Earlier this week Vox Day quoted from a recent Daily Mail article:
According to the Office of National Statistics, the number of ‘silver divorces’ has risen by three-quarters in the past 20 years, while the divorce rate among the rest of the population has fallen.
As well as fractured relationships and infidelity, the rise in late-life divorce is also fueled by women fed up with old-before-their-time husbands and a lack of excitement.
Few of these women anticipate that their silver divorce will cost them all the home comforts and financial security they once took for granted.
Dominik Lipnicki, a housing expert for Your Mortgage Decisions, believes this boom in divorce and the financial instability it can cause is a huge problem for older women.
There is quite a bit packed in this quote, especially since the Daily Mail is using their standard tactic of trolling their readers. In this case the trolling consists of whispering that it’s time for older married women to ditch their boring loyal dudes, while simultaneously framing late life divorcées as victims whose cash and prizes run out far too soon. What gets lost in the trolling however is the fact that the Mail and other papers are selling a great misconception; there simply is no “boom” in divorce as couples get older. It is true that divorce rates have been rising in the UK for women over 50*:
However, divorce rates for older age brackets are very small in comparison with younger brackets. In fact, divorce rates decrease dramatically as women age. Here is what it looks like in the US:
The UK has a very similar pattern, with the exception of women under 25**. Here is a time series animation I put together using the latest ONS data going back thirty five years:
The great misconception you will find in all pieces on late life divorce is a sense that as a generation ages through or past middle age there is a time when their rate of divorce suddenly “booms” or “explodes”. This is the opposite of reality, but newspapers have a strong incentive to give the sense that “everyone is doing it” to both sell feminist divorce empowerment and to sell copy.
If you break the UK data down by cohort you can see that for the last thirty five years around age 27 a woman’s tendency to divorce starts falling and continues to fall; It falls so quickly as she ages that by the time she passes sixty her likelyhood of divorcing in any given year drops to around 1.5 per 1,000. The chart below presents data for all four birth cohorts of Baby Boomers (B), along with two cohorts of Silents (S) before them and Gen Xers (X) after them. This tracks each cohort from their early twenties through their late 50s***:
To understand the data represented in the chart above, it might help to see it in table form. Also, keep in mind that the chart above actually understates the way that divorce risk reduces as women age because:
- The older the age bracket we are looking at, the higher the proportion of second, third, etc marriages in the mix. Remarriages have far higher rates of divorce than first marriages, so this skews the data to make it look like late life divorce is higher (relatively) than it really is.
- The curves only show data through the late 50s***, because after a woman turns 60 the ONS stops breaking divorce rates out in five year brackets. Divorce rates after 60 are so low (around 1.5 per 1,000 married women per year) that it doesn’t make sense to try to measure it separately for each over 60 bracket.
*The data is from the ONS page here. The most recent data file is for 2013 (tab 3b). Note that for 1981 the data isn’t broken out for the 50-54 and 55-59 age brackets, so I used the averages for the years immediately prior and after 1981 to fill in the gap.
**I won’t speculate on the reason US and UK divorce patterns are different for the under 25 age brackets since this is a post on late(r) life divorce.
***Except for the younger cohorts where there isn’t yet data for the older age brackets.
In the UK chart above, it looked like one generation continued to have a lot of divorces, especially in the late 80s. Am I seeing things?
[D: Which cohort are you referring to?]
Status-consciousness is both the ‘stick and carrot’ for older married women retaining their married status. Which rightly benefits the man who has ‘put his money where his mouth is’ for a decades-old marriage.
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Dalrock, I treasure this blog, and we may be neighbors, but I must ask: why do you read the Mail? Or did someone suggest it?
Man, they thought they were Unhaaaaaaapy before. Wait until they get a load of living in retirement on 50% of their pre-divorce retirement income, and nobody to chat with / gripe to / nag. The amazing thing about leftist social orthodoxy is not that it results in horrible ends – that part is utterly predictable – but that so many people and institutions (like most of our churches) buy into it despite the fact that particular road has big signs on it, “Ruin This Way —> 45 Miles” and “You Nagging Inner Voice is Right: You Will Regret This.” Evil is no longer even attractive and they’re still buying it. Amazing.
The only thing Hawter! than a 40 ish spinster cat lady, is a 70 ish divorced cat lady. And by “Hawter!” I mean glamorized by the media but in reality a gaping black hole of sadness that is difficult to even look at.
