accounting for divorce: gender and uncoupling...

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Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466795 May 15, 2003 18:52 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 26, No. 3, Fall 2003 (C© 2003)

Accounting for Divorce: Genderand Uncoupling Narratives

Susan Walzer1 and Thomas P. Oles

Past research about uncoupling processes has focused on the differing narrativespeople offer to explain the end of their marriages, depending on whether or notthey perceive themselves to have initiated the ending. This article extends previouswork by adding gender to the analysis, exploring intersections between accounts ofdivorce and accountability to cultural assumptions related to gender. In this in-ductive study, we examine qualitative interview data—particularly discrepanciesin the narratives of some men and women—and suggest that gender mediateshow people talk about the process of uncoupling as well as their motives fordivorce.

KEY WORDS: accounts; narratives; divorce; uncoupling.

A divorced man explained in an interview that he and his wife should neverhave married in the first place. Early in their relationship, they had gone on avacation together—he figured that he could “get laid five or six times”—but shehad become pregnant and they had married. Although he didn’t “enjoy” beingmarried, he “wouldn’t have broken up the family.” When he was delivered somepaperwork from family court, however, he waited a year and then filed for divorcebecause he realized that his wife was going to do it. He described her “bitterness”toward him as “ruining” their children’s lives; they were currently engaged in acustody battle. From his point of view, his ex-wife was attempting to “control” and“alienate” the children from him. She had “allowed the heat of battle to consumeher” and he had to fight back. “Like countries,” he commented, “if one wants toremain at war, peace cannot be achieved.”

1Correspondence should be directed to Susan Walzer, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, andSocial Work, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866; e-mail: [email protected].

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In another interview, a former wife described coming upon her husband andanother woman in a restaurant. She described it as “a terrible shock”—not justthe girlfriend, but also “the realization this was no kind of partnership.” Whenthey talked, her husband admitted that he had met the other woman four monthsbefore they married, which “kind of invalidated our whole marriage. . . I was totallydemoralized,” she said, and “there just didn’t seem to me to be any way out of it.”On the way home from the restaurant, she declared that they were going to have toget a divorce, hoping that he would disagree. But he didn’t: “Just: ‘Guess you’reright. The jig is up. I’m caught.’ If he couldn’t go on with this triangle thing, Idon’t think he wanted the marriage.”

Scott and Lyman (1968, p. 46) identify the kind of talk that is meant tobridge a gap between actions and expectations as an “account” or a “statement”made by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior.” Our con-cern in this article is with the kinds of accounts that people provide when theyexperience the ending of a relationship that is institutionalized as one that isnot supposed to end: a marriage. As Hopper (2001a, p.129) writes, “Marriageis valued both as an institution and as a personal accomplishment, and it is a re-lationship that is supposed to last forever. Divorce violates the profound valuewe attach to marriage, and it represents a personal failure for both spouses.” Be-cause divorce violates deeply entrenched individual and social expectations, itgenerates explanations both from people who experience it and from people whostudy it.

To the extent that narratives of uncoupling have been studied, previous anal-yses have focused on rhetorical differences between the accounts of initiatingand non-initiating partners (Hopper 1993, 2001a, 2001b; Vaughan 1986). Hopper(2001a, p. 129) notes that the identification of oneself as either an initiator ora non-initiator helps divorcing people to address the morality of their position,to form accounts that “neutralize their own culpability” and “emphasize com-pelling cultural values” (see also Riessman 1990). Our purpose in this article isto extend previous work on divorce narratives by making the argument, groundedin qualitative interview data, that gender norms are among the cultural valuesthat mediate how divorcing people explain their experiences (see also Arendell1995).

We suggest that bringing gender into an analysis of divorce complicates thedistinction between initiator and non-initiator identities because of potential ten-sions between narrating one’s life as a woman or man and narrating one’s part as aninitiator or non-initiator of divorce. As people go through the process of divorce,they also “do gender”: create, sustain and/or answer for an expected differentiationbetween women and men, the content of which includes female deference and malecontrol (West and Zimmerman 1987; West and Fenstermaker 1993). When womeninitiate divorces, and men have them initiated, they may offer narratives that are ac-countable to gender—a process that lends ambiguity to the categories of initiator

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and partner and unmasks motives for divorce that do not necessarily surface insurvey data or reflect the emphasis on individualism in current understandings ofdivorce (Hackstaff 1999).

THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF DIVORCE NARRATIVES

As C. Wright Mills notes (1940, pp. 904,908), the differing reasons thatpeople give for their actions “are not themselves without reasons.” Motives mustbe situated, Mills argues; they “line up conduct with norms.” This process of“aligning” behavior with cultural expectations happens largely through a varietyof verbal efforts—through actions directed at addressing “discrepancies betweenwhat is actually taking place in a given situation and what is thought to be typical,normatively expected, probable, desirable or, in other respects, more in accordwith what is culturally normal” (Stokes and Hewitt 1976, p. 843). In this sense,then, not only do we tell stories about our lives; our lives are shaped by the storieswe tell and how others hear our narratives (Chase 1995).

