# A manly divorce  ## About - Author: Joshua Coleman - Title: A manly divorce - Tags: #articles - URL: https://aeon.co/essays/women-write-about-their-divorce-experience-why-dont-more-men?utm_source=rss-feed ## Highlights The past few decades witnessed a flood of personal essays and memoirs about divorce. Perhaps the most successful was *Eat, Pray, Love* (2006) by Elizabeth Gilbert, which has sold more than 12 million copies to date, and became a movie starring Julia Roberts. In her breakaway bestseller, Gilbert describes her ‘devastating, interminable divorce’ and the search for fulfilment that followed it. The book’s popularity is not only due to Gilbert being a gifted writer, but also her ability to capture a cultural perception of marriage as an institution often antithetical to personal growth and self-development. What’s more, the book is just one of dozens tracking the same territory: the freedom and self-exploration that comes of departing from past strictures and setting a new course. --- Women are also more likely to carry the emotional burdens of their extended network of family and friends – to keep track of birthdays, gifts and crises – and to respond with cards, calls and outreach; a task sociologists [refer](https://www.jstor.org/stable/353341) to as ‘kinkeeping’. While this orientation has the potential to make for deep and lasting relationships with friends or family, the sociologists Ronald Kessler and Jane Mcleod [observe](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1985-25457-001) that this effort takes an emotional toll when it involves helping loved ones manage stressful life events. In those cases, what they call a ‘cost of caring’ leaves women more vulnerable to depression, anxiety and burnout, a reality from which men are often insulated. --- Many men feel rudderless today since the role of provider and protector is no longer a pathway to identity. Men who lack the ability to provide, protect or significantly contribute to the family are psychologically the least likely to be able to offer their wives the kind of vulnerable, emotional and collaborative support that predicts today’s stable marriages. --- Another reason men – at least those in heterosexual marriages – sometimes do worse after divorce is that, for a significant percentage, their wives are their best friend, if not their only friend. Women commonly [have](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35856404/) much more extensive social networks, which may explain why they’re more likely to show resilience post-divorce, even if they’re often more at [risk](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/gray-divorce-can-be-financially-devastating-especially-for-women-11659983537) financially. Friendship is important and [carries](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/friendships/art-20044860) a whole host of psychological and health benefits. My wife calls her closest friends her ‘sister wives’. I like the double helix of the term, the way it encircles them as siblings and spouses, where platonic rather than romantic love is the bond. She talks to them often, sometimes daily. I like talking to my wife too, but not all of the time, and sometimes not as much as she wants. She accepts that we have temperamentally different inclinations towards conversation. And her acceptance of that disparity allows me to feel comfortable expressing vulnerability in ways that I would likely avoid under less favourable marital conditions. --- Some of these differences begin in childhood. Men are sometimes less fluent with feelings in adulthood, in part because parents, even parents today, are more likely to use emotion words with girls than they are with boys. This may also occur because girls begin talking at a younger age and remain more verbal than boys throughout their lives. The psychology professor Thomas Joiner found that, overall, boys are more secretive with their parents than are girls, and less responsive to and inclusive of their mothers. ‘The fact that, when the genders are combined into one group, gender rises to the top as a predictor of speech frequency, even beyond a personality characteristic like expressivity, shows its fundamental importance,’ Joiner [writes](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780230341111/lonelyatthetop) in *Lonely at the Top: The High Cost of Men’s Success* (2011). ‘Speech frequency is of obvious importance to interpersonal exchange; indeed, it can be viewed as its currency … Talk can be viewed as tiny stitches in a social fabric; the more stitches, the more varied and durable the fabric.’ Men have fewer friends, fewer sources of support, and are far less likely to reach out for help. This means that, when they fall, there’s often no one there to catch them. Worse, they often won’t let anyone know that they’re falling. --- As we therapists sometimes advise: ‘Before you say you don’t feel heard, consider how well you listen.’ --- While women can’t be described as liking conflict, some report that they see it as affirming when their husbands complain, since at least it shows he’s thinking about the relationship. Meanwhile, men often experience their wives’ complaints as a failure in their role as men or partners. ---