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News

New study: switching male and female marriage roles makes both sexes unhappy

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Child grabs for his mom, who is leaving for work
Child grabs for his mom, who is leaving for work

Here’s a report on a new study from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

When females were the main breadwinner in the family, they were discovered to report more symptoms of depression.

However, the opposite effect was found in men: Their psychological well-being was highest when they were the primary wage-earners.

Researchers at the University of Illinois examined data on nearly 1,500 men and 1,800 women, aged between 52 and 60. Their well-being was evaluated through surveys.

The researchers first found that men’s well-being decreased once they had exited the workforce to become home-makers.

Meanwhile, the inverse was not so for women: Women’s psychological well-being was not affected by leaving their jobs to become stay-at-home mothers.

‘We observed a statistically significant and substantial difference in depressive symptoms between men and women in our study,’ says lead researcher Karen Kramer.

‘The results supported the overarching hypothesis: well-being was lower for mothers and fathers who violated gendered expectations about the division of paid labor, and higher for parents who conformed to these expectations.’

If you don’t like the UK Daily Mail, CNN reported on a similar study back in 2014.

Indeed. The trouble is this: who can afford to provide for a stay-at-home wife on one salary, in a country where 30% of your income is taxed, and many things (e.g. – health care, college tuition, etc.) are way more expensive because of socialist welfare state policies? We have a $20 trillion dollar debt, and taxes are only going to go higher, making it that much harder for a working man to provide for a family – no matter how diligent he is about getting STEM degree(s) and working full time, non-stop. Marriages where the woman stays home with the children are happiest for everyone, but thanks to the voting patterns of radical feminists, husbands have been replaced by government programs, and those cost taxpayer money. You can either have a big government welfare state or you can have a stay-at-home wife. You can’t have both.

I got a snarky comment on a post I wrote last week about how marriages where the husband does not work full-time are more likely to fail.

Here is the comment:

Well done.
I’ll now await your follow-up article on the divorce rate for couples where the wife works full-time outside of the home and how men should choose a woman who has demonstrated an ability to do marriage tasks – like taking care of the household full time, raising and nuturing children, being loving and supportive of a husband when times are tough (especially if, God forbid, he should ever find himself unemployed and thus no longer a provider, in which case most wives’ base and visceral impulse is to abandon him), not wanting “a career,” and not insisting that her husband waste all his earnings on fun and thrills for her.

Well, I’m blogging about it again today, but if the commenter were very clever, then he would have found this post from June of 2013 entitled “STUDY SHOWS THAT FEMALE-BREADWINNER MARRIAGES ARE LESS HAPPY AND LESS STABLE”.

Excerpt:

Given these findings, it isn’t surprising that when a wife earns more than her husband, the risk of divorce rises, too. To study this, the authors used a survey conducted in two waves, 1987-88 and 1992-93. (There were no more recent data available for this particular test.) Then they investigated the likelihood of a divorce in the five-year interval. For this sample, some 12 percent of all couples were divorced during this period — a sobering fact about the stability of marriages in general. But the divorce rate rose by half, to about 18 percent, for couples in which the wife earned more than the husband.

When I was a high school student, I can remember trying to decide between being an English teacher, being a prosecuting attorney, or being a software engineer. It was my Dad who pointed me towards software engineering. As an avid stock picker, my Dad was seeing tech stocks exploding in value, and he knew that I would be able to find work even if I was laid off during tough times. I am glad that I listened to his advice, although my career still has not been easy, which is why I saved money for the two times where I was laid off (both times my subsidiary was folded by the parent company!). My reason for going into a field where I could earn more money was because I wanted to get married, have 4 children, and “heal” the experience of being neglected by my mother (who stuck me in day care after 6 weeks and worked full-time until she retired) by watching her parent my kids as a stay-at-home mom. I knew enough to know that marriage works better when the man provides and the woman focuses on the children – at least until they are 6 years old. Since then, I’ve discovered homeschooling, and I would definitely have done that. It’s not that I am opposed to women working, it’s that I am opposed to children not being raised by their mother.

As I explained in my lengthy reply to the snarky commenter, it’s gotten much harder for men to be the sole provider, and have a stay at home wife and homeschooling mom:

Regarding tough times, I think that the situation for men right now is horrible with respect to marriage and children. $20 trillion debt and a generation of unskilled snowflake millenials voting for socialism in droves. I also think that co-ed schools where teachers and administrators are 80% females produce lousy outcomes for boys (read Christina Hoff Sommers’ “The War on Boys”, 2nd edition). Affirmative action in higher education and in the workplace for women doesn’t help men become providers, either. Men also pay the same premiums for health care as women, and yet they use far less health care: more tilting the field against men. And so on, don’t even get me started on divorce courts and child custody.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve blogged on studies about male and female roles in marriage. If you want to get good results from your marriage, you definitely want to follow the studies below.