Goffman (1967, p. 10) argues that we do not have “face”—a sense of havingpositive social value—without confirmation from other people. A person’s socialface can be his or her “most personal possession,” but “it is only on loan. . . fromsociety”; it can be withdrawn if a person’s conduct is not worthy of it. This,Goffman writes, is a “fundamental social constraint.” Indeed, he argues, it is thebasis of morality and social order. Narration, therefore, is a form of social actionaimed at constructing and communicating meaning—and one that both “draws onand is constrained by the culture in which it is embedded” (Chase 1995, p. 7).Our explanations may reflect attempts to maintain face—to convince our audiencethat we are okay—by framing our actions in terms we perceive to be acceptable.When we behave in ways that appear to deviate from social norms, we have moreexplaining to do.

Scott and Lyman (1968) identify two types of accounts: justifications, inwhich responsibility is taken, but the pejorative quality of an act is denied; andexcuses, in which the act is acknowledged as wrong in some way, but full respon-sibility is denied. Both kinds of accounts tell us about social norms—justificationsserving as attempts to reconstruct social perceptions of what is right and wrong,and excuses reproducing social views of unacceptable behavior. Both kinds ofaccounts surface from divorcing people. Some try to offer justification for an actthey want to convince their audience is right; others offer excuses for an act theyperceive as wrong. Accounting for divorce may be an adaptive strategy for peo-ple who experience themselves as having “failed” and are attempting to organizetrying events into a coherent story (Weber 1992; Weiss 1975; Riessman 1990).Social psychological research supports the notion that feeling a sense of controlenhances adjustment to change, and post-marital accounting helps people attaina sense of control (Grych and Fincham 1992), perhaps especially when they can

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tell their story “in a biased and ego-enhancing fashion” (Gray and Silver 1990,p. 1180).

GENDER AND MEANINGS OF INITIATION

Although research about uncoupling processes has tended to focus on differ-ences between initiator and non-initiator experiences, there is more than one wayto identify who initiates the end of a marriage. Braver, Whitley, and Ng (1993)point out that initiation can be operationalized in a number of ways: who was themost unhappy, who was to blame, who suggested the divorce first, whose decisionit was to divorce, who filed the legal documents. They find that the “dumper” isnot necessarily the one who files the divorce papers, for example. As we began toanalyze accounts from our own interview data, there were even more areas of am-biguity, such as who asked whom to leave. The answers to questions that seemedempirical were inconsistent at times.

Sociological conceptualizations of the roles of initiator and non-initiator cap-ture some of this ambiguity. In Diane Vaughan’s (1986) analysis, initiators wantdistance from their partners and move, not always consciously, toward endingrelationships; the non-initiators are people who (eventually) recognize that theirpartners want their relationships to end and resist the break-ups, although theirpartners’ behavior may ultimately lead them to end the relationship. These ex-periences result in two transitions: one that begins earlier for initiators, who aresecretly aware of their own dissatisfaction; and a later, more involuntary one forthe non-initiator. The post-separation experience is determined, in Vaughan’s view,by whether one is the initiating or the non-initiating partner during the process ofthe relationship turning point.

In contrast to the idea that initiator/non-initiator identities are embedded inactual relationship processes, Joseph Hopper (1993, pp. 804–805) argues thatidentification of each is rather arbitrary—that divorces are complex and chaoticexperiences in which the initiator and non-initiator roles surface only after a deci-sion to divorce has been made. Unlike Vaughan, he does not root post-separationidentities in the experience of the relationship itself; most relationships prior todivorce, he argues, are characterized by “a long period of discontent, multiplecomplaints, and ambivalence” on the part of both people that could result in anynumber of outcomes. People make distinctions only after the divorce, Hopper sug-gests, as they interpret their behavior with “an emergent symbolic order structuredaround initiator and non-initiator identities.”

While Hopper sees the initiator and partner identities as rhetorical devicesthrough which divorcing people construct motives retrospectively, Vaughan sug-gests that these roles emerge from some real process in the ending of therelationship—that initiators and partners actually feel and act differently fromeach other. We think that both positions are useful for making sense of uncouplingprocesses. We agree, as Vaughan suggests, that the identities are linked to real

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experiences in the relationship. We also agree with Hopper’s assertion that theretrospective accounts of “exes” tend to consolidate a particular status as partneror initiator. What we wish to add to the analysis of divorce accounts is attentionto how gendered meanings associated with initiation may complicate the narrativeprocesses of divorcing women and men.

