Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status | Hacker News Reader

Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status

bloomberg.com

154 pointsJerry2176 comments

If we realize that the legal system has made the wife essentially a stockholder who is entitled to a stream of dividends from her marriage, and who has a right to sell when she sees fit, it's no surprise that women choose to sell when there is a sustained decline in earnings.

It really is a lease-hold. There's no selling the shares, and the dividends don't stop. Apparently the wife keeps the shares until remarrying.

And that men choose not to enter into that business partnership.

If you assume an absurdity you can deduce all sorts of things.

Not lying when I say this and I quote a certain wife who I know "... I wish he was drinking, or bad to me or the kids. It would makes things much easier ..."

This is in a situation where she is absolutely not fit for family life and is the one who is unprepared for realities of being a mom and a wife. Literally, this is a person who has not grown up yet and constantly looks for comfort without being able to show it to her family.

I honestly can say that folks get into marriages more by happenstance than solid planning. Maybe I'm wrong. Who knows.

I used to be bothered by lots of stuff. All the dying, the diseased, the suffering, the doomed... Luckily, this is all just a product of our political system, and if you have a problem with that then you're quite simply a goddamn communist.

You have disagreed with me, so you're a racist.

Given that the laws are gender symmetric that poses the question why men enter business relations with rent seekers.

> The big factor, Harvard sociology professor Alexandra Killewald found, is the husband's employment status. For the past four decades, she discovered, husbands who aren’t employed full time have a 3.3 percent chance of getting divorced in any given year, compared with 2.5 percent for husbands employed full time. In other words, their marriages are one-third more likely to break up.

Interesting. I'd be curious to see how the hours spent at work impact that number.

Specifically, do longer hours away at the office lead to a more stable marriage? Will having a second (or third!) job increase my chances of maintaining a nuclear family?

Based only on intuition, my guess is no. It seems more likely that husbands not working full time are more likely to have financial instability, which would be a cause of stress on the relationship.

From the second paragraph: "A Harvard University study suggests that neither financial strains [...] is typically the main reason for a split."

The headline of the story itself literally reads "Don’t Blame Divorce on Money."

This is a tricky one. Once again it could just be correlation, and "people who can't hold down a job" are more likely to get divorced, not necessarily "some person who gets fired" is more likely to get divorced, non causal as it were...

Presumably, the full-time job's contribution to financial security is the driver of this indicator, rather than its contribution to lack of facetime between spouses. But as these are confounding variables -- they correlate inversely -- it makes testing it difficult.

I imagine there are a lot factors.

Time spent together skyrocketing, financial instability causing stress, and the fact that a lot of men tie their identity to their employment so strongly.

Becoming unemployed is immensely turbulent in pretty much every way.

>and the fact that a lot of men tie their identity to their employment so strongly.

That's a really interesting point, especially in light of the study pointing out that it's moreso job status that's a risk factor than money problems.

One would normally think the two would go hand-in-hand in terms of a divorce autopsy. But as you (and the study) point out, there's very much distinct.

> a lot of men tie their identity to their employment so strongly

I wonder if the other side of the coin isn't that wives tend to respect their husbands less when these earn less than they do. It could be because it violates a social norm caused by society's gender role expectations.

Research found that even employed men who earn a bit less than their wives are affected by higher divorce rate.

So we can cast these men as insecure and emasculated, or it could be a mix of both men and women's reaction to the situation, along with many other variables that you've hinted at.

> it violates a social norm

This story hit me pretty hard. While I was in medical school, my wife's family, especially her mother, routinely encouraged her to divorce me.

We had two small kids, and I had gone on job interviews and seen the offers I was getting without a graduate degree, despite a BS in physics and 7 years of experience. It was obvious to everyone that medical school was the right course of action in the long term but it would be hard.

I didn't realize it would get harder when her family started jumping on any opportunity to point out my "temporary financial embarrassment". On a day-to-day basis, she was working 40 hours a week and while med school was paid for, and I had a small stipend, her paycheck was better. And cognitively, she understood that. But her brothers and mother, and eventually her father told her to "get rid of him".

We stuck it out. They wonder why we don't fly across country to visit them much...

Interesting. Clearly there were hardships involved and getting an MD is a non-trivial financial and time commitment. However, at least in popular culture, an MD is a highly respected career path and often the joked about target for 'gold diggers'. Sure, it isn't marry a student, but it is a pretty well regarded track socially, financially and educationally.

Impressed that you and your wife stuck together! Bet your kids will be too.

My father used to quote someone that "the best a man can do for his kids are to love their mother."

And: I feel sorry that this can actually happen to people.

Thank you for that reply!

Wow, it must have been such a pain going through all that! Good job handling the pressure, hope it only gets better from then on.

> and the fact that a lot of men tie their identity to their employment so strongly

At least this part is nothing new. Men have always (up until now and I'd argue that this is still true today) tied their identity, masculinity and even self-worth as a human being to their profession as society expected men contribute the necessary resources to their families in order to support wife & children.

If a man couldn't provide the resources anymore he usually lost his value and function to his family and society.

Will your kids still love you even though you can't provide for them? Will they look down on you because they're starving and you are not competent enough to feed them?

When they look around, they see other dads being able to feed their own kids, and they ask themselves, "Why is it that my dad can not feed them?" Will your kids look down on you because of this?

Is the patriarchy forcing men to tie their identity to their ability to provide for their own kids?

Or do men understands naturally that if they can't provide for their kids, then they must be pretty incompetent, and then they feels bad about it, naturally, because they love their kids. And then their kids look down on them, because "all the other dads can feed their children, when can't my dad feed me?"

I was wondering why men tie their identity to employment so much. Is it because society expects them to be providers, and ridicules men who don't ?

I'd assume so. As much as HN likes to ridicule the notion of "the patriarchy," this is a component of it that's awfully harmful to men.

Yes absolutely. Sexism harms everyone.

There is a vast difference between ridiculing something and not accepting it on faith solely because very passionate people make assertions about it.

Sure, but that's my point. I think a lot of men on here have probably felt this effect. If it's not from "the patriarchy," or something similar by a different name, then what is it from?

You don't have to think that, say, women's fashion changes faster than men's fashion because "the patriarchy!", but it takes some serious aloofness not to see that male dominance in society trickles down to some very strange places indeed. As an example: that a man's employment status is the largest factor in his marital success.