Related posts

Polemics

Why does atheist historian Gerd Ludemann accept the post-mortem experiences of the risen Jesus?

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A conflict of worldviews
A conflict of worldviews

William Lane Craig explains why even atheist historians like Gerd Ludemann accept that the earliest followers of Jesus had experiences in which Jesus appeared to them as resurrected Lord.

Excerpt:

Fact #3: On multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead. This is a fact which is almost universally acknowledged among New Testament scholars, for the following reasons:

1. The list of eyewitnesses to Jesus’s resurrection appearances which is quoted by Paul in I Cor. 15. 5-7 guarantees that such appearances occurred.

2. The appearance traditions in the gospels provide multiple, independent attestation of such appearances.

With respect to the first supporting line of evidence, it is universally accepted on the basis of the early date of Paul’s tradition as well as the apostle’s personal acquaintance with many of the people listed that the disciples did experience postmortem appearances of Christ. Among the witnesses of the resurrection appearances were Peter, the immediate circle of the disciples known as “the Twelve,” a gathering of 500 Christian believers (many of whom Paul evidently knew, since he was aware that some had died by the time of his writing), Jesus’s younger brother James, and a wider group of apostles. “Finally,” says Paul, “as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me” (I Cor. 15.8).

The second supporting line of evidence appeals again to the criterion of multiple attestation. The Gospels independently attest to postmortem appearances of Jesus, even to some of the same appearances found in Paul’s list. Wolfgang Trilling explains,

From the list in I Cor. 15 the particular reports of the Gospels are now to be interpreted. Here may be of help what we said about Jesus’s miracles. It is impossible to ‘prove’ historically a particular miracle. But the totality of the miracle reports permits no reasonable doubt that Jesus in fact performed ‘miracles.’ That holds analogously for the appearance reports. It is not possible to secure historically the particular event. But the totality of the appearance reports permits no reasonable doubt that Jesus in fact bore witness to himself in such a way.38

The appearance to Peter is independently attested by Paul and Luke (I Cor. 15.5; Lk. 24.34), the appearance to the Twelve by Paul, Luke, and John (I Cor. 15.5; Lk. 24:36-43; Jn. 20.19-20), the appearance to the women disciples by Matthew and John (Mt. 28.9-10; Jn. 20.11-17), and appearances to the disciples in Galilee by Mark, Matthew, and John (Mk. 16.7; Mt. 28. 16-17; Jn. 21). Taken sequentially, the appearances follow the pattern of Jerusalem-Galilee-Jerusalem, matching the festival pilgrimages of the disciples as they returned to Galilee following the Passover/Feast of Unleavened Bread and traveled again to Jerusalem two months later for Pentecost.

Lüdemann himself concludes, “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’s death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”39 Thus, we are in basic agreement that following Jesus’s crucifixion various individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Christ alive from the dead. The real bone of contention will be how these experiences are best to be explained.

Triablogue notes that most historians accept these post-mortem experiences of the risen Jesus:

In their 2004 book, Gary Habermas and Michael Licona mention five facts accepted by the large majority of scholars:

1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
2. Jesus’ disciples believed that he rose and appeared to them.
3. The church persecutor Paul was suddenly changed.
4. The skeptic James, brother of Jesus, was suddenly changed.
5. The tomb was empty.

Habermas and Licona write:

“On the state of Resurrection studies today, I (Habermas) recently completed an overview of more than 1,400 sources on the resurrection of Jesus published since 1975. I studied and catalogued about 650 of these texts in English, German, and French. Some of the results of this study are certainly intriguing. For example, perhaps no fact is more widely recognized than that early Christian believers had real experiences that they thought were appearances of the risen Jesus. A critic may claim that what they saw were hallucinations or visions, but he does not deny that they actually experienced something….roughly 75 percent of scholars on the subject accept the empty tomb as a historical fact.” (The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications, 2004], pp. 60, 70)

Habermas and Licona explain that even “the majority of nonbelieving scholars” (p. 149) accept such facts, not just Christian scholars. And even many professing Christian scholars are Christian in name, but reject much of what Christians have traditionally believed. Skeptics sometimes suggest that a scholarly consensus on facts related to Jesus’ resurrection isn’t of much significance, because so many of the scholars are Christians, but traditional Christians make up only a small percentage of scholarship.

