Men are more likely to leave ill wives. Women are more likely to leave unemployed husbands. Which, if any, is more f-ed up?

buartha · 2019-09-26T19:30:18+00:00

My instincts say it's worse to leave a sick spouse, but there are narratives for either situation that could make them more or less understandable. I've given some extreme examples of both below to illustrate, but obviously in real life it's much less black and white and more down to personal values.

Job loss

1/ husband lost his job a month ago due to company shut down, has been looking for work ever since, is applying to roles both in his field and more easily attainable jobs out of it and is spending his free time making your life easier (i.e. if you still work he's taken over the bulk of the households chores)

2/ husband lost his job 6 months ago due to punching his boss and you suspect that when you do nag him enough to apply for a job he's only applying to things he's under qualified for. He gets angry when you bring up financial stresses and doesn't help more with housework than he did before. This is not the first time something like this has happened.

Sickness

1/ wife is ill, is complying with her treatments and/or rehab and tries her best to help you out when she can, and if she can't physically help she still expresses her love and support for you. She isn't leaning 100% on you for support and tries avoid giving you caregiver's fatigue by spreading her emotional support needs across friends and family.

2/ wife is not complying with treatment/ rehab and this is having an active effect on her disease progression. She refuses to comply properly no matter how much you beg her. She refuses to speak to anyone else and takes her pain out on you by saying that you're lazy, don't help and that she'd be better off without you.

Obviously no situation is as clear cut as any of those above, but it should show that these things are so situationally dependent that there's no clear way to make a judgement without the specific facts.

Atlas_B_Shruggin · 2019-09-26T16:22:11+00:00

what must it be like to have idealist and fantasy world conceptions of reality to begin with, is my q

SunflowerBurst · 2019-09-26T16:53:44+00:00

It’s worse for anyone to leave a sick spouse. They are weak and most need help and leaving because they are not as fun or sexy says you never cared to begin with. I’ve seen women do this to men too, and it was despicable. so I’m not about the sex bias here. A sick person can try their hardest and that’s all they can do. As for unemployed, just leaving for one job loss is pretty bad. Chronic unemployment with no effort to change, when the other spouse didn’t want to be a breadwinner, is something else. Unless they want to be the sole provider which is fine.

Sadly the exception is sickness brought on by weight or addiction or any self-imposed cause, IF the person refuses to stop doing the destructive things for a long period of time and won’t get better. That’s not as bad to leave.

wtknight · 2019-09-26T16:40:41+00:00

Probably leaving ill wives. It’s less fucked up to leave a fat wife than an ill wife. With unemployment much of the time she leaves him because he loses motivation and ambition, but not always, of course.

Niki_Biryani · 2019-09-26T19:14:02+00:00

Just some insight into the first study and what I read from it:

"While the few clinical studies finding gender differences in the impact of illness on divorce risk are intriguing, these results have not been replicated in large social surveys or across an array of illnesses."
"Our finding that cancer onset was not associated with divorce is in contrast to prior clinical studies which found elevated divorce risks for reproductive cancers"

There were so many things contradictory and so many assumptions in this study so I looked up where it is published. It is published in "Journal of health and social behavior". It has an impact factor of only 2.6. I am sorry to say, but that is extremely low for a health sciences journal. I would take everything they publish with a grain of salt. Not to mention, they don't provide enough evidence for the conclusion they come up with.

Orange_Paisley · 2019-09-26T16:32:25+00:00

Men leaving ill wives is more f'd up. A sick wife can't help being sick. An unemployed husband can make an effort to get a job. I wouldn't be with a man who expected me to support him while he sat on his ass and made no effort to remedy his situation. That said, my partner was very ill most of last year and I supported him because he couldn't help being sick.

Aaren_Augustine · 2019-09-26T17:03:21+00:00

My mother bolted on my father when he was forced to retire. He'd broken his spine in the Army and that fix action had deteriorated enough that he nearly died. Like pick line punched into his armpit so medicine could be dripped straight over his heart kind of pain.

My FIL didn't bolt when my MIL was dying of cancer. Right there to the end.

I didn't leave when my wife got a double mastectomy. Med schedule, draining lines, pulling out spider morphine robots out of her back, reconstructive surgeries...crazy shit.

Shit people will bail when it gets too hard. Weak people will scatter when faced with difficult times.

