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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Women are surnamed Kaur (princess) and the men are surnamed Singh (lion).
Patriarchal and matriarchal?
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.
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).
Except it's not true: http://www.businessinsider.com/women-now-control-more-than-h...
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/...
In other word, she already owned half his property, he just didn't realized it until she divorced him. Hahaha.
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.
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.
Obviously it seems Tumblr-inas get awfully large soapboxes to stand upon, but my personal experience indicates they are outliers.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?"