When we talk about gender, we are not referring simply to the sexes ofthe divorcing partners, but to the gendered content of their narratives. Genderbeliefs in North American society are frequently organized around the assump-tions that men are more agentic, instrumental, and competent at most thingswhile women are more communal and competent at nurturing (Ridgeway andCorrell 2000). These socialized gender expectations make their way into the ver-bal presentations men and women make about their lives. Research comparingcommunication approaches suggests that men’s style of talk tends to reflect agreater emphasis on establishing social position while women tend to be moreoriented toward connection and collaboration (Pierce 1995; Tannen 1990; Wood1999).

Our reading of previous analyses of initiator and non-initiator rhetorics isthat they are embedded with gendered imagery that is not identified as such.As Vaughan renders initiators, for example, they flee their commitments, do notaddress their feelings directly, and behave passive-aggressively until their partnersfinally clean up after them. Vaughan’s partners, on the other hand, try to hold theirrelationships together, lack resources, and have experienced an erosion of self in thecontext of the relationship. In Hopper’s analysis, initiators are those who decide(or are perceived as having decided) the fate of a marriage. Hopper’s initiatorspresent assertive accounts about their own needs and how their marriages shouldnever have happened, how they’d like to remain friends but get out quickly andpainlessly. Their counterparts, the non-initiators, invoke the values of family andcommitment, and they feel victimized by their manipulative and deceitful partners.These categories, we suggest, resonate with views of men and women as they aresocially scripted: men avoiding commitment and women attempting to rein themin, men being in control and women accommodating them (see Ehrenreich’s [1983]historical analysis of this cultural script).

These categories further resonate with the forms of utilitarian and expressiveindividualism that Bellah et al. describe. In the utilitarian approach enacted in thepublic realm historically associated with men, “the only valid contract is one basedon negotiation between individuals acting in their own self-interest” (1985/1996,p. 107). In expressive individualism, a mode for the domestic realm historicallyassociated with women, individuals embed their selves in relationships “createdby full sharing of authentic feelings.” Love and marriage are therefore potentialvehicles for expressive individualism while both people’s needs are being met; butin situations of divorce, the utilitarian attitude becomes “plausible”—the previouslove now perceived as an “exchange” that has ceased delivering a reasonable returnon the investment (ibid., p. 108).

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This is how the initiators that Hopper (1993, p. 807) interviewed talked aboutmarriage: as “a functional arrangement” that ended when emotional and practi-cal needs were unfulfilled. Initiator rhetoric is individualistic. Bellah et al. notethat in both utilitarian and expressive forms of individualism, a relationship isnot bound by obligation or justified by “wider social understanding”; it exists“only as the expression of the choices of the free selves who make it up. Andshould it no longer meet their needs, it must end” (1985/1996, p. 107). Non-initiator rhetoric, in contrast, emphasizes commitment and upholding family bonds(Hopper 1993). It is more collectivist and echoes themes that Chase identifies inWestern culture’s metanarratives about women: their “selflessness, orientation toand development through others, and preoccupation with family and domesticaffairs” (1995, p. 8).

Given that more women than men are apparently initiating divorces (Braver,Whitley, and Ng 1993), certain narrative dilemmas are posed for individuals whoare accountable to dominant notions that men are in control and decide their ownfates while women hold families together and put others’ needs before their own.These dilemmas surface in incongruities in the narratives of divorced individualsthat have not previously been identified in analyses of uncoupling narratives andare not represented in aggregated data about divorce initiation.

The man we quoted above, for example, sounds rhetorically like both an initia-tor and a non-initiator. On one hand, he believes in keeping “the family” together;on the other hand, he suggests that his marriage should never have happened—thathe hadn’t particularly cared for his wife or enjoyed their marriage. Although hisnarrative reflects that he did not initiate his divorce, he presents himself as the onein control while suggesting that his ex-wife is consumed by their battle. The womanwe quoted also sounds like both an initiator and a non-initiator. She responds toher husband’s affair with the idea that they should divorce (since he had not per-ceived it as a reason not to marry in the first place, he apparently did not perceiveit as a reason to initiate a divorce). Yet she presents herself as out of control ofthe decision—hopeful that he would think it was the wrong course of action. Sheperceived him as the one who had not wanted the marriage and whose behaviorgave her no other way. The categories of initiator and non-initiator are embeddedwith imageries of power and victimization that have implications for how men andwomen construct themselves within them. If every account “is a manifestation ofthe underlying negotiation of identities,” as Scott and Lyman (1968, p. 59) write,accounting for oneself as a socially defined man or woman is one of the identitiesthat divorcing people negotiate.

