for some special interests.
And I think that philosophy applies to relationships as well. Whether it’s a marriage, LRT, or just casual dating, both parties are doing so freely and presumably for their own self-interests. Ideally, they should care about the other person as well. But I don’t think there should be some expectation that you should always put your partner’s needs ahead of your own. If your partner is constantly unhappy, the onus isn’t on you to see to their happiness (I mean, unless you want to for some reason). The alternative is always “I see you are unhappy with the current situation, you are asking more than I want to give, therefore we should split up and find people more compatible.”
I don’t know if it’s true “Ayn Rand philosophy”. Maybe it’s more “airplane oxygen mask philosophy”. I don’t believe you can help others with their needs until you take care of your first.
I think you are way overthinking things and placing way to much pressure on the outcome of any new relationship. I mean it kind of sounds like you are trying to “check boxes” to align with some woman also looking for the right boxes to check. What about just going out on some dates and seeing if you two kids hit it off?
Because I have a history of overcommitting to random or poor fits and trying to overcome this with effort. This may amuse the women I am with for a time, but in the long run they are going to run with what works for them instead of the ill fitting try hard.
I am working on this with my life coach, trying to be more seen for who I am.
I take your point, that there was ambiguity in the thread that perhaps there were mutual divorces and women were more likely to file because reasons – that’s clearly not the case. Women want the divorce more than the men. It’s not about the paperwork.
But I’d like to reassert my other point: this isn’t about divorce. Women in all cases, including in unmarried and uncohabiting relationships, are much more likely to end things than men.
Tearing down a building is not part of the labor of constructing a building.
To be honest, to me this speaks to “Women are the gatekeepers of relationships at all times, AND their choices carry moral weight.” Whether the former is true, I do not particularly believe the latter. Beyond infidelity/abuse or universal moral issues applied to any sort of relationship.
In a “free love” society, I actually think women are allowed to leave more often than men if they wish. Even if women still have more options than men due to their sexual desirability at younger ages. I just don’t think there’s anything moral about wanting new countertops or any of that crap, and that men are allowed to take into account the possibly finicky and fickle natures of their entertaining roommates.
I’m not saying it’s the way it should be, just that it is generally true that women do more of the emotional labour in relationships (with exceptions, as I said before). I have never said that women’s choices carry moral weight, or that wanting new countertops (huh??) is moral or immoral. I also have not said that women are finicky and fickle, partly because, well, that’s not my experience.
You are reading an AWFUL lot into what I posted, with the stress on the awful.
But tearing down a building is indeed labor.
I think you’re conflating two different possible scenarios here: (A) The man is continuing to work on the building while the woman is starting to tear it down, and (B) Neither of them is really interested in working on the building anymore, but the man defaults to letting the woman start the teardown process because they have fallen into a pattern where she’s the one who takes the initiative on emotional-labor projects.
I’m sure that both of those situations can happen at the end of relationships, and I couldn’t say which of them happens more frequently. But I think SciFiSam’s point was just that scenario (B) can be one of the contributing reasons that women take the lead in ending relationships more than men do.
But we can say. Per the chart I posted above, scenario (A) is more frequent. Women are more likely (and in marriage overwhelmingly likely) to want to end a relationship than a man. It’s not about her doing the heavy emotional lifting, it’s about what she sees as a goal that the man does not: the end of the relationship.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the man’s always actually interested in working on the relationship. Your cited chart isn’t comparing just scenarios (A) and (B), and I didn’t mean to imply that those are the only two ways relationships can end.
For example, there’s the abovementioned issue about disparities in traditional gender-role expectations making modern marriage a more attractive deal for men than for women. In that situation, even if neither partner is actively trying to work on the crumbling building, the husband still gets to live in a more comfortable and convenient part of the building than the wife does. So the wife is more likely to be the one to decide that the building’s not worth salvaging.
I would like to ask a very basic question and I don’t mean to be funny. Why do women want to be with men in the first place.
Biology I suppose. I suspect that they have a strong drive to attract a man at certain times. My experience as a man is that the drive for a woman for a particular man is stronger initially than the reverse, but that over time that feeling is more likely to fade than it does with a man. That has been my experience to date, and part of the reason I started the thread.
I think it’s difficult for me as a man to describe everything that goes on with a woman over the course of her life. Sometimes it seems like it is for women as well. Women seem more prone to cycles, whereas man strive to define themselves.
-
Some men are worth spending time with.
-
Many women are heterosexual.
-
Men are all over the place. If a given woman doesn’t want to live alone, she’s probably going to live with somebody. Why not with a man?
-
Habit.
-
Societal expectations.
More than one reason may apply in any given case. Or none of the above might, and the particular woman might have some other reason(s).
Why is this a gendered question?
Yeah, most of the reasons that women want to be with men are similar to the reasons anyone wants to be with anyone.
Assuming I understand the spirit question being asked - why does anyone decide to “settle down” with someone else?
I’m sure there are all sorts of sociological or biological explanations, but ultimately I think it’s just people like having someone in their lives who is a bit more permanent than “some girl/guy I’ve been seeing”.