Men Need to Hold On to This if They Want to Avoid Divorce
New research has pinpointed one surprising thing that’s likely to see couples heading for divorce court – and that’s men who don’t have a full-time job.
Harvard University sociology professor Alexandra Killewald studied 6,300 heterosexual couples and found that men who weren’t employed full-time were 33 percent more likely to divorce than the hubbies who did head off to work every day.
“Contemporary husbands face higher risk of divorce when they do not fulfill the stereotypical breadwinner role, by being employed full-time,” says Killewald. But it’s more complicated than just financial strains on the relationship.
The study, published in the American Sociological Review, did not address men who choose to stay home with the kids. The vast majority of men without a full-time job in the sample were involuntarily unemployed.
As part of the study, Killewald looked at employment status and willingness to do housework separate from financial issues to see which of these two factors was greater in divorce. Using census data, she predicted the wives’ economic dependence on their marriages and concluded that the couples’ incomes and the wives’ economic independence didn’t correlate with a higher risk of divorce.
However, it seems while women’s expectations for their careers have changed, the expectations for men’s have not. For couples married before 1975, the husband’s employment status barely affected their chances of divorce. In the decades since 1975, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the correlation between a husband’s job status and a couple’s risk of divorce.
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