This strikes me as taking a very complex issue with a lot of components and reducing it down to something simple because that feels easier to address, but I can't see how it would actually work. For example, as of now, most men benefit from a lot of unpaid labor from women, whether they work outside the home or not. Women who work full time outside the home still do the lion's share of home, child, and elder care, and those who earn more than their husbands actually do an even greater share.
This keeps women from being as available to pursue their careers because they can't put in the same hours as men who have a wife leaving at 5 to pick up the kids or who is there for them full-time as it is. It's been determined that a huge amount of the gender pay gap is actually a kind of motherhood penalty. This isn't necessarily a husband's fault - it's often a larger societal issue, but there are also plenty of men who think it they put in their 8-9 hours at the office, their work is done, where a full-time stay at home wife is never off the clock — something that is hardly equitable — to say nothing of the wife who puts in 8 hours and then comes home to a second shift of cooking, cleaning, and child care.
There have been various estimates over the years about what all the unpaid labor it takes to run a home and family is worth, but it's always around $120k-$130 per year. So how exactly is that going to work in a divorce where the result is "no different" than it was if the couple had stayed together. How does all that unpaid labor get compensated? As already noted, divorce places a lot of women into poverty. If both partners are going to keep the same sort of home and same standard of living, in many cases that is going to cost twice as much. Do you see what I'm saying about your quite noble desires being unworkable from a practical standpoint?
Long-term supposedly monogamous relationships face a lot of obstacles. One of these is that women get bored with the same old same old sex, which often takes place in a sort of unerotic environment and it kills their libido. They think they no longer like sex, but in truth they no longer like “that kind of sex.”
Then there are the issues with how what makes for good love for both partners is largely at odds with what makes for a good sex life, e.g., security and familiarity vs. excitement and novelty. Esther Perel talks about this in Mating in Captivity. “Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air.”
This is not to say that men are universally responsible for the breakdown in long-term relationships, but Rosenfeld wasn't wrong when he said that expectations in marriage don't seem to have caught up to the times in the way that they have in dating. Dating relationships break up 50-50, and one of the comments I got on my "She's Your Wife, Not Your Mom" story was that he did his share when they lived together but once they got married, he expected her to "be the wife." Research bears this out, that married women do more housework than those who are simply cohabitating. And, I get what you are saying about sometimes women being too perfectionist around the way chores are done - but in the end, women get judged more than men for how their home looks, so they have more pressure on them to have it appear a certain way. If a couple's house is "lacking" in some way, the woman is the one who will be judged for that. This is another example of how there's a lot of complexity and nuance to these issues and how larger societal dynamics need to also be considered if we are going to improve things for everyone.
For example, working moms need more support and a lot of countries offer that. The US is terrible on that front. Strict gender roles, which are better but still very much in affect particularly for men, need to ease up. Monogamous couples need more guidance about how to keep both good communication and "the spark" alive, etc., etc. They need to learn how to actually co-create their relationship instead of falling into outdated roles and expectations.
And, none of this above actually speaks to how and why you think that divorce currently favors women. But, as you said, I appreciate the chance to discuss and exchange views.
