There's nothing secret or exclusive to women about it, much of our culture still reflects that it was widely recognized, including things like the wide variety of derogatory names for spouses (“ball and chain”, for instance.)
The comment I responded to has a fairly big assumption: that divorce is always a bad thing. I don't think that is a given.
People used to be quite stuck in the family or marriage system. Even when faced with violence and sexual abuse, there was often no way out. I've seen heartbreaking examples of this.
Though the tightness of past bonds may feel attractive in this era of fleeting connections, it was often not quite as cosy as what we long for. The freedom to move out of these traps was and is liberating for many. And yes, there is a cost to that freedom as well of course. I don't want to support anything, I just put a nuance here against a naive kind of nostalgia.
This style of concern trolling drives me up the fucking wall, given what we know about abuse statistics.
Step-fathers and live-in boyfriends are several times more likely to commit sexual or physical abuse on the mother's children than biological fathers. [1][2]
If biodad is actually abusing the children, then yes, by all means, get out.
But if you're leaving a non-abusive dad in order to "find yourself", or because you're "just not happy", you are, statistically speaking, endangering your children, unless you accept a lifetime vow of celibacy.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2845296/ [2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1077559501006004001
well kinda the point is that in the past you couldn't.
And how does one "get out" when that is not an option?
It shouldn't because it isn't.
> given what we know about abuse statistics.
If marriages are safer for female spouses, I suggest it's because marriages have to compete with other relationships.
In my parents day (silent gen), marriage had little competition and were commonly a safe environment for abusers.
I personally witnessed mom in traction & my brothers broken. Most of her relatives/friends were mistreated by their husbands (possibly all but not everyone confided). Similar stores could be said by the children of that generation. And, my observations were far from unique. Family abuse was everywhere (victims confide in victims).
For my cousins' generation, many things are improved. eg:Their understanding of abuse. eg:The meaningful expectation for men to not mistreat their loved ones. eg:The expectation for men to support all obligations in a household (not just the ones they want).
Meanwhile, if we are more vocal about More Marriages than we are about better marriages, I suggest we have lost our way.
I do think a culture of instant gratification and the myriad of stimulus that hits in rapid fire from all sides sets up even the most stalwartly to succumb to feelings or urges to do something opposite of their rationale, because they don't spend a lot of time ruminating and re-examining the source and cause of these feelings and harmonizing them with their goals and values, a sort of re-programming.
I am divorced, but do not want to go into the personal details. I did meet my ex when we were both in our twenties and did not have high body counts. Our divorce would be hard to define with cause(s). I know a large part of it was that my ex-wife struggled with giving up her career (that made her unhappy when she did not have kids) to be a stay-at-home mom when she pushed for having kids, but rejected my offer to stay at home if she wanted to work, and then happy she stayed home and vice versa all over again. Film and media echo this dislocation and dichotomy all the time. Films that show people working through things against all odds (yes a filmic reference but not to the point ;)) or the reality of dealing with everyday life with all of its tensions and releases, and unforeseen events and emergencies, is not common in non-action movies. Call it naive nostalgia, but I don't see that many happy divorced people who have not found someone. And the older we get the harder it is to find someone that can be more than a platonic friend.
I have now been remarried for many years with younger children, and we are all friends - my ex-wife and my current wife and my older children love their young siblings. I am very grateful to have kept those I love and care about around me. I will say that my current wife is traditional and not American and our differences and desires are not so dramatic and easy to harmonize with our life and family.
It's safe, secure, and boring. Not happily ever after, but you get by. I think these are the kinds of relationships that break down more in an age where "meh" isn't good enough anymore. Why not strive for the best if there's no pressure disengage?
[https://www.nber.org/digest/mar04/divorce-laws-and-family-vi...]
Current US stats are 14.04/100k, with men 3.9x more likely than women.
As the following example doesn't depend on the actual numbers, let's eyeball that and imprecisely say the married women's suicide rate was 5/100k before and 4/100k after: this is a 20% reduction, but I don't even need to look up marriage rates for it to be clear that nowhere near 20% of all marriages end in suicide.
In the other direction, suicide isn't and never was the only was out of abusive relationships. It's a desperate path for very extreme situations, and the divorce rate being much higher than 20% means there may be a correspondingly higher abuse rate.
Islam also allows the husband to divorce as per his will but doesn't allow it for the wife, the wife needs to go to a judge and show evidence of unagreement (unwillingness of her husband to treat her reasonably well) between the spouses. If women were allowed to divorce willy-nilly, as they are generally emotionally less stable, they would lead to divorces in a rough patch of life which are regretted soon after, just like it is usually seen in the modern society. The husband has 3 rights to divorce, when he uses one of them, it's a reversable divorce. If all 3 of them are used the husband can't remarry his wife until the wife marries and divorces another man. All these together successfully lead to people not divorcing unless it's really necessary.
One can look up SWB (subjective wellbeing) rates of women and men in non-muslim and traditional muslim countries.
I've been in both ages. As a kid, in a small village, nobody got divorced. Really, it was just not done, the concept was alien to them. We came from the city, my parents were divorced, and I had to explain it as other kids would literally not grok the idea.
There was a lot of pain, abuse and unhappiness in those marriages. Years later something happened in that village and a lot of women claimed their rights: it rained divorces, often very long marriages that fell apart. A lot of these former wives banded together in self-help groups to encourage each other and process their sometimes traumatic marriages.
A divorce itself is never fun I guess, but it isn't automatically a negative and the outcome can be vastly superior to staying together. You may say: but what about all those divorces? I tend to assume those would have been unhappy marriages in the past, at least they have a new chance at life. So yes, what about them? Good they have ended their misery.