By Yanan Wang
Sunday, Sept. 13, 2015, 9:00 p.m.
Expectations for a spouse are much higher than they used to be.
For most of Western history, marriage had
little equality. Wives bore the brunt of child care and housework,
depended on their husbands for financial support and enjoyed little
social autonomy while men openly had affairs.
Fast-forward to the age of rom-coms,
Valentine's Day and a $50 billion wedding industry. It's all based on
finding, marrying and keeping “The One.”
“Today, Americans want not only a spouse
who is reliable and reasonable, but also someone who is their best
friend, and a great lover, and someone who pays the bills ... but is
also really fun,” said Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld.
According to research that Rosenfeld
recently presented at the American Sociological Association's annual
meeting, these heightened expectations can leave women feeling worse off
in marriage than men. In a survey of 2,262 adults in heterosexual
partnerships over the course of five years, Rosenfeld found that women
initiate divorces 69 percent of the time.
On the whole, they also reported less satisfaction with their marriages than men.
Scientists have known for decades that
wives are usually the ones asking for a divorce. But Rosenfeld's study
also surveyed people in nonmarital romantic relationships, from casual
flings to couples who had lived together for several years; in those
relationships, women and men initiated breakups at equal rates. So,
there's something about marriage that makes it harder on women.
“The expectation is that marriage has a
whole bunch of benefits and positive characteristics for women that it
didn't have in the past, but the truth is much trickier than that,”
Rosenfeld said.
Though he stressed that most women surveyed
were happy with their marriages, many of those who weren't cited
controlling husbands and a loss of independence as causes of discontent.
He also speculated that, although most men
today espouse egalitarian values, many probably still harbor
subconscious expectations of a wife's traditional role in the household.
This could explain why, after all these years, women still shoulder
twice as many domestic responsibilities as men. (In contrast, studies
have shown that couples who equally divide their child-care duties have
better sex lives.)
Rosenfeld's survey checked in with the same
individuals every year for five years. In cases in which someone was
married the first year of the study and divorced in the last, his team
was able to gather details in the breakup's immediate aftermath.
One woman, who was 23 when the study began
in 2009, initially reported a “good” (4 out of 5 points on the
satisfaction scale) relationship with her husband-to-be: “He is very
clever, fun, and sweet. I respect him and feel like we are equals on
values, intellect and humor.”
She noted, however, “It is not ‘excellent' because I wish that he was more romantic. He's very practical.”
Four years later, the couple got divorced.
In early 2015, she said, “I used to be a very happy, optimistic person,
and it was like he was slowly starving my soul.”
She realized that the relationship had become emotionally abusive and promptly filed for a divorce.
Rosenfeld said respondents' stories had
echoes of “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan's feminist treatise
about unhappiness among middle-class housewives. Instead, many of
today's disgruntled wives have full-time jobs — and, hence, no practical
need for husbands who don't make them happy.
So, while the institution of marriage hasn't completely shed its inequitable roots, women can afford to be a lot choosier.
Yanan Wang is a staff writer for The Washington Post.
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