I think plenty of people agree that Traditional Gender Roles cause problems for men and women who don't conform to them. But not everyone agrees that Traditional Genders Roles should be called "the patriarchy", because that has connotations that men (even the men being hurt by Traditional Gender Roles) are in control, which feels like blaming the victim.

>...that a man's employment status is the largest factor in his marital success.

Well, if he can't provide for his kids, then what's the point of staying married to him? For love? Love can't feed your starving kids. Might as well go remarry some other dude who are competent enough to provide for your kids. Unless of course, you want to take the easy route and rely on government food stamps. Or, be those like stressed out single mom who has to do everything by herself, single handily doing BOTH the jobs of a man and a woman.

This idea really has nothing to do with the concept of patriarchy. It would only be one idea out of many that patriarchy represents.

HN ridicules the notion of patriarchy because the word itself implies it's somehow men's fault. Which it isn't. Social toles are enforced by most of the society, so we might as well call it "matriarchy", but that would piss feminists off, so we don't.

It implies no such thing. "patriarchy" is a descriptive term in social science and it has nothing to do with fault or blame. We don't choose the society we're born into and obviously we're not responsible for those things that are out of our control. We should of course be held accountable for the choices we make, especially when those choices hurt others.

It's also a wrong term. "Patriarchy" means a system where women are owned by men (husbands, fathers, brothers), cannot own property, etc. The only reason why feminists chose this term to describe the current social order (which is clearly not a patriarchy in the literal sense) is to elicit negative emotions.

Uh, no it doesn't.

Patriarchal societies are ones where elder males are the heads of households (generally true) and descent (such as surnames) are passed through the males (generally true).

There are matriarchal societies – including many Native American ones. Those are called matriarchal societies. They're notably different from what we have. I think they're less common today than they ever have been, but patriarchal societies are also "less patriarchal," i.e. males don't own females, as you stated.

Feminists, and everyone with an education, use that term because we do live in a patriarchal society.

Edit: In response to your comment below, you're literally in the comment section of an article discussing the repercussions of men "failing" in their expected social role of head of household.

So... your argument that we do live in a patriarchal society is (1) we get surnames after dads (I mean, really, who cares), and (2) the unsubstantiated assertion that men are the "head" of the household (what does that even mean? that they spend less time with kids? that they earn more money so the wife can spen more? that they're less likely to keep the kids in event of divorce?)? Oh, well, now you've convinced me, of course it's a patriarchy!

What society is the Sikh?

Women are surnamed Kaur (princess) and the men are surnamed Singh (lion).

Patriarchal and matriarchal?

Language evolves so words take on new meanings all the time. It's tedious to invent new words for everything, so you have to use context to figure out which definition is being used. This is completely standard, so I don't see why this is suddenly a problem when it comes to feminist terminology.

Today's society is one where men make most of the laws, own most of the property, earn most of the money, commit the most violence, set the behavioral norms and so on. Everything of importance is controlled by men, white men in particular. Using the word patriarchy to refer a society like that makes perfect sense to me.

Most of those points are moot. Women are > 50% of the population, so they could choose different lawmakers. Men work more, so it seems fair that they earn more money. More violence is caused by biology so we can't really help that (consequently, men also receive the majority of punishment), but statistics say that (1) men are also more often victims of violence, and (2) e.g. in relationships, violence is equally likely, but women get hurt more (which is kind of obvious, as men are stronger). I don't agree that men set most behavioral norms - if anything, I'd say that a lot of media is influenced by women and catered to women's desires. Your remark about whites is unnecessarily racist, whites are the original setlers of "the West" and still the majority of the population (but e.g. in Asia, most positions of power are held by ... drum roll please ... Asians!).

The only valid point is ownership of property, and I agree with it - although I don't want it to be more fairly distributed across sex, but rather across the whole population (the fact that owners are the 1% gives them much more power than the fact that they're white).

> The only valid point is ownership of property

Except it's not true: http://www.businessinsider.com/women-now-control-more-than-h...

They control most of the wealth according to that non-academic report (the report is an advertisement for wealth management services), and I couldn't find an academic study that came up with a similar number. I should also note that the report doesn't say US women possess 51% of the wealth, they just "control" it, whatever that means.

Women do not accumulate wealth at an equal rate to men, one reason is that their salary is much lower (wage gap). A second reason is that most single parents are women and that pushes the wealth distribution for women further down.

In terms of ownership it's closer to 36%.

http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/shortchanged-women-and-...

It's especially bad for unmarried women who have about half the wealth of unmarried men. When you take race/ethnicity into account the gap is even wider.

http://globalpolicysolutions.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/...

The "wage gap" has been debunked many times over. Can we please put an end to using it in arguments? Here's one of many examples: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whats-the-real-gende...

On the topic of ownership of property, yes, the guy owns the property. That is, until she divorce him, then she owns half his properties. LOL.

In other word, she already owned half his property, he just didn't realized it until she divorced him. Hahaha.

I don't think there's that implication at all. I think what's happening is that this component of patriarchy isn't really a rallying point for many people. That is, there are a lot of people who are vocally upset about other components of patriarchy in which men actually are the primary antagonists, e.g. rape culture. That does not, however, imply that man are the antagonists, nor that women are the victims of every component of patriarchy.

I think more people should be pissed off about this component, too. A man shouldn't feel obligated to be masculine, nor a provider, nor a protector, nor anything he doesn't want to be. Truthfully, more of HN should empathize with this as well. I would be surprised if a very large portion of us didn't grow up being called a variety of epithets for being less athletic, more booky, less masculine and therefore less valuable than the general population.

Ironically enough, it's exactly this component of patriarchy that leads to the aggressive anti-feminist views seen all over this board.

You can call it matriarchy if you want, I don't really care, except that a) no one will know what you're talking about and b) we don't live in a matriarchal society so it doesn't make sense.

What's happening is that, as you point out, people who claim to be fighting the patriarchy are not in fact interested in fighting against problems where men are the ones being hurt rather than the antagonists. However, they lump both categories together under one "patriarchy" label as a way of demanding that they be treated as though they were tackling both, arguing that because men's problems are caused by the patriarchy and they're attacking it, they're the ones really trying to solve those problems.

In fact, I've seen them go even further and accuse people who make a fuss those problems of being the ones who don't actually care about them, because if they really cared they'd recognise that feminism was the movement that was actually trying to solve those problems and copy its approach of refusing to do anything about them. That, in fact, this proves that said activists are misogynists who are just out to attack feminism.