METHOD

Our argument is grounded in excerpts from qualitative, semi-structured inter-views that we conducted as part of an inductive study of post-marital relationships.

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Motivated by an interest in understanding more about how formerly married peopleinterpret and renegotiate their relationships, we spoke with twenty-five individuals(including five former couples, interviewed separately) who had been divorced orseparated from their partners for at least one year. This parameter was establishedso that couples would be over the distress that often accompanies the first year ofdivorce or separation (see studies cited in Cherlin 1981), enabling us to focus onpeople’s retrospective accounts of what had happened in their marriages.

When we began our data collection in a small city in upstate New York, welocated participants by advertising the study in a local newspaper and sendingoutreach letters to individuals in a public county clerk’s computer listing of peoplewho had filed legal documents (because the legal matters were confidential, wedid not know how many of the documents filed actually pertained to divorce).After conducting interviews generated by these means, we received help from apsychologist who sent a mailing on our behalf to people mandated by the courtto attend a class designed to reduce conflict around custody issues. Because theseinformants were conflicted enough for mandated intervention, we attempted tobalance our set of informants by interviewing people referred to us by a mediator(an individual and two former couples), who had voluntarily used a less adversarialapproach in their separation process.

Although our selection of informants was driven by theoretical concerns andnot intended to be representative, we have no reason to think that the individuals inour sample reflect any particular kind of divorce experience; i.e., a number of peoplereported “misbehavior” on their own parts and the content of the narratives rangedfrom highly conflicted to relatively peaceful situations. During the interviews,we asked participants about their present and past relationships with their formerspouses, input from significant others, and experiences with legal and other systemsthat they encountered in the context of ending their marriages.

Of the twenty-five individuals we interviewed, thirteen were men and twelvewere women. Ten of these participants were formerly married to each other. Fourwere cohabiting with each other, having ended previous marriages. The age rangeof the participants interviewed was 29 to 68. Most of them were white; one personidentified as Latina and another as Native American. The sample was mixed inclass, ranging from very low income to middle- and upper middle-class householdincomes. Most of the sample interviewed discussed a first marriage; two peoplewere ending a second marriage; and one person had been married four times. Thelength of former marriages described ranged from less than two years to thirty-nineyears.

The focus of this particular article is an outgrowth of our serendipitous diffi-culty in categorizing some of the people in our sample as initiators or non-initiatorsof their divorces. Although initiation can be operationalized in a number of ways(Braver, Whitley, and Ng 1993), we had learned that most divorcing people do notperceive their marriages to have ended by mutual consent and are able to identify

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who decided on a divorce and who did not (Hopper 1993). Our intention was to usea constant comparative approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967) to understand moreabout the roles that initiator/non-initiator identities play in conflict after marriagesend (Walzer and Oles, forthcoming).

We began by identifying initiators and non-initiators in our sample basedboth on Vaughan’s longer-term sense of initiation (i.e., who first behaved in away that felt anomalous and hurtful to their partner) and on Hopper’s shorter-term approach (who decided to get a divorce). Yet as we analyzed our data, wehad difficulty with some incongruities between people’s narratives and their post-marital identities, and found ourselves disagreeing with each other about how tocharacterize some of the people we interviewed. We became interested in tryingto make sense of discrepant cases that didn’t have the clarity that descriptions ofuncoupling statuses are supposed to have, specifically examining them in order toenhance the validity of our commentary (Maxwell 1996). Once we started to lookdirectly for discrepancies, we found that at least half of the accounts in our samplehad them—either because the rhetoric of the narrative did not match up (initiatorssounded like non-initiators and vice versa), or because we literally could not figureout how to categorize some people. For example, some people claimed to haveinitiated their divorces while presenting narratives that suggested otherwise, andsome described initiating behavior but did not want to claim to have initiated whenasked directly.

We hesitate to present our analysis with too much emphasis on quantifyingthe discrepancies because one of our goals is to critique the dichotomous mean-ings associated with initiation and non-initiation. Nevertheless, of the twenty-fivepeople we interviewed, only one man presented himself as an initiator driven byhis own needs (the individualistic rhetoric expected of an initiator). Nine otherpeople who, we could agree, identified as initiators focused on how their behaviorhad been driven by behaviors of their spouses in ways that made them concernedfor their children as well as for themselves. When we examined those who usedthis different kind of initiator discourse in which the decision to divorce was notpresented as an act of self-fulfillment, and the needs of others were placed inthe foreground (what we call “collectivist” rhetoric), we found that they all werewomen, with the exception of one man who described himself as having been abattered husband. As for accounts in which the claimed identity did not seem to fitthe narrative, we found that those who claimed to be initiators, while they hadn’tseemed to be, were primarily men, and at least two women denied being initiatorswhile it seemed to us they had been.

