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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

#91

Post by lmmlzxx »

I'm not working right now and my wife is supporting me. To be brief, I'm taking time to be healthier mentally and my wife can see that I'm making a concerted effort. I let her know frequently how much I appreciate it, and I'm also accomplishing a lot and putting myself in a position to be successful again in the near future. I've supported her financially at times in the past as well.

Because of this, we're actually in a very good place in our relationship. I had put a lot of stress on her by being manic, obsessive, paranoid (not about her or our relationship), constantly using, etc. We've both noticed the improvement and have been more introspective and open about what causes us to argue. Anyway, just a counter-anecdote to the top comment.

Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status

#92

Post by maerF0x0 »

vacri wrote: post #52
rustynails wrote: post #39

It's a disappointing article in that it makes many narrowly focused and unfounded assumptions and one conclusion. I've recently been doing an indepth study of sexism in Australia starting at 1970. I've poured over archives (and I'm documenting it) to see how Australia went off the rails with its sexist attitude (eg. Domestic Violence is male only, or a revised false history of voting-who could and when). What I have…

My mother was a teacher in Australia in the early '70s. Her pay rate was 2/3rds that of male teachers, simply because of her gender. > I've never been able to reconcile the modern story compared to my own family's history. Look up the term 'anecdata'. You really need to look at things at a demographic level, not just "well, my family...".

You prefaced an attack on anecdata with... "anecdata"

Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status

#93

Post by zaroth »

MollyR wrote: post #70
zaroth wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what definition of "healthy"? Few marriages are perfect, and many are quite broken in many respects. Stress drives people to do all sorts of things they might later regret. But if an affair is unhealthy, by that definition literally most marriages are.

Stress doesn't absolve you of responsibility for your actions. Most marriages being degrees of unhealthy doesn't equate to most marriages having affairs in them. If my husband had an affair, child or no child, It would be an instant divorce. I could never trust him again.

Regret and responsibility are two different things.

I'm no expert on it, but from the stats I could find, most marriages indeed have affairs in them. However it seems this stat has an unreasonably large confidence interval.

My poorly articulated point is that life is messy, and I felt your original comment comes off as overly judgmental of a situation we really can't begin to appreciate. That half of marriages have affairs (that it is effectively the norm) I thought would bolster the defense, but probably is a red herring.

Edit: Now you have me curious, are men more likely than women to forgive an affair? It seems informal studies find men on average less forgiving, but I couldn't find what I would consider a reputable data source. Crucially, asking married people to imagine how they might feel hypothetically I think would produce significantly different results from reporting statistics on marriages which have actually had an affair in their past.

Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status

#94

Post by 55acdda48ab5 »

Xunxi wrote: post #40
ktRolster wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This time damaged my marriage a lot and things never got back to how they had been previously. Wow, that sounds drastic. What happened?

Same boat, I was picking up almost any job to keep the family afloat, one time I got home and my partner was lying in the couch and crying. I thought it was the impending hardships we were going through so i cuddled and talked her into believing good times were ahead. Her response was "baby I'm pregnant and I'm not sure its yours" The rest is history. Luckily I bounced back, the boy was mine but phew..!

My jaw is literally agape at the fact that you didn't understand your marriage was long over well before that point.

Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status

#95

Post by honkhonkpants »

rhino369 wrote: post #27
antisthenes wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-di…

But it's not just the uneducated that have high divorce rates. When I worked on Wall Street people there referred to their first wife as "my first wife" ... when they were still married to her! The expectation that everyone at the firm would eventually burn through 2 or 3 spouses was bizarre to me.

Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status

#96

Post by rogerdpack »

codemanneil wrote: post #4
koolba wrote: post #2

> 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…

Based only on intuition, my guess is no. It seems more likely that husbands not working full time are more likely to have financial instability, which would be a cause of stress on the relationship.

This is a tricky one. Once again it could just be correlation, and "people who can't hold down a job" are more likely to get divorced, not necessarily "some person who gets fired" is more likely to get divorced, non causal as it were...

Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status

#97

Post by int_19h »

cname wrote: post #49
rustynails wrote: post #39

It's a disappointing article in that it makes many narrowly focused and unfounded assumptions and one conclusion. I've recently been doing an indepth study of sexism in Australia starting at 1970. I've poured over archives (and I'm documenting it) to see how Australia went off the rails with its sexist attitude (eg. Domestic Violence is male only, or a revised false history of voting-who could and when). What I have…

Aiming STEM programs at girls isn't sexist. That just isn't what "sexist" means. Those programs exist to correct an imbalance caused by actual sexism.

It depends on your definitions. If you subscribe to the "prejudice + power" model that is common in social studies these days, then no, it's not sexist.

Most people don't, however, and interpret the word in its more traditional sense, which is "discriminatory on the basis of sex or gender". And in that sense, yeah, it is very much sexist. Arguably justifiable on the "lesser evil" basis, in that it tries to affect the outcomes in way that negates other (unjustified) sexism elsewhere in the system. But nevertheless, from this perspective, the fact that you have to discriminate is bad, and the ideal state of affairs is where it's not necessary (i.e. there's no sexism elsewhere to mitigate).

Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status

#98

Post by autokad »

sokoloff wrote: post #23
tamana wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i heard there's a lot of truth in the '7 year itch' milestone, but I havent seen the #s

Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status

#99

Post by zepolen »

lmmlzxx wrote: post #91

I'm not working right now and my wife is supporting me. To be brief, I'm taking time to be healthier mentally and my wife can see that I'm making a concerted effort. I let her know frequently how much I appreciate it, and I'm also accomplishing a lot and putting myself in a position to be successful again in the near future. I've supported her financially at times in the past as well. Because of this, we're actually…

constantly using?

Re: Harvard Study: Biggest Factor in Divorce Is Husband's Employment Status

#100

Post by int_19h »

enave wrote: post #69
bruceb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say you are getting down voted because the MRM seems to be not limited to trying to make things better for men but also endless attacking women and creating stawman(woman) feminism. Men do face many challenges. Some men have dangerous jobs which they die providing for society (fishing, war, etc). This doesn't get enough acknowledgement. But one doesn't have to be a total jerk to make this point and tear other…

> the MRM seems to be not limited to trying to make things better for men but also endless attacking women ?? Are you implying that feminism is limited to just helping women? Surely you're not that naive. If we were to play a game where each time you post a crazy thing an MRA has said, I have to post two crazy things feminists have said, I'll win that game. I'll win it easily. I'll win it with politicians and academi…

The points that have merit constitute the bulk of the message coming from people self-identifying as feminists. Sure, there's all kind of weird stuff - TERFs, separatist and even supremacist feminists etc - but they're a minority compared to the mainstream.

On the other hand, when looking at the MRA scene (again, going by self-identification of the speakers), the mainstream seems to consist of "incels", red pillers, and the like. So, as far as most people are concerned, the label is firmly associated with that sort of stuff. Consequently, suggestion to listen to "points that have merit", when they come in a binder with "MRA" on the cover, is not going to fly. If you want to be heard, you'll have to break the association by using a different label - or by finding enough like-minded vocal associates to reclaim the label (and at this point it would need to be a supermajority with a hefty margin before we can seriously start talking about this).

You might object that this is unfair, because the label is descriptive and appropriate, and all those misogynists have misappropriated it. Tough luck - descriptive labels get misappropriated all the time. For example, if you happen to be a socialist and a civic nationalist at the same time, a common sense descriptive label would be "national socialist" - but you really shouldn't be using it for obvious reasons.

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