Think back on the romantic relationships in your life. Now, think about
who ended those relationships. If a recent study from Stanford University
is any indication, then you would’ve broken up half, and they the
other half. How do we know? Because men and women split being the cause
of a breakup of a relationship 50/50.
"The breakups of nonmarital heterosexual relationships in the U.S.
are quite gender-neutral and fairly egalitarian," study author Michael
Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University,
said in a statement. "This was a surprise because the only prior
research that had been done on who wanted the breakup was research on
marital divorces."
And that’s where our focus comes into play. While boyfriend/girlfriend
breakups a evenly split, women are far more likely to initiate divorce,
at least in the United States, Europe and Australia.
The Stanford study looked at data from the 2009 to 2015 waves of How Couples
Meet and Stay Together, a nationally representative survey spearheaded
by Rosenfeld and his colleagues. The new study includes 2,262 adults,
ages 19 to 64, who reported having opposite-sex partners in 2009. By 2015,
371 of the participants had broken up or gotten divorced.
Women initiated 69 percent of the 92 divorces, Rosenfeld found. But there
was no statistically significant difference between women and men when
it came to nonmarital breakups, regardless of whether they were living
together, he said.
For more:
Women Are More Likely to Initiate Divorce, But Not Dating Breakups (Yahoo)
Image via Wikimedia Commons.