In a population of 325 million with more than 60 million married couples, there will always be anomalies. I think most people on here are discussing frequent events. It is quite frequent for the amount of sex the wife gives the husband post marriage drops significantly from pre-marriage. It is not that common for a man to cut-off his wife from sex (in fact, I’d argue that is extremely rare) unless the wife went from like 125lbs pre-marriage to like > 300 lbs over the next few years. Yes, it happens, again the law of large #s - but that is not even remotely close to normal while the other is probably > 90% of the time (even if only slightly less)
I should have learned by now that there can be no reasoning with male marriage martyrs on FR that bad divorce outcomes also happen to a sizeable enough number of women to blunt the idea that women are the evil sex when it comes to marriage, sex and divorce.
For instance, the stat that women file for divorce 75% of the time reveals nothing on its face. It may be that more men than women are content to have a girlfriend or a drug habit and still think they can stay married, but more women find this intolerable — just as men would if women were the larger proportion of habitual cheaters or substance abusers, but so far they’re not. The millenials may change all this; but my point is not to win an argument here with statistics, many of which are interpreted in ways that manipulate or fail to illuminate the deeper circumstances.
My overall point is that divorce is a nasty business and not all the bad outcomes are attributable to one sex. Both sexes make critical mistakes in setting up and participating in marriages.
We inherited Christian values and time-honored courtship rituals from England when the country was founded, and did not stray far from them until the 1960s and the so-called Sexual Revolution and feminist revolution, which are components of the worldwide atheist/communist revolution underway for the past 100 years. Those rituals differed only slightly from one economic bracket to another.
What is different post-60s is the legalized practice of casual sexual involvement that many participants then try to morph into a longer-term commitment or marriage, often with a period of cohabitation in between. This pattern is different than past generations’ courtship rituals in which birth control was not freely available or even legal in many states. Vrginity was not merely an expectation but a test of maturity based on fear of social disgrace. The environment pre-60s was still heavily influenced by religious morality and many economic and family-oriented social expectations. Uncommitted sex and extramarital sex were social evils, not just personal failiings.
I would also like to take issue with your characterization that marital sex is something the wife “gives” to the husband. It should be a mutual sharing, not a “giving” or a “taking.” Sex is used as a weapon by women perhaps more frequently; men use other weapons, such as lack of cooperation, verbal abuse directed at a woman’s self-confidence, etc. Marriage is supposed to be a two-way thing in which, ideally, both people are under the leadership of God and strive to honor His creation. The gift of sex is given by Him to both partners.