Why Do Women REALLY Divorce Men? (Why’s the Divorce Rate So High?)

Women initiate 69% of divorces. Among the most empowered (college-educated) women, it’s 90%. Why though are women who driving so much of modern divorce?

Commenting on my article about why women always seem to go for the wrong guys, Vince C. asks

Chase, overall I certainly agree with most of what you're saying here but I think there should be a follow up article to this.

Because I'm genuinely curious, why is the divorce rate hovers close to 50% if many girls believe they are choosing the right guy for themselves, later to find out that this was in fact not the case?

A reader named Montage replies to Vince, noting that

Back in the day, a researcher looked at the divorce rate, concluding it was actually around 33-35%. The 50% figure was supposedly inflated by "serial divorcees."

I'm not sure why you're exclusively blaming women, though. What about the guys who filed for divorce? Some of them assumed they had found "Ms. Right," only to end up wrong. Other men marry their first wife for pure economics. Once a dude's career has taken off, he drops her for a trophy wife. I remember some guy did exactly that. Once his first wife had helped him graduate from schools of both law & medicine, he ditched the poor woman. He's no longer with us, and she's doing life in prison.

Another issue you're overlooking is that women's market value is mostly attractiveness/youth. For that reason, many will marry out of a fear of ending up as a spinster/weirdo, or out of a fear of life on one income, not because they feel they've found somebody special.

We know divorce happens.

We know it doesn’t always happen.

In India in 2024 the divorce rate was 1%.

In the United States in 1924, 100 years ago, the divorce rate was 14.4%, which is about a quarter what it is today. The U.S. was already the world leader in divorce at this point (and had since 1916).

Yet if you go all the way back to 1867 in the United States, the earliest date we have reliable data for, the American divorce rate was just 3%, not very much higher than India’s in 2024.

You can see how divorce rates have changed over the years in the U.S.:

U.S. marriage & divorce rates, 1867-2010

Obviously, we are looking at something highly variable over time.

Women initiate 69% of divorces overall. However, among women with the greatest amount of personal liberty – that is, college-educated women – women initiate a jaw-dropping 90% of divorces.

If women are carefully selecting men for a lifelong commitment, why are they the ones who most often break that up?