My conclusion: humans are innately users, and what makes humans pitiable monsters isn't the fact that we are users, but rather the fact that we all try so very hard to pretend otherwise!

Everyone has a plan until they get knocked in the face. Not everyone will cower when this happens.

ConcreteAngel708 · 2019-09-26T16:46:50+00:00

Context and circumstance matter. Ultimately I think it is communication that drives a woman to leave. It is not the employment itself. I could get a job myself, I get help with his search, I could do a lot to help but when a man shuts down, doesn't tell me what the plan is or what part of the future I am, perhaps starts drinking, after time, the best choice is to leave.

I don't understand leaving a sick spouse for either gender so I don't have any thoughts on that.

NockerJoe · 2019-09-26T16:21:00+00:00

I think steps 2 and 3 show a fundamental difference in the thought process and assumptions. Men assume their women will be slobby and terrible and get sick as a result. Women assume their men are losers and fail to find a job as a result.

Nobody is really aknowledging that someone can be top of their game and fail, or someone at the bottom can get to the top of their game with a bit of faith and loyalty.

LifterofThings · 2019-09-26T16:24:49+00:00

The other "side" is always worse. lol.

sadomasochrist · 2019-09-26T17:17:13+00:00

Does this illness take good sex off the table? Did they delineate that?

poppy_blu · 2019-09-27T00:48:43+00:00

Only on PPD.

Anecdotal but I suspect that nearly all cases most people leaving a spouse supposedly because they got sick, fat or broke are really leaving for other reasons.

A man who truly loves his wife isn’t bouncing because she gained weight. He might be bouncing because she’s become lazy and combative, because she’s refusing sex, because he’s he doesn’t love her anymore, etc.

A woman who truly loves her husband isn’t leaving because he got fire or laid off. She may be leaving because he’s become defeated and lazy, because he’s taking his lack of a job out on her, because he’s sitting around the house all day, because she no longer loves him, etc.

For a group who pretends to be intellectuals and science experts, the inability of people on this sub to analyze a simple study and understand when the study authors are claiming a causal relationship and when they’re not is downright hilarious.

This fucking place...

AI_WAIFU · 2019-09-28T14:47:59+00:00

Right now, leaving during illness is worse. As technology improves and unemployment becomes more common than illness, both due to medical technology and automation, that will flip. It becomes far more reasonable to leave someone in a 1/1000 event than a 1/10 event.

abaxeron · 2019-09-26T19:30:00+00:00

Second link doesn't provide coefficients. It would be easier to just compare two numbers.

Wives are the primary, first-order heirs of their spouses' assets. They are the only people who can contest inheritance rights of children on equal terms. I see what you're trying to do here, but what we're having is situation 1 showing that women treat men as their meal tickets, and situation 2 showing that women treat men as their meal tickets.

The first study also shows that in the sample, a marriage was 4 times (2 to 12 times depending on wave) more likely to end in widowhood than in divorce.

Finally, women in the US have been initiating the majority of divorces at least since year 1867.

sparksjoy · 2019-09-26T16:25:13+00:00

For a man, not being employed not only increases the chances that his wife will initiate divorce, but also that he will be the one who opts to leave. Even men who are relatively happy in their marriages are more likely to leave if they are not employed, the research found.

Wait what? Can someone explain this please?

TheJim66 · 2019-09-26T16:39:09+00:00

I'm quite convinced that the answer to men leaving their wives more often when sick is that women stay to collect life insurance.

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Bntt89 · 2019-09-26T17:18:00+00:00

They are both fucked up stop trying to start a gender war lol. You need to be completely unbiased to truly answer this men and women wont be unbiased in this.

Shadow_Of_ · 2019-09-26T19:27:07+00:00

Both are equally bad

goneaway2thewind · 2019-09-26T20:54:50+00:00

Too many of you are looking at this from a top down perspective. We shouldn't look at what people do and make conclusions, we should analyze why they do it to get too the root.

Firstly, most marriages fail anyway. I think it's safe to say that's its at least a coin flip success rate based off of former statistics people posted here.

I'll be honest, most people that I know who are in relationships anyway are either secretly miserable or perpetually furious with their spouse.

So I think the reason we see these statistics are that these scenarios are the deal breaker for each gender after have had been in a bad relationship already. Because the truth is, women don't immediately up and leave when guys are between jobs and guys wouldn't just abandon their wife has to get a surgery. If these couples were in healthy relationships neither would happen because their love would transcend those tribulations.

