Expectation gap

There are several old jokes about marriages.

The one that is suitable for company is that all Grooms smile at the altar because they are sure nothing is going to change and all Brides smile because they are sure everything will change.

Depending on the statistics you look up, the women in the relationship file for 70%-to-80% of all divorces.

It is a bit puckish of me, but I will take that as evidence that the men are more accurate in their expectations than the women.

An anecdote

One single woman that I know moved into a new apartment with a divorced mother of two children.

It worked for a little while but the mother expected the single woman to kill the spiders, unclog the toilets, purchase far more food than she was actually consuming and ask for permission before going on vacations. On the flip-side, the mother became angry when the single woman corrected the children for breaking into her bedroom and messing up her stuff.

In other words, the divorced woman wanted a husband and had an inflexible list of exactly what that husband's duties.

Single-sex couples

On average, single-sex couples do not get divorced any more than man-woman couples. On average.

Gay (male-male) couples get divorced at a rate that is significantly lower* than hetero couples. Some writers are cute and will say that "gay marriage is better than hetero" for this reason but they are being disingenuous because....

Lesbian (woman-woman) couples get divorces at a rate that is much, much higher than for hetero couples.

That is compelling evidence that many women expect more out of marriage than it can deliver. Men think about marriage as melting a blue crayon and a red crayon and getting two morons. Women melt two crayons and expect a Disney fairytale ending.

*"significant" has technical meanings and the articles I looked up did not give me enough information of the methods they used for me to be happy.

For example, I didn't see any discussion of a per-cohort study where divorce rates by year-of-marriage were compared. Nor were any attempts made to control for age of the partners. It is my perception that hetero marriages average younger than gay or lesbian marriages. If marriages between the youngest people are riskier then saying the divorce rates are "the same" could be misleading.

Another way to lie using statistics is to define divorce rate as the life-time risk of getting divorced which would disadvantage hetero unions. There are no gay or lesbian marriages that are older than 10 years old. So you are comparing the failure-rates of unions with decades of exposure with unions that are less than ten years of stress-and-strain.

Never-the-less, the articles were uniformly in agreement that women are much more likely to pull-the-trigger on divorce and that lesbian marriages have a very high failure rate and that gay marriages (surprising to me) seem fairly resistant to divorce.