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Who files for divorce is not the same thing as who initiated the divorce. Second the US has few mutual filing options, but in Europe in the countries that do offer mutual filing options we see 75-80 percent of divorces are mutual decisions. Most people in troubled marriages know their relationship is not working and usually agree about the areas where it's not working out. Divorce is usually not a surprise, it's something that has been building for a while.
That is a widely quoted and accepted statistics. I think the article that you found is almost the only one that questions those numbers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shelato
Additionally the things that tend to precipitate a divorce are things like marital infidelity, domestic violence. These are the things that make people really unhappy and want to get a divorce.
No argument there. However, the percentage of marriages that experience domestic violence is small by definition. And women are perfectly capable of domestic violence, they are not angels. I hope you are not accusing all men of being violent based on a very small percentage of men who are.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shelato
But this idea that women are just getting a divorce for some sort of vague unidentifiable reason akin to the vapors just isn't true. Most people don't waltz into marriage lightly and they don't end things for arbitrary reasons either. People take their commitments seriously. Life can just get messy sometimes.
Well, I never implied that woman are getting a divorce for an unidentifiable reason. And the family life with kids is always messy and challenging.
In my judgement, US women are greatly influenced by the pop culture idea of eternal true love, soulmates and being always happy. At the same time, feminist propaganda that is waging war against men typically portrays men are irresponsible idiots exploiting women.
These expectations do not mesh together with a difficult reality of raising kids in the US. I think US is the hardest country to raise children as the child care and health care are the most expensive in the world, school education is generally terrible and families are often spread out and can not help. When women experience this reality, they understandably become unhappy/depressed and often want to divorce instead of toughening up. Men, on the other hand, have in general have more realistic expectations of eternal happiness and true love and most realize that raising kids are not easy.
Woman's decision to divorce is also helped by the fact that children usually stay with the mother. Who is then understandably entitled to child support and often stays in family home. If a woman has not worked, her husband now owns her alimony.
While a man is forced to probably rent a small apartment in order to afford to pay for child support. Furthermore, women are usually better at maintaining relationship with friends/acquaintances and often have a support network after the divorce.
I think the best option for American men is not to marry and not have children. Of course I realize that this is not a situation that all men will be happy with...
If I had left in 2014, our bills were paid off and both of us would have been in a good financial situation. The kids would never have had to be living in terror, or to have seen how low their father really could fall. Well. I guess perhaps that may have happened during a break up anyways. But when I finally got out, the things that had happened in the year leading up to it... He started patrolling around the house with a loaded AK and sleeping with it in bed with him (I had moved to a spare room.) He terrorized and threatened our kids. He would not work or volunteer or do anything but drink and get high and play video games. He met an abused woman in rural TN, played his "white knight savior" act, and invited her to bring her family to live in our house, they were going to form a new relationship as ours was ending...she arrived with two kids, a dangerous delinquent older teen who bullied my kids and her much younger child she told us was from a rape. And three unfixed dogs and a pregnant cat. They came in and totally trashed our house. And he never told her that mine was the only paycheck supporting the household and that his disability wasn't enough to even pay the mortgage. When she found out the reality of the situation, she lost it. Her arrival was the last straw, I was not trying to support two families, including some trashy person he just told to come move in with her whole disaster on a flatbed behind her crummy old truck. I was DONE.
So at this point...you know, I'd rather have people calling me selfish, if I'd left before all that crap went down. And I know they would have. Such a terrible, selfish, frivolous woman, breaking up her family because she's "not happy." My selfishness could have saved my kids a whole lot of hardship.
Yes, you shared this horrible situation a number of times. Of course you were perfectly justified to escape this hell of a relationship and it tragic that you had to go through this.
However, I am not sure who relevant your situation is to the general discussion about US families and divorces. Your experience is in general unusual as most men are not violent, disturbed individuals. And I hope you are not blaming all men for the sins of one disturbed individual...
And where did your former husband get a machine gun, I thought those were illegal?
These expectations do not mesh together with a difficult reality of raising kids in the US. I think US is the hardest country to raise children as the child care and health care are the most expensive in the world, school education is generally terrible and families are often spread out and can not help. When women experience this reality, they understandably become unhappy/depressed and often want to divorce instead of toughening up. Men, on the other hand, have in general have more realistic expectations of eternal happiness and true love and most realize that raising kids are not easy.
This just reads like you don't know many women. There's a reason why many divorced and widowed women don't want to get remarried, and it's not because they have a princess fantasy. It's because they're *tired* of being the only one in the relationship who's holding things together. They don't need to toughen up.