Keep in mind that a lot of these older women promptly lose their cash and prizes to a Nigerian romance scam. This is common enough to be noteworthy.
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I always appreciate Dalrock’s posts with charts even as the charts give my poor brain melt-down.
I had seen the Vox article and had thus clicked through to the D.M. article which I had been thinking about. I have a theory about the D.M. which amounts to the notion that they are doing the opposite of what they appear to be doing. The article discussed the post divorce fate of three women who had really been exceptionally well off but now have little or nothing. The pictures however tell to me a different story. The women all look as if they have money to burn on clothing and are dressed-to-kill although I presume that the clothes come from the D.M. wardrobe department and the houses which may not really be their abodes but which they stand outside are surely highly desirable houses in which to live.
I don’t know women like these; they look like D.M. journalists and if not that then the sisters or sisters-in-law thereof. To what extent any of the stories are true I have my doubts.
It was certainly my experience as a matrimonial practitioner that there was little grey divorce; mostly it was young women in the mid-twenties and thirties the numbers exacerbated by the fact that the State – on the basis that what you subsidise you encourage – would pay for this.
By chance I have a grey-divorce story to hand as my friend has been shagging a woman half his age. Now that his wife (aged in her early to mid-fifties) knows, she has sought some rather inadequate pseudo-legal advice (she can’t afford lawyers but earns too much for state handouts) and has been told she cannot get rid of her husband. This woeful advice she has accepted. She has thus given her husband three months to come to his senses; both act as if his adultery never happened and Mother-in-Law is shortly visiting for a few weeks. I had told him not to do it, but, ‘Look Opus, this may be the last chance I’ll ever get etc etc’. The new woman strikes me as seriously bad news even though she is also seriously fit albeit despite the age-gap too old. No one; neither the husband, wife, mistress nor the distressed children can benefit form this, and it’s causing me problems as I am asked to pretend to all-and-sundry that I know nothing of these marital hiccups. It may as the Canadian Prime Minister says be 2016 but public knowledge would be highly embarrassing for my friend and he has thus imposed a news black-out. The delicious irony is that the wife did to her then cohabitee (back when she was in her twenties) what her husband is now doing to her, but her somewhat limited looks have of course long since vanished. Even so men are hungry and I do not doubt that men will be sniffing around ‘ere long if my friend does not come to his senses.
Dalrock thanks for the ongoing education. I saw this article somewhere else and my first thought was. “That’s not what is going on.” I knew I would come here to find a more detailed explanation. Appreciate your efforts.
By chance I have a grey-divorce story to hand as my friend has been shagging a woman half his age. Now that his wife (aged in her early to mid-fifties) knows, she has sought some rather inadequate pseudo-legal advice (she can’t afford lawyers but earns too much for state handouts) and has been told she cannot get rid of her husband. This woeful advice she has accepted. She has thus given her husband three months to come to his senses; both act as if his adultery never happened and Mother-in-Law is shortly visiting for a few weeks.
I know that what I’m about write is is a waste of bits, because such common-sense advice is almost NEVER acted upon by post-menopausal middle-aged women, but if your friend’s wife really wants to save her marriage, there is only one way she is going to do it: by digging deep down inside of herself, getting in touch with her inner depraved slut/whore, and turning into an insatiable sex machine that will make her husband forget he ever knew this “other woman.”
Alas, this not only takes serious effort on the wife’s part, put also calls for introspection, something that is as alien to most women as a diet of roasted meat is to a rabbit. While I sincerely hope that things work out for your friend and his wife, unless she can meet his “manly needs” better than the younger woman can, or at least make an honest and sincere effort to do so, he’s going to continue to “take the long way home.”
(The more examples of the above scenario that I see in today’s world, the more I begin to understand why polygyny has been an acceptable practice throughout so much of human history and in so many cultures. Men’s sex drives are infinitely more powerful and longer lasting than women’s. God didn’t do this by accident.)
In the UK chart above, it looked like one generation continued to have a lot of divorces, especially in the late 80s. Am I seeing things?
[D: Which cohort are you referring to?]
The 20-24 age group.