That's fair. I've never felt that I was being blamed for anything and every feminist I know (including myself) explicitly includes these types of issues in their scope of problems.

Obviously it seems Tumblr-inas get awfully large soapboxes to stand upon, but my personal experience indicates they are outliers.

>A man shouldn't feel obligated to be masculine, nor a provider, nor a protector, nor anything he doesn't want to be.

Well, if a man doesn't want to provide for his kids, then who should provide for his kids? Should a man force his wife to provide for his kids while he sits around doing nothing? Or should a man force the government to provide for his kids?

Other options include (1) not having kids, and (2) finding a partner (possibly a woman) who's willing to provide.

>Is it because society expects them to be providers, and ridicules men who don't ?

No. It's because his starving kids expect their father to bring home the food. Because how else are his kids suppose to get food?

My interest lies in why is the baseline so high in the first place?

2.5%/y sounds like an unacceptable risk , considering how devastating divorce is for men by design (in the USA, at least)

An unacceptable risk, compared to what? Never marrying?

Living comes with a 100% chance of dying.

Yes, compared to never marrying, maybe paying child support but not alimony, or compared to getting sterilized.

I don't think that 2.5% is evenly distributed (as in, every year each couple pulls a ball from a lotto machine with 39 green and 1 red ball in it).

I know my own chance isn't 0%, but I'm confident that it's lower than average. I choose to be married to my wife and to raise our kids in that framework. It's not easy every day, but it's absolutely an acceptable risk, IMO.

i heard there's a lot of truth in the '7 year itch' milestone, but I havent seen the #s

Yes but there's no alternative to living, so it's not a factor to consider.

That the average for all marriages, but certain groups account for a disproportionate amount of divorces. The rate is a lot lower if you take out groups like that: under 20 when married, shotgun weddings, the already divorced, poorly educated, etc. IIRC, latinos who marry under the age 18 have an 80% 5-year divorce rate.

I'd heard people say a 20% lifetime chance of divorce if you are a middle class, educated, non-divorcee, and over 25. But I can't vouch.

I've seen similar numbers. I'd be curious to see how becoming an entrepreneur affects this. Practically every entrepreneur I know over the age of 40 has divorced.

Entrepeneurship killed a significant relationship of mine. It was entirely about money, she felt that I should continue to pursue my former profession, which provided meager, but stable income.

I was thinking about her and my future, which would require more than meager, stable income could provide.

Society hates entrepreneurship and that is why it is not a popular track: you need really thick skin to pursue it.

It's not about the money or lack of but the risk vs reward. Most males are risk takers where as most females are risk adverse(the why is many fold and not just limited to humans or even mammals).

My wife would hate it if I wanted to start a company, if she couldn't see a solid plan. If she could see the opportunity but more importantly the roadmap she would be on board.

But it's not just the uneducated that have high divorce rates. When I worked on Wall Street people there referred to their first wife as "my first wife" ... when they were still married to her! The expectation that everyone at the firm would eventually burn through 2 or 3 spouses was bizarre to me.

It doesn't seem that bizarre. If I called my current wife my first wife I doubt I'd still be on wife one.

Well, wait, you have to measure that against not marrying in the first place, which I presume also comes with pros and cons. The question is whether ExpectedValue(staying single) > ExpectedValue(Getting married given the risk with risk of divorce).

I assume the answer is different for different people.

Good question, but I'm not sure why you included the gender distinction. Do you think divorce is less devastating for women, or that risk of divorce is more of a factor for men?

I think they mean how resources are split after a divorce, where courts are viewed as being more favourable to women.

For example I think women are more likely to keep children, whereas the men will pay alimony to support them. If there are no kids the resource split might be more equitable.

[edit] Also see further down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12184148

Courts are more favorable to women in some ways, but the economic consequences are generally worse for women. "Worse" and "better" all depends on what endpoint you're looking at, just like all those studies on cholesterol (do you want to lower cholesterol or not die from heart problems?) -- do you want the alimony now or the overall financial health?

According to the 2010 Census only 3% of Americans receiving spousal benefits were men. This is after splitting the estate "equitably".

So I really don't understand what you mean by economic consequences are generally worse for women? 97% of the time it's the man's wages being garnished.

You are simplifying to wage garnishing. Probably the parent comment is intimating things like loss of socioeconomic position due to the divorce. If marriages are financially unequal in many cases, fundamentally, then divorce shows that too. But the consequences are like, how well you fare after versus before... the schoolteacher and the banker divorce, and which can maintain the social connections?

During a marriage, spouses share equally the family income even if one spouse is actually earning more than the other. At the time of separation, the estate is valued and then split equally.

From that point forward these two people have chosen to part ways. They no longer rely on each other or are bound to each other. They are two individuals existing independently in the world.

But a man is expected to pay the woman every week, until one or the other dies, or the woman remarries.

So an independent single divorced woman, her ex is now a paycheck. Almost never the other way around.

It's not a question of, were they better off married, because the marriage is over. Now as singles, what is the consequence of having been married?

The economic consequence of getting married and then divorced for a woman is a weekly payment. The economic consequence for a man getting married and then divorced is a large percentage of income after taxes is confiscated from him.

Not even necessarily a percentage of actual income either - it can be a percentage of the income the courts think the ex-husband should be earning, because there's this idea that men who are unemployed or underemployed, or even just self-employed and not doing as well as before, are doing it to screw their ex-wife out of the money they should be earning for her. (Little details like the entire industry they were employed in going away, or them being in their 50s and in a line of work with massive ageism, matter less than they perhaps ought. Especially since he probably can't afford a good lawyer.)

Reading news articles of judges telling 67 year old men to "just get a job" was pretty eye opening. [1]

MA passed an alimony reform act specifying that alimony should cease at full retirement age. The courts reinterpreted it to only apply prospectively to agreements after the law was enacted, when the clear meaning was that it should apply to all alimony. [2] These are the economic consequences.

[1] - https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/style/2013/10/19/new-s... [2] - https://www.divorcelawmonitor.com/2015/02/articles/alimony-a...

Here's another way to think of it...The economics of a marriage are just this: two people promising to be equals.

The man and woman give to each other everything they have; economic, socioeconomic, mind, body, and soul. There is perfect economy in this Union.

