When Laws Make Divorce Easier, Women Benefit, Outcomes Improve (2019)
census.gov
census.gov
Yet, from another study
“In the United States, the rate of suicide among persons who are divorced or separated is usually reported as about 2.4 times greater than the suicide rate for married persons. ”
And
“For every one divorced woman who dies by suicide, there are nine divorced men who do so.”
Seems like we are managing against the wrong metric.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/acquainted-the-night...
Of course the suicide right is going to be higher, but you shouldn't compare it against the part of the population who is happily married, you would have to compare it to the people who are desperately unhappy in their marriage and don't get divorced. At the end of my marriage I still dearly loved my wife, but hadn't been happy for years and I was wishing for death to give me a noble exit from a situation I couldn't see a way out of myself.
It depends a lot. Very little time in court (no fault divorce, informal agreement re money, and child just stayed with me) and the family courts here are secret so will not comment on that courts, but as for society it depends a lot.
My own experience is that no one who knows me at all well blames me. Some of my ex-wife's friends do - the ones who do not know me mostly. Why should I care what they think? My friends have been supportive, so have my (extended) family.
The only thing that annoys me is that she has been playing on racial stereotypes to gain sympathy. More that people are ignorant enough of other cultures to believe her uncritically than anything else.
I had to sign a paper where I agreed I committed all sorts of "faults" just for the court to process the thing and make the divorce official. To me it doesn't matter -- the legal system of the UK is archaic regardless. A divorce is nothing more than a contract agreeing to share financial and child responsibilities.
They were quite uncooperative as well to get the paperwork necessary to register the divorce elsewhere in the EU, but that might have breen Brexit.
The law was changed from 2022 (I delayed starting my divorce proceedings by a few months to benefit from it) and we now have no-fault divorce. Essentially, all it needs is for one party to want to divorce and the a certain lapse of time after you married. The only grounds for opposing it are very narrows ones like jurisdiction.
The divorce case is separate from those over money and children which are also optional. You can just have informal agreements over both unless someone wants to go to court. That is why I spent very little time in court - in fact the divorce itself happened with need to attend hearings with the application made through the family court website.
Even before the change judges would try and find for an allegation of a fault (usually "unreasonable behaviour") and most lawyers advised clients not to contest divorces. One lawyer I consulted told me that in the previous 20 years he dealt with one contested divorce (contesting the end of the marriage that is, obviously going to court over child and financial arrangements is common).
On the other hand I have come across many cases where the less affluent former spouse (especially one who did not work while married to look after the children) does not get a fair amount of child support and these are mostly women. Not a problem in my case as I was the one who was earning and the primary parent.
The biggest criticism I would make is not of the courts, but society and the police do not take domestic abuse of men seriously. They also do not take emotional abuse such as controlling behaviour seriously despite it now being a crime. This is pervasive - the Crown Prosecution Service classifies domestic abuse as "violence against women and girls" and then mentions in passing that men can be victims too (40% of violent abuse victims, in fact, but you would not know that from their manuals).
People can be awful to each other. Gender doesn’t matter.
I also think it's too early to really look at these rates. Of course many women would be happy they weren't destitute when they got married during a time when women couldn't have bank accounts. Of course men would feel put out when they were used to having everything handled by their wife and existed during a time where joint custody was not so common.
I'd like to see these studies again in 20 or so years when most people surveyed got married out of commitment instead of life necessity.
We are already there, what kind of world are you imagining? The need for women to marry was removed 50-60 years ago in the west, there hasn't been a necessity to marry in a really long time, you might have some really old couples left from the time before that but it wouldn't affect statistics much.
There are definitely difficulties, but no need to throw out the baby with bathwater, if done right a partner & children are one of the biggest joys & sources of meaning for life.
For me, my spouse is someone I can implicitly rely on and vice versa. We are a team working towards our shared purposes, but we are still individuals. We each have skills that make the others life easier. It's a lot easier to get a ride from a spouse than from a friend, and a spouse will be more available to help tend to sickness and injury. That sounds emotionless, but of course emotions and emotional support are important too.
For me, having a spouse where we have compatible ideas on children, money, climate, travel, and most things is like an easy button for life. Research and problem solving is easier with two people. Decision making can be harder though.
If you marry someone who doesn't have compatible ideas, there's going to be a lot more conflict and a lot more deep compromise, and that may not be as appealing. And, of course, people change, and exiting a long term commited relationship comes with trauma, so there's risk. Maybe none of this feels appealing to you, and that's fine. There's some social and legal pressure to marry for lots of reasons, but we live in a world full of social and legal pressures, and you should reject those pressures if they don't feel right to you.
