Tag Archives: Divorce

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Thoughts about my conversations with two Christian feminists

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I was reading some work by a Christian feminist this week. She was arguing that if only men were to help out their wives with housework, then marriages would be more stable. So often, society works very hard to give women what they say will make them happy. Then when women get what they asked for, it doesn’t make them happy. Is equal housework once of these cases?

Consider this New York Daily story about a Norwegian study that affirms traditional roles within the marriage.

Excerpt:

Couples who share housework duties run a higher risk of divorce than couples where the woman does most of the chores, a Norwegian study sure to get tongues wagging has shown.

The divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 per cent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work.

“The more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled Equality in the Home, said.

So here is a case where women say what they think they want. Then they get it. And then they don’t like the result.

Emotional intimacy

Another point made by the Christian feminist was that women only initiate 80% of divorces because men are terrible at emotional intimacy. The Christian feminist says that we just need to have churches teach men how to be more emotionally available. Men need to take the initiative to make marriages work for women.

Here’s conservative Andrew Klavan explaining that many women today are attracted to emotionally unavailable men, and that men adapt to this in order to get the girl:

I wanted to take a serious look at this situation and get at the reasons men such as Weiner behave in this grotesque way.

I blame women.  No, really.  Women — by which I mean each and every single member of the female gender — you know who you are — need look no further than themselves to explain why [Anthony] Weiner-types behave toward them in this fashion.   We men are always hearing complaints from women about how badly we treat them, what pigs we are, how pushy and abrasive…  on and on.  But what these same women conveniently fail to mention is that this stuff really works on them!

There are tons of studies about how women are attracted to the so-called “dark triad” character traits. Many women are attracted to emotionally unavailable men before marriage, but after marriage, most of them realize how terrible that is for marriage. They asked for something, got it, but then they don’t like what they got. Although they’ve vowed to love this (terrible) man through thick and thin, they just can’t do it, and they use no-fault divorce to eject him from the home.

So, I guess I would just ask this Christian feminist: do women have any responsibility to test men for intimacy ability before marriage? Do they have any responsibility to suppress their feelings in the moment, and choose what will work in the long run?

It seems to me that women need to take the initiative to evaluate men for the most important things that they want out of marriage. I agree that women want emotional intimacy. So they need to choose men who provide them with that. Men do not change. The man you marry will not change for you after you marry him. It seems to me that instead of telling bad men that they need to turn good after marriage, we should tell women to choose better.

Many women today spend an awful lot of their time looking into mystical nonsense: astrology, the law of attraction, manifesting, Disney princesses, happily ever after, Hallmark movies, etc. They have a deep intuition that the whole universe is set up for their benefit, and that the path they must choose in order to be happy is shown to them through their feelings. Maybe we should work on fixing that, rather than destroy the society (and children’s lives) with rampant no-fault divorce. Maybe the problem is that women need to be taught that when it comes to marriage, they need to treat it like a job interview. They need to evaluate men, and choose one with demonstrated ability for the job’s actual requirements.

Elsewhere in the Christian feminists writings, she says that men have 100% of the responsibility for marriage success. But none of the authority to lead. I just want men to understand that this is often how women see men. Women want to choose men based on how a man makes her feel. She will make a snap judgment about whether he is “The One”. She feels good when she makes decisions based on intuitions and first impressions. She has enormous confidence in the judgment of her intuitions. This is the man that The Universe has chosen to make her happy, and She doesn’t make mistakes. And if that man doesn’t make her happy, then she can divorce him. And all the Christian feminists will celebrate her decision. Does that sound like a good deal for men? In particular, does entering a situation like that free you up to focus on serving God? (2 Tim 2:4) Sounds to me like you would be skating on thin ice for the rest of your life. And for what? To please God? No, to make her happy.

Last month, another Christian feminist told me that “masculinity is when men use their physical strength to benefit women as protector and provider”. Again, this view that it is men’s job to make women happy is everywhere, and if men fail to make women happy, then that’s what divorce is for. There is no idea among Christian feminists that men are supposed to serve God first, and women are supposed to help them to serve God. One divorced Christian woman once told me “marriage is for women”. So just understand what you’re getting into, if you decide to get married.

I personally think that Christian men ought to focus on serving God, and stay far away from marriage. Even the most conservative Christian women have this view that men are there to serve them, and meet their needs, and make them happy. They call it “servant leadership”: men get all the responsibility with none of the authority. It’s a reversal of male headship, where the new God is the woman’s feelings. That sort of arrangement certainly isn’t going to allow a man to focus on serving God.