After such a union is dissolved, from one perspective both have lost half of everything. Both are a fraction of what they once were. The loss is staggering -- decimated five times over. But from another perspective, two souls are parting ways. They unwind their affairs and equitably share them. And walk away.

Except not for the man, for he is still bound by law to support the woman with weekly payments till he or she shall die, or she shall find another to wed.

Is this "chivalry" not deeply insulting to feminists?

It's not chivalry. The concept of alimony is a recognition that house keeping and child rearing is work too, even if not a job, that the stay-at-home spouse performs for the benefit of both parties. It's essentially unemployment benefits owed by the marriage as an association.

Now, implementations vary, it's often hard to know facts about the life of the marriage and there are certainly many biases affecting judgment, but the core idea is definitively feminist: fixing an injustice that overwhelmingly affects women in a gender-equitable way (both men and women should get alimony if they fulfill the conditions).

Are you saying a partner should be reimbursed after the fact for doing that job versus something in the workplace? Also I think the argument for diminished wages is overblown. If one partner chooses to stay at home, if that was their choice, then I don't get it. We all make choices which impact our future job prospects. Unless it's something that one spouse did to the other, why should one spouse pay reparations to the other?

Calling it something like unemployment benefits is a cute line, but a busted analogy. The child rearing did not produce income, but it does cost money. It's an expense which should be shared equally until the children are over 18 absolutely, and the number of hours spent caring for the children should be equally and highly valued. Child support is a different matter entirely. I think alimony by definition is not child support?

Now once the kids are grown a bit, perhaps your skills are now somewhat obsolete. Once the kids are in school full time, 5-6 years old, how many at that point are actually staying at home?

Even if a person is just starting a career, how many years into it does it take to get established? 2-3 years you can get started in almost any industry. Don't tell me the stay-at-home partner just really wanted to be a Doctor and they should be funded to go to that now. So I can absolutely see paying for 2-3 years if the income is there, and it's needed for the ex to get started in their new life.

The best thing for these laws will be gay marriage. When it's two same-sex partners being judged, how the decision making might be surprisingly rational!

> It's essentially unemployment benefits owed by the marriage as an association.

1) You don't get unemployment benefits for life. There is usually a limit. It is a free ride.

2) Women today expect men to share work at home equally. Not every couple does that but many do and most women do return to their jobs a few years after child birth. So what exactly should the women be reimbursed for?

Like I said, implementations vary and I don't mean to defend them all, just the core idea. And I'm not even necessarily a supporter of alimony at all; a system where such spouses got actual unemployment and other state benefits instead is probably preferable.

I could see how the state paying may seem preferable at first glance but as a tax payer I absolutely do not want to be paying to support people post-divorce.

We must change the legal framework so that women cannot effectively marry the state anymore. They are responsible for their own life choices just as any other person so I don't see why they should get a free ride.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of that 97% had child custody. The economic consequences of dependant children are enormous - apart from the cost of feeding, housing, clothing and caring for them, it significantly reduces your employment options.

It depends on the legal framework of the country you live in, but generally in the West I'd answer the question with no, at least from a financial perspective.

For example in the EU country I live in I'd have to pay 40% of my net income to my ex-wife even if there are no children and there was no fault (from a legal perspective) on my side for the divorce.

Considering that 40% of my net income is much more than even 100% of the average males income the risks of marriage by far outweigh the benefits for many men in my financial situation.

I realise of course that many women end up having to deal with financial issues after divorce because not every women can attract a husband with a high income and also women on average, regardless of education, devote less time to their careers compared to men (many choose to work part time to optimise for more time with children) which impacts their own income.

But the fact still remains that within the current legal framework a wife can decide at will to turn her husband into a revenue stream for life, doesn't matter how the conduct of both parties was.

She gets the real estate they've been living in, even if her husband owned it before marriage, she gets the children and in many Western countries she can even prevent her husband from seeing his children without having to face any penalties.

Does that kind of contract sound fair to you?

How does the math go when you compound those rates over 30years?

Well, there's been at least one study purporting to show that longer commute times correlate with a higher chance of relationship breakdown, so that would tend to push the other way.

http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2014/1/2/longer-c...

Statistically, especially for a study of this sort, a difference of 0.8% is not that significant.

> Interesting. I'd be curious to see how the hours spent at work impact that number.

I'de more interested in comparing these percent changes with the sample's margin of error.

Extrapolating conclusions based on a deviation of 0.8% sounds an awful lot like grasping at straws.

3.3 percent is still very, very small. That's encouraging.

>Specifically, do longer hours away at the office lead to a more stable marriage? Will having a second (or third!) job increase my chances of maintaining a nuclear family?

Well, obviously, if you work 24/7, you'll have the perfect marriage. LOL.

From personal experience I can confirm that finding. During the tech crash in 2002 I was unemployed for a year and it took several more years for me to get back to the salary and position I had had before the crash. I was frustrated and depressed by my failure to provide and my wife was frustrated with me too. This time damaged my marriage a lot and things never got back to how they had been previously.

This time damaged my marriage a lot and things never got back to how they had been previously.

Wow, that sounds drastic. What happened?

Same boat, I was picking up almost any job to keep the family afloat, one time I got home and my partner was lying in the couch and crying. I thought it was the impending hardships we were going through so i cuddled and talked her into believing good times were ahead.

Her response was "baby I'm pregnant and I'm not sure its yours"

The rest is history. Luckily I bounced back, the boy was mine but phew..!

That doesn't sound like a healthy relationship.

For what definition of "healthy"? Few marriages are perfect, and many are quite broken in many respects. Stress drives people to do all sorts of things they might later regret. But if an affair is unhealthy, by that definition literally most marriages are.

Stress doesn't absolve you of responsibility for your actions. Most marriages being degrees of unhealthy doesn't equate to most marriages having affairs in them. If my husband had an affair, child or no child, It would be an instant divorce. I could never trust him again.

Regret and responsibility are two different things.

I'm no expert on it, but from the stats I could find, most marriages indeed have affairs in them. However it seems this stat has an unreasonably large confidence interval.

My poorly articulated point is that life is messy, and I felt your original comment comes off as overly judgmental of a situation we really can't begin to appreciate. That half of marriages have affairs (that it is effectively the norm) I thought would bolster the defense, but probably is a red herring.

Edit: Now you have me curious, are men more likely than women to forgive an affair? It seems informal studies find men on average less forgiving, but I couldn't find what I would consider a reputable data source. Crucially, asking married people to imagine how they might feel hypothetically I think would produce significantly different results from reporting statistics on marriages which have actually had an affair in their past.