Raising children is a whole other thing. I don't think people should be pressured into it, and it's best to be on the same page as a potential spouse before considering marriage, otherwise one spouse is likely to have to make a big compromise and that's not great. Personally, I find raising children to benefit from a team approach, but it's not required and a marriage is just one way to form a child raising team.
But I understand, however I hope you find it, in which way works for you, it does make life much richer.
For me family is one of them & buddhism another one.
If I can give advice, the easiest way to experience meaning is to serve & help others. Easiest is to do voluntary work in obvious helpful things like food serving etc. Something where you just enjoy & give and not think deeper about what the point of it all is.
I think there is quite a bit of nihilism in Western evolutionary materialism (all our feelings are just side effect of evolution). But that's a very limited view on reality. Not sure if that's also part of your experience, but I do see this cause similar feelings to smart & technical people around.
It was inspiring to see a couple who actively supported each other's hobbies and careers, who engaged with each others' professional communities.
Being a doormat to your partner is a great way to end up miserable.
You will have arguments and challenges. Those are good things and sometimes it needs to be said and worked out .
Marriage was always a partnership and a business in the past. Treat it as such anx you'll find it works way better.
It is true, but an incomplete instruction for life happiness . What more do you want from a platitude?
Good luck having a happy life with a miserable wife.
It seems crazy to me that you think people are incapable of doing things to add or detract from the happiness of others.
If I treat my wife with kindness and care in the morning, she will be much happier than if I hypothetically berated or beat her.
Heck in most cases you might even be getting benchmarked against a fictional figure who exists only in her imaginations.
The more you do, more that fictional figure gets better than you, and you are expected jump over the bar she just raised. Sooner or later you will burnout and she will hate you for being weak compared to the hero that exists in her mind.
I think that is absolutely true. Hopefully by marriage, partners have some practice and success promoting each other's happiness.
Today my toddler asked for candy and my wife almost gave her a piece (it's 7:45am). I said no. When the wife rebuked, I said, "stop, you're going to make our daughter fat like you." Mad her piping mad but guess what?
Happiness comes from within and you know what makes me happy? Having a healthy family that makes good choices. The happiest wives are those that get gentlely pushed around from time to time.
So in short, stop being a push over and maybe your wife won't leave you for a man that does.
Sorry if this is a common expression.
I believe the idea expressed in ‘appetite comes with eating’ is that your desire to indulge in an activity is correlated (caused even) with that activity. IE skydivers will likely have a larger appetite or desire for skydiving than a layman.
In a larger context I believe cjbgkagh is arguing that women can retain an advantageous position in a marriage by pretending or presenting unhappiness because exiting a marital contract would be an especially poor outcome her partner.
I'm happily married, and in the sense of being counter-cultural would be in completely the other end of the spectrum (very conservative about family, intend on having 6-8 kids that I will cherish even when they're adults).
That said, I think you've hit the nail on the head about "happy wife, happy life".
It's important to basically dedicate your life to being in service to her, but on the flip side it's important for her to do the same.
This level of dedication is almost counter-cultural in a sense, because you're not putting yourself first, but it's absolutely worth it in the long run.
On a visceral level, you feel always loved, always important, always worthy.
> intend on having 6-8 kids that I will cherish even when they're adults
There's a wonderful Mike Tyson quote that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. I assure you that it's quite a rare individual who gets married and has kids with the intent of despising their spouse and estranging themselves from their children. Sometimes it works out, and other times it doesn't.
Why not just find someone who is already content living their life single but enjoys the added social aspects of a relationship? That plus someone where those social aspects happen naturally without a lot of using the finite motivational energy.
Then there's no expectation or perceived responsibility to have a sort of dependency relationship, and the happy social reinforcing moments happen naturally.
The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive. Even happy and independent people have ups and downs, and can benefit from someone enthusiastically helping them promote their happiness.
It is a win win win for everyone involved.
The recipient of support is even happier, the supporter gets to enjoy the process of making the other happy, and then the supporter get the company of a very happy person.
Ideally this is bidirectional with each partner playing both roles.
It doesn't use finite motivational energy. It creates net positive energy.
If you ignore the romance, and only consider the practicalities, there is no good reason to get married. It doesn't offer significant rights or benefits and mostly puts you at risk and restricts your option.
Me, I've been married, and I know I'll likely do it again. Not for personal gain, but because I'm a fool who believes in love.
When you don't want to do something, but you also don't want to be blamed for not doing it, you can transfer the blame to someone who isn't there.
Boss wants to go out drinking after work which is his idea of 'team building' but you don't feel like it right now? "Well gee boss I'd love to come, but my wife's expecting me home by 7pm. Happy wife happy life, right?"
