Who Initiates Divorce More Often: Men or Women?

If you are a woman, you are overwhelmingly more likely to initiate a divorce than if you are a man. In a study that looked at more than 2,000 people in heterosexual marriages, husbands were the ones to initiate divorce only 31 percent of the time, according to the Huffington Post. That means that the wives were the ones to ask for a divorce 69 percent of the time.

Interestingly, the same cannot be said if you are part of an unmarried heterosexual couple. By remaining unmarried, you and your spouse are equally likely to be the ones to end the relationship.

Traditional thinking held that if you were a woman, you were more emotional and more in tune to the difficulties that exist in a relationship; and if you were a man, you were more complacent with the benefits the relationship provided to you. However, if that were true then women would be responsible for unmarried breakups at the same rate as married splits, and this study showed that is not the case.

One of the researchers suggests that perhaps women are more dissatisfied in marriages because of how women's roles in society have shifted over the last few decades. While women yield more power in the world and in the workplace, they are often disproportionately saddled with household responsibilities, even if both she and her husband have jobs outside the home. Therefore, regardless of your gender, making an effort to communicate with your partner and ensuring that tasks around the home are divided equally will likely go a long way in keeping your marriage intact.

Tags: Divorce

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