Divorce

Two people I know both told me that they're getting divorced this week. Bit of a coincidence, but in both cases the situation was almost identical. The two parties had just drifted apart, the split was fairly amicable, there was little more than mild regret, no-one else was involved. Both were middle-aged couples.

This is the reality of what long-term relationships are actually like. Hopefully you find your soulmate, and you grow together, and you feel a really deep and profound connection that lasts for the rest of your life. In many cases, this doesn't happen, although I think the divorce rate in the UK is only 40%.

I personally believe that we are too quick to abandon relationships when every waking moment isn't pure bliss and that the old values of sticking together through thick and thin were superior, but that's finished now as a societal value, so we can forget about that.

Many divorces (I would say most) have absolutely nothing to do with sex whatsoever. They're just couples who are bored of each other and have grown apart. The idea that women dump men because they're not alpha enough and they inevitably end up craving alpha cock again is just bollocks. It's fucking horseshit.

Of course women like high status and very attractive men. Of course they do. But there is just no evidence to support the idea that they're all on the verge of trading their partner in for a better model at any given moment. As it happens, men are considerably more likely to go off with a younger woman than women are to go off with a younger man. Women are far less likely to trade up at the end of a marriage, in fact this is one of the core beliefs of RPers, the so-called 'wall'.

That's before you go into another aspect of your older years, which many of you kids won't realise yet. You're not going to go on having some phenomenal, exclusive sex life with the same person forever, not least because you will physically decline. It makes me laugh when I hear some vain individual who has defined himself by traditional masculinity – not in itself a bad thing – but is now past his sell-by date proclaiming to be in better shape than ever. I've heard Sylvester Stallone claim this, Tom Cruise, Hulk Hogan, probably many others.

You are not in the same shape at 55 that you are at 25; it's just a fucking impossibility. It doesn't matter what you say, Mr. Stallone and Mr. Cruise! I'm significantly younger than that, and while I'm in good shape for my age and you wouldn't know that my body has declined...it has! You just have to learn to live with it. If you can have a sex life in your 50s, 60s and even 70s then great, but increasingly you will face physical challenges.

I saw this clip recently (I don't know if you will all be able to view this) of a TV programme in which a woman is caring for her alcoholic husband who is on the verge of killing himself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03rvjd8

According to RPers, she should have fucked off by now because he's showing weakness and vulnerability. It's quite obvious to me that she's the better catch, I'm sure everyone would agree with that. But she's stuck by him because she loves him, despite the fact that her life is objectively terrible.

All of this “women initiate 80% of divorces (wrong) because of their hypergamous nature”, it's just not correct. It has nothing to do with what happens in reality. Perhaps it could be more relevant for people who get married at a very young age and then get divorced before they are 30 (I don't think that it is, but perhaps it could be). But for older people the goalposts move completely. Sex becomes steadily less important, and eventually you barely have sex at all. This is in pretty much all relationships, it's simply a reality of your inevitable physical decline.

Yet even when couples have reached an age where sex isn't common and certainly not important, people still get divorced. In fact, while the general incidence of divorce has declined in the UK, the level of divorce for the over-60s has increased by nearly 50% in a decade.

Do you think some 65 year-old woman is gagging for some alpha cock? The reality is that people just won't tolerate living with someone who pisses them off any more. As I say, the values of our society have shifted. They won't ever go back to where they were.

My grandparents were pretty traditional, but they always had a troubled relationship. My mum was in foster care a fair bit when she was younger because they didn't get on, which was pretty rare at the time, I think. But they never got divorced, they always stuck together. And then about two years before my grandmother actually died, she told my mum that she was going to get her own flat. My mum was apoplectic and thought it was insane. I must admit, I thought it was an odd decision. But she just couldn't tolerate my grandfather any more. She wanted her own space for what she recognised were the last years of her life.

They both moved into sheltered accommodation, and had their own separate flats in the same development for their rest of their lives. They still saw each other, they still used to come to my mum's house for Sunday dinner together, but my grandmother wouldn't live with him any more, and was happier on her own. This is what happens in many marriages.

If you want an explanation for why women initiate two-thirds of divorces, it's because (a) men are far more likely to trade a woman in for a younger model, (b) men are far more likely to be dissatisfied in later life and thus behave in a grumpy or unreasonable fashion than women, hence the term 'mid-life crisis', (c) women are far more likely to do the majority of the housework, etc, and most men cannot look after themselves (for example, my mum's husband is basically helpless without my mum, I don't think he even knows how to turn a kettle on) so even when men are unhappy in a marriage they will tend to stick with it because it's better than the alternative of having to look after themselves.

Many of you kids are too young to know this yet, and you think you're going to go on forever with rampant erections and undiminished libido. Life is short, enjoy it while it lasts.