The Chart of Divorces per 1000 women is most perplexing: Whereas divorce for those under twenty start in 1976 at about one per thousand, in 1985 the rate jumps to fifteen per thousand and then slowly declines to just five per thousand in 2011. The age of greatest divorce is always between the age of twenty-five and twenty-nine with the exception of 1985 where there is a sudden spike for those age between twenty and twenty-four such that that cohort has for the next four years the greatest number of divorces before reverting to the normality of those aged between twenty-five and twenty-nine having the greatest number of divorces. Over sixties divorce is low consistently at just one or two per thousand.
America (varying shades of grey) seems to be slightly different with grey divorce in 2009 being about five per thousand but although otherwise Americans are divorcing at about the same rate as the U.K. it seems to have (it is not entirely clear) a higher divorce rate for teenage years – no spike but just a gradually declining rate.
I do not suppose that anyone thinks that these divorces are anything other than driven by women though I wonder whether the increase in divorce for those aged between fifty and sixty might be driven by men?
@Opus
The extremely low divorce rates for under twenties is indeed perplexing. My best guess is that in the time frames being measured the women who are married at such a young age are markedly different from the population of women who are married in older age brackets. How common is it for a woman to marry under 20 in the UK? I’m guessing pretty uncommon. Also, while a woman who marries at 19 has less than a year as a married under twenty, a woman who marries at 15 or 16 is in the under 20 married category for four or five times as long. So perhaps a large percentage of the under 20 married market are truly different than the general married population, and likely much more strictly religious. This is just a guess.
But I don’t know how well this would explain the 20-24 year bracket being lower (but not by nearly as much) than the late twenties bracket as well. But if very few marriages happen before say age 23 or 24, it could be the same phenomenon. In fact, if “normal” women don’t often marry before 23 or 24 we could still be seeing a skew due to truly young brides remaining in the category for five full years where the handful of more common women who happened to marry slightly earlier than normal are only there for a year or maybe two.
I just checked Wikipedia and it shows the average age for women to marry in the US as 27 vs 30 in the UK, so perhaps this does explain the different pattern.
The other possibility is that incentives are encouraging young women in the UK to wait a few extra years before they get unhappy. This could be anything from cash and prizes, to social reactions, to getting the last child out of diapers. Since you know the US better than I know the UK perhaps you have some observations here.
@asdgamer
I’m not sure now which chart you are looking at. I originally assumed you were looking at the last chart. Assuming that was the case, I was looking for something like “1946-1950 (B)”.
Dalrock,
The extremely low divorce rates for under twenties is indeed perplexing.
Why? In Britain, the only people in that age bracket who marry at all are Muslims.
America does not have enough of those yet to appear in the data, plus some rural Americans still marry early.
Comment may be duplicate..
@Dalrock
I fear that my understanding of the U.S.A. is not necessarily greater than yours of Brexitland. So far as the U.K. is concerned (and by the U.K. I mean England which has a population far greater than all the U.K.’s other parts together) I would say:
1. I do not think we have any statistically observable group of people who are strictly religious (and who thus might marry young). Almost everyone is (de facto) C of E – it is the State religion after all and most schools are thereto affiliated – unfortunately the C of E is the home of Marxist Feminism. We have no equivalent of The Amish or The Mormons – or sufficient land to enable them to form a distinct and separate group, England being about the same size as the State of New York but with two and a half times the population.
2. Back in 1975 or thereabouts the average (or do I mean Median) age of marriage for a woman was twenty point eight years, that is to say not quite twenty-one, thus many women married at nineteen, and most were engaged by the age of seventeen, thus whilst still at school. This of course placed terrible pressure on young men to find someone and quickly, because if one didn’t, then by their mid-twenties all that were left were the weird, the lesbians and the terminally un marriageable. Most men married the first woman to show them any consistent interest, but likewise women often married under pressure not to be left on the shelf (or to prevent their being seen as Sluts – ‘Still going out with that Brad – hasn’t he asked you yet?’ was something young women dreaded hearing from their female friends, for chastity had gone the way of the dodo.
3. In forty years that age of marriage has drifted from twenty to thirty; increased education is part of the explanation for this as is the willingness of women to cohabit without the benefit of clergy, but there surely must be more to the lateness of marriage than that.
