Color me “surprised” … and quite pleasantly so. Most relationship advice I run across on the Internet is pretty dismal.
It largely repeats conventional wisdom (which is a lot more “conventional” than it is “wisdom”) and often pushes a “women good, men bad” viewpoint. That seems doubly true when the author is a woman, as she’s understandably likely to view relationship matters from a woman’s perspective … namely, her own.
So when I ran across the “Wedding bells to wedding hell in one generation” commentary written by Janet Street-Porter, I wasn’t expecting much. Much to my surprise, however, she provided a thoughtful, logically presented summary of several key reasons why people today are less likely to get married and, if they do marry, are less likely to stay together for life.
The one comment she made which I would quibble with is this one:
“In divorce, ultimately it’s middle-aged women who suffer the most, because their chances of remarriage are very slim indeed.”
To anyone who reads the newspaper, watches TV, visits the Internet or has almost any type of human contact these days, it could certainly seem that way. After all, the media seem to be focusing ever more on celebrities: paparazzi follow even middle-tier show business performers, and fan and scandal magazines and websites proliferate like kudzu on steroids.
“…
the “loyal wife” gave him “the best years of his life” and then “the cad” trades her in on a new wife half her age! What gall!
…”
And therefore, most of the divorce or remarriage stories which make the news nowadays do so because they involve celebrities, or at least the rich and powerful. And that means frequent stories about trophy brides. The “loyal wife” gave him “the best years of his life” and then “the cad” trades her in on a new wife half her age! What gall!
Suppose you’re the soon-to-be ex-wife of a wealthy celebrity … are your chances of remarriage slim?
Well, your chances of remarriage to another incredibly handsome and similarly wealthy and powerful celebrity are not great.
But that’s like saying that because nobody would hire me to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company making $40 million a year, therefore my chances of getting a job doing anything are “very slim indeed”. That’s simply not true.
Granted, I might be unemployable due, say, to having an exceptionally bad attitude which turned off every potential employer I approached or to having grandiose expectations of my “worth” in the job market such that I priced myself well out of the market.
But that wouldn’t make me a victim …
… it would just mean that I was considerably out of touch with reality.
And in my experience, women with good attitudes and an understanding of realities were all able to find quite a decent new husband if they found themselves suddenly a divorcée and middle-aged. True, they all worried a lot about whether they would be able to find someone.
But the ones who were halfway pleasant to be around seemed to have no trouble in attracting a replacement. On the contrary, many of them ended up having their pick of several decent and eager suitors.
However, stories like that won’t sell newspapers and so they’re seldom written about.
“…
the large majority of divorce actions are initiated by the wife rather than by the husband
…”
Contrary to the typical “successful man trades his loyal wife in on a much younger trophy bride” stories, the large majority of divorce actions are initiated by the wife rather than by the husband. So if it really were true that it was women (of whatever age group) who suffered most in divorce, women wouldn’t be initiating divorces so eagerly.
Look closely and the partner who suffers most from divorce is more likely to be the middle-aged ex-husband, who will become much more impoverished (making it much harder for him to attract another wife) and to lose his kids as well.
The soon-to-be ex-wife is likely to receive money (often a lot of it in relative terms) and to keep the kids.
Who gets the better deal there?
Here’s a test: suppose you see a news story whereby one ex-spouse confronts and shoots the other ex-spouse with a gun (and then commits suicide) shortly after getting divorced. What would you guess is the gender of the shooter? Male? Or female?
In more than 90% of the times I’ve come across this scenario, it was the ex-husband who was so traumatized by his experiences that he decided that life was no longer worth living. I’m aware of only two instances where it was the ex-wife who did the honors.
The moral of the story (as I see it)? It can be relatively easy for rich and powerful men to recover from a divorce because they’ll still have a lot left (in terms of both fame and fortune). So for those marriages, the wife they divorce probably gets the worse deal (although getting a $50 million or $100 million settlement should go quite a way toward salving their pain).
But for the average guy and the average wife, everything I’ve seen indicates that the wives usually seem to handle it much better than the husbands.
Stay tuned,
-Mack Doppler
