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.
Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status
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Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In fact, I can think of several factors like that: alcoholism, drug addiction, anger management issues, clinical depression, chronic diseases, etc.
Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status
#24Maybe people in unhappy marriages find the strain leaks into their professional lives?
Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status
#25The 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
Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status
#26> 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…
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.
> 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.
Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status
#27> 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…
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)
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.
Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status
#28It 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.
Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status
#29From 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?
Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status
#30> 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…
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)
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.