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New study: virgins have happiest marriages, more sex partners means more unhappiness

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Although we live in a culture that is dominated by the thoughts and opinions of secular leftists, science provides useful information for those who want defend Biblical morality. Consider the issue of sexuality and marriage. Secular leftists claim that sex outside of marriage is natural, and produces happiness. Bible believing Christians and Jews say chastity is best. Who is right?

Here is the latest study authored by Dr. Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociologist at the University of Utah. His previous book on relationships was published by Oxford University Press. In his analysis of the data, Wolfinger controlled for divorce rates, religiosity, and socioeconomic status.

Here’s the most important graph:

Study: virgins have the happiest marriages, more partners means less happiness
Study: virgins have the happiest marriages, more partners means less happiness

Other factors that increased marital happiness: having a 4-year college degree (5%), having a salary > 78K (5%), regular church attendance (6%). Notice that women are more dissatisfied with marriage (in general) than men are, and they tend to blame the spouse they freely chose for that unhappiness.

The Federalist also reported on previous research relevant to this study:

Psychologists Galena K. Rhoades and Scott M. Stanley found that women who have had sex with someone other than their husband report statistically significant drops in marital quality over those who don’t. A 2004 study by sociologist Jay Teachman showed that intimate premarital activities such as cohabitation and intercourse increased the rate of marital dissolution by anywhere between 28 and 109 percent, depending on the activity.

Wolfinger also noted in a previous study that only 5% of women were virgins when they married.

Wolfinger noted that a possible explanation for the link between promiscuity and unhappiness is that people look back on their past partners and compare their spouse unfavorably to them. This is especially the case with women. My concern about this is that feminism has taught women to try to increase their social standing by having hook-up sex with attractive bad boys. If those women ever marry, they do it when they are older, less fertile, and less attractive. The husband they eventually “settle” for will (in their minds) always compare unfavorably to the hot bad boys they had sex with when they were younger and prettier. This, I believe, is what leads to their unhappiness with the man they chose to marry.

More partners also means more marital instability

In a previous post, I blogged about several studies linking virginity to marital stability. Couples who don’t have sex before marriage, or even who delayed it, reported better communication, higher satisfaction, better quality sex, and a lower chance of divorce.

Men ought to be aware of this research when they are choosing a spouse. Women initiate 69% of divorces, and the most common reason given is “unhappiness”. Well, now we know what’s causing that unhappiness – a high number of sexual partners prior to marrying. Smart men should prefer a virgin, for the increased happiness and increased stability. A large number of past sexual partners teaches women that relationships are engines for them to be happy, not commitments that are permanent and exclusive. They’ll have internalized the view that relationships are not commitments to invest in self-sacrificially. The pattern will be: “if it doesn’t make me feel happy right now, then it should be ended”. It will be seen as the man’s fault that she is unhappy, even if the study I talked about above shows the real reason is her past promiscuity. Men who aren’t serious about evaluating the character of the women for the marriage enterprise are running the risk of divorce, it’s that simple.

The best way to make sure that you have a clear head when evaluating a woman is to stay sober, and keep her hands off of you. When a man refuses to let a woman cloud his judgment with sex, then she is forced to learn how to love him in marriage-oriented ways, e.g. – help him, support him, and submit to his leadership. Male chastity encourages women who have been influenced by feminism to abandon selfishness, fun-seeking, and thrill-seeking, so that they learn to care for others. Male chastity also helps a man to resist older women who chose bad boys in their teens and 20s and want to get married to a good provider in their 30s. The studies discussed above clearly show that such women are more likely to be unhappy, and their future marriages are more likely to be unstable. Avoid them. You don’t want to be in a marriage to someone who isn’t very good at it, because she never prepared herself for it.

News

New study: the majority (69%) of divorces are initiated by women

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Is it OK to tell women they are wrong?
Is this “I’ll do what I want” attitude compatible with life-long married love?

This new report from Live Science gives us some numbers about who initiates divorces most frequently.

It says:

Women are more likely than men to initiate divorce in the United States, but they are no more likely than men to initiate breakups in a dating relationship, a new study finds.

“The breakups of nonmarital heterosexual relationships in the U.S. are quite gender-neutral and fairly egalitarian,” study author Michael Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University, said in a statement. “This was a surprise because the only prior research that had been done on who wanted the breakup was research on marital divorces.”

Previous research had found that women are more likely to initiate divorce, at least in the United States, Europe and Australia. In the new study, Rosenfeld compared divorces to nonmarital breakups, in an effort to understand the driving forces behind each type of breakup.

To investigate, he looked at data from the 2009 to 2015 waves of How Couples Meet and Stay Together, a nationally representative survey spearheaded by Rosenfeld and his colleagues. The new study includes 2,262 adults, ages 19 to 64, who reported having opposite-sex partners in 2009. By 2015, 371 of the participants had broken up or gotten divorced.

