Cynics Unlimited

A recent article on divorce in Canada may overturn one’s impression of who suffers the most after family break-up:

The stereotype might be that a man relishes trading his wife for a fast car or a younger woman, but a new study finds that men appear to take separation harder than women.
While both men and women whose marriages have dissolved have a higher risk of being depressed than people who remained with their spouses, a Statistics Canada study found that men who had divorced or separated were six times more likely to report an episode of depression compared with men who remained married.
Women who had undergone marital breakups were 3.5 times more likely to have had bouts of depression than their counterparts who were still in relationships.
…
Nineteen per cent of men who were no longer with their spouse found a decline in social support, while only six per cent of men who remained in a relationship found a drop. Among women the proportions were 11 per cent for those no longer in a relationship and five for those who were.
…
The study found that 34 per cent of men and three per cent of women were residing with at least one less child after the breakdown of their relationship.

The article also mentions a general disparity in wealth between men and women after divorce, but does not take into account the programs in place to help women in these situations (discounted daycare, Battered Women’s Support Services, support groups and not least a state-funded gender advocacy group) or the fact that equivalent facilities rarely exist for men in the same custondial situation.

A lawyer specializing in separations once told me that a divorce is very much like a death and that irrational/grief-induced behaviour by both parties is often the result. Unfortunately, his advice was merely a late-coming summary - most people in my generation have bore witness to at least one really bad divorce and several other soul-destroying separations. One early observation I made was that nearly all the attention and concern is placed with the woman – concerned parties want to know whether the woman is still emotionally stable or whether she’ll be able to cope with the children. The man is often assumed to have done something wrong to provoke the divorce, and -consistent with 1950’s folklore- will stoicly endure beyond the breakup. That’s what Gary Cooper would do, right?

21st century reality defies this notion. Anecdotally, I’ve witnessed women in relationships abuse their male counterparts physically, abuse their male counterparts and children mentally/emotionally, bring false charges upon their men (which police officers have informed my colleagues they must ALWAYS investigate, effectively convicting the man in the court of public opinion) and simply abandon the family for a third party du jour. In nearly every case, the female got custody of the children and the male simply had to “pay up” so that he might see his children … or otherwise face jail time.

The role of the male in family life has changed dramatically since the women’s liberation movement of the 1960’s. Men no longer suffice as stern and detached bread-winners, but are also expected to be nurturing and emotionally-focused mentors to their children. To a great extent this social conditioning has worked, as more than a few men can be seen pushing strollers or cutting out of work early to pick up the kids. Why, then, have the courts and the social infrastructure not kept up with the times? Why should a court automatically assume the mother is the most capable parent in all but the most extreme situations? How come there are few social resources for single fathers? As the article above lightly hints, there is a hidden toll for our refusal to acknowledge that men also suffer from not having their families intact or having readily available social networks to deal with financial/emotional burden of separation. Unfortunately, few people seem to think about it until a jilted male takes matters into his own hands, and by then it’s too late.