220 DIVorCe wItH DeCenCY
The ultimate solution? What Mr. Baber related about divorced
men having higher suicide rates than divorced women hardly
surprises me. I’ve read elsewhere that the count of men who com-
mit suicide after an unhappy love affair is actually three times that
of women who do so. Frankly, I am not exactly sure what to make
of this scary statistic, but I point it out for whatever it’s worth.
Women
It is he who has broken the bond of marriage—not I. I only break its bondage.
—Oscar Wilde
As referenced earlier, women today are often worse off following
a divorce than they were in the past, although many are finding
that they value their new independent lives.
The good news. The National Center for Women and Retirement
Research recently produced an interesting study. The findings are
published in a book titled Our Turn: The Good News about Women
and Divorce. Some of its surprisingly positive findings are: (1) 77
percent of the women surveyed said they valued independence
and privacy over remarriage; (2) 82 percent said they experienced
new independence and strength after divorce; (3) 63 percent said
the divorce created a better situation for their children; and (4) 77
percent reported that they had a better relationship with their
children after the divorce.
The bad news. The bad news, of course, centers on post-divorce
economics: women’s incomes generally drop severely and finan-
cial devastation often follows. The Policy Center on Aging in
the Heller School at Brandeis University produced a study spe-
cifically on this topic, “The Economic Status of Divorced Older
Women.” The trends are sobering.
One key finding of the study was that actual impoverishment is
resulting for an unacceptably high proportion of divorced women
in their sixties. Too many of these women are being forced into
the untenable position of having to live only on social security
income. The experts suggested three factors contributing to this:
(1) the growth of no-fault divorces, which ignore women’s gener-
ally tougher economic situations; (2) women’s work patterns of