I haven’t said it’s always the man’s fault but the truth is men ARE messaged that women are there for their pleasure and to take care of them because 50 years ago that was a highly mainstream belief — and it’s still heavily in the cultural subconscious. Evidence of this is that women still do the lion’s share of child, home, and elder care even when they work outside the home and even if they make more money. Men are absolutely not messaged that they need to be partnered. What are you even talking about? Nobody thinks twice about bachelors or divorced guys who are “playing the field” particularly if they had a “difficult” wife.
It takes two to keep a relationship healthy and happy but patriarchal dynamics that foster male entitlement do exist and are named most often as major reasons why women are asking for a divorce. Non marital break-ups tend to be 50/50 who initiates, even if they live together. Something about having a “wife” brings out that entitlement in a lot of men.
“These clinical observations are consistent with what the study’s lead author, Michael Rosenfeld, suggests: that women may be more likely to initiate divorces because the married women reported lower levels of relationship quality than married men. In contrast, women and men in non-marital relationships reported equal levels of relationship quality. Rosenfeld said his results support the feminist assertion that some women experience heterosexual marriage as oppressive or uncomfortable.
He adds, “I think that marriage as an institution has been a little bit slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality. Wives still take their husbands’ surnames, and are sometimes pressured to do so. Husbands still expect their wives to do the bulk of the housework and the bulk of the childcare. On the other hand, I think that non-marital relationships lack the historical baggage and expectations of marriage, which makes the non-marital relationships more flexible and therefore more adaptable to modern expectations, including women’s expectations for more gender equality.”
