Deep Strength offered his own explanation on why young wives in the UK are divorcing in much lower numbers:
However, when you take into context women getting married closer to the wall — 26-27+ range on average — you get the women over the average of 29s and 30s where they’re not blowing up their marriages because they want children. It’s after they get their children that they start to blow up their marriages.
He brings up an excellent point. Women wanting to have it all have a delicate balancing act to perform, and this gets more difficult every year. Much of this comes from the ever increasing age of first marriage combined with the realities of fertility and the wall. A woman who marries in her late twenties or early thirties doesn’t have time on her side if she hopes to divorce and remarry. If she divorces without having children it isn’t a given that she will be able to remarry in time to have children with partner-for-life number two. Also, she may feel that it is classier to have at least two of her children by the same baby daddy, so this would mean remaining married to her starter husband long enough to have two children.
But it isn’t just having children that the woman attempting to have it all needs to consider when deciding how long to stay married to her starter husband. She also wants to maximize the cash and prizes she receives in the process. Having a child, or better yet two is extremely helpful here, but if she wants alimony depending on the state she may have to wait ten years to discover that she is unhappy. If she wants to be eligible for Social Security benefits based on her first husband’s income (should she not be able to remarry) ten years is the cutoff for that as well.
Waiting ten years to divorce her starter husband doesn’t give today’s have-it-aller much time to enjoy her divorce empowerment and then remarry. If she marries in her late twenties and waits ten years to divorce she will be in her late thirties before she can start sampling penises again. By then her chances to remarry have dropped dramatically, and they will continue to drop each year she fails to remarry*. The problem is worse than the remarriage stats would suggest though, because they don’t take into account the quality of her prospects for remarriage. She found her first husband when she was younger and didn’t have the baggage of another man’s children and a history of not keeping her sacred promise. She now has to sell an older baggage laden version of herself to a smaller pool of eligible men. Not only are single men her own age sought after by the newest crop of marriage delayers, but a large percentage of them earn nothing or next to nothing.
Even if a woman marries and divorces by her early twenties, remarriage will be far more difficult today than it would have been in the past. Remarriage rates for women 20-25 today are half of what they were twenty years ago*.
*See Fig 3 in this new NCFMR paper on remarriage rates. This breaks the age categories to much smaller ones than I was able to do here.
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