Men Without Full-Time Jobs Are 33% More Likely to Divorce

Is it surprising though? Regardless of how far we’ve come in terms of viewing gender roles, the society still expects men to provide. Most women don’t prefer marrying down, while men are okay with it and that is a fact. And when married men do not have stable jobs, most women get additional pressure from people around them, friends, family, etc.

Anecdote but I’ve noticed there’s a big difference in the activities men and women do when they’re “idle.” In 2009 a friend got laid off and began to play World of Warcraft for like 14 hours a day. His girlfriend started to think he was intolerable in this state. It’s something like pathological depression.

I get the feeling that males not engaged in something perceptibly “productive” are judged very harshly.

Under employed and unemployed men are less likely to be the primary breadwinner of the household. Pretty much all the formulas and tables that divorce courts use to determine how hard of a financial fucking a man gets deliver much less of a fucking if the man is being out earned by their spouse so there's less incentive for under-employed men to "fix things". While state laws different and some states are pretty equitable about divorce enough aren't that it should show up in statistics.

> One new study of 6,300 heterosexual couples found that all other factors being equal, men who were not working full time were 33% more likely to divorce in the following 12 months than husbands who did have full time jobs.

You cannot control for ”all” other factors in an observational study. You can control for ”how people choose to answer your survey questions,” which is two steps removed from the truth.

Statistics do not create a causal hivemind, and vice-versa. We must stipulatively define what "unemployment" we're discussing. It is especially true in lower- and middle-incomes where women decide to become single mothers much more readily and demand employed men.

For wealthier people, I intuitively doubt this holds because there are other fulfillment activities that supplant clawing at jobs for survival. Freedom from meeting survival needs can be counterintuitively freeing and depressingly boring or allow stopping to smell the proverbial roses, depending on individual outlook. There are millions of existentially depressed wealthy housewives who feel they don't have a greater purpose in the world, enough excitement, or anything new to look forward to... hence cheating, therapy, and post menstrual adventures breaking free from family.

I hypothesize from intuition that coupling, marriage, and families are more likely to start and continue when there is necessary and sufficient wealth captured. OTOH, crimes and diseases of despair (heroin and mass shootings) happen when there is not.. because happy and comfortable people generally don't throw themselves away. I'm wondering about the future of many countries, including China, where there are idle, surplus men without income... this is very dangerous.

I guess the overton window has shifted enough that a major publication simply writing about Men's issues makes me content.

I quit my full time job a year and a half ago, so my wife could pursue her dream career, I could spend more time with the family, take care of the house, be there for the kids when they get home from school, do some hobby projects for myself, have dinner ready when my wife comes home from work etc etc. Everyone is happier. If anything, I feel we're _less_ likely to divorce thanks to this change.

It’s probably more of a confusion in the measurement - if you are not working full time, that’s a whole lot more time to spend around someone who may have only been tolerable to you in smaller intervals.

Glad I am permanently disabled. Now I just need to find a woman.

Any nerdy ladies here want to marry a handsome, brilliant, creative, well managed bipolar male in his mid 50's who lives in a minivan? :)

So in the past I've worked 33h/w instead of 38.5h/w. Soon I'll go 35h/w to get an afternoon with the kids or some time for a workout. That will make me more likely to divorce? I think the opposite is the case.

Anecdotal, but there is a large overlap between the breadwinning woman’s group and the divorce groups at my office. I myself fall into that Venn diagram.

>For years sociologists have argued over why couples split up and what policies should be put in place to try to coax couples into getting married or keeping them married. (This is not just meddling; an intact family is widely considered to be a sound unit on which to build a society, so governments have an incentive to try and keep them together.)

Um, this paragraph was jaw-dropping to me. People think it is ok for the state to manipulate the personal lives of citizens like that? People think that incentives/punishments that keep people pushed to stay in unhappy/unhealthy marriages is a good thing?

Even the statistical conclusion seems absurd. People who only stay in marriages because of incentives will not have the same effect as "a sound unit on which to build a society"; I would actually suspect the opposite

So, I would be less likely to divorce if I sell my billion dollar business and start a full time job at local McDonald?

These kind of bullshit statistics presented as news must be stopped.

Yes, I read the full article. And it was full of guesses and theory but not much substance

Confounding factor? They are not submissed into wage slavery, to fight for a marriage which is not working.

People (including men) without full time jobs are more likely to have an illness.

People (including men) without full time jobs are more likely to have a mental health issue (including addiction and depression).

People (including men) without full time jobs …

And so forth.