The next section describes how bringing gender into our reading of thesenarratives illuminated these ambiguities. In some ways it should not be a surprisethat gender is relevant to divorce narratives at this particular historical moment. AsHackstaff’s (1999) analysis reveals, couples who married in the 1970s, comparedwith those who married in the 1950s, brought to marriage an alternative set of

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meanings, including a shift from an assumption of male dominance to a quest forgender equality. The people that we interviewed—most of them having marriedin the 1970s or later—were well into what Hackstaff (1999) identifies as a socialshift from an assumption of marital permanence to a culture of divorce in whichgender issues figure prominently. This makes it all the more interesting to examinehow gender accountability that is not necessarily recognized as such complicatessome of their uncoupling narratives.

INTERSECTIONS OF DIVORCE ACCOUNTING AND GENDER

We first present two voices in which the narratives are congruent with nor-mative expectations of men and women. We then discuss some of the incongruentaccounts that generated our identification of gender accountability as a mediatingfactor in initiator and non-initiator identities. Finally, we look at an example ofgender accountability itself becoming an explicit part of an uncoupling narrative,and how its presence in the narrative subverts the initiator/non-initiator dichotomy.

Conventional Scripts

Our first example is a man we interviewed who actively decided to end hismarriage and spoke about his decision in utilitarian individualistic rhetoric—theonly one in our sample who did so. This man’s account is a justification forhis divorce. He does not suggest that he has done something wrong that shouldbe excused; rather, he acknowledges responsibility for ending his marriage, andjustifies it through the individualistic value of putting the self first:

Respondent: I was on an overseas mission for six months and when I came home I thinkthat’s when I realized something had to give in my marriage. . . it had to meet more thingsthat I thought I was looking for in one way, shape or another. . .We went to one session ofcounseling. She openly expressed her positive feelings towards me and I was neutral andambivalent. So that was devastating [for her]. Probably two months later is when I finallyjust said, you know, it wasn’t working and two or three months later. . . I just said I didn’tthink I wanted to keep the marriage alive. Shortly after that was when I got involved withthe other lady.

Interviewer: So that didn’t precede this?

Respondent: No. Probably pretty close, but the thing is I had definitely resolved that I wasn’thaving a healthy relationship at home and I just wasn’t having needs met.

This man was resolved that his needs weren’t being met and “something had togive.” He was able to provide a justifying account because there was congruence forhim between his act of ending his marriage and the social norm of individualism.

Our next example is the narrative of a non-initiating woman who expressedcontempt for her ex-husband’s self-focus. Married for over thirty-five years to aprominent man in the community, she reported that “the bottom line” was that he

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had left her for another woman, although he had not mentioned the other womanduring their uncoupling. She related great humiliation and a sense of victimization,describing her ex-husband as someone who had “stepped on” her. She talked abouther desire to have had a cordial relationship on her children’s behalf, but said thatshe was unable to make this happen because her ex-husband was “still very wrappedup in himself.” This woman’s account was not a justification for divorce, nor didshe place the same value on taking care of the self as the man cited earlier did. Whatthis woman offered, rather, was an excuse for why she was unable to maintain hermarriage or to construct a congenial post-marital relationship for her children.

Variations on Uncoupling Scripts

The accounts that we heard from these two people describe routes to maritaldissolution that correspond to stereotypical gender expectations. The man wasin control; the woman was not. His rhetoric contained the self-focus of initiatornarratives, while she sounded like a non-initiator, victimized by a selfish partner.But what happens when women end marriages and men have them ended, whichis the more typical national pattern reported in survey data?

While women appear in aggregated data to be initiating divorces much morethan men, we want to suggest that the individualism previously identified as un-derlying initiator accounts does not fully capture the ways that marital and divorceexperiences and accounts are mediated by gender. As Hackstaff (1999, p. 214)points out, individualism may have different meanings for men and women. Shenotes that refusing to be subordinated or removing children from violent house-holds is a way of using individualism for relational ends. We did not hear accountsfrom women whose primary justification for divorce was putting themselves first.Even in cases of abuse, our informants tended to justify initiating their divorcesbased on the effects of their ex-husbands’ behavior on their children as well as onthemselves (see also Kurz 1995). Their narratives, rather than being grounded inindividualistic rhetoric, tended to be what we call more collectivist.

One woman, who presented herself as having reluctantly initiated her divorce,said, “It was a tragedy for us. For our family. It really was. But here we are. Andlike I say, I don’t think he’s changed.” Another woman said of her ex-husband:

He was staying out late all the time, verbally abusive, not doing anything in the house, neverspending time with us as a family, and as the marriage progressed, it was less and less. Thenit got to the point where he was barely sitting down to dinner. I mean, he was out gamblingand going out and I was home with the kids. . . I asked him to go to counseling; he didn’twant to go.

