Homophobia, kids, and monogamy drive lesbian divorces
If you’re not reading Stephanie Murray on a regular basis, what are you even doing with your life? One study in her latest weekly roundup of marriage and family studies concluded that no one really knows why the lesbian divorce rate is higher than for gay men or straights. It’s not income.
It may not shock you to learn that people punish other people for failing to perform gender to their expectations. So, homophobia likely plays a role. Homophobia is a huge reason gays are more lonely than straights, on average. For straights, stigma is a major reason female breadwinner marriages are less happy and more likely to divorce.
That doesn’t explain why lesbians divorce more frequently than gay men. Male homosexuality is more stigmatized than female homosexuality, so you’d think the opposite would be true.
For this, I blame kids. Couples who procreate quickly after marriage are more likely to divorce than couples who wait. I’d guess that a lot of lesbian couples are in that boat, both because women must move quicker than men and because many lesbians likely marry at least in part to have children with a committed partner and to give the non-birthing partner parental rights with or without legal adoption. We know that married lesbians are more than three times as likely to be raising kids as married gay men.
In addition to kids, I also blame monogamy. Research from Dr. Wednesday Martin suggests that women, on average, tire of monogamy more quickly than men. I’m sure you’ve heard of lesbian bed death. It’s a little unfair, since after two years most couples, regardless of sex, have sex less often. The chemicals that fuel the feeling of being “in love” fade out after 18 months, on average. In many human societies, “marriage” happens when two people become parents and lasts until the mother and resulting infant no longer require as much protection and provision, which just happens to be about two years.
Monogamy matters more for lesbian couples because women generally insist upon monogamy while gay men generally do not. At least in the US. Again, this is probably not because women are “hardwired” to love monogamy. If anything, Dr. Martin’s research would indicate the opposite. Indeed, from a cultural and evolutionary psychology perspective, monogamy disproportionately benefits low-status men. Rather, it’s more likely that women tend to value sex less than they value avoiding the stigma against non-monogamy and the threat that stigma poses to the stability of their families. Gay men, by contrast, value sex more than women because they’re men. In addition, men who marry other men are demonstrably not all that concerned about societal disapproval of their sexual practices.
Do I have a point here? Kinda. Mostly, I think it’s an interesting question and I like showing off all these studies I’ve read skimmed.
Otherwise, what I think this reminds me of is that conservatives love to point to connections between “degeneracy” and bad outcomes while totally ignoring the role of stigma and confounding variables.
Let me give you three real correlations to illustrate. First, female breadwinner marriages are shorter and less happy. Second, early promiscuity is associated with negative outcomes in adulthood. Third, spending many hours watching porn is associated with lower levels of labor force participation.
Researchers find that the stigma against the arrangement, rather than anything inherent to it, makes female breadwinner marriages worse. We know this in part because we used to similarly stigmatize marriages where the woman was more educated. But as those have become more normal, they’re less stigmatized, and have also become happier, healthier, and longer.
Similarly, there’s nothing inherently damaging about early promiscuity. It’s just highly stigmatized. We know this in part because male youthful dalliances are both much less stigmatized and also much less strongly associated with negative outcomes. In addition, the kind of girl who is slutty early in life is, on average, set up for failure across a range of dimensions. She’s much more likely to be poorly supervised, exposed to abuse, to use drugs and alcohol, to have parents who are poorly educated and low-income, etc. Not having sex early is a sign that a girl has parents who are active, engaged, and on-the-ball.
Lastly, there’s no evidence spending many hours watching porn causes low labor force participation. But there’s lots of evidence that low labor force participation causes many hours of porn watching. One reason we know this is that there’s no known correlation between watching porn at all and labor force participation. Fully employed men just tend to spend less time watching it for reasons that should be obvious. Also, there’s little correlation between hours (or money) spent on porn and “addiction.” The best predictor of a “porn addiction” is a feeling of shame, especially religious shame, around the fact that the person is watching porn.
Understanding the difference between correlation and causation is super useful across every domain. But when it comes to findings around sex, people seem to forget about this distinction. It’s almost like stigmatizing something makes us worse at thinking about it. And it’s almost like all the people who claim to care about issues around sex and gender should be the most invested in eliminating that stigma. But, strangely, that rarely seems to be the case.