Naw man, what goes on behind closed doors is not easily noticed or heard. There is all kinds of dysfunction that goes on for years no one had any idea about. Often what we see on the surface is not the reality.
Why we too often hear neighbors, family and friends being interviewed on the evening news saying things like "I cant believe he/she beat/killed their spouse, kept their kids locked in cages, was a serial killer, they were so normal and nice, its such a shock.
To know all the subtle intimate idiosyncrasies between a lot of couples you know is extremely weird and rare or BS.
I'm not sure your gender, the genders of your friends, whether you are extroverted or introverted or what kind of social circles you have.
But women who have other women for friends or close relationships, often do tell each other EVERYTHING. Even when my ex tried his best to isolate me as much as possible, I would sometimes go sit in a parking lot and call my Mom and talk to her. And I had the odd coworker (woman) I got close to, and felt safe talking to, who also knew a lot about the hidden details of my personal life. Also, some people like me have some kind of...I dunno, a vibe, whatever it is...other people feel comfortable telling me personal things. I have had TONS of people including many men, if given an opportunity, open up and tell me all sorts of things. Hell, some guys on this subforum over the years, I've got long message chains to prove it, were going through hard times and told me all about their lives. Some of them had more drama going on than any woman I have ever known.
Some people do go through life never getting this kind of information from others...but I promise you, some of us do get it, and sometimes without asking for it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DefiantNJ
Yes, you shared this horrible situation a number of times. Of course you were perfectly justified to escape this hell of a relationship and it tragic that you had to go through this.
However, I am not sure who relevant your situation is to the general discussion about US families and divorces. Your experience is in general unusual as most men are not violent, disturbed individuals. And I hope you are not blaming all men for the sins of one disturbed individual...
And where did your former husband get a machine gun, I thought those were illegal?
It's not irrelevant, because as I have said... WAY more men than some guys want to believe, are horribly behaved in relationships with women. The number one threat to a woman's life from another human being, is from a current or former (male) intimate partner. No one is saying that women are never violent, but nowhere near as much as men are. Of course, too, if we are talking about all violent crime, men are far more often the targets of other men.
But when I say "horribly behaved in relationships with women" I am also counting:
-Mooches who expect the wife to struggle to support them when they can't or won't hold a job, while also doing all of the household work and being available on demand for sex...takers, who give nothing back.
-Insecure men who won't let women have friends or go out or do anything enjoyable, because THEY don't want to go out, and they also don't want us to go out without them either.
-Men who never stop shouting and punishing and complaining and make the whole atmosphere in the home hostile all the time, ruin family trips, and keep everyone tense and unhappy.
-Men who have addictions to drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc.
-Cheaters
It's not just "one disturbed individual" when I have known so many men across the trajectory of my life, starting with my own father who was a violent alcoholic who cheated on my Mom...his father, my Mom's father and his father, my best friend's Dad and her older teenage brother were both violent, my uncles are drug addicts, my sons are mooches, my Mom's second and third husbands after my Dad were both abusive, one dramatically so...
I don't think that most men are violent and disturbed. But I have met more men I would not want in my life, than men that I would. I think it's safe to put it that way.
And in certain professions, the rate of domestic violence and abuse goes up a lot higher.
Also, shelato's article you tried to dismiss, very well detailed where the constantly repeated 70% stat came from, and did a great job of explaining why there's some vague point to be made by it, the methodology of getting that statistic means that it shouldn't be taken as absolute. And why some stats actually draw a different picture.
But you know what the real problem is with the aggrieved men claiming that women just can't be loyal and faithful and good wives anymore? She posted upthread a bit. It's women who have codependent mindsets taking these statements as confirmation that we just have to suck it up and deal with it, or we are bad, selfish people. Same as I did for 18 years.
As for the AK, good lord man, you can get those easily in many parts of the US. Are you kidding me? Illegal? LOL
Here. To make a point I took less than a minute to go Google it and get this screenshot for ya. I'm not upset with you about this, I'm not a gun person either, but you should know...they are not illegal or even hard to obtain in a lot of places.
I don't have any issue with a man wanting a wife who will be by his side through thick and thin, but there is an important distinction to be made. (And actually you can take gender right out of that, a person wanting a partner who will stick with them...)
Are the hard times because life is just hard sometimes, in ways we need to buck up and deal with?
Or are the hard times because one of the two people is MAKING IT HARD through their choices and actions, and they could do better but they won't? Because the latter...sorry, but no one really needs to just put up with that. Not to preserve the sanctity of some institution, not to prove that their gender is made up of good and unselfish people. The only legit reason is to work on your situation so that you can get out. By all means communicate with your partner and try to get them on board or try to save your marriage to a point, but if all they want to do is defend their bad behavior, or turn it around to tell you why you aren't "perfect" either... I mean, you can be imperfect and maybe happier on your own.
