Comment by ximeng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ximeng | Hacker News Reader

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Suppose a guy and a girl married are both 5/10 in happiness, and that if they divorce they will be 2/10 in happiness for five years, then will recover.

Scenario 1

The woman and the man expect their happiness in marriage to stay around 5/10.

After five years of divorce they have recovered a bit, but the woman recovers more and is now 6/10 but the man is 4/10.

Scenario 2

An alternative is that even though they are both 5/10 in happiness to start with, the woman's expected future happiness in the marriage after five years is only 3/10 while the man's is still 5/10.

Suppose they divorce and both recover the same to 4/10 after five years.

Analysis

In both scenarios after five years the woman will be happier if she divorces, and it may make sense for her to file for divorce depending on her risk tolerance.

Woman filing for divorce more could be evidence for scenario 1, which is my interpretation of your post. It could also be evidence for scenario 2, which is incompatible with your interpretation. It is not so simple to say that more filing is evidence for a better recovery for women.

> Woman filing for divorce more could be evidence for scenario 1, which is my interpretation of your post.

This is not what I intended. I was just trying to counter the suggestion by me_im_counting that men are likely to do better following divorce because of reasons like (according to him) men find it easier to remarry, women are more likely to keep the kids, and men divorce in response to cancer. All of those, as explanations, are in tension with the fact that men are less likely to be initiating divorce.

So following a divorce there are a number of factors that affect people's long term happiness: possibility of remarrying, quality of time spent to kids, amount of income lost due to childcare and amount of income paid to ex-spouse, and so on.

We can assume overall these tend to impact men and women differently, with for example women tending to get more access to kids but losing income as they spend time on childcare, and men tending to pay more to their ex-wives and losing time with the kids.

You argue that women gain more from divorce than men overall as women are the ones who file for divorce in the majority of cases.

Let's accept for the sake of argument that women do relatively better out of divorces all things considered. The explanation for this could be good post-divorce outcomes for women, which are the factors above such as ease of remarrying or custody. This is what I see as the core of your argument.

An alternative explanation might be that in a bad marriage, women are in a particularly vulnerable position relative to men. In that case even with worse outcomes from divorce for women, it might still make sense for women to file for divorce more often.

I think it would be hard to find convincing evidence either way. But it's plausible the tension may just be apparent and there is another explanation.

> In that case even with worse outcomes from divorce for women, it might still make sense for women to file for divorce more often.

I don't understand. If bad marriages effect women more often then men, then women do better from divorce. The divorce initiation data doesn't tell us who's happier overall (insofar as such interpersonal utility comparisons even make sense), and I didn't make a claim about this. That data point only tell us who expects to benefit from divorce relative to where they are.

I think you're arguing against a position I don't have.

Agreed on the data point likely showing a greater expected benefit relative to where they are.

It wouldn't exactly show that women "recover better" versus men, which was your original wording, but that is not perhaps the most important point - I'm more trying to tease out nuance than argue against you.

One factor confusing the issue is that a number of reasons mentioned in the thread, such as cancer, remarriage, and access to children, are not particularly relevant to your argument.

The original post of this thread said divorce was lose-lose and that men are the biggest losers. My point, perhaps clumsily made, was that it is possible that some men take advantage of a relatively strong position in a bad marriage. So even though they lose from the divorce itself more, the increased initiation from women may partly represent a relative weakness within the marriage leading to women losing more in a bad marriage prior to initiating divorce (and men gambling that they won't divorce due to the costs involved).

That still feels clumsily expressed, but I hope you can understand where I'm coming from. Again it's an attempt to add a little more nuance to the overall analysis here.

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