It’s a well-known fact that women file for divorce far more often than men do. Ask anyone why they think this is, and you’ll likely hear one of two answers: either that men have far fewer reasons to leave their marriages than women do, or that women have far more. However, according to a 2022 review published in Current Opinion in Psychology, the explanation is significantly less simple than this.
The authors of the study suggest that, from an evolutionary standpoint, women are more likely to initiate divorce due to the fact that modern marriages are structured in ways that clash with the preferences they were evolutionarily shaped to value. In other words, many modern marriages function in ways that, by design, will likely leave women largely unfulfilled.
The researchers’ overarching argument is that women’s waning romantic and sexual interest in their partners can likely be traced back to their foremothers’ ancient preferences. Throughout evolution, women have been drawn to men with very specific traits: those who can provide resources, who possess desirable genetic traits and who act as reliable caregivers.
Yet there’s one surprisingly simple behavioral cue that can make men appear to fall short on all three of these counts: not helping out around the house.
When A Partner Starts To Feel Like A Child
The abovementioned review makes reference to a revered 2022 study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. By means of two large surveys — including a total of 1,073 women with husbands and children — it became clear that one of the strongest predictors of low sexual desire among women was imbalance.
More specifically, the researchers found that when women carried out the majority of the household labor, they reported significantly lower sexual desire for their partners.
Contrary to what many people might initially assume, this finding likely isn’t a matter of women being too busy or exhausted for sex. The research findings suggest that it’s likely due to the fact that when women carry the bulk of the household’s domestic responsibilities (which is, unfortunately, still the case in many modern marriages), they don’t see their partners as equals. Rather, they see them more so as dependents.
What’s important to note was that this perceived dependence wasn’t one of genuine need. Instead, the authors suggest that it stems from the husbands’ reliance on their wives for basic, everyday tasks that they should otherwise be perfectly capable of managing on their own. These include straightforward, everyday responsibilities like doing laundry, cooking, cleaning or remembering to buy groceries.
Notably, these are the very same tasks that, in a vast majority of nuclear families, overlap heavily with childcare.
This is precisely where the dynamic of a marriage can turn from unequal to infantilizing. The chores mentioned above are, typically, the kind of duties that flow in one direction: from caregiver to child. Specifically, what often defines them as acts of childcare is that there is no expectation of reciprocity.
That is, we don’t expect our children to clean up after us, to cook dinner for us or to notice when the trash needs to be taken out. This is because they are children; they are supposed to be dependent. But when this dynamic takes shape between two able-bodied adults, it can palpably change that way that one partner perceives the other. In time, they stop seeing the other as an equal, but instead as someone who needs constant supervision or prompting.
As the researchers explain, this perceived sense of caregiving is what mediated the link between the unequal division of domestic labor and low sexual desire. This is to say that the more a wife felt as though she was caring for her partner rather than living with him, the harder it became to feel sexually attracted to him.
This shift in perception is one that, from an evolutionary perspective, often proves to have detrimental effects on a marriage. Just as the abovementioned Current Opinion in Psychology study notes, women have historically been drawn to men who can provide resources, possess good genes and act as dependable caregivers.
But when a husband consistently leaves the household labor to his partner, he then begins to signal the opposite of all three of those traits. In other words, he starts to seem unreliable rather than resourceful, immature rather than capable and self-serving rather than nurturing.
In one fell swoop, a husband can stop seeming like a partner and start feeling like an extra child that needs to be cared for. And for just about any person alive, that shift will feel profoundly unsexy.
How Unequal Dynamics Are Enabled
Looking at imbalances like these from an outside perspective, it’s often all too easy for us to roll our eyes at these kinds of spouses, who are seemingly shocked when they’re served with divorce papers. After all, it seems almost audacious to say you were “blindsided” by a divorce when you’ve contributed so little to keeping the household running.
However, the pitiful reality is that, for many, the surprise is real. This is because most spouses — even ones in obviously unequal marriages — genuinely believe that they’re pulling their weight. In a widely acclaimed 1979 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, social psychologists Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly found that both husbands and wives dramatically overestimate how much they contribute to shared tasks.
Specifically, when Ross and Sicoly asked married couples to estimate what their share of household responsibilities was, their combined responses almost always added up to well over 100%.
To put this into perspective, imagine a marriage where, in reality, the husband completes about 30% of the total household labor: he cooks if it’s a barbecue, he takes out the trash and he does the school run once or twice a week. His wife, on the other hand, manages the remaining 70%: laundry, meal planning, cooking, cleaning, scheduling and the bulk of childcare.
If you asked both of these spouses to estimate their share, the husband might confidently say he does around 50%, while the wife might say she’s doing closer to 90%. On paper, their combined estimates now add up to 140%. Both spouses feel as though they’re contributing more than they actually are, but only one of them sees things as relatively equal. In both cases, everyone is wrong.
This is the result of a cognitive availability heuristic, known as the “egocentric bias,” that leads us to over-rely on our own perspective of reality. In turn, our brains make us acutely aware of exactly which tasks and contributions we were responsible for, but much less so of the ones that our partners consistently take care of.
This bias can be disastrous in the confines of a marriage, even more so if the marriage is objectively unequal. On one hand, this bias often leads the partner doing less to perceive themselves as doing plenty. On the other, the partner who is actually doing plenty perceives themselves as doing a ridiculous amount, if not inconceivable.
This discrepancy between perception and reality will, in many cases, lead to breakdowns in various areas of the marriage; the bedroom is typically just the first. The overburdened spouse will feel uninterested in the other, if not outright resentful. Yet the other may be confused as to why their spouse is withdrawing from them, as, in their eyes, the dynamic seems totally fair.
The downfall of an unequal marriage will rarely be one especially bad argument, nor one especially bad week. In most cases, it will be the slow but steady accumulation of inequity that, likely, one partner hasn’t even noticed yet. From the wife’s side, it feels like the inevitable conclusion of years of imbalance; from the husband’s, it feels like it came out of nowhere.
Are you feeling burnt out from carrying too much in your relationship? Take this science-backed test to learn more: Couple Burnout Measure