I agree with you. No relationship is roses all the time, and cheaters will eventually find an excuse to cheat.

I think "cheaters gonna cheat" is overly reductive and crass. The point is that if most marriages are unable to deal with infidelity, then most marriages will fail. But the divorce rate has been declining for some time now, perhaps due to more modern approaches to human fallibility.

Again, this has nothing at all to do with excusing an affair, or abdicating responsibility. It's really examining and appreciating that many marriages are faced with these very serious challenges, and perhaps it's a sign of strength, dare I say health, in a marriage that it can continue on after an affair rather than collapsing at the mere thought.

EDIT: Keep in mind we can also speak more generally about affairs both romantic or sexual. It is interesting how many people just equate it to a sex act.

>I think "cheaters gonna cheat" is overly reductive and crass.

I disagree, obviously. It's trendy to expect people are merely the sum of their circumstances, and that they'll cheat if a and b and c are true. I don't believe it. People with character don't cheat on their spouses. It's really that simple. You can be a marriage with "very serious challenges" and not cheat, even when the opportunities are all around. Millions of people do it.

>...and perhaps it's a sign of strength, dare I say health, in a marriage that it can continue on after an affair rather than collapsing at the mere thought.

Yes, the "mere thought" and action of the ultimate betrayal. I'm not buying it. Whatever they say, people who stay together after an affair are making a calculation. It's for the kids, or it's over money, or the cheated-on spouse is afraid to be alone. Oh, sign me up.

> But if an affair is unhealthy, by that definition literally most marriages are.

I would be inclined to say that yes an affair would be a characteristic of an unhealthy marriage; at least by western standards. However I'm not sure you are correct in stating that most marriages have one or both partners being unfaithful. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infidelity#Infidelity_and_gend...

The numbers seem to be all over the place. I've read 25% of married Americans report having an affair (meaning .75 * .75 = 56% chance of a marriage not having an affair) Then just below it says 20%. The Washington Post quotes a study claiming fully 70% of women and 72% of men (study by sex researcher Shere Hite, so pretty big grain of salt there) and then cite a University of Chicago study finding 25% of married men have affairs.

So it's apparently somewhere between 30-70% of marriages which have at least one partner who has an affair.

> I've read 25% of married Americans report having an affair (meaning .75 * .75 = 56% chance of a marriage not having an affair)

Only if "married but having an affair" is an independent variable, which I would doubt -- I would be shocked if one partner having an affair weren't predictive of the other partner having an affair.

Interesting to see the spread of numbers by different studies though; I wonder how close to reality any of them are.

By definition, it wasn't. At the time.

Just like our bodies, relationships may be at various states of disrepair. Kudos to the grandparent for having bounced back.

Real strength is making it through something like that. Respect.

I have personally witnessed couples where the cause of the job loss was marital stress. Husband's job performance suffered because of things going on at home, company decides to cut back jobs, stressed husband is on the low end of performance and gets cut. It just adds to the mess at that point. Often the wife felt that the husband was less than he was before without his job, and ditched him.

I've also seen men in that situation who bounce back professionally after a divorce. Usually not immediately, but relatively short term (1 to 5 years).

The correlation is not that surprising, but I agree with others here who note that it is not provable as causation. Too many factors.

>I've also seen men in that situation who bounce back professionally after a divorce. Usually not immediately, but relatively short term (1 to 5 years).

That makes a lot of sense. That 1 to 5 year period may be due to depression, despondency and general lack of motivation. If they get through that there may well be strong motivation to rebuild yourself. Plus, if you no longer have a spouse and children waiting at home there is no one to complain if you start putting in extra hours.

Extrapolating from that correlation!=causation theme, now I wonder if that "thing that happened in 1975" was something affecting people's marriages or something within those marriages affecting everything else.

I'm not working right now and my wife is supporting me. To be brief, I'm taking time to be healthier mentally and my wife can see that I'm making a concerted effort. I let her know frequently how much I appreciate it, and I'm also accomplishing a lot and putting myself in a position to be successful again in the near future. I've supported her financially at times in the past as well.

Because of this, we're actually in a very good place in our relationship. I had put a lot of stress on her by being manic, obsessive, paranoid (not about her or our relationship), constantly using, etc. We've both noticed the improvement and have been more introspective and open about what causes us to argue. Anyway, just a counter-anecdote to the top comment.

constantly using?

He is likely referring to hard drugs of some sort. "Using" connotes methamphetamines or heroin.

No meth or heroin for the last many years. I never liked either much anyway. I've referring mostly to psychedelic drugs and marijuana, which normally are considered soft, but I've consumed them to a degree that would probably shock most people.

Constantly using various recreational drugs. It's actually not something my wife has a problem with at all, and even recently she encouraged me to keep doing so. The decision to stop was my own. There have been many extended periods of heavy use and total abstinence in my life already, and I wouldn't change that. In general it's a habit that I have good control over, and one that has never jeopardized my physical wellbeing. Emotionally, psychoactive drugs can have myriad effects, but on the whole they have influenced my personality in remarkably positive ways.

It can go the other way as well. It would be interesting to study any change in the percentage of divorces in households where incomes/assets increased. In my case, I sold a business for a tidy sum, which then allowed us to divorce without financial difficulties. It is true that a lot of marriages unhappily continue because either party is unable to financially support themselves alone, especially when kids are involved.

Whenever someone I know is breaking up I ask, "Money or sex?". It's always one of these reasons.

Yeah, I've heard this before from recent divorcees. But in a more stricter form of; marriages end in divorce when the wife doesn't get enough money or the man doesn't get enough sex. Horribly stereotypical, sexist, and crude but does seem to aptly describe the proximate cause of many divorces.

I can see "stereotypical", but why "sexist"?

It would be interesting if one could predict a likelihood of divorce based upon a number of inputs, like credit scores, age differences, education levels, income, hours worked, number of children, smoking, etc. I suppose the possible set of criteria could be large.

The couples income and wife's economic independence did not correlate to divorce (post 1970s). Which implies that the lack of a full time job is not a proxy for "money worries" but instead seems to be a proxy for something else - potential the husbands behaviour, wife / social perceptions of husband etc.

