Male Version of the ‘Walkaway Wife’
Eight months ago, after 22 years of marriage, the 53-year-old woman’s husband walked out, full of wounded feelings and boiling anger.
What his wife perceived as good-intentioned stabs at improving the marriage, her husband read as criticism and contempt. He felt humiliated and hurt, for instance, when his wife, admiring a friend’s jewelry, would say, “I wish my husband would buy me a piece of jewelry.”
Then there was the dysfunctional pattern of resolving conflict. When the husband thought a discussion over a troublesome issue devolved into unproductive and negative talk, he would try to end the conversation, at which point his wife would call him a master of conflict avoidance.
“He is three-quarters of the way out the door,” said Michele Weiner Davis, a marriage therapist in Woodstock, Ill., who counseled the woman.
There is no way to predict whether or not this couple’s marriage can be salvaged, said Weiner Davis, but, generally speaking, men are less likely than women to walk away from a marriage, even a really bad marriage. Of all U.S. divorces, about two-thirds are petitioned by women, according to the National Marriage Project, a nonpartisan, interdisciplinary initiative at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.
One recent study found that a greater number of women may initiate divorce because of laws that in most states are written so that women have an advantage in receiving child custody. In states where there is a presumption of shared custody, the percentage of women initiating divorce is much lower, according to a recent article in the journal American Law and Economics Review.
The higher rate of women initiators (or “walkaway wives,” as Weiner Davis calls them) is also probably due to the fact that men are more likely to be “badly behaved” (meaning husbands are more likely to have problems with drinking, drug abuse and infidelity), according to researchers at the Marriage Project.
That is not to say that men don’t leave marriages in which wives behave badly. They most certainly do. But there are general, yet salient differences in what motivates the genders to leave.
“Women can actually work up some real heavy dissatisfaction and leave a marriage because of a poor guy’s failure to live up to her romantic fantasies,” said Frank Pittman, a psychiatrist with a practice in Atlanta and author of “Grow Up.” “Men are generally too uninterested in their marriages to work up dissatisfaction. The most important thing in their lives is their work. They don’t base their sense of themselves on how perfect their wife or marriage is.”
Men are more satisfied with their wives and marriages because they expect less than women do, Pittman added. Men, he said, like to eat well, and they like to have sex (although, he added, “they hope it doesn’t require too much conversation”). But mostly, men like a wife who is not mad at them.
The chances that a man would leave his wife without being involved in an affair that may or may not have been consummated is low, said Pittman. “If anyone is going to leave a marriage without [having an affair], it is far, far likelier to be the woman,” he added.
Usually, a husband leaves following a significant precipitating event. It could be the birth of a baby, a midlife crisis, an advancement, setback or change in career, the death of a parent or a serious illness. During these crises, spouses must change to cope and will either draw closer or be split apart, psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists agree. “Men are obsessed with performance at work and sexually,” said Alon Gratch, a clinical psychologist who sees mostly men in his Manhattan practice. “When there is a disappointment at work, men often transpose it into their personal or sexual life. So many men start to fantasize about a younger woman or have an affair with a younger woman as an escape.”
Men don’t consciously connect an affair to a work failure, which can percolate powerful feelings of shame and inadequacy. “The affair starts as a sexual thing and sometimes the man falls in love,” said Gratch, author of “If Men Could Talk ... Here’s What They’d Say.” “Often when men walk away from marriage they choose someone who is [the] opposite [of] their wife.”Men are also more likely to have an affair or initiate a divorce when they feel they are not getting enough attention from a spouse.
Some men may have a hard time with the birth of a second child, said Gratch. “The second child really makes a family and it is the final blow to a man’s independence,” he said. “These men who leave are not willing to live with the consequences of the choices they made.”
But generally, said Gratch, men have a hard time leaving. Many men in his practice who have had affairs and even told their wives, “I no longer love you,” still won’t leave unless the wife instigates it. “They try to break up the affair, and they can’t,” said Gratch, who theorizes in his book that men wish they could be more vulnerable in relationships but often feel so threatened by intimacy that even relationship talks are perceived as scary business. “But they don’t leave their wife because there is a sense of dependency on the wife and a sense of loyalty to the family. Finally, it is the wife who forces the issue.”
Men don’t necessarily have lower expectations of marriage, said Weiner Davis, author of “The Divorce Remedy,” but different expectations, “such as ‘Don’t criticize me and don’t hassle me when I go out with my friends, and accept me as I am.’ Women need to be close to their spouse, but I don’t know that it is any more intense than a man’s need to connect with his wife sexually.”
Oh, yes, sex.
In one therapy session, said Weiner Davis, a husband confessed to his wife that her passive, indolent sexual response led him to the conclusion that she didn’t enjoy sex, said Weiner Davis. “He told her it made him feel bad about himself as a man,” said Weiner Davis, who added that the wife cried when she realized how her spouse felt. “He told her he wanted her to attack him [sexually] once in a while.”
As for the 53-year-old woman whose husband moved out after 22 years, said Weiner Davis, “At the end of the session, this woman said to me: ‘I get it now. You just have to be nice to each other.”’
Sadly, her epiphany may have come too late to save her marriage.
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Birds & Bees, a column about sexuality and relationships, runs Mondays. E-mail: kathykelleher@home.com