Although this couple went on to become legally separated, this woman reportedthat her husband still hadn’t wanted to leave; he had wanted to remain married.Her decision was made in the context of what was happening to them “as afamily.”

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Did this woman present herself as an initiator? Yes and no. We suggest thatthe ambiguity in her account may be explained by gender accountability. Herfirst choice was for her husband to shape up; and she spoke in the rhetoric ofnon-initiators, as described by Hopper (1993), concerned about family and com-mitment: “I felt bad for the children. And I don’t believe in divorce, personally, andI don’t like it, especially when there’s kids involved.” Her account was an excuserather than a justification; she presented her act as something that she was drivento rather than in control of, and as something that was in some way wrong. Thiswoman perceived herself as a non-initiating partner, as Vaughan (1986) describesit—ending the marriage only when she was pushed to by her husband. On the otherhand, she did make the call; she ended a marriage that her husband, according toher, had not wanted to end. Our point is that there may be women who do notnecessarily experience or want to claim the sense of control implied in the initiatoridentity. There are also men who have not, by definition, initiated, but would liketo present themselves as having been in control.

Among our informants, there were several men who claimed initiator statusdespite their wives having been the ones to commit the kind of rule violations thatVaughan attributes to initiators—in two of these cases, infidelity. One husbanddescribed his wife as having wanted to “find herself.” His reaction to his wife’sinitiation was a face-saving account in which he asserted control of the ending ofhis marriage:

I: So it sounds like she initiated the separation?

R: I did.

I: You did?

R: Yep. The boyfriend in the picture kind of put a stumbling block in the marriage.

Another man in our sample claimed to be the initiator after having describeda number of initiating moves on his wife’s part, which generated the followinginterchange (with a confused interviewer) about whose decision it was to break up:

I: It wasn’t your choice to split up?

R: It was.

I: It was your choice?

R: It was.

I: Was it like a mutual thing or you made the call?

R: No, it wasn’t mutual. . .There was somebody else involved in the relationship and Icouldn’t deal with that.

Accounts do not reveal a clear “truth”; they reveal interpretations that are generatedin interaction with some kind of social audience (Riessman 1990). This man’s ex-wife told us that she had not been having an affair and that her ex-husband’salcoholism had precipitated their separation. She also said that he had asked for areconciliation that she turned down. In his narrative he asserted control, however,telling us that he had refused a request from his ex-wife to get back together.

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One uncoupling scenario described by Vaughan involves the initiator’s sud-denly violating a “relationship rule” in order to push a partner into ending arelationship—becoming less respectful, less affectionate, sexually intimate withsomeone else, or violent. Are men who have behaved in these ways throughouttheir marriages “initiators”? Not necessarily. Would they like to perceive and por-tray themselves as in control once their wives give up? Probably so. In these casesa gender violation occurs when the previously victimized partner decides to endthe marriage, such as in the case we described above or that of another woman,who said that her domineering ex-husband “put out a contract” on her when shedecided to leave their marriage.

Ahrons (1994) interprets women leaving men as an assumption of power,and she suggests that the loss of power men experience in being left has specialmeaning for them because they are men. The woman whose husband wanted tohave her killed agreed: “It was something he just didn’t want to accept. . .Thedivorce was just sort of a blow in the head to his ego, being a man.” Joseph Hopper(1999) provided us with interview data from an attorney who described some maleclients “who by and large are pretty controlling people. . . frequently get very, veryobsessive about maintaining the relationship that the other person doesn’t want.And you get a real strong sense from that, that they’re not missing the person somuch as they’re missing the control over the person.”

Some of the men we interviewed who did not actively decide to end theirmarriages, like the men quoted here, nevertheless claimed initiator status. Othermen’s behavior is captured in Vaughan’s initiator category; i.e., their actions pushedtheir wives to divorce. These men spoke in individualistic initiator rhetoric, butit’s not clear that they would have ever ended their marriages had they not been“caught” in behavior that their wives deemed marriage-ending. One example ofthis is the man whose ex-wife we quoted earlier, whose marriage ended after shelearned of his affair that had begun at the time they married. He said of his marriage:

The problem with the relationship was that. . . I didn’t really feel the kind of a yen youneed to feel where you say that you’d fallen in love with her. . . I met someone who wasparticularly younger—half my age. At the time she was very forward, and I guess she wasintriguing, really passionate.

While this man offered a justifying account, he had not embarked on this affairto initiate an end to his marriage; in fact, he was making secret calls to his girl-friend during his honeymoon. Yet in his retrospective account, he attempted toposition himself differently, as having been more in control of choosing betweenhis marriage and this other relationship, despite the stigma associated with leavinghis wife for another woman (Gerstel 1987).

