 I try to look at this strictly from the point of view of the system itself... what incentives are built into it, and how might we expect a rational actor to behave in such a system.
At one time there was a huge price to be paid for divorce. It was a social taboo, highly frowned upon by all. A divorced man could expect to be considered flawed in some way, perhaps unstable or unreliable, by prospective employers; a divorced woman could expect to be ostracized by her community, shunned by her friends. No one contemplated divorce except in the most extreme cases of dissatisfaction or abuse. Needless to say, the divorce rate was very low in that environment.
Over the past forty years or so, we have steadily reduced the price of divorce, to the point that there is little or no social stigma attached to it. We have also made divorces easier to get. In most states, "I don't like it here anymore" qualifies as grounds for divorce now. Well, not surprisingly, having reduced the price of something and increased its availability, we now have a lot more of it. This is totally independent of the particulars of any individual couple. We don't need to speculate on whether men or women, or both, are bigger jerks now than in the past, and we don't need to analyze this divorce or that one to understand the trend. Any time we reduce the price of anything, we get more of it.
Now we have gone beyond that. Having reduced the price of divorce to a fraction of what it was, we have also installed financial incentives for women to divorce their husbands, and we have pretty much eliminated the possibility that they risk losing custody of their children. So women not only see a near-zero price for divorce, with virtually no risk of losing their children, they also see a way to get paid for doing it. All this was done with the of best intentions, but it has created a system where marriage-and-divorce becomes a kind of financial gain enterprise, through which women -- but only women -- can obtain cars, real estate, and cash income.
We could describe this system to a Martian, and even the Martian could tell us that this system is going to produce a high divorce rate followed by increasing reluctance on the part of males to marry. We don't need to know anything about the particulars of the people involved.
For some reason we believe that handing out speeding tickets, and fining people for going 65 in a 35, reduces the number of people who speed. But then we act surprised when fining men for getting married causes fewer of them to want to get married. In the case of marriage, we act like men are supposed to be stupid enough to not know there might be a cop over the hill, or that going 65 in a 35 is so much fun that they should do it anyway. Most men don't need to get a ticket themselves to understand the principle involved here. If you get married, and it turns out there's a lawyer on the other side of the hill, you get fined tens of thousands of dollars and your kids are taken away from you. Well, don't do it, then. It's a simple message that even men can comprehend.
I don't understand why people seem bewildered by this, or seek to find character flaws in men to explain it. Men are reacting absolutely rationally to a system that not only punishes men severely, and at random, it even provides financial incentives to the women to initiate the process. The only sane response to such a system is to steer clear of it.
I think it is an absolute travesty that we have set up such a thing. We have created a system that destroys the ability of young people to have what we used to call "a life." No young man today can reasonably contemplate marriage and a family without accepting the fact that his partner will be able to destroy his life at her whim, at any point in their travels, for any reason or for no reason at all. It is literally a crap shoot whether he will be able to live in the same house with his own children. Surely there are substantial rewards should it all pan out, but a reasonable person has to weigh the risk of it turning out badly -- apparently a 50-50 chance. The penalties are now so high for men, and the odds of encountering them so likely, that the potential rewards are no longer worth the candle for an increasing number of men. This is reality, and trying to point fingers at men or calling them names will not change things. They are behaving in a perfectly rational manner, responding to a system of incentives and penalties that virtually screams, "don't do this if you're a man."
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