Basically I infer that couoles pull together when faced with external financial stress, but if the husbands a dick about his job it's a different matter

> if the husbands a dick about his job it's a different matter

I'm not sure why you're convinced that the husband's behavior is the causal link (if there is one: the headline implies there is though the study only shows a correlation). I find it just as easy to imagine that, just as gender roles downplay women's potential contributions in the workforce, they reduce men to workhorses in family and relationships. It could just as easily be the wife being a dick about having an unemployed husband (as the article mention, financial strain per se was controlled for). I personally had a friend in high school who had really rich parents and whose dad retired early and was a stay-at-home dad (his mom was employed as an executive at a big bank). I would hear about him getting shit for being stay-at-home dad despite the fact that everybody in the family (himself included) was really happy with the arrangement.

Maybe people in unhappy marriages find the strain leaks into their professional lives?

Anecdotally, every household I know who has gotten divorced had one of two deciding factors; either they didn't get along, or there was infidelity.

Infidelity is more often a symptom than the actual root of the problem. While some people just can't help themselves, more often what happens is one or both aren't getting the support they need from their spouse and they start looking elsewhere because of it. Then cheating, fighting, divorce. Not really an excuse, so much as an observation.

"They didn't get along" hides a lot of complexity, since a lot of concrete things can put strain on a relationship and then the couple "doesn't get along". In fact, this practically reduces to a tautology, since deciding to get a divorce means that you're goiong through something severe enough that staying together isn't considered to be the better option.

Well we know women choose men based on how likely they'll be to commit and properly provide to her offspring. So I guess it's not much of a surprise there. What I think is surprising, is that it seems society looks at women as the victim of a divorce, when this is telling a different story where women have a plan of when to exit.

I find the correlation-causation discussion a bit troubling.

What if, for instance, men who want a divorce manage to quit working/become involuntarily unemployed because they don't want their incomes going toward alimony for a spouse they now dislike?

Or what if it's like those initial studies linking low body weight with high mortality, which we found were mixing together healthy skinny people and people who'd lost a lot of weight due to cancer? Maybe men who are involuntarily unemployed are drawn from a mix of guys with bad luck and guys with traits that cause them to be less stably employed?

How do these decisions fluctuate or not with the national unemployment rate?

It seems like this is an interesting exploratory study but not yet very specific.

"Results from models with alternative cutpoints at 1980 and 1985 are shown in the online supplement."

Does anyone have a link to the online supliment?

Also would it be normal practice for a study like this to make the raw data aviailable? I'd love to take a look. As it's not totally clear how the 3.3% figure was arrived at.

This sentence struck me as a little odd: "For example, I use employment from 1985, reported in survey year 1986, to predict marital dissolution in 1987"

I would have thought unemployment in the actual year of divorce would be more important when looking for a corellation? Not looking at the husband's unemployemnt two years previously?

Anyone have a link to the actual study?

http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/journals/au...

Thanks Alex!

Here's the worst thing about this... if you are married, and working on your pre-revenue startup as a solo founder out of the house... that is another description of a person that we call "unemployed". Whoops, yeah that part of building a business, we do not talk about so much. :-/

A man without a job is much more unbearable than a man without money.

Solid proof that there's little loyalty beyond whatever's attached to a wallet.

Love is a plaything for deluded teenagers.

How am I not surprised?

To quantify it, yes.

It's a disappointing article in that it makes many narrowly focused and unfounded assumptions and one conclusion.

I've recently been doing an indepth study of sexism in Australia starting at 1970.

I've poured over archives (and I'm documenting it) to see how Australia went off the rails with its sexist attitude (eg. Domestic Violence is male only, or a revised false history of voting-who could and when).

What I have noticed is that there were plenty of ads and articles back in the early 70s (eg. One bank advertised its female branch manager with a large photo, quite proudly) that are inclusive, unlike today. TV adverts had plenty of representation in work, sport, etc. watch the "life be in it" as an example.

I know that there was an inclusive attitude back in the early 70s that we have lost. As an example, check out Science Week, aimed at kids, that has several girls only events and competitions. This sort of sexism was unprecedented from 1970-2000 (and possibly earlier). Also add that all of my female ancestors from 1900 onward held good jobs and were largely financially independent (which contradicts the article saying it didn't really happen before 1975). I've never been able to reconcile the modern story compared to my own family's history. It might be luck.

So, the article concluded that the difference is that women can now work. It ignores depression, stress (non financial), Boredom, lack of self-worth etc. if a person defines themself by a career and that career vanishes, it can turn an individual and their family upside down. I'm not surprised the authors focussed on housework and financial independence and ignored almost everything else as it seems to be the modern trend (ala domestic violence is male only).

I'm curious to see if any media outlets in Australia pick up on the blatant sexism of Science Week (targeted at kids). The last 10 years are proving to be the most sexist (by far) that I've ever seen. I'm doing some research by looking at government, education (which is largely government) and media. I will include photos, videos and loads of references - but it's a big job. It will take time when I am committed to work and family too.

Love to see that when you finish it, but why not blog along the way?

Aiming STEM programs at girls isn't sexist. That just isn't what "sexist" means. Those programs exist to correct an imbalance caused by actual sexism.

> Those programs exist to correct an imbalance caused by actual sexism.

Is the new statistical model: "Correlation not equal to causation unless it agrees with my politics"?

> Those programs exist to correct an imbalance caused by actual sexism.

But the evidence of sexism is the existence of the imbalance. This whole thing is circular.

Aiming STEM programs at girls isn't sexist. That just isn't what "sexist" means.

To the contrary, it perfectly fits the dictionary definition: Discrimination on the basis of gender.

It happens to be a form of discrimination which is (generally) considered to be acceptable since it is aiming to ameliorate a disadvantaged group; but it is discrimination nonetheless. The relevant question isn't "is this sexist", but rather "is this sexist in a way that society does not condone".

You might say that programs that encourage girls are "discriminatory" in some pedantic sense, but they don't keep boys from learning about math and science, nor do they discourage boys from going into STEM fields.

The difference between this and actual sexism is that sexism discourages and systematically excludes people, typically girls/women, based on gender. Programs that target girls do nothing at all to discourage boys, because no one is saying, "These kinds of activities, careers, etc are only for girls now."

Generally speaking, when any disadvantaged group gets together to discuss issues and take action on issues affecting them, they are not being racist, sexist, etc.

Watch out: don't be tripped up by semantics. The two of you are using different definitions of the word "sexism".

