Reasons for Divorce

Bryan Caplan categorizes the reasons people get divorced.  This is an interesting piece for divorced people.  They can determine which category of reason they fit into.  It’s interesting for unhappily married people.  They can use it as a tool to analyze their marriage.  And it’s also a bit useful to single people.  They can use it to figure out whether they want to marry the person they’re dating. 

For those of you who aren’t married and aren’t dating anyone, take a look at the rest of this blog.  There’s plenty of material on dating. 

1. Initial mismatch. Some divorces arise because they were a bad idea from the start. If people only stay married for six months, they were probably incompatible all along.

2. Emergent mismatch - or in plain English, “We grew apart.” Some divorces arise because a marriage was a good idea for a while, but eventually ceased to be in the interests of either party.

3. Defection due to expected divergence in mate value. As evolutionary psychologists will tell you, female mate value peaks and starts to decline at a much earlier age than male mate value: It’s a lot easier for a 45-year-old man to remarry than a 45-year-old woman. This creates a big incentive for men to promise lifetime fidelity, then jump ship.

4. Defection due to unexpected non-culpable divergence in mate value. Remember the part of the contract that says “for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health”? When one partner experiences an unexpected rise in mate value (e.g. one becomes a successful novelist) or experiences an unexpected fall (e.g. develops a horrible disease), one of the parties has a temptation to back out - and some do.

5. Punishment for clear-cut breach of contract. Adultery’s the obvious example, but I’m sure you can think of more.

6. Punishment for unexpected and culpable decline in mate value - or in plain English, “You let yourself go!” The marriage contract may not explicitly say that you can’t become a bum or morbidly obese or perpetually bitter. But you’ve heard about incomplete contracts, right? When one party falls far short of expected mate value due to deliberate action or inaction, divorce is not only likely, but easy for neutral outside observers to understand.

(Just to make a men’s rights aside, it strikes me that people are a lot more forgiving when a women divorces her husband for becoming a bum than when a man divorces his wife for gaining a hundred pounds. When I see a man whose wife has let herself go, I often think “Poor guy - how could she do this to him?!”)

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/03/the_root_causes.html

I’ll focus on number six: unexpected and culpable (blameworthy) decline in mate value.  It always amazes me when people get married, then completely let themselves go, or become consistently nasty to their spouses, etc., and are shocked when their spouse considers divorce.

When you get married you have a number of obligations.  I like Bryan’s examples: you should avoid being perpetually bitter and becoming morbidly obese.  And you should do your part to support the family.

He is spot on when he remarks that most people are more understanding when a wife divorces her husband for becoming a bum than they are when a husband divorces his wife for becoming hugely obese.  If you doubt this, gently raise the topic with your married friends.  Very gently. 

Lots of people will respond that the guy married his wife for better or worse.  But it seems that each spouse owes the other a fair degree of effort not to let themselves go.  And if they do let themselves go, they should bear quite a bit of the blame when their spouse files for divorce.

Why Most Married Women in NYC Don’t Work

I came across an interesting analysis entitled “Why Don’t Married Women in New York Work”.  New York City was the only city in the US in which most married women didn’t hold down jobs. 

If you’re a married woman living in the New York City area, there’s a better than 50 percent chance that you don’t work, according to a recent analysis of Census data by economists affiliated with the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

More specifically, only 49 percent of white high school-educated married women in their prime working ages were holding down jobs in the New York area as of the 2000 Census. To put that in perspective, there are roughly 2 million woman over 15-years-old who are married in the New York area.

The national average for this particular demographic is 67 percent. At the other end of the spectrum is Minneapolis where almost 80 percent of these married women are employed — that’s larger than the percentage of working men aged 25 and older in the U.S.

http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/odd-numbers/2008/05/08/why-dont-married-women-in-new-york-work

Hat tip: www.marginalrevolution.com

The fascinating question is why.  The author suggests several possibilities.  First, traffic congestion.  If you click on the link above to see the full article you will find a list of cities with the percentages of married women who work.  Almost all of them are cities with famously bad traffic.  The explanation would be it’s more time-consuming and stressful to face rush-hour traffic, so more married women decide not to work. 

This sounds plausible, but I’m not convinced.  I suspect there has to be more to the explanation than just bad traffic.  Another suggestion made is there are lots of well-off guys who live in NYC, so their wives can afford not to work.  That’s probably a good part of the explanation.  But I’m curious why there is no great correlation between income and non-working wives in all the other cities. 

Any thoughts?