WHEN THE SINGER Seal divorced from the model Heidi Klum, she quickly put their marriage behind her while Seal struggled to have meaningful relationships. He tried to be happy, but it was short-lived. His relationship and separation from Heidi broke him. Seal said he believed that the entire concept of marriage is flawed. While being far from perfect, Heidi was Seal’s world.
Women, unlike men find divorce easier to deal with since they are more likely to talk about it to friends and family and seek professional advice.
According to popular thinking, women are more emotional than men. However, numerous divorce studies have shown divorce can be more difficult for men – and can cause a husband to lose far more wealth, health and happiness than it does for his wife.
1. Men Don’t Go Through the Grieving Process
Divorce is one of the most traumatic events that may occur in anyone’s life, second only to death in terms of stress. And you are losing someone who has been in your life for a long time. Men who skip the grieving process reman ‘pissed off’ because their goals have been derailed and drastically altered.
Unlike men, women allow themselves to grieve, which is a healthy emotion essential for moving forward. When women divorce, they will seek professional counselling or assistance from family members to help them cope emotionally. Speaking from personal experience, I know that men keep their emotions bottled up, leading to significant anxiety.
2. Men’s Health Gets Worse
Studies show that men have a higher incidence of health issues during and after a divorce – weight swings, depression, anxiety and insomnia are the most frequent. Men are also more likely than women to self-medicate with drink and narcotics rather than seeking counselling in stressful situations.
When they are married, wives frequently encourage their husbands to adopt healthy habits. As a consequence, men become more reliant on women for their wellbeing. When men are depressed, they often turn to their wives for help, whereas when women are depressed, they often turn to a friend or a family member. Men aren’t used to receiving emotional assistance from people who aren’t their wives or partners.
3. Men Make Hasty Decisions in New Relationships
Most guys I know don’t correctly grieve because they don’t want to be alone after a divorce and will most likely go into a new relationship straight after. They will meet someone fresh and suppress their sentiments and frustrations from the previous marriage. But this can result in complex partnerships.
On the other hand, women take time to grieve and evaluate their feelings. Before starting a new relationship, women will also take their time, resulting in a more vital future connection.
Divorced women are substantially less likely than divorced men to remarry. On online dating sites, there are many more guys than women. Many divorced women do not want to enter another relationship immediately because they fear that the new relationship will go the same way.
4. Fathers Miss Their Kids Too
My biggest gripe is that after a divorce, the mother is more frequently than not awarded child custody, no matter how useless she is as a parent. As a result, after several court appearances, I could only see my son on a custody schedule rather than daily – as I did when I was married.
On the other hand, the mother continues her usual role in a child’s life, because they are with her daily and she interacts with them regularly. The mother will often use a child as a stick to beat the father.
5. Divorce is a Challenging Experience for Everyone
Breakups are complex, but most women are better at coping with their emotions and moving on than men are. In part, they have considerably superior support networks in place – close friends with whom they can discuss, grieve, and receive comfort and encouragement – and are more likely to seek treatment than men.
Women can emerge stronger after a divorce, whereas males may try to move on but never fully recover from the pain they have experienced.
According to Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld, women initiate divorce more frequently than men (69 percent of divorces are started by women). In contrast, studies have found that males have higher marital contentment than women.
• Research has found that divorce is linked to men having poorer mental and physical health than women.
• Men are more likely to ponder suicide following a divorce than women.
• Women need to give their ex-husbands a break for the sake of their children. Your children will most likely still want to spend time with their dad, which will benefit their health and relationships in the future.
Marriage is for better or worse; for me, it was for worse.