It depends on your definitions. If you subscribe to the "prejudice + power" model that is common in social studies these days, then no, it's not sexist.

Most people don't, however, and interpret the word in its more traditional sense, which is "discriminatory on the basis of sex or gender". And in that sense, yeah, it is very much sexist. Arguably justifiable on the "lesser evil" basis, in that it tries to affect the outcomes in way that negates other (unjustified) sexism elsewhere in the system. But nevertheless, from this perspective, the fact that you have to discriminate is bad, and the ideal state of affairs is where it's not necessary (i.e. there's no sexism elsewhere to mitigate).

My mother was a teacher in Australia in the early '70s. Her pay rate was 2/3rds that of male teachers, simply because of her gender.

> I've never been able to reconcile the modern story compared to my own family's history.

Look up the term 'anecdata'. You really need to look at things at a demographic level, not just "well, my family...".

You prefaced an attack on anecdata with... "anecdata"

The original poster also didn't really say anything about pay inequality. Just, that women ancestors were financially independent.

Also

> Also add that all of my female ancestors from 1900 onward held good jobs and were largely financially independent (which contradicts the article saying it didn't really happen before 1975).

So rustynails may have trend data for at least the women in their family. And all of them had good jobs and were financially independent? Another data point, is those 80s lego ads featuring girls with their creations. So maybe there is something going on here and society as gone off the rails regarding sexism.

Blog your research rustynails.

Confirmation bias again, though. Lego ads had girls in them? Cool. Now, how many politicians were women? How many managers or other people in authority? How seriously were women's opinions taken in the media? Were there extra hurdles to overcome for a woman who wanted to start her own business?

It sounds like it's just a project to look for specific counter-examples, rather than a proper gestalt look at society as it was.

And really, if you want to tell if 'society has gone off the rails', pretend (if you aren't already) that you're a minority, a woman, or gay, and then ask "Would I rather be living in today's society, or that of the 50s and 60s?".

Yes. Masterful, wasn't it? :)

I don't know what the laws are in the US regarding divorce but there's an astonishing imbalance in favour of women in many EU countries that causes marriages to be an unacceptable risk for me and many other men.

You can get divorced for no cause (no infidelity, financials are fine and you didn't do anything else wrong) and you'll be forced to hand over 40% of your net income to your ex-wife for the rest of your life. (even if there are no children - if there are, you get to pay even more)

I'm fine with women leaving for no cause (it's her business) and also with financially supporting children (as probably most men are) but I'm not going to sign a contract that could potentially leave me financially broke for no cause.

So even though the Harvard study might give some insight to married men on what they could do better I doubt that marriage under the current framework will even exist in a few decades.

It varies widely from state to state. Texas doesn't have alimony except under some narrow conditions, but Massachusetts is so liberal with it that it actively discourages women from remarrying.

> I'm fine with women leaving for no cause (it's her business) and also with financially supporting children (as probably most men are)

I'm not OK with that. I would wnt to keep shared custody of children (or full custody if she doesn't want it), and share the financial burden equally. But that option is often forcibly denied to men...

> I'm fine with women leaving for no cause (it's her business) and also with financially supporting children (as probably most men are)

My mother's parents divorced acrimoniously.

She told me that her mother was constantly fighting to receive child support checks. They were always late, any disputes that could be raised were raised, etc.

When she went off to college, the checks were assigned to her rather than her mother. And, like magic, they arrived on time and in full, with never a word of complaint.

I think a majority of men are indeed quite willing to support their children financially, even children they don't see much. But money extracted from you by a court and handed over to your ex-wife to be spent however she sees fit is something a little different.

Poor journalism, yet again.

Factor implies causal link. It's just a correlation in this case.

You don't think there's any causal link?

There may be, but it also may be that there is a third factor which makes the husband more likely to be unemployed and also a less valuable mate.

Yeah, if the husband is emotionally unstable that could lead to both things.

In fact, I can think of several factors like that: alcoholism, drug addiction, anger management issues, clinical depression, chronic diseases, etc.

And potentially that men (and women) may react a certain way to unemployment that makes them difficult to be with.

If there is a third factor, that doesn't stop anything else from being a factor.

The very word 'factor' requires there to be more than one. A single thing can't be the factor.

I view it as the study went looking for X, and to it's surprise didn't see X, but happened to see statistical significance in Y. However the study did not have the scope to determine why Y occurred.

I think the most likely thing that changed over time is Z: the first wave(s) of feminism began to liberate females from the traditional limitations of roles in society. However the true from of feminism is a recognition and reconstruction based around /all/ gender roles being bad for mental health, emotional health, and positive relations among individuals.

Men haven't had that liberation; a large part of society still believes in specific roles and responsibilities for men that coupled females are (at their option) exempted from. This probably leads to increased stress to both individuals and also an increased risk of negative feedback loops for the situation and everyone involved.

The inherent bias in society is even reflected in the premise of the study. It's tracking a specific type of male/female relationship and a specific correlation of role towards problems. Instead a more balanced study would look at the starting condition, determine what percentage of the population (restricting to males and females alone is OK, but including all sets of couples is better) fits different configurations, and tracking for outcomes as well as associated economic, emotional, mental, and physical health in the related intervals would be a better study design. The study might also have a follow-up for 'marriage failure' cases where isolation of the root causes is performed.

> Men haven't had that liberation; a large part of society still believes in specific roles and responsibilities for men that coupled females are (at their option) exempted from. This probably leads to increased stress to both individuals and also an increased risk of negative feedback loops for the situation and everyone involved.

Sadly that role restructuring, when driven by men, is still almost universally derided. Look at the men's rights movement or mgtow. The trope of the basement dwelling virgin is immidately deployed to minimize their concerns. Feminism isn't the tool needed. Men need to drive their role in society. Society just isn't ready for it.

EDIT: heavily down voted, almost makes my point for me.

I would say you are getting down voted because the MRM seems to be not limited to trying to make things better for men but also endless attacking women and creating stawman(woman) feminism.

Men do face many challenges. Some men have dangerous jobs which they die providing for society (fishing, war, etc). This doesn't get enough acknowledgement. But one doesn't have to be a total jerk to make this point and tear others down.

> the MRM seems to be not limited to trying to make things better for men but also endless attacking women

?? Are you implying that feminism is limited to just helping women? Surely you're not that naive. If we were to play a game where each time you post a crazy thing an MRA has said, I have to post two crazy things feminists have said, I'll win that game. I'll win it easily. I'll win it with politicians and academics and people who have real power in our society while you'll be scouring fringe websites. And if ever I run low on important people, I still have the Tumblr feminists.