About 75% of the time when you hear people in the workplace saying "happy wife happy life" what they actually mean is "thanks for the offer but no thanks, and don't bother trying to cajole or peer-pressure me"
(Veterans at transferring blame will go even further, transferring blame to abstract concepts like 'market conditions' and 'company policy' )
Not at all, for all they know you're living some 1950s lifestyle where your wife has dinner on the table just as you get home, and it'll be cold if you're late. Or if they prefer, they can imagine you're a progressive modern father, going home to change diapers and help with bedtime. Or they can imagine you're deeply in love, and eager not to disappoint your best friend in the whole world.
There really is nothing abusive about a man saying he likes his wife to be happy. Making an effort to make the other person happy and them making an effort to make you happy is the whole point of a relationship, isn't it?
This matters in business too.
If people want to have a long-lasting and successful marriage they need to be clear-eyed and pragmatic about it. The fact that Hollywood makes a fortune selling romantic stories has not helped!
Finding good business partners is like dating
It works very well for me. We both appreciate each other and actively make an effort to make one another happy.
If you’re a man in the US: You. Are. On. Your. Own.
It's true across Africa. It's true across Asia (see: China, Japan for two very prominent examples). It's true in India. It's true across all of the Islamic world. It's commonly true in most of Europe (and absolutely true across Eastern Europe). Canada is quite similar to the US. It's true across Latin America. And it's true in the US.
When it's that comprehensive, spanning most of the human population across wildly different cultures, it's not society, it's biology. Society - cultures - are a production of that biology, reinforcing, not the other way around. It's not recent, it's ancient; it wasn't originated by humanity through society, nature organized humanity in a way that assisted survival.
Good thing they used that autonomy to build... everything.
I’m often in awe that we can both propose equal rights and responsibilities and sympathetically treat forty-year-old adults as children in these situations, but only if they belong to one sex. The other sex gets disgust or at best pity.
Using the government to screw your partner over as a negotiating tactic is a sick way to frame a divorce. It's this sick mentality that young men are warned about as they begin to seriously date.
This does not seem a very modern way to view laws. Divorce is not some tribal war, and the law some tool to favor one tribe over an other.
There is a government role in reducing suicide rates and increasing employment. We have social support, mental health care, employment programs, and so on. Attaching those to divorce laws only works as a method to reduce responsibility and costs of the government.
A recent and rather good change in divorce laws here in Sweden was a requirement of couple therapy before family court will see a case. Invoking divorce laws and family courts should be the exception when people can't find a way to split on equitable terms.
In addition, it’s obviously possible to be single, unhappy about it, but happier than you were in a bad marriage.
At the same time the headline already simplifies the article, which focuses a lot on laws about division of property after divorce, and the article itself is dodging some of the negative consequences of easier divorce. See e.g.:
Remember that if unhappy people are more likely to divorce or never marry, this has a double-whammy effect on the average happiness gap: the unmarried person pool gets unhappier because of the new person, and the "married person" pool gets happier on average because of a survivorship bias after the unhappy person was taken out. This happens even if marriage has no effect on happiness.
Many men get lifes destroyed due to insane "child support" payments which are totaly out of bounds for what "child support" should be.
So if by "faster divorce" they mean that the "women can take everything from a guy faster", I'm not sure this is going to end well as far as men's incentives are to get married.
The primary flaw in US jurisdictions is that a spouse, well - let's back up. I want to try to balance this with ungendered neutral language, but the courts are gendered and that's the main incompatible flaw I want to address. The pervasive logic in our society and permeating in our court system is that the woman is
A) providing emotional and homemaking labor
B) it is uncompensated labor
C) it is the basis for the success of the man's labor
D) compensation for this in a divorce has an unlimited market value
these are convenient beliefs, that lack substantiation and reality
There are some jurisdictions that have laws that recognize this. Where ultimately there is a fixed - capped - value and time length, not based on any proportion of wealth or lifestyle. a uniform law like this across the US would make this more tenable and predictable. As US states are a total patchwork of conditions, assumptions, and even our most progressive heavily populated jurisdictions are backwards in this regard. Primarily because men don't feel comfortable being associated with this conversation.
This is on top of the more general issues caused by gating access to justice behind a bunch of really expensive professionals with student loans to pay off, of course.
The 6th amendment is for criminal trials and the 7th is not currently applied at the state level.
The problem here is that divorce, by its nature, destroys a tremendous amount of wealth. Because there are a bunch of assets which can no longer be shared, the total amount of cash needed to raise a child goes way up after a divorce happens. This, not anti-male bias, is the reason why both parties feel screwed by child support: the men feel like they're getting bled dry (because they are) while the women feel like they're still not being made whole (because they're not).
It's a thorny problem but it's not made easier by griping about bias. When thinking about child support payments, take as your foundational axiom "divorce destroys a bunch of wealth and makes both parties poorer on average; there is probably no solution that doesn't make both people feel fucked over."
