Thank your Ex-Wife

... for dumping your ass

I, like Louis C. K, think divorces are almost always good. And since most divorces are initiated by women, there’s a lot of ex wives out there that deserve thanks for making the hard but right choice to breakup. I’ve seen several posters claim that the “women initiating” statistic is high because it’s based on divorce filings data, and since women are most often the “household managers” they tend to do the work of filing. But the data I looked at was not based on filings, it was based on survey answers from the How Couples Meet and Stay Together Survey, so I don’t put much merit on this point.

These stats are often cited by manosphere types as evidence that feminism has made women overconfident and greedy, willing to drop their husband if he fails to live up to their sky high expectations or if they get a shot at trading up. But I also see them cited as evidence that marriage under patriarchy is bad for women, that men get way more out of it, and so women are more likely to be the ones that leave. I think both of these are wrong even if they have some grain of truth…

I did find that women who made more money than their partner were even more likely than normal to have been the one who initiated a divorce (79% vs. 65%). And while this doesn’t tell us why I think it’s plausible that this could in part be driven by a higher chance of finding a “better” partner in favor of the high status wife. I also find it plausible that men put less effort into maintaining an emotional connection with their partner and to joint responsibilities (childcare, housework etc.) in general. This could make marriage a better deal for men on average and therefore make them less likely to leave. But… most of the time I think it’s just that women are more focused on their relationships and therefore spend more time thinking and talking about them. We should expect that they’d be more likely to be the first to recognize when the relationship should end.

It’s interesting that people think breakups of long term relationships are normal but divorce is tragic. Obviously, if you’re religious and think there’s some kind of sacred duty involved you’ll think divorce is bad. But I find this to be common even with other atheists (or as the cowardly like to call themselves “agnostics”) which is what makes the Louis C. K. bit funny. If there’re kids involved of course it’s reasonable to feel sorry that they weren’t lucky enough to be born to a couple that could have a long term stable and happy marriage (which would’ve been ideal). And I do think the bar for leaving should be significantly higher if you have kids with someone, but living with really unhappy, bitter or resentful parents doesn’t seem better than having divorced parents.

When unmarried long term couples break up friends and family lend support and seek to understand what happened (assuming this came as a surprise to them). But generally, they act as though the person in the relationship has assessed the situation and realized it’s unworkable. Otherwise they wouldn’t have chosen to go through the considerable pain that comes from severing a deep connection with a partner. Marriages are WAY harder to leave and come with several layers of added social embarrassment and so it seems even more reasonable to assume that if someone’s leaving they probably should. Anecdotally, I observe that people tend to be happier after a divorce. Maybe not happier than they were at the start of their marriage but happier than they were right before breaking up and happier than they would’ve been if they stayed, but I wanted to see if there was data on this.

Unfortunately, as far as I could tell, while the HCMST surveys have questions about how satisfied respondents are with their relationship they don’t have questions on how happy they are generally. However, the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) does include these questions. The data is 30 years old (first wave was conducted from 1987-1988 and second wave from 1992-1994) so if you think the climate around divorce has changed significantly you might not put a lot of stock in it. But, given that the overall divorce rate has decreased since the 90s I think it’s reasonable to assume that the “bar to divorce” hasn’t been significantly lowered such that we’d expect there to be more “bad divorces”.

I looked at couples that were married as of the first wave of the NSFH and were separated or divorced as of the second wave, 5 years later. I then looked at how they ranked their general happiness before vs. after the breakup, separating out people who had remarried and reporting the average reported happiness levels by gender. I found that men and women who were separated but not yet divorced as of wave 2 were significantly less happy than when they took the survey in wave 1. This makes sense to me, separated couples probably only broke up recently and are still uncertain about divorce which doesn’t sound like a happy time. Divorced men as of wave 2 were only slightly less happy than in wave 1 while women reported the same levels of happiness. And, unsurprisingly, people of both sexes who were remarried as of wave 2 were a little happier than they had been as of wave 1. The before and after values in the table below are the average of answers to the question “Overall, how would you say things are these days?” on a scale from 1-Very Unhappy to 7-Very Happy.

Data from: Bumpass, Larry L., Sweet, James A., and Call, Vaughn R.A. National Survey of Families and Households, Wave 1: 1987-1988 and Wave 2: 1992-1994, United States. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Python script to organize data is here, excel output is here.¹

Keeping in mind that there were only 5 years between these surveys most of these divorces would still be somewhat fresh, so I’d expect to see improvement in the happiness of the divorced group even if they don’t end up remarrying (although a majority of divorced people do). And when you ask people how happy they are now relative to the last year before their breakup even the sad separated men and women say they’re happier. The values in the table below are the average of answers to the question “Overall, how is your life now, compared to the year before you separated?” on a scale from 1-Much Worse to 5-Much Better with 3 being neutral.

Note: this table is from the same data sources as the above but the number of people in each category differs due to missing data on some questions for some respondents.

Divorce is sad, and you probably won’t come out the other side a brand new person who’s far happier than you were before. But I expect that in the vast majority of cases people who are divorced should be, and that it really is in both partner’s long term interests. So, if you’ve been dumped, thank your ex!

1. Note that I didn’t add the downloaded data files which were in .tsv format to my GitHub. You’d have to download the wave 1 and wave 2 data here and then save them in a folder format like: data downloads/NSFH wave X/{all the unzipped files that you downloaded for that wave} for it to work with the Python script.