I knew many fish that did not need bicycles but I also knew many women who had married before they were twenty years of age. This was normal and no one thought it odd. No one cared whether there was or was not a strict application of the law limiting sexual intercourse to the over sixteens. What scared parents were drugs and the fear that their daughter would be knocked-up by Harley McBadBoy or FuckBuddy RockDrummer. Beta males – that is to say well-presented men with motor-cars and white-collar employment – were popular with parents. Marriage meant commitment for life and no one was anti-marriage and thus young marriage was entirely acceptable. Divorce was low before The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1973 which opened the flood-gates and ended that embarrassing business of Private Detectives giving evidence in court of having seen a Mr X entering a building at 7.00 pm and exiting at 6.00am – what a nice little earner that was.
Ironically, I can see a lot of conservatives jumping on the man who left his second wife to return to his first wife. For Christians, that often ends up being what a repentant “remarried” man must be willing to do.
The UK age cohort in question is product of an ‘arranged marriage’ lifestyle immported in past two decades by Labour governments (and so-called Conservatives as well) and officially sanctioned at highest levels of British Empire. The Empire WIth No Name that has no..ahem..clearly defined DNA roots….or endgame. This ongoing race replacement project is at heart of New Rome (Vol.4, or is it 5 by now?). The aims and objectives can be easily googled by using ‘coudenhove+kalergi+plan’ search terms.
@Opus
Interesting. When I was pulling together data for this post I was surprised by a sudden spike in divorce for over 60 women in 1971/72, briefly taking it all the way up to 3 per 1000 before dropping back down to around 1.5 (roughly where it remains today). Digging around I found that there was a similar but less dramatic effect for the younger brackets in 71/72. When I googled the question I learned that the 1969 Divorce Reform Act took effect in January 1971. I wasn’t aware of the act in 1973, but I believe it explains the continued but more moderate rise in divorce rates for the younger age brackets. If I have some time I’ll pull together some charts for a short post.
@Dalrock
I had forgotten about the 1969 Act (perhaps because I studied Matrimonial Law after the passing of the 1973 Act) but that certainly supports my view that women respond immediately to changes in the law whereas men lag behind sometimes by decades, if ever. No woman ever came to me to claim she was being stalked (bar one) until stalking was upgraded from a civil to a criminal offence after which I was consulted thereon frequently. Male victims of stalking – of which I happen to be one – hardly ever complain – I didn’t. One of my other friends was telling me earlier this evening that his wife fell last Saturday whilst out shopping. The cause of her fall were her high-heeled shoes. Apparently, so she texted her husband, no less than two married men with wives in tow immediately rushed to her mini-skirted aid. White knights are not yet an endangered species.
I have confessed my forgetfulness of the 1969 Act but it might help if I explain that the 1973 Act granted in all but name Divorce on demand. I vaguely recall that at the time the Ecclesiastic members (The Lords Spiritual) of The House of Lords (the equivalent of your Senate) feared that the Act might prove to be a blueprint for Pick-Up artists – as if such men are going to bother with marriage! The Act declares that there is just one ground for the dissolution of a marriage (the irrevocable breakdown of the marriage) which ground can be proved in one of five ways – there being no true causation between the ground and the five possible types of allegation. Almost all Divorce Petitions are issued on the grounds of the husband’s Unreasonable Behaviour, and what you may ask would such behaviour comprise? Anything you like! but some of the most popular are, leaving the toothpaste-cap off, leaving the loo-seat up and forgetting the mother-in-law’s birthday. In other words, whim. No man ever complained in a Petition as to his wife’s behaviour.
“How common is it for a woman to marry under 20 in the UK? I’m guessing pretty uncommon.” ~ Dalrock
That’ll change soon.
I smell a big greedy rat in the Daily Mail article.
As people age, they accumulate wealth for retirement. They do so pretty quickly when children are grown, the nest is empty and paid off.
Dangle cash and prizes in front of the woman, just like the Serpent did in Eden. Messy divorce ensues. Lawyers get paid, the couple’s paid home gets sold and split, the children’s inheritance gone as both now-single people find two new homes, that they have to pay off.
Who benefits? The greedy elites whose wealth is in real estate, driving fancy cars, wearing fancy loafers and who have all of the trappings of success but who are soulless because they’ve sold their souls to satan for that success long ago.
Freedom? This is a recipe from Hell to enslave and impoverish everyone.