In contrast to the men quoted above, the accounts of women in our samplewho decided to get divorced in the context of their husbands having had affairswere different in tone. These women did not necessarily want to claim the status ofhaving initiated a divorce. As we saw, one wife hoped that her husband wouldn’t

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take her up on the divorce:

We drove home together and I said, “We are going to have to get a divorce,” and he said,“I guess so”; and I guess in the back of my mind I was hoping he’d say, “Well, let’s thinkit over, it’s not that important to me.” But he never said that.

She went on to say:

A lot of people said to me, “You were so great, once you made up your mind, that was itfor you.” [But] it wasn’t me who made that decision.

Another woman described being in an auto accident with her child and beingunable to reach her husband. “Now where was my husband at midnight?” sheasked. But she did not necessarily want to claim to have initiated a divorce inresponse to his affair:

I: So it was your call?

R: I think he would have left eventually because I think he was probably seeing someoneanyway.

This woman was reluctant to identify as an initiator—at least in terms of herresponse to her husband’s affair—yet later in the interview she invoked the accidentas crystallizing her decision:

R: I said, “You couldn’t be reached.” He was like, “Well, what could I have done?” Thatwas it. That showed me that, you know, he was like so into himself and his own things, hewasn’t even available to, you know, your wife, and you almost lost your daughter. If shehadn’t been in a seat belt in the booster seat, she would have been out in the street.

I: So that was the moment where you thought. . .

R: That was it. That was it. There was no turning back after that.

In this woman’s account, her decision was made especially after she perceived herhusband’s indifference to their daughter’s well-being.

Although this woman was ambivalent about identifying herself as the initiatorof her divorce, her ex-husband found it distasteful not to have initiated. When askedwhose decision it was to end the marriage, he responded, “I’d rather not go there.”Later in the interview he said, “Let me put it this way, I was happier than she wasabout the divorce.” Finally, he said that he suspected that his ex-wife “could be gay.”

Of the twenty-five people we interviewed, there was one non-initiating womanwho offered an initiator account. She responded to our question about her currentrelationship with her ex-husband by saying, “He had an affair. I threw his assout. Okay? Point blank. People don’t do that to me.” As her narrative continued,we found that she had discovered the affair only after her husband had left andshe’d hired a detective, because her lawyer and others suspected a third partyinvolvement.

We will speculate that one reason this woman presented a forthright justifyingaccount in which she was in control and taking care of herself is that she and her ex-husband were childless. She was not accountable as a mother, as the other women in

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the sample were, and did not have to answer to the same expectation that she wouldtry to hold the family together. In other words, if there are gendered experiencesof uncoupling, they are likely to be linked to the gendered experiences of marriageand parenthood, in which women are held ultimately responsible for maintainingrelationships and children’s well-being (see, e.g., Walzer 1998). Gerstel (1987)notes, for example, that mothers who get divorced perceive more disapproval thando childless women, and in a way that men do not. In the next section we look atone former couple who illustrate the possible ways that making gender dynamicsexplicit can transform uncoupling rhetoric.

The Invisible Initiator: Gender in Marriage

Accounting for divorce generally leads to finger-pointing at a specific personor marriage, but not at the institution of marriage itself (Hopper 2001b; Stewartet al. 1997). One of the former couples we interviewed, however, spoke to thetensions that marital roles generated in their marriage. Their post-marital accountswere more “androgynous” in the sense that they both identified as initiators andnon-initiators, and their accounts reflected some analysis of the role that genderand marital expectations had played in their relationship.

In terms of the initiator/partner dichotomy, this man and woman (we will callthem Lyle and Melanie) had each been both. Lyle told us that Melanie had left,but their history was more complicated than that, as his narrative reflects:

We both understand that we both made mistakes. I had an affair way back in ’76. That wasprobably one of the keys because she didn’t trust me after that and all that. I would never dothat again. . .She basically forgave me but the trust takes a long time to get back. But thatwas like so. . . I mean, we did not split because of that reason, another woman or any of thatkind of stuff. So maybe that made it also better in the sense that it wasn’t anger-at-each-othertype thing. We both kind of realized at this point in time that neither one of us were happyand I remember her saying to me one time, she says, “Look, we’re both good people. Whydon’t we just split and move on?” And we eventually did. It took a long time. . . I had leftone time. . . I didn’t leave, no, I went out and I put a deposit on an apartment for myself. Ihad just had enough. . . I came home and I told her, cause we hadn’t really discussed it. Shehad talked earlier that she wanted to leave and she hadn’t done anything, so I did. And boy,did I catch hell for that. She was angry with me because she felt that I didn’t discuss it withher first. She’s right. . . I lost my hundred bucks. I didn’t leave. She said, “No, I want you tostay,” and. . . she left [about a year later]. So it did go on another year. . .we tolerated eachother kind of. It was like two ships moving apart.

