The men that keep society running do so behind the scenes. By this I do not refer to shadowy creatures operating in the dark, but instead those men who work in factories, on construction sites, or on infrastructure maintenance. This also includes software engineers who sit in cubicle farms whose work ensures that Stacy can flip through her stack of profile matches on Tinder at lightning speed. In addition to these men working out of sight, there is the problem of female solipsism, i.e. a lot of women consider themselves to be the center of the world. They normally spend absolutely no thought at all about where the comforts we enjoy in modern society come from. To them, everything is just there.

I do not think that anything I wrote in the introductory paragraph is controversial at all among readers of this blog. However, if you take the above as given, I wonder if this might explain why women so readily divorce men. While there are high-profile cases of some trophy wife divorcing her CEO husband, and getting dozens of millions out of it, most divorces do not work like this at all. The most likely outcome is that her economic circumstances will deteriorate considerably. This is even true if she contributed about half to the family income, which is hardly the norm. One aspect is that women like to spend money and another that you can obviously afford a higher standard of living with two incomes. Of course, if the husband contributed most of the money, she will be clearly worse off as she will not get 100% of it. The same also applies to the pampered trophy wife but she is still very well off in absolute terms, but perhaps not relative to her previous lifestyle.

Taking women’s solipsism into account, I wonder if many women even have a concept of what men do at work. I recall, as a child, that my mother used to berate my father for not coming home for dinner on time. Having to warm up his food separately angered her, and clearly this is much more important than him making enough money to afford all the trappings of the middle-class lifestyle. As a kid my mother’s behavior did not make any sense to me. Now that I am much more familiar with the problem of female solipsism, the underlying psychological mechanism is self-evident.

While my parents are not divorced, the parents of many other men and women are. Even if female solipsism may not have been the sole case, it surely is a contributor. All it takes is a woman taking for granted that she lives in a nice house or apartment or that the fridge is always stocked. Being not sure what her husband actually does leads to the childish assumption that money and consumer goods simply materialize out of thin air.

You may think that I am flippant or that this article is not serious at all. I am dead serious, however. There are plenty of women out there who filed for divorce on a whim and ended up severely struggling with the challenges of day-to-day life. Once their husbands are gone, they realize how much they really did for them, and even if it was just something as trivial as moving a piece of furniture into a different corner of the living room or killing a spider. I even have a case in my extended family — different lineage — where some woman divorced her husband because she thought he was “not ambitious enough”. He is doing fine, and in fact managed to marry again whereas she nowadays works some shitty job in retail to make ends meet. Clearly, she did not really think this through, and neither do a lot of other strong and independent women.