So yeah, I don't really know what point you thought you were making, unless the point was to demonstrate the totally different standard that you hold these groups to.

If you think feminism has legitimacy (and it most certainly does) it's because you're choosing to listen to the points that have merit, and disregard those that don't. It's selection bias, sure, but I do it too.

Consider trying the same thing with three MRM

The points that have merit constitute the bulk of the message coming from people self-identifying as feminists. Sure, there's all kind of weird stuff - TERFs, separatist and even supremacist feminists etc - but they're a minority compared to the mainstream.

On the other hand, when looking at the MRA scene (again, going by self-identification of the speakers), the mainstream seems to consist of "incels", red pillers, and the like. So, as far as most people are concerned, the label is firmly associated with that sort of stuff. Consequently, suggestion to listen to "points that have merit", when they come in a binder with "MRA" on the cover, is not going to fly. If you want to be heard, you'll have to break the association by using a different label - or by finding enough like-minded vocal associates to reclaim the label (and at this point it would need to be a supermajority with a hefty margin before we can seriously start talking about this).

You might object that this is unfair, because the label is descriptive and appropriate, and all those misogynists have misappropriated it. Tough luck - descriptive labels get misappropriated all the time. For example, if you happen to be a socialist and a civic nationalist at the same time, a common sense descriptive label would be "national socialist" - but you really shouldn't be using it for obvious reasons.

What "message" are you talking about?

I've associated feminism with "women make $0.67 for every dollar that a man makes for the same job, working the same hours" and equal gender ratio over equal opportunity.

Based on numerous conversations I've had with self-identifying feminists, I would say the primary message seems to be that a person's gender (regardless of what it is) shouldn't decide their opportunities in life. Opinions on the extent or existence of systemic societal discrimination against women tend to depend largely on individual experience (and admittedly, on occasion, misinterpreted and badly gathered statistics) I think. And of course, there are as many versions of feminism as there are feminists because no two people are exactly alike.

Can you give some links where MRM people support women? Genuinely curious.

Can you give some links where feminists support men? Feminists are concerned with women, the MRM is concerned with men, so the majority of their arguments will be focused on their respective gender.

The negation of "attacking women" isn't "supporting women", it's "not attacking women". Not saying anything at all about women is "not attacking women", but it's not "supporting women".

The second rule of fight club is don't fucking whine about downvotes.

It makes a difference that the MR movement is almost completely regressive.

> Sadly that role restructuring, when driven by men, is still almost universally derided.

Well now, that point couldn't have been more directly substantiated if you tried!

However the true from of feminism is a recognition and reconstruction based around /all/ gender roles being bad for mental health, emotional health, and positive relations among individuals.

I believe this in the same sense that all food and your metabolism is bound to kill you in the long term. Utopian social engineering at this scale and depth rarely pans out. It's usually built on very shaky epistemological foundations -- usually a narrative about how utterly terrible the current social order is and a vague sense that there should be something better possible. This is not to say that all utopian social engineering is bad or wrong.

Utopian social engineering experiments are a lot like startups. There are generally a lot of them popping up all the time. Often, they seem wonderful and magical to a small number of people for awhile. Sometimes, they scale and stay around for awhile, appearing to be magical and of-the-future for somewhat more people for a while longer. It's only rarely they become forces that change society and really last.

Exactly what empirical data is this assertion based on? -- "/all/ gender roles being bad for mental health"

> Men haven't had that liberation

Liberation from what? The "burden to provide" comes with a lot of benefits, and I know I wouldn't trade them all for "liberated" homesteading.

In many ways, what you call "the true form of feminism" for men is just a long way down, a fall from grace, in the same way as Enlightenment was for aristocrats. It's not surprising that most turkeys refuse to vote for Christmas.

I think the idea is "Liberation from set expectations", i.e. the MUST in "must be a in a provider". At least, that WAS the idea at some point, not sure it has stood the test of time, and modern rhetoric seems to have gone to a bizarre place.

The idea is that we should be free of societal expectations, and free to choose our own path, is liberation I can get behind. It is the part of the modern, western world I embrace and am happy for, that I am free to chose my own path. Neither I nor anyone else should be judged against a sense of universal criteria, because my happy life might be someone else's living hell, and the multitude of lifestyles possible is something I like.

Sometimes, I think all sides get this wrong. Feminism that doesn't value stay at home mothers who freely make that choice from personal preference is just enforcing a different norm, not a freedom from norms. Ditto the reverse and a view women should only be SAHM, or that men should be providers, or strong, or whatever.

I have no idea if any of that is possible at scale and, quite frankly, I don't care. I am going to live my life how I see fit, grant everyone else the same privilege, and let ideologues argue amongst themselves about what people should do.

I'm the opposite, I'd rather stay at home with family than build a career, given the choice.

But feminism never cared for that. They only tried to make women more like men, implying that men are better, a position I cannot agree with.

> Men haven't had that liberation; a large part of society still believes in specific roles and responsibilities for men that coupled females are (at their option) exempted from.

It's probably going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. As it stands right now, women have nearly all the power in heterosexual relationships, so they are able to see to it that progress is made in removing their own shackles while keeping them firmly in place on men. This is not some evil conspiracy, it's just a natural consequence of self-interest combined with a power imbalance. (Incidentally, one of the other rigid expectations of society is that this power imbalance is never discussed out in the open, so I fully expect a harsh negative reaction to this comment.)

The only things which could change this situation are technological emergences which directly impact the power dynamic: realistic sex robots, artificial wombs, AI strong enough to put everyone permanently out of work, etc. Some of these might balance things out to a more equal level, while some of them might tip the scales wildly in one direction or another. It remains to be seen how things will play out as technology advances, but it is doubtful that things will stay as they are now over the long term, even if they do in the near / foreseeable term.

> As it stands right now, women have nearly all the power in heterosexual relationships

What? I think I know where you're coming from, but surely you realize there are many relationships where this is not the case, so it's strange to state it so absolutely.

I'd love to see this unpacked though - why do you think women hold nearly all the power in heterosexual relationships?

> As it stands right now, women have nearly all the power in heterosexual relationships

Huh? Why do you think so? I guess legally, after marriage, they do have more power (on average), but not in all cases and much less before marriage.

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