Now do men who work at home

"But Killewald’s study, which will be out in the August issue of the American Sociological Review, disputes that suggestion: “My results suggest that, in general, financial factors do not determine whether couples stay together or separate,” she says."

I am curious, does the myth that rich men will marry poor women, but rich women will not marry poor men, apply here?

33%!

> These days guys who have jobs have a predicted divorce probability in the next year of 2.5%, whereas the same guys who do not have a probability of 3.3%. That’s a third higher.

I feel that's a bit misleading, isn't it? In the grand scheme, it's 1 extra divorce per 100 (25 per 1,000 or 33 per 1000).

It's a grave mistake to ignore sex differences and dangerous when this ignorance is institutionalized. While people can be wrong about what those differences are exactly or may exaggerate certain differences in some respects or even go so far as to take a chauvinistic view, it is also possible to go to the other extreme and downplay or deny them altogether. Ideological framing and anti-intellectual misrepresentation can enable dismissive attitudes about these differences (which, frankly, are essentially beautiful and complementary and the basis for much of human dynamism). I think our understanding of men and women has suffered greatly under this infantile ideological pressure and the result is misery and disorientation.

How is this relevant? It is relevant because these sex differences influence what each sex contributes in this complementary relation. I mean this in a general sense as the particulars will be affected by circumstance. These differences affect what each sex seeks to provide and what each sex is drawn to. One does not desire what one already has. In this respect, it will not be surprising to find that unemployment or part-time employment will affect men differently than women. Men relate differently to people than women do. Women have a strong tendency to love regardless of merit while men tend to have a strong need to earn respect. A man without a job is, in most cases, going to be synonymous with a man who is aimless and has feelings of worthlessness. (This is why rich kids often become profligate, deranged, and depressed. Aimlessness, indolence, softness, helplessness, and self-absorption. Selfishness is the loneliest of states; only in living selflessly for the good of others in concrete ways and through self-sacrifice, forgetting about ourselves, are we liberated from the prison of selfishness.) This is going to affect his relationships, including his martial relationship. These sorts of men are more likely to wallow in self-pity, scapegoating (therapy is often a great way to obsessively blame one's parents, for everything), and self-destructive and hedonistic pursuits which further damage their ability to relate properly to women as human beings and in healthy ways to people in general. They are also dangerous because these alienated men are more likely to find appeal in ideologies of hatred, violence, and scapegoating.

Incidentally, this is one reason why UBI would be a terrible idea. Jobs are supposed to be ways in which both a family is served and the community is served. That's how we find purpose. For men, taking away their jobs is a way of ensuring their alienation from community, their sense of meaninglessness, and their aimlessness. It would deny them the ability to be who they are: men. There is a reason why so many retirees, especially men, have shorter lifespans than those that continue to work in some capacity.

Only 33%?

> Two thirds of divorces are initiated by women, even though their chances of remarrying are slimmer than their ex-spouses’.

The framing here is flawed, it suggests that being in a state of marriage is a goal. That only holds up in the earlier mentioned "government incentive to have intact families" perspective, but it is devoid of acknowledging the individual motives.

It could mean the partner is not financially independent and therefor has to stay in the marriage.

It's very weird watching believers in the blank slate hypothesis, collide with reality again and again.

In general women are hard wired to being attracted to healthy, high status intelligent men, with access to resources, and good personal hygiene. Fortunately for men, these are all things guys can do a lot to cultivate and build through concerted effort.

It's really no different to the things most men find attractive in a women. We can tell whether a women is "hot" instantly.

This notion of challenging the expectations of society, or redefining gender roles is largely nonsense. You can't redefine the things men are going to find attractive in women, no more than you can redefine the things women are going to find attractive in men.

It's a little odd that anyone is even surprised by this outcome. That's liberalism- I guess

Disposable males, no longer useful, are disposed.

could it be they have more spare time to find new partner while the wife is away from home whole day?

more time together get home also means more time for conflict. most relationships - i would say - are highly depending on not spending too much time together.

Does this control for wealth?

Plenty of successful but "jobless" entrepreneurs living off passive income.

What an awful website experience on mobile. I couldn't get to the article through all these layers of upselling and ads.

#m seems_legit

So.... 1/3 of men are non-committal in all aspects of their life.

> One new study of 6,300 heterosexual couples

Why are major sociology studies done with such small samples? I understand that if everything is done correctly a relatively small sample can strongly reflect a population. However wither someone has a full time job or not (1099 or W2) is reported to the IRS, and marriage/divorce records are public. Why are government departments not collaborating with academic institutions publish these types of insights?