What do I miss here? It’s commonly thought that about half of marriages end in divorce, which means the “divorces per 1000 married women” stats should be around 500. According to the second graph about 120 women per 1000 divorce in their lifetimes, which would imply that 12% of marriages end in divorce.
Dalrock @ 2.31pm is puzzled as to why there is a low level of teenage divorce. May I suggest two possible reasons which may not otherwise be apparent (I had to drag this out from the depth of memory). Firstly (though this may have changed) it used to be the case that one had to be married for at least two years before it was even possible to issue a Petition for Divorce, thus, say, if the woman marries at eighteen and immediately runs off she would have to wait until the age of twenty to commence proceedings. Secondly and despite what I said above about Unreasonable Behaviour, it was always the more civilised to use one of the other five possible facts, namely that the married couple had been living apart for two years, thus if you split up at say nineteen and even though you have been married since you were seventeen you might delay proceedings until you were twenty-one. This was fairly common as there was frequently no need to rush to Divorce – no assets to divided, no children to provision. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 is, and always was, of course, a complete mess. The standard work on Divorce is Rayden which (I just checked on Amazon) now runs to five Volumes and some eight thousand pages! so please forgive me if my grasp of the subject is no longer encyclopaedic.
It is heartening to observe from the above data that Divorce is down for the young by about two sevenths from what it had been at its height in the late eighties/early nineties and more or less back to where it was in the mid-seventies.
Dangle cash and prizes in front of the woman, just like the Serpent did in Eden. Messy divorce ensues….Who benefits? The greedy elites whose wealth is in real estate, driving fancy cars, wearing fancy loafers and who have all of the trappings of success but who are soulless because they’ve sold their souls to satan for that success long ago….
Another proof that women never grow up. Or that the only women who grow up are those who have been under the authority of a man. And being under a man’s authority does not mean she lived with a man, for there are many women living with their HINO [husbands in name only] but are not under his authority. The rest of the women are nothing but female version of Peter pans.
Or how else do you explain the response of a fully grown woman blowing up her family because Nancy down the street did the same thing, and got a few prizes from papa government?
In England & Wales (which is the vast majority of the U.K.) the hard minimum is now one year from wedding to filing the divorce petition, which works out as just under 18 months from wedding to divorce decree. Which is still enough to skew the statistics for the early 20’s divorce rate.
We’d have to see the stats, of course, but my speculation is that the low divorce rates for very young marriage in the UK is because most of the people who are marrying at those ages in the UK these days are Muslim, and they have very low divorce rates because divorce by women is very strongly frowned upon socially in that community (even though it’s legally available under UK law).
“What do I miss here? It’s commonly thought that about half of marriages end in divorce, which means the “divorces per 1000 married women” stats should be around 500. According to the second graph about 120 women per 1000 divorce in their lifetimes, which would imply that 12% of marriages end in divorce.”
You’re right, rates of divorce are vastly overstated, in large part to discourage people from marriage in the first place.
I believe the 50% statistic is calculated by comparing the number of divorces in any given year with the number of new marriages — in that same year.
To explain further:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/divorce-rate-its-not-as-high-as-you-think.html
It’s per year….
Year after year of that… well it adds up quickly.
[D: Correct.]
There’s one more factor that we need to look at: the age at which people marry vs. divorce likelihood.
It’s pretty common knowledge that the younger a couple marries, the more likely they are to divorce (at least when it comes to couples married nowadays), but as it turns out, this only holds true up until about the late 20s, the average age of marriage. Most people like to stop keeping track after this age, and a recent study done by the University of Utah might tell us why: the divorce-risk-by-age bottoms out in the late 20s, but it doesn’t keep going down; after that age, it starts to skyrocket, and by the time you end up in your 40s (as I recall) your risk of divorce is as high as it was when you were in your late teens.
Some people should simply not get married.
@boydoesn’tmeetgirl
The mechanics for this would seem simple. First, the forces pushing divorce risk down:
1) We know that divorce risk correlates negatively with IQ (at least today, initially it was the other way around). IQ is highly correlated with completion of college. Women who go to college tend to marry a few years later than women who don’t attend or attend and drop out.
2) By not being married in during the years with the greatest temptation for a woman to divorce, it only stands to reason that the risk of divorce would go down. Moreover, even if women weren’t far more tempted to divorce while young, the total number of years a marriage has to survive until the death of one spouse is reduced by one year for every year marriage is delayed.