Many of you have got it down in that, no sex can be a deal breaker for guys and no provisions can be a deal breaker for ladies. But usually this happens after a period of many other unsettled issues that make them incompatible. Bad relationship + no sex = Guy dips : Bad relationship + no financial security = lady dips.

If you'd leave your spouse for either of these reasons, you shouldn't be with them in the first place.

SpookyQueenofCats · 2019-09-26T20:57:48+00:00

It's worse to leave someone who is sick. You can't help being sick, but you CAN help being a deadbeat with no job.

madmadG · 2019-09-26T21:10:58+00:00

I don’t think it’s productive to debate this. Men and women shouldn’t be evaluated and generalized on a topic like this. Women can leave ill husbands and men can leave unemployed wives as well. Why have you ignored that? We should be evaluated based on our individual actions and circumstances. Again, there’s no need to generalize this to the sexes.

With that said, we all find utility in our spouses. I agree that romanticism is just fantasy.

Bpinchosrep · 2019-09-26T22:00:07+00:00

It is what it is. Human relationships are conditional. We just have to accept that.

AggravatingTartlet · 2019-09-27T04:34:31+00:00

For a man, not being employed not only increases the chances that his wife will initiate divorce, but also that he will be the one who opts to leave. Even men who are relatively happy in their marriages are more likely to leave if they are not employed, the research found.

I'd want to know why the men are leaving. It's possible the marriage seemed happy but the man secretly wanted out. If he doesn't have a job it might be easier to leave without having to pay child support/alimony.

In cases where the man doesn't leave, does he start drinking or smoking pot? Does he get abusive because his self-esteem is shot?

Also, some women would have secretly wanted out, and the loss of the job was the prompt to leave. Also, some women are shitty and would blame the man for not having a job.

I need more info on the reasons. And probably, we can't have that info. It feels like useless stats because of that.

Spaghetti2012 · 2019-09-27T11:32:02+00:00

Well here is how that may come about: Hard working honest woman unwittingly marries narcissistic male. She thinks they are both going to be providing equally for each other because that is love? Right? She goes to work every day and comes home and finds that he simply refuses to do his part around the house. At all. He finds ways to be unavailable and leaves most unpaid work and emotional labor to her. Resentment builds, as does her financial dependence unless she busts her tail preventing that. He has firmly established himself as “just a paycheck”. There is no “we” just a “i go to work and you do everything else”.

Obviously for such a man, if she gets sick, he will need a new maid. All she ever was to him in the first place was a maid. She just didn’t know it.

As for women leaving men who lose their jobs— one person in the marriage is probably a narcissist, but it could be either one. Narc woman leaving a man because all he ever was to her was a paycheck, or an honest loving woman leaving a narc man because over the years he demonstrated all he was capable of being was a paycheck.

[deleted] · 2019-09-27T13:09:47+00:00

I think given equal levels of control in either situation, they are both equally fucked up. You cant always control employment or health

BPremium · 2019-09-26T16:45:40+00:00

Depends on the circumstances, but I'd say women leaving men is worse. Only by a slight margin though. A woman getting sick is bad, but depending on the illness, there is a good chance she will get better with time.

Where as with men, unless he's an entrepreneur, his unemployment is the direct result of some douche with power making a unilateral decision to ax the guy. Same thing when he's looking for a new job. He can do everything under the sun to improve his chances, but ultimately, the decision to hire him is made by some fuckwad with power.

MoodyBrizo · 2019-09-26T17:05:33+00:00

Women leave sick men more than men leave sick women. The methodology of that study is call kinds of fucked up.

[deleted] · 2019-09-26T16:23:15+00:00

Neither.

People can leave relationships at anytime for any reason. Certain other people may consider you a scumbag for doing so. But fuck 'em.

I mean, you probably are a scumbag. But, if it makes you feel better, you can just rationalize it as you doing the other person a favor by leaving.

mylifesux62 · 2019-09-26T16:25:20+00:00

Women of course

Title	Men are more likely to leave ill wives. Women are more likely to leave unemployed husbands. Which, if any, is more f-ed up?
Author	Goingprorogue
Upvotes	29
Comments	154
Date	September 26, 2019 4:16 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/d9lud0/men_are_more_likely_to_leave_ill_wives_women_are/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/men-are-more-likely-to-leave-ill-wives-women-are.278018 https://theredarchive.com/post/278018

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