Whoever has less tolerance for the decaying state of the relationship will...

Whoever has less tolerance for the decaying state of the relationship will initiate the divorce. Women are usually less tolerant of a failing marriage than men and will check out sooner.

That’s not a criticism of women. It’s just nature. I often wish men were more intolerant of unhappy marriages and would take steps to fix the family before it got so bad that the wife wanted to end it.

We also need to distinguish between “initiated the divorce” and “caused the divorce.” They are not the same things.

Initiating a divorce is a legal acknowledgement of the broken state of the relationship. But that broken state existed long before anyone filed papers. The relationship often broke before they even got married.

The important question is, “Why do marriages break down?” And the answer is very simple:

• Few people are raised to be husbands, wives, or parents. This is a subject we should be learning about in childhood, and catching up as adults is expensive and painful.
• There is a lack of good, truthful, and consistent information for married couples to get prepared and stay married.
• Our social institutions, which used to teach us social skills and enforce good , have all been devastated.

Combine these things, and you have a population without the skills, resources, knowledge, and incentives to create happy marriages.

There are a handful of people like me who will help you prepare for marriage, reducing your risk of divorce to near zero. But there are not enough of us to go around. That’s why we used to institutionalize the knowledge in church and family customs.