On the other hand, delaying marriage increases (on average) a woman’s sexual and romantic partners prior to marriage, which correlates with higher rates of divorce. In addition, beyond a certain point women who delay marriage are also a category of women either less interested in marriage or seen as less fit for marriage (or both).
There’s so much money in the Divorce/family law industry, I can’t see it stopping any more than the Military Industrial Complex rolling forward.
If men stop marrying (as they are), womynz will simply adopt increasingly intrusive versions of the “she left the toothbrush at his house, thus deserves ‘common law status'” concept.
Men are assigned slave/mule status, even from afar, and must work to provide for women, whether they are young women are silver status.
I read the Daily Mail article and it is very misleading in another way. The examples they chose said that their husbands left them for other women. But if you read between the lines it is clear that the the divorces were initiated by the women. After which, of course, their husbands did find other women. The silver divorcees did not find other men. What a surprise.
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enrique,
If men stop marrying (as they are), womynz will simply adopt increasingly intrusive versions of the “she left the toothbrush at his house, thus deserves ‘common law status’” concept.
Men are assigned slave/mule status, even from afar, and must work to provide for women, whether they are young women are silver status.
That is why Democracy is an unviable form of government over time. The only real solution is for politicians to become red pill and realize they can endlessly pretend to push for ‘women’s rights’ yet not ever pass anything (since women never measure any objective progress metrics, and will endlessly make the same complaint whether 20 laws pass or zero do).
But the nature of female psychology is incompatible with democracy *unless* politicians realize that running interference can substitute for passing any feminist legislation.
Woman and hormones
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=1009886
Marriage and Abuse
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=1010341
Wearing Bikini for Husband Sin?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=1010335
OT: A professor was banned from teaching a “Men in Literature” course because the course didn’t adopt the narrative that men are oppressors:
https://www.nas.org/articles/springfield_purges_men_in_literature
…The silver divorcees did not find other men. What a surprise….
I think that explains one of Dalrock’s previous posts where he showed that divorce rates correlate negatively with the woman’s age. Women, being naturally insecure, will always seek security, even when contemplating a divorce. They will ensure that the next man has been lined up, or their hopes of doing so are high, before they kick the current man to the curb. Or that they have enough of their peers in the same situation before they join the bandwagon. All these are missing as women get older.
Older men who become single (widowers or divorcees) tend to marry relatively younger women, if they remarry at all, and this makes it harder for women their age to line them up in hopes of divorcing their husbands. Moreover, by the time these older married women get to that age, they’ve realized that there is not much excitement out there. Even if there were, their failing health couldn’t handle them anyhow. Not many men find the prospect of kissing grandma with dentures particularly sexy.
Dalrock:
This may be the only blog that I follow on a regular basis, mostly lurking (but sometimes commenting).
I follow it because it (1) advocates an entirely counter-cultural (i.e., Red-Pill) view [witness this OP], which it (2) backs up with hard data [witness this OP], and that (3) is immediately relevant to the dominant political problem of our time, which is the deteriorated relationship between men and women, while (4) also doing all this from a (generic but “orthodox”) Christian PoV.
Highly unusual. Dalrock, thank you for all your hard work.
A recurring theme, is Dalrock pointing out glaring contradictions and obvious but ignored counter-factuality in the Official Feminist Story® about What Exactly Is Going On™, for example >70% of divorces initiated by women, who couldn’t be bothered to get married until the age of 31 (the point being, as Dalrock sarcastically points out, to waste as little of their youth and fertility on their husbands as possible), but — says the Official Feminist Story® — what’s wrong with society is that men are incapable of commitment.
Contradiction after contradiction, counter-factuality after counter-factuality, most of which I had never noticed, but understand right away, once Dalrock has pointed them out. And so, I read, and I learn.
One result of this, is that reading Dalrock’s blog has sharpened my awareness of the possibility of contradictions and counter-factuality in narratives in general.
And so now this has extended to the Red Pill / Manosphere analysis of What Exactly Is Going On™.
Doesn’t necessarily mean these are contradictions in the Manosphere narrative/analysis, but still, I’m left wondering:
… How is it that on the one hand, women are filing for divorce/frivorce because of the temptation of “cash and prizes”, and the soon-to-be-dumped husbands are described as being (financially as well as emotionally) “divorce raped” by the process, and yet on the other hand the ex-wives on average mostly end up poorer (as per Dalrock’s misc. statistical analyses)? Either the “cash and prizes” are there, or they are not. Right? What am I missing here? Seems like a contradiction.