Dudes have been saying this for a long time but I've never seen any argument as to why that actually holds up to scrutiny.
Why do you say that they're anti-men?
> Many men get lifes destroyed due to insane "child support" payments which are totaly out of bounds for what "child support" should be.
Why are they out of bounds? What would make a reasonable child support payment service?
I'm not here to boss anyone around; nor do I dispute the tactical findings in the research cited.
However, diminishing the value of the family is an unequivocal strategic disaster, as advanced economies with cratered birthrates are showing.
My wife and I have barely clocked in at the replacement rate, so this is not me passing judgement on anyone.
But here is some truth: a reinstatement of the fruitful XXXY family as a primary goal is needful.
Or not. All I can do is point my two toward common sense and away from the follies of the day.
Certainly so if economic velocity and growth are the metrics you're operationalizing "success" around. I do not believe that is the case for many, and I'd argue that it shouldn't be the case for the global population as it's not a trajectory that be sustained indefinitely without an ability to expand off of terrestrial Earth.
It's a bit wild to see Malthusianism alive and well in 2024. He couldn't predict the industrial revolution, and we likely can't predict whatever will come next, either.
> The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.
Smart people make predictions about the future all the time. The problem is the future is hard to predict. The mere fact that birth rates in developed nations are falling below sustainment level calls into question any sort of extrapolation of when or if overpopulation will happen. That's not to say the Earth can support an infinite number of people because it can't; but that doesn't imply any specific trends we see right now will continue into the future.
This is especially true if you value (as I certainly do) the ongoing existence of land not just for farming and habitation but for the diverse ecologies of flora and fauna to continue to exist. I'm certainly more pessimistic than optimistic about how the rest of the natural world would fare in the next 150 years if we continue on as we have been.
But honestly, this to me is a sideshow: given our ability to produce efficiently and often autonomously, we shouldn't require a reliance on constant population growth to function effectively. Maybe that's where I'm being laughably naive.
The empirical evidence is overwhelmingly on your side.
This does not make childlessness a swift call.
Indeed, I would call parenthood (biological or adoptive) an important part of the human experience.
Or maybe I just personally wasn't going to grow up without a forcing function.
I'm going to have to write two arguments here, because you're both wrong. The Earth is nowhere near carrying capacity, every advanced economy is looking at underpopulation. At the same time, however, forcing people to breed is inhumane and counterproductive.
The root cause here is economic inequality. A large part of environmental damage is caused by a handful of outsize polluters who manage to escape prosecution and liability. People don't have kids because they don't have economic opportunity, because it's been eaten up by perpetually enshittifying monopolies. Who are also those same outsize polluters.
Examples of outsize polluters include things like the fishing industry, responsible for one of the largest streams of plastic pollution into the oceans. The agricultural industry uses a majority of the American midwest and west's water, deliberately wasting it in order to retain the legal right to use it in the future, "just in case". And 30% of US greenhouse gas emissions is just industrial emissions.
Examples of fertility rates being tied to inequality include countries like South Korea. For the record, almost a quarter of all of South Korea's economic output is just Samsung. 60% of their GDP is chaebols[0]. The chaebols control the political system to a ludicrous degree[2]. They have such deep ties that the South Korean CIA will literally have people writing down the names of people involved in protests so they can add them to Samsung's hiring blacklists. Who the hell would want to have children in such a country?
Malthusianism fails as a political philosophy because it ignores the distribution of resources and treats reproduction as a scarce resource that needs to be limited (specifically to ourselves, and people like us, or people we like, etc). This makes it apt for coopting by exactly the kinds of people consuming Earth's limited resources to shift blame.
Likewise, pro-natalism wants to blame the victims of income inequality for not having lots of children. This is specifically because it's easier than actually breaking the power systems that are fueling the inequality.
[0] Korean for zaibatsu[1]
[1] Japanese for chaebol[0]
[2] Every South Korean president since the country democratized ends their term in a corruption scandal, followed by their successor pardoning them as a way to pay it forward to future corrupt politicians.
This is not my argument, just that a society that only effectively functions with continual population growth is ultimately a Ponzi scheme unless we begin living outside of the Earth's boundary. I'm not making a practical argument, more an argument that no species can grow indefinitely in a closed-loop system. I meant it more as cheeky remark than literal concern-trolling.
Why not three, or four, adults? Two seems like an arbitrary definition, and larger families can share responsibility more evenly.
Consider that the reason you have so few children is the same reason that fewer people are making stable families: difficult economic pressures.
I agree that this is below the sustainment rate, but we have at least replaced ourselves.
But you are quite correct, and my usage was loosey-goosey in this context.
Quite to the contrary, tinkering about at that level seems to trigger societal apoptosis, per the demographics.