Women initiated 69 percent of the 92 divorces, Rosenfeld found. But there was no statistically significant difference between women and men when it came to nonmarital breakups, regardless of whether they were living together, he said.

The Ruth Institute reports on a few studies:

Female unions seem to have the highest divorce rates, followed by male unions, followed by opposite sex unions.

“For Sweden, the divorce risk for partnerships of men is 50% higher than the risk for heterosexual marriages, and that the divorce risk for female partnerships is nearly double that for men.”

“For Norway, divorce risks are 77% higher in lesbian partnerships than in those of gay men.”  (The Norwegian data did not include a comparison with opposite sex couples.)

In California, the data is collected a little differently. The study looks at couples who describe themselves as partners, whether same sex or opposite sex. The study asks the question, how likely is it that these couples live in the same household five years later. Male couples were only 30% as likely, while female couples were less that 25% as likely, as heterosexual married couples, to be residing in the same household for five years.

It really seems as if there is something about women in particular that causes them to be unable to keep to commitments in their actions, despite what they might say with their words.

So I am seeing a couple of problems in young, unmarried women that might explain this.

Feminism is bad

First, there is the feminism. Feminism was the driving force behind no-fault divorce. Today, young unmarried women are being taught to view marriage as stifling to their freedom. So if they do get married, they are often resolved that marriage should not affect their freedom in any way. That is just not the way marriage works, though – both spouses need to be equally ready to have their freedom infringed upon by things that HAVE TO GET DONE. Lots of things that have to get done will not be fun, thrilling or amusing – and that’s why it’s good to be prepared to do them before you marry.

My friend Dina says that she only knows one happily married couple from among her friends. The most frequent case she sees is wife is working in order to pay for big house, two cars, etc. and wife is denying husband sex, which makes him disengage from the marriage. A working wife tends to not be as responsive to the needs of husband and kids as a non-working wife, probably in part due to work stress. There is an epidemic of sex-withholding by women, and it causes men to disengage from marriage because they feel unloved. Although women tend to rebel against the idea that the man’s bad behavior is their fault, and that there is a “contractual” nature to marriage, that is how marriage works. You cannot stay married, women, by just doing whatever you feel like, and NOT doing whatever you DON’T feel like. Men will disengage when their needs are not supplied, and that’s no fault of theirs. It’s your fault. Denying relationship obligations causes men to underperform.

Feminism is often linked closely to “independence”. There is a lot of confusion over what the word independence means among young, unmarried women. A man uses that word to mean “lack of financial dependence on parents, the state, etc. because of good decisions in education, career and finances”. But a woman means “not having to care about the needs of a man and the leadership of a man, or the needs of children while still getting what I want from men and children”. That attitude is not compatible with life-long married love.

Emotions are bad

Second, emotions. In my experience, young, unmarried women are less likely to have reasoned out their own life plan in a practical step-by-step manner. Instead, they tend to do whatever makes them feel good moment-by-moment without any realistic plan. One Christian woman was recently telling me how attracted she was to an atheist moral relativist who had been promiscuous from the age of 15. She explained that her emotions were kindled by his GQ looks, 6-pack abs, mysterious European accent, seductive manner and witty conversations. Although she is apparently a Christian, she doesn’t take Christianity seriously in her decisions about relationships and marriage.

Peer-approval and culture play a large part in determining what women think is attractive in a man, as well as their life goals, and women are driven by these cultural standards more than men who focus on honoring their commitments regardless of their emotions. In my experience, women struggle to make their day-to-day actions match their socially-acceptable goal of getting married “some day”. Marriage is for “some day” for today’s busy women, but fun and thrills is for today. “Live in the moment”, they often tell me. If you try to talk to them about roles and responsibilities in a marriage, they will withdraw and rebel. But marriage is about each spouse doing his or her job, and feeling content about what the couple is building together. You can’t make life-long married love from emotional craziness and pursuing fun and thrills with seductive promiscuous moral relativist atheists.

How to pick a woman who won’t divorce you

Young men, I advise you to choose wives who have had to do things that they did not feel like doing. That can involve things like getting a STEM degree, getting a job in STEM, moving out of her parents’ house, getting a “boring” job that helps her pay off her debts, keeping commitments when she doesn’t feel like it, and caring for other people and even animals.

Basically, the more the woman has ground down any narcissism and hedonism she may have, by having to do nasty calculus and horrid lab work, the better. The more accustomed she is to constraints, responsibilities, expectations and obligations, the less likely it is that she’ll divorce you for unhappiness. And all of this goes for men, as well. STEM degree, STEM job, save money, serve others, give to charity.

Marriage is not the time for people to be carried away by their emotions. It’s an enterprise, and it works when both people are rational, practical, hard-working and self-controlled.