59 Women Share The Moment They Realized Loving Their Husband Wasn’t Enough To Stay

Until 1970, a woman who wanted out of her marriage had to prove her husband had done something awful. In most US states, divorce required legal grounds, meaning a judge had to agree that someone was at fault, usually because of adultery or cruelty.

California ended that with what is widely seen as the country's first true no-fault divorce law, which took effect in January 1970 under Governor Ronald Reagan. The other states followed over the next four decades, and New York was the last in 2010. Today "we want different things" is enough to end a marriage anywhere in the country, and the women in this thread still came with receipts.

And the numbers say those receipts mostly belong to wives. Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford, analyzed a national survey of couples and found that women started 69% of divorces among heterosexual marriages. Unmarried couples ended their relationships at about the same rate as each other, so the gap only appeared once a ring was involved. Rosenfeld's reading was that marriage still tends to work out better for husbands than for wives, which gives wives more reason to walk.

Researchers at the University of Denver asked divorced Americans to name the reasons their marriages ended. Roughly three quarters pointed to a lack of commitment, and more than half named too much conflict or infidelity. About one in four cited domestic violence. Most people gave several reasons at once, so a long list of smaller problems usually sits behind the one dramatic event that gets retold at dinner parties.

Money is a repeat offender. Jeffrey Dew, a family researcher at Utah State University, found in a 2012 study that couples who argued about finances weekly were over 30% more likely to divorce than couples who argued about it a few times a month.

Then there is financial infidelity, the term for secret accounts, hidden debt, and purchases nobody was told about. Surveys from the National Endowment for Financial Education suggest roughly four in ten adults who share finances with a partner have kept some kind of money secret. A husband who quietly drains the joint account is doing something very common, and very expensive.

The daily workload is another source of friction. In 1989 sociologist Arlie Hochschild published The Second Shift, based on years spent observing working couples. She calculated that women with full-time jobs did about an extra month of 24-hour days of housework and childcare every year compared with their husbands. Plenty of wives in threads like this one describe the same arrangement: two people with jobs, and only one of them managing the household. The husband usually considers this fine because he has never had to count the hours.

Communication breakdowns follow a similar pattern. John Gottman, the researcher famous for predicting divorce from couples' arguments, reports that about 85% of stonewallers are men. Stonewalling means shutting down mid-argument by going silent, leaving the room, or answering in grunts. Gottman's lab measured heart rates and found that stonewallers are often overwhelmed, with pulses above 100 beats per minute, and shutting down is their attempt to calm down. That explains the behavior, but it does nothing for the wife still standing in the kitchen waiting for an answer.