And that last bit, that does seem to be a gendered distinction, because the women I know who get out of relationships with bad partners, so long as we've got the means to survive OK and aren't struggling just to live, we do tend to be OK on our own if it comes to that. We can usually find someone new, but a lot of divorced women I know choose not to, and are perfectly happy. But I see a lot of men post divorce, if they can't get someone new fast, they seem very unhappy alone even if they have abundant means to survive in comfort.
oh for crying out loud , knew even saying anything in this thread would be more trouble than it's worth.
No ones talking about knowing every tiny intracity wth are you even rambling about.
l could waffle on with 50 examples of the very basic stuff l mentioned it's not rocket science but eh,zero interest. As you were l'll just leave the thread to toss and turn another 40 pages.
That is a widely quoted and accepted statistics. I think the article that you found is almost the only one that questions those numbers.
No argument there. However, the percentage of marriages that experience domestic violence is small by definition. And women are perfectly capable of domestic violence, they are not angels. I hope you are not accusing all men of being violent based on a very small percentage of men who are.
Well, I never implied that woman are getting a divorce for an unidentifiable reason. And the family life with kids is always messy and challenging.
In my judgement, US women are greatly influenced by the pop culture idea of eternal true love, soulmates and being always happy. At the same time, feminist propaganda that is waging war against men typically portrays men are irresponsible idiots exploiting women.
These expectations do not mesh together with a difficult reality of raising kids in the US. I think US is the hardest country to raise children as the child care and health care are the most expensive in the world, school education is generally terrible and families are often spread out and can not help. When women experience this reality, they understandably become unhappy/depressed and often want to divorce instead of toughening up. Men, on the other hand, have in general have more realistic expectations of eternal happiness and true love and most realize that raising kids are not easy.
Woman's decision to divorce is also helped by the fact that children usually stay with the mother. Who is then understandably entitled to child support and often stays in family home. If a woman has not worked, her husband now owns her alimony.
While a man is forced to probably rent a small apartment in order to afford to pay for child support. Furthermore, women are usually better at maintaining relationship with friends/acquaintances and often have a support network after the divorce.
I think the best option for American men is not to marry and not have children. Of course I realize that this is not a situation that all men will be happy with...
The divorce filing statistic is widely cited and accepted in the manosphere as a claim for who initiated divorce, but the divorce filing statistics is not accepted by actual researchers in the field as as at all representative of who actually initiates divorce. The Date Psychology article explains how actual experts in the field look at the matter and cites 89 academic papers to back up his position of why this statistic is misleading about who is actually initiating divorce and at what rates as well as why they are initiating divorce. This article is really worth reading if you haven't read it already.
If you read the article above, both men and women engage in domestic violence at similar rates, but men are much more likely to use drugs or alcohol and are much stronger than women, so when it happens women are much more likely to be physically injured, much more likely need to go to a hospital and that in turn drives more women to initiate divorce. More importantly, I think escaping domestic violence is a really sensible reason to divorce. Who wants to be in a relationship where they are getting hit? When relationships have broken down and are really messed up like this, divorce is a good thing. Do you want to be stuck in an unhappy sexless marriage or should couples be able to divorce? Divorce can be expensive and messy but if your relationship is bad enough, I also think it's money well spent.
Do you think woman want to break up their families? Women will stay in bad relationships for the kids. Financially neither party does well after divorce. Divorce always makes the couple much worse off. Money going to lawyers is money that is not available to the couple It's more expensive to sustain two separate homes, so both are more likely to fall into poverty. Custody of children is usually shared so there is no child support. It's not a financial windfall for women to get divorced. It's also not easy being a single mom. The reason women divorce is that there relationship has just gotten so bad, they are willing to take the financial hit anyways.
I think if you are a man over 25 dating a woman over 25 and the more education both of you have, the lower your divorce risk is. I am also in favor of dating for a year or two first, so you have a really good idea of who this person is and what they're really like. I think if you did that you have a really great chance of being happily married.
I will point out according to the census bureau the divorce rate is continuing to fall as the age of first marriage has dropped.
But the research in positive psychology is clear, The very happiest people are people who are in successful long term marriages. There are huge benefits to men from being in a happy marriage.They live longer, they have more sex, they make more money they also bounce back faster from adverse life events like the death of a parent. Marriage to the right person is a lot of fun. It can also be really fun to have a wife and kids.
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