Scientists have recently come to some possible conclusions as to why this might be so. It may be as simple as a loss of being touched. James Coan, PhD, a psychologist in the departments of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Virginia, found that, for a husband, just holding his wife’s hand is enough to reduce the stress associated with the anticipation of pain. Regular sex helps insulate a man from chronic stress, and that can pay off in increased longevity: In a study of 1,000 middle-aged men by researchers at Queen’s University in Belfast, men who had sex at least three times a week had half the risk of heart attack or stroke of men who had sex less frequently.
The whole story is about how terrible it is for us poor, picked on middle aged divorced men.
I may have to rethink this whole “non-attachment” and “hiatus” movement going on in the blogosphere. I mean, heart attack and stroke, that’s pretty serious stuff.
I don’t know crap about the validity of anything in the story linked above, but I can tell you this about divorced men: they turn into whining bitches when the topic is their divorce. Men use the term “bitch” as a disrespectful idiom for a certain woman or stereotype of a woman, it’s used rather loosely as you all know. In the most general use of that term, a 40 or 50 something guy can turn into instant bitch over his divorce. Like the tee-shirts, zero to bitch in 60 seconds. I sometimes wonder about how gender specific the word “bitch” is (despite the obvious literal reference) because the very definition of bitch is a guy on a tear about his divorce. The very widespread perception is that the deck is stacked against them and that they take it in the shorts like a man or they cry about it, but that they take it in the shorts either way. I’m too close to that forest to see the trees and offer no divorce lawyer wisdom. I just think that’s the widespread perception among divorced middle aged men. And if you think a man is not emotional or doesn’t show his emotions, just try him out on this topic. You may get more than you ask for. Men get red in the face angry and, under the influence, weepy. They will complain and whine and threaten and stamp their foot and right there throw a tantrum like it’s the expected thing for a grown man to do in public. It’s everybody else’s fault, it’s not fair, blah blah and blogblah.
I guess I’m the exception, then. I still think of my wife as a saint. Things didn’t work out for a variety of reasons and I left. We had good times and bad times, but mostly we had just times. I didn’t end up like the guys in that article.
But did you notice how much of it focused on their material possessions? ‘So and so had a career making $xxx,xxx, a house in a fashionable suburb, and he was married. But suddenly, she divorced him and his cool stuff got taken away from him.’
Ain’t that the truth.
I’ve witnessed that exact tantrum and crying spell over and over and over again, regardless of time passed.
How come ya’ll can’t just git over it already?
For now, I’m crawling in my safe hole or going on search for my own Cold Mountain.
Nina, I don’t get your response. I’ve heard you rail about men who are emotionally locked up and emotionally unavailable. But, when the subject is men showing their emotion, it’s “get over it.”
MCARP, your response gives me the same cognitive dissonance; if we’re gonna slam the guys for whining about losing their “cool stuff”, why don’t we slam the gals for their gold bricking, money grubbing land grabs?
My experience with the system just tells me that divorce is a bad deal all the way around. In general, my own “hunch”, if it even deserves that much credit, is that we tend to give women the childen even when he’s been father of the year, but we impoverish the women so that they cannot successfully raise the kids. Meanwhile, the men are involuntary servants, working for material gains they can never realize under penalty of jail should they fail.
If my hunch is correct, it’s not so much the fault of the divorce system per se as it it the fault of the American culture of consumerism. Most of the families of divorce lived a paycheck to paycheck existence, barely staying ahead of their joint debts with their joint incomes. When there’s a divorce, there are instantly two light bills, two telephone bills, the mortgage and the rent, and when there’s not enough money to go around with one household, there’s even less when there are two households.
This combines with a black and white absolutist idea of child rearing within the system to create some very unfair situations. A child may well need its mother at one time in the child’s development, but need its father at another and child development is far more fluid and individual than laws can cope with. A three year old male child at the time of the divorce can be placed with the mother rather reliably because a child that age needs to be nurtured, but that child grows into the 10, 11 or 12 year old pre adolescent who needs a strong male role model that is absent under the custody arrangement. However, if we give the boy back to dad, it’s too late to move dad into the boy’s customary environment of the former family home and the change in child support can be devastating to a Mom who has built that money into her budget.
Whatever. I stand by my post. It’s a damn good bet that when a man gets divorced, he will whine and cry and bitch to high heaven. Generally speaking, I think if people REALLY understood the problems they will face after the divorce, the problems divorce solves would not look so monumental.
Post Script:
Sex three (3!) times a week???
Dayum
Emotional men over divorce is the only emotion I’ve seen. They’re stuck on the ex even years later and cannot move forward. After all the hell they went through and what a horrible rotten bitch she is to this very day (although she was The One true love), you’d think they’d get tired of hearing themselves moan. I sure do.
Sex three times a week would indeed change the world! Where do we sign the petition for the Defense of Marriage Act?
“MCARP, your response gives me the same cognitive dissonance; if we’re gonna slam the guys for whining about losing their “cool stuff”, why don’t we slam the gals for their gold bricking, money grubbing land grabs?”
Well, we can. Somewhere – maybe on your sister’s blog – I read something about women talking about a marriage that would ‘get them to Central Park West,’ and what women were looking for in their ‘first husband.’
But the point I was trying to make is that the article seems to put a lot of emphasis on marriage as a vehicle for obtaining material possessions. Maybe the guys being interviewed were taken out of context, but that’s the impression I got. And if a whole relationship is built around getting stuff – basically a business partnership – it’s not surprising to me that it ends badly.
Incidentally, Nina, the door you describe swings both ways. I’ve been on a couple of first dates where I listened to lengthy descriptions of what a bastard the ex-husband was. In one instance, it was not only the ex-husband, but the ex-husband before him. I learned more about those guys than I did the woman I was having dinner with. (Although one of them was the woman who also insisted on telling me every minor detail of her physical well-being, including stuff only she and her gynecologist needed to know. I mean warts and growths and stuff.)
In case that wasn’t clear, I don’t mean the ex-husband was also a woman. I mean the date told me a) about her exes and b) about her warts, growths, shrinking uterus, etc. Over Mexican food.
My favorite date of the sort mentioned by MCARP is one in which the lady spent an hour and 30 minutes complaining about her controlling husband, but answered the phone and spoke to him for 20 minutes while I dawdled over my dinner. According to her, he wanted her to know that the men she dated were only “interested in one thing.” Later, after a bottle of red wine, she decided that’s what she was also interested in, but by then I wasn’t because once you’ve learned the ex brought home HPV and that was the occasion for the divorce, well… call it a quirk of mine.
Lovely.
Please pass the guacamole once I’m off the phone.