The myth of the wife who leaves without warning
Why men so often are blindsided by divorce--and what it means about how they view women's needs.
“She just left me without warning.”
Or maybe he’ll claim that she left for a completely ridiculous reason—because he was home late once, or left a dish in the sink, or was in a bad mood that one time—without acknowledging that the final blow was part of a series of years of ignored needs.
It’s the familiar refrain of every angry and disillusioned divorced man, often followed by a long lament about how much he has suffered. He has to pay child support to help fund his children’s existence. Sometimes he has to coordinate his children’s schedules. He doesn’t have guaranteed access to sex. And he’s having to split resources with someone he literally promised in his wedding vows to split resources with.
My God, the horror.
Divorced men pretend to be angry and hurt about the injustices of splitting up the life they jointly made. They feign shock and horror that their partners would leave perfect marriages. But what they’re actually upset about is something much more insidious: They’re angry that women are allowed to leave, without permission, because they are unhappy.
They’re aghast that after years of ignoring their partners’ needs, their partners no longer want to be with them.
So why is this myth of the woman who leaves without warning so pervasive? And how does it serve patriarchy?
Dispelling the myth of the woman who leaves for silly, trivial reasons—or no reason at all
Think about all the women you know. Now think about how much effort they put into their relationships—the books they read, the message boards they post to, the endless ways they tie themselves in knots, making excuses for their loser manbaby husbands and endlessly trying to find some way to make it work.
Women are socialized from birth to over-value men and relationships with them, to see men through rose-colored glasses, to blame objectively abusive behavior on neurodivergence or trauma or just not knowing any better—anything but abuse.
So for a woman to finally gather the strength to leave is a Herculean task. She’s likely spent years trying to make it work, and gotten nothing in return.
Now think about the extent to which men are willing to sacrifice for their partners. Are they willing to go to couples therapy? To change their communication style? To do a few chores? Almost always, the answer is no.
Patriarchal relationships are built upon the idea that relational work is women’s job. It’s women who must contort themselves to make the relationship work, and men who should get to reap the benefits of these contortions. So if the relationship ends, men insist it’s because the woman didn’t do enough work. She left for no reason because, in the mind of the misogynist man, there’s no reason that can justify leaving.
Why do men do this?
Wrapped up in the idea that women “leave for no reason” is the notion that women must not only have a reason to leave, but also must have a reason that a man—specifically, a man who has ignored her needs and made her miserable—approves of.
The reason men do this is neither very interesting nor very complicated: Because it makes them look better.
Men assume their wives won’t leave because they view relationships with women (and specifically women they can treat as useful appliances) as an entitlement. So they don’t change. And then when the wife leaves, the man is indeed shocked—because he expected her to tolerate his bullshit, not because he really believes she left for no reason.
Who wants to say he ignored his wife’s stated needs for years because he thought he could get away with it?
The anger men feel in the wake of divorce is not because they have been unjustly abandoned. It’s because they have to treat women like people or face the consequences. It’s anger that they can’t (usually) use divorce to permanently destroy their ex-partners’ lives for daring to leave.
Marriage works great for men. It demands little to nothing of them (usually just that they have a job, but they don’t even always have to do that), and in return it prolongs their lives, improves their well-being, and gives them access to a person they can treat like a useful appliance and servant with few consequences.
No wonder they’re so angry when it ends.
The wider political implications of this narrative
The myth of the flighty, volatile woman who leaves for stupid reasons and without warning both draws upon and supports cultural myths about women’s irrationality and unreliability. These myths bolster a massive political agenda designed to place women fully under men’s control.
Women agonize over their relationships before ending them. My own data, for example, show that women talk to their partners about household labor inequity an average of every other week. Most women are begging their partners to do better. Begging them to go to therapy. Posting on message boards, reading books, and bending over backward to improve relationships into which their partners put zero effort.
But patriarchy is a system designed to benefit men at women’s expense. It serves patriarchy well to depict women as flighty, crazy, and excessively emotional. For generations, patriarchy has portrayed women as unpredictable beings who must be under a man’s guidance, lest they go wild and destroy society—or worse still, leave their partner/owner/boss.
Social media has promoted a new, and aggressively silly, version of this tale. In this narrative, men are “leaders” to whom women must “submit,” and men with masculine energy promote women’s embrace of feminine energy. Feminist women have become too masculine, and just need a strong male leader. This might seem like harmless New Age bullshit, but it’s a seemingly nicer version of the harsh and aggressive sexism being peddled on the left.
And these two versions of women—the energetic New Age nonsense and the violent right wing ownership culture—are converging on the idea that women don’t deserve to choose whether and when to be with men.
It’s why Republicans in the United States are campaigning to end no-fault divorce, so that a male judge has to determine if women are allowed to leave their marriages.
It’s why the mainstream right wing in the United States has destroyed abortion rights and is now coming for contraception. They want the price of sex to be birth, and the permanent tie to a man that that entails
It’s why we see the current Republican ticket ranting and raving about single women. Because women who refuse to tie themselves to a man are a threat to male entitlement.
The backlash has been swift and aggressive. It has also shown how important it is for women to wield one of the few political powers we have: the power to decline relationships with men who are unworthy of us.
Men will do whatever they can to force us to get into and remain in relationships with them. We have to push back.
How to push back
When men start spouting this narrative about being callously abandoned for no reason, we have an obligation to call them on it, and to show their arguments for the hollow misogyny they actually are.
If you’re considering a relationship with a man who spews this nonsense, please reconsider.
But if the man is a colleague or a family member, remember the power of a few follow up questions to decimate a low-value man’s nonsense:
“It sounds like the relationship was really good for you if you’re so angry at her for leaving. I guess it wasn’t good for her!”
“I wonder what she would say about her reason for leaving.”
“It sounds like you’re really angry that women have the right to leave relationships that aren’t working for them.”
Rest assured, he’ll get angry. Because he knows the truth. Part of the patriarchal bargain is the unspoken assumption that women will accept men’s bullshit at face value, without embarrassing or correcting them.
You don’t have to accept this bargain.
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I feel like this was a tribute to women like me in the middle of divorce. I teared up when you said that it takes a Herculean effort for a woman to leave a marriage - SO validating. The reality is that I didn’t want to leave but if I didn’t I would have fully lost myself. Thank you 🥹