WHICH SEX Is More Responsible For Divorce?

Wives are now incentivized to divorce by the alimony retirement plan racket, the anti-male divorce industrial complex, and the practical guarantee of child custody. The data — especially the “wives initiate 70% of divorces” figure — strongly suggest that [this] view is the correct one.

But [some] claim that figure could just as easily mean that 70% of husbands are sh*tty spouses. Well, maybe. But that interpretation is no less speculative than the opposite, and in fact is less sustainable under scrutiny, because the simpler explanation for the 70% female divorce-initiation figure is that men and women are about equally represented among the crappy spouse demographic, but women initiate more divorces because they perceive that a host of benefits will accrue to them from severing their marriages. Husbands, in contrast, perceive no such benefits, and are thus more loathe to divorce even when their wives are insufferable.

One way to test this hypothesis . . . is to look at which sex initiates more non-marital break-ups. If men really are crappier partners than women, then the break-up initiation rate will be roughly the same inside and outside of marriage. The break-up initiation rate should skew approximately 70% in favor of women in whatever form of relationship they’re in. The premise behind this assumption is that a person’s romantic character or “livability” traits are fairly constant throughout life.

Using the variable FAMPER3 (“During the last year, did you… 3. Break up with a steady boyfriend/girlfriend or fiance?”) from the General Social Survey (GSS) dataset, we find that men broke up their non-marital relationships almost twice as often as did women.