I came across an article from Lisa Wade on time.com recently on unhappy marriages.
According to research conducted, married men are usually happier than married women. In fact, married women are shown to be less happy than the average married man, single women and are more likely to file for divorce than men.
After their divorces, their happiness quickly returns whereas a divorced man’s happiness declines. It comes as no surprise that divorced women are less eager to remarry than divorced men, given the unhappiness that they experienced during the marriage.
What are the causes of unhappy marriages?
Some of the reasons that caused the unhappiness in women lies in the thought that women do more thinking work than men in marriage, maintenance of household and care of children. The women’s minds are occupied and they even feel that their minds are not truly their own.
Men also do thinking work. For instance, they make sure that the cars get serviced or the toilets get fixed. However, the thinking work carried out by men are not on a frequent basis and maybe weekly or even annually in some cases.
External factors
The author suggests that most couples do not plan for this inequality. Rather it is external forces that force them into these situations.
For example, at work, many companies still assume that there is a wife at home for the husbands and therefore the male employee has no major household responsibilities at home.
While some people plan for an equal division of labour, it is difficult making it come true.
See: Lisa Wade, “The Modern Marriage Trap- and What to Do About it”, Time.com, 12 January 2017
As a divorce lawyer in Singapore, I would say that most of the marriages I have seen are unhappy ones. I have many clients of both genders and unequal division of work can be a cause of unhappy marriages in Singapore.
In many cases of unhappy marriages, one spouse would have felt that he/ she contributed substantially more and the other spouse did little or nothing. Singapore is a stressful place to live in. In such cases of unhappy marriages, people would start to wonder- what is the point of staying in an unhappy marriage when I can still live the way I do without my spouse?
Divorce will then become the desired outcome. Is divorce the only way out? Will a period of separation or cooling-off period work? Maybe a marital agreement explaining each party’s obligations to the marriage and family will help?
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