In seven years he'll still be happy - but she'll want a divorce
Wives are becoming increasingly less tolerant of their husbands, a survey last week showed. So what's going wrong with their men? Alasdair Palmer finds out
ALAN JONES is, to use his word, "gobsmacked". Last week, his wife served him with a petition for divorce. "I can't understand it. I don't think we have a bad marriage. I mean, she seemed to be perfectly normal. We only made love two days ago. And now this."
Mr Jones' predicament is shared by an increasing number of men. Most divorces are now initiated by women, and moreover by women who are not in love with another man. They have not decided to leave because they want to be with someone else. They have decided to leave because they can no longer stand their husbands.
"A lot of men find that very hard to understand," says Susan Deas, a lawyer who specialises in divorce cases. "They think if they are having sex regularly with their wives, the marriage must be OK. They have no idea of the depth of resentment their wives feel for them, possibly because they don't really talk to them. They have missed all the hints and cues. So when the explosion comes, they are taken by surprise."
They certainly are. A lot of married men think they are happily married, and that their wives are just as content. But a lot of men are wrong. There is an ever-widening gap between the way husbands see marriage, and the way their wives do.
Research published last week shows that whereas nearly three quarters of men would marry their wives again, only half of women would choose to re-marry their husbands. The rest would either not marry at all, or look for someone else. That means there are several million doting husbands who are living in blissful - or perhaps painful - ignorance of the cruel truth: their wives don't love them.
"I don't think this is a particularly new phenomenon," says Rosalind Miles, a historian who has written several books chronicling the intensifying battle of the sexes. "For women, marital bliss has always been a relatively rare event. The difference now is that there is a way out.
"In the Middle Ages a woman could retire to a nunnery if she got fed up with her husband, but that was a desperate move, and you had to have a high degree of social status to make it.
"In the Victorian era, there were basically two options: you could go mad or you could become an invalid. Quite a lot of wives took permanently to their beds or were shut up in lunatic asylums. But many women were just waiting for their husbands to die. The prospect of becoming a widow was what kept many wives going.
"Of course, the liberalisation of the divorce laws has changed that. Now, instead of waiting for a dreadful husband to die off, you can divorce him."
Isn't that an excessively gloomy picture of the situation? "Women do not enter into marriage expecting disaster, or with a cynical, calculating assessment of their future. On the contrary, there is probably more dewey-eyed romance about marriage than there has ever been. And that is part of the problem," says Ms Miles. "In the past, women had very low expectations of marriage. They did not expect their men to be much use. They were brought up to focus their lives on husband and children, and not to think of themselves.
"Now that has changed. Women expect to be treated as equals by their husbands. They expect to be cherished and cared for. They are at the beginning, but then it tails off. And that's when the trouble starts."
So why do so many women today feel their marriages are not working? "The short answer is men," stresses Ms Miles. "Most married women now work outside the home. But they also do all the work inside it. Their husbands expect them to do most of the cooking, the cleaning, and caring for the children. Women feel they are being treated not as equal partners, but as domestic servants."
"It's a question of what the deal in marriage is," stresses Penny Mansfield, Director of the Charity One-plus-One, which conducts research into why marriages succeed or fail. "It used to be that a woman got status and economic security from marriage. Now, it is often easier for a woman to acquire status and economic security outside it.
"Women still want to get married - and are doing so in larger numbers than ever. It's just that they expect something different from a husband: not a meal ticket, but emotional warmth, reassurance, support, and help with housework."
One of the problems seems to be that, while women no longer see their role as supporting their husbands, men still see their function as providing financial resources, and not much else. They believe that if they are earning, then they have done their bit. They do not expect to have to do housework.
"A lot of men seem to think housework gets done by magic," says Ms Mansfield, "particularly after children arrive. A man may start by doing quite a bit, but that seems to drop off quickly. Even if she has a full time job, his wife ends up doing practically everything."
Ms Mansfield points to research which indicates that even in households where women work as many hours in their jobs as their husbands, they will - on average - do a further nine hours a week in cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. "It is hardly surprising that many women resent that."
The resentment builds up over years. Rosemary Carter, a lawyer who also acts a mediator for warring couples, says the most common complaint she hears from women about their husbands is that "he's not the man I married". By that they do not mean that he has grown fat, bald and ugly. They mean that whereas in the first year of marriage, he used to pull his weight around the house, he now "never picks up the Hoover, he doesn't think to clean the lavatory, and he always leaves it up to me to arrange baby-sitters".
Husbands seem often to fail to pick up on their wives' irritation. If they do react, it is often with a kind of mute resistance: not talking about it, and not doing anything about it either. Women get increasingly frustrated, but are reluctant to express it, perhaps because they do not want to be perceived as nagging. But the resentment builds up, until they decide they've had enough - and set about getting a divorce.
"The first thing they want to know," says Ms Carter, "is the financial consequences of divorce. Some will listen and then say: that will impose too much financial hardship on me and the children. I'll just have to stick it out." Others will accept a lower living standard just to be out of the house.
"Many women," notes Susan Deas, "feel that being on their own with their children is bound to be better than sticking with a husband who takes them for granted. If they're going to be alone, they would rather be alone independently than alone in a marriage. As one woman put it: 'I've got kids aged two and four. I don't need another one aged 44'."
Another common complaint is what women perceive as the sheer selfishness of their husbands. " 'He thinks all that matters is his job. He ignores me': that's something that comes up all the time," says Ms Carter. "Husbands appear to be very happy to receive domestic and emotional support from their wives, but many of them don't seem to know how to return it."
One indication of the fact that husbands get benefits from marriage that wives do not is that when men initiate divorce proceedings, they nearly always do it in order to go and live with another woman. They go straight from one marriage to another, or at least to sharing a household with the new woman in their lives. Men hardly ever leave their wives in order to go and live on their own.
"I have only ever had one male client who said he wanted a divorce so he could live on his own," says Susan Deas. "All the others had a lover already lined up."
Women, on the other hand, do not usually leave a marriage to go and live with another man. "That is hardly surprising when you consider the burdens that living with a man puts on a woman," says Penny Mansfield. Rosemary Carter agrees. "The only women who don't mind going straight from one marriage to another are those who don't have to work," she says. "Either the very rich, or the very poor - if you are on benefits, and have no prospect of a job, you have the time you need to devote your life to children."
The rest would rather be alone than have to deal with cooking, cleaning and generally looking after another man. "Men are so used to getting these benefits from a wife," says Penny Mansfield, "that they take them for granted. They think, perhaps subconsciously, that women are simply there to provide domestic labour and emotional support. They don't realise that their wives want the same from them."
"What is surprising, and in some ways depressing," says Rosemary Carter, "is that many husbands, when confronted by this, simply cannot recognise it as a problem. Sometimes, you would think husband and wife were living in different households - they have such a different view of their marriage."
So, men - if you want to stay married, start listening to your wife. And try picking up the Hoover more than once every six months.