… and …
… How is it on the one hand, that the Decline of Marriage is the result of, basically, consciously or not, young men going on a Marriage Strike, but that on the other hand, that the Decline of Marriage is the result of, basically, consciously or not, young women postponing marriage via the practice of serial monogamy, etc., while pursuing their post-secondary educations? Either the young men are not marrying the
sluttish harridans & shrewish whores, or the young women are disdaining the men. It can’t be both, can it? Because then it is neither, I should think. Right? What am I missing here? Seems like a contradiction.Just some thoughts.
Dalrock, thanks again for this blog. It may not have saved my life, but it has probably saved me a lot of pain.
Pax Christi Vobiscum. (ツ)
Jonathan M reminds me that of course there is no Divorce until a Decree Absolute thereof has been issued, and I’ll accept his leisurely time-scale of six months between issuing a Petition and the issuing of the final final Decree – I don’t think they would be counting form the earlier Nisi Decree, and thus: subject to Novaseeker’s supposition as to Islam affecting these rates an extra ha;f year would have to be added to the timescales that I set out at 3.48 on the fourteenth.
I rather gain the impression that throughout the United States, I can marry on a Monday, file for Divorce on the Tuesday and the only matter to be taken account of is that I wish to end the marriage. Is that correct? – for it would certainly make sense of the one chart above for American divorce – just one continual slide.
“According to the second graph about 120 women per 1000 divorce in their lifetimes, which would imply that 12% of marriages end in divorce.”
Even if the divorce statistics are exaggerated, as Barbarossa pointed out in one of his videos, none of them take into account the number of men trapped in the proverbial “Cheaper-to-keep-her” marriage that they do not want to dissolve because of the personal risks involved in doing so.
@ Yac-Yac
“… How is it that on the one hand, women are filing for divorce/frivorce because of the temptation of “cash and prizes”, and the soon-to-be-dumped husbands are described as being (financially as well as emotionally) “divorce raped” by the process, and yet on the other hand the ex-wives on average mostly end up poorer (as per Dalrock’s misc. statistical analyses)? Either the “cash and prizes” are there, or they are not. Right? What am I missing here? Seems like a contradiction”
The “Cash and Prizes” narrative of the manosphere is catchy because as men, it burns us up and makes for great clickbait, but it needs to be challenged. Women still frivorce their husbands at the magic 70% area, regardless of geography, language, ethnicity or nationality wherever No-Fault Divorce is the law of the land and even if the asset division laws are more equitable to men. The #1 reason why women divorce is unhaaaaaapiness. Cash-and-Prizes simply greases the hamster wheel of a woman’s decision making process; it’s not the primary reason for frivorce by a long shot and to imply that is misleading.
Case in point, Lesbian couples in Sweden were 267% more likely to divorce than heterosexual couples despite being much more likely to be closer to one another in earnings than heterosexual couples.
Simple arithmetical expression:
I’m Unhaaaaaaapy + I’m Unhaaaaaaapy = Wow, I’m surprised no one’s slit their wrists yet.
After lurking for ages, I comment at last…
@ Yac-Yac
I might have an answer for the disparity you note. If I may paraphrase your question, “How is it that there is Cash & Prizes(TM) at the same time as single women ending up in poverty in disproportionate numbers?”
I think in many cases it may be because a lot of these women were unhaaapy in part because they wanted to waste large sums of money on stupid, unnecessary things in place of boring Patriarchy things like 401K’s and paying off the house. Travel is another big one with women more often than men, it seems traveling a lot signals sophistication without all of the tedious work of actually becoming sophisticated. Few men want to spend $30K to redo a perfectly good kitchen. Once the divorce is finalized, her ex-husband can no longer tell her they can’t afford this or that, so she can indulge her endless appetite for novelty which does not lead to a comfortable retirement.