When talking about the appearances, the challenge is always to make the move from “thought they saw” to “they actually saw”. In chapter 6 of their introductory book on the resurrection of Jesus, “The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus“, Mike Licona and Gary Habermas give some reasons why the post-mortem appearances of Jesus were not hallucinations. First, they argue that hallucinations are had by individuals, not groups. Second, they argue that the hallucination hypothesis leaves the empty tomb unexplained. It also doesn’t explain the appearances to skeptical James and antagonistic Paul. Finally, the appearance narratives are too varied to be hallucinations, i.e. – individuals, groups, friends, enemies, different times and different places.

If you want to read a scholarly response to the hallucination hypothesis, it’s right in the article by Dr. Craig that I was quoting from above. He assesses the hallucination hypothesis as put forward by atheist scholar Gerd Ludemann against the standard criteria for judging multiple competing historical explanations. It’s too much to quote here, but click through and read it when you can. If you want to see a good summary of the arguments for the empty tomb, go right here.

See it used in a debate

You can see the arguments made and defended from criticism in this debate with the atheist scholar James Crossley.

This my favorite resurrection debate.

Commentary

Study: marriages where husband does not work full-time more likely to end in divorce

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Air Force TACPs confirm target locations with their map
Air Force TACPs confirm target locations with their map

This was reported in Family Studies.

Excerpt:

In a recent study published this July in American Sociological Review, Harvard sociology professor Alexandra Killewald, Ph.D., analyzed data on 6,309 heterosexual married couples from the 1968 to 2013 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). She looked specifically at the potential effects on marital stability of “spouses’ division of labor, overall financial resources, and wives’ economic prospects following divorce,” comparing couples married before 1975 to those married in 1975 or later (through 2011).

[…]Killewald found that for couples married in 1975 or later, marriages in which the husband was not employed full-time were one-third more likely to divorce. Specifically, a husband who was not employed full-time experienced a “3.3 percent predicted probability of divorce the following year, compared to 2.5 percent if he is employed full-time.”

[…]Killewald is certainly not the first to find an association between men’s employment and marital stability. A study conducted by three economists and published in 2015 found that “In couples where the wife earns more than the husband, the wife spends more time on household chores; moreover, those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce.”

And an earlier study by Liana C. Sayer, Paula England, Paul Allison and Nicole Kangas found that when a husband is “nonemployed” (defined as not working at all), both the husband and the wife are more likely to end a marriage. In an email interview with IFS, one of the study’s co-authors, New York University sociology professor Paula England, explained her findings.

“The innovation of our study was to look separately at what predicts a divorce wanted more by the woman versus a divorce wanted more by the man,” England wrote. “We found that a nonemployed man predicts either the woman leaving the man or the man leaving the woman.”

She continued, “Killewald’s data just show her if they got divorced, not who left. We found that women’s employment doesn’t make men leave more, and it only makes women leave more when they are unhappy in the marriage.”

People sometimes ask me why I have all these rules and best practices when it comes to relationships and marriage plans. You know: men must have STEM degrees, no sex before marriage, men have to approach women by speaking to fathers first, etc. Well, why have all these rules? Why not just do what feels good? Why not just do what my peers will approve of?

The answer is this: don’t get your ideas about relationships and marriage from your feelings, your peers or the culture. Think for yourself.

I didn’t get my idea of how courting and marriage works from a culture that dismisses all of the ancient wisdom about love and marriage in favor of the trends of a culture dominated by ideologies that emphasize pleasure over wisdom. The right way to learn about romance, love, marriage and parenting is to go the classics, and then to the scientific studies. We have to learn how the world really works, and abide by the best practices that we find in the classics and in the peer-reviewed publications. And we have to be willing to say no to feelings and friends and even family, when the classics and the peer-reviewed literature say something different. Peer-reviewed studies matter: we cannot escape them by feelings or by peer approval or by cultural trends.

The big problem with this Peter Pan, Disney princess view of relationships popular with women (Christian and non-Christian) is children. Children deserve to have parents who are wise and self-controlled, willing to do things the right way. You can’t break all the rules and then expect things to somehow magically work out because you feel that they will somehow. The rules are there for a reason. If a man cannot demonstrate that he is serious about the husband role by showing you a resume with 5 years of full-time private sector experience in a STEM or vocational job, and $50,000 net worth, then he’s not fit for the role of husband. Women need to rule out every man who has not demonstrated his ability as a provider and saver, then choose from the ones who are left by evaluating for other criteria. Feelings of attraction based on “hot” appearance, non-judgmentalism, liberal politics and lack of leadership, (which often goes along with lack of planning), are not signs that a man is qualified for husband and father roles. Women today have things exactly backwards when choosing men. If your goal is marriage, choose a man who has demonstrated ability to do marriage tasks – like working full time and not wasting all his earnings on fun and thrills.