Cash & Prizes doesn’t explain everything, but here is something else that might drive the disparity. Women who never get married, who ride the carrousel until it spins so fast it flings them off, often never really learn how much life costs. When they’re young and pretty people want to pay them just for their company, in the form of eating out, drinks, cruises, everything from picnics to seeing the olympics in person. They simply don’t learn how to handle money because they don’t know the value of anything. I find that this is actually more often true of women who make a lot of money than those who don’t, they just can’t imagine that it will ever end. After all, a financial nincompoop (male or female) can go deeper into debt if they make good money than if they do not. Deep down I don’t think they really believe they’ll ever have to pay off anything they’ve borrowed. If you didn’t believe you’d actually have to pay it back, and if you didn’t look at signing your name to the Terms & Conditions as an honor-bound oath to repay the money, wouldn’t anyone here just max out their cards as well?
>How is it that there is Cash & Prizes(TM) at the same time as single women ending up in poverty in disproportionate numbers?
It is because women are not good at math. Divorcing wife math goes: I make 20,000 per year, hubby makes 80,000 per year. I can get 1/2 of his money if I divorce and I get to keep all my money. So that means I get 60,000 a year (1/2 of husbands which is mine anyway plus my 20k) just for me which is better than 100,000 per year for both of us plus the family.
Wait, it costs more money to maintain TWO households rather than one? Why? It must be the patriarchy. Women need more power and men need less power. Yes, that will solve it.
“What do I miss here? It’s commonly thought that about half of marriages end in divorce, which means the “divorces per 1000 married women” stats should be around 500. According to the second graph about 120 women per 1000 divorce in their lifetimes, which would imply that 12% of marriages end in divorce.”
“It’s per year….
Year after year of that… well it adds up quickly.”
[D: Correct.]
So how do I read the chart? Do I multiply all numbers by 10, since each slice represents 10 years? This would seem to indicate that 120% of marriages end in divorce. Or can’t we tell from these numbers what the cumulative rate is?
Please pardon any statistical ignorance on my part. College was three dozen years ago.
@Hmm
The numbers in the chart are the number of divorces per year, per 1,000 married women. The X axis represents women’s age, but it groups women into 10 year age brackets instead of showing the specific divorce rate for women at age 28, women at age 29, etc. So, no, you do not multiply by 10.
Hmm says:
This would seem to indicate that 120% of marriages end in divorce. Or can’t we tell from these numbers what the cumulative rate is?
The survival rate would be around e^{-1.20}, about 30%, in that case – 70% are divorces. That’s just approximate; and only applies to an early marriage where death does not intervene until old age; and can still be confounded by various things, especially since this is longitudinal.
I find the idea of sexualized grandparents as abhorrent as sexualized children. Whatever happened to dignity and innocence? I wrote a post a while back about what I called the “empty nest epiphany,” which is a phenomenon whereby second marriages end in divorce as the once “single mom” no longer has use for the second spouse because the children are raised. I suppose, the same could be true of the greyhairs. Their grandchildren are grown? Maybe they don’t see them? There is no extended family to hold them together? Retirement gives the spouses too much time together? It all seems to hinge on usefulness, just as early divorce can become an issue when a child is four.
I have no plans to remarry- ever. But I am lucky because I am completely spoiled in my husband. It will not be easy to lose him, but it will be easy to stay married to his memory.
@ Kate Minter
I remember a story a friend of mine told me when he was going for his Master’s at University of Central Florida in Orlando. While he was visiting with family at a restaurant they’ve never been too, they noticed ALOT of old people there as in more than normal for Orlando. He overheard a short conversation between an old woman who just walked into the restaurants bar area and approached an old man sitting there drinking at the bar. She literally said, “You wanna hook up?”. The guy looked at her for a moment and followed her outside.
There’s an elderly hookup culture and it is super weird and creepy.
There’s an elderly hookup culture and it is super weird and creepy.
I wonder if that’s something unique to Florida, which is, after all, America’s geriatric capital.
The phony 50% divorce rate continues to be thrown around, in spite of the good news that divorce rates are much lower and dropping. I’d like to see divorce rates exclusively for first time marriages, as well as further narrowing the data by factors such as:
• Did the marriage begin under duress
• More breakout of education levels
• More breakout of income brackets
• Race/ethnicity
• Cultural homogeny of husband and wife
• Number of children, if any
• Earnings variance, i.e., 50/50, 70/30, 100/0
• Religious beliefs and practices
And lastly, can someone do a better age breakout than 15-24 at time of marriage? The difference between those bracket ends is ridiculous.
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