Although Lyle said that he “had just had enough,” taking care of himself by leavingwas not a good enough justification; rather, he waited for Melanie to be ready toseparate, or for their split to be perceived as more mutual.

Consideration of their children was embedded in Melanie’s account, but shewas straightforward about her need to act on her own unhappiness:

For a long time we had talked about splitting up. At one point he had gotten an apartment.He was gonna leave and it’s difficult. It’s very, very difficult. . . I was just completely lost.Even though I was alive I was not living. I was lonely all the time. I was angry all the time.

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So I got an apartment with the help of friends and a little support. I asked my daughter toleave—she wouldn’t go. She wanted to stay in the house, which made it even harder. Shewas thirteen at the time but I moved like two miles down the road so I saw her all the time.I think both of us wanted it, but it just took somebody to actually make the move. . . I thinkI was maybe more unhappy than he was, at least for a longer time. And our son was incollege, he was away, and we just had to do something.

While Lyle was an initiator in a couple of different ways, in the end he concededthis status to Melanie; she, in turn, allowed him primary ownership of the care oftheir daughter. Both, in other words, subverted the gendered expectations in theuncoupling process and in their accounts of the process.

When Lyle and Melanie reflected on the sources of their stress, they invokedobservations about the institution of marriage and gender. As Lyle said:

We had our problems in the marriage just like everybody else does. And a lot of our problemswere. . . “the ones everybody has” type thing. . . I would say I was not ready for marriage.I was ready for the marriage to the extent of a wife, but not kids. . .A child comes into it,the woman really kind of takes on the burden of the child, it came from her, you are kindof put on the back burner. . .All of sudden she’s tired at night when you wanted somethingelse. . . It’s funny how at that point in time I didn’t understand it real well, where now I thinkone of the biggest changes is when you. . .do what the other person did. . .When you walkin the other person’s shoes, you find out real fast that that person had an awful lot to do.You know, maintain the house, clean the house, do the dishes, take care of the kids. . .AndI realized that after. It took me a long time before I realized. Holy smokes, when you walkin their shoes you find out this person needs help. But as a 20-some-year-old, I was justprobably too immature to be married and I realize it now what it amounted to—it’s a lot.I’m not alone when it comes to that. There’s a lot of asshole men out there. I probably wasone for a while.

While Lyle reflected on having been an “asshole” man, Melanie thought shehad been too much of a wife like her mother, “very gender-like”:

R: Neither one of us gave the other person what they wanted. I mean, I was brought upthat, you know, a wife cooks and cleans, takes care of the kids and Lyle would have ratherhad hot dogs for dinner and go to a movie, you know, and I didn’t see it that way. And hewanted to leave the kids and go on vacation, the two of us, and I would say, “Oh, no, we can’tleave the kids.” So it was both of us. I think I had a warped idea of what marriage should be. . .

I: What was that image?

R: Very typical.

I: Typical how?

R: My father worked. My mother stayed home. “Dad’s home now, so be quiet.” Just very,very typical. She took care of the household, cooking and cleaning. He took care of the car,mowing. Very gender-like. . .

I: And that’s what you expected your marriage to be too?

R: Oh, I turned into my mother. As soon as I walked back down that aisle I thought I had tohave a hot meal on the. . .although I did work outside the home, but it was always I thoughtI had to do the dishes and I had to take care of the kids. I just assumed that role. . .

I: What do you think about marriage now?

R: It’s a tough role to play. . .What you’re starting to see are younger people now thathave more of a partnership and share more responsibilities and split up the responsibilitiesdifferently and I think that’s good.

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Melanie and Lyle concurred on the impact that traditional gender arrange-ments had had on their marriage and found in their uncoupling what they had notbeen able to find while they were together: a sense that rigid differentiation in rolesdid not work for them. Unlike divorced people who do not conceptualize genderroles as problematic and attribute difficulties to the personality or values of theirpartner (Stewart et al. 1997), Lyle and Melanie’s recognition of their accountabilityto gender within their marriage allowed them to account for their divorce in waysthat did not implicate each other as individuals. Their narratives also combinedindividualistic and collectivist orientations: attention to their children’s and to eachother’s needs as well as their own, and a sense of joint responsibility for endingtheir marriage.

DISCUSSION

The accomplishment of gender does not necessarily occur behaviorally, butin accounting for behavior in terms of femininity and masculinity (West andZimmerman 1987). Our argument has been that incongruities in some divorcenarratives may be explained by an accountability to gender that has not previouslybeen identified in analyses of uncoupling identities and do not surface in aggre-gated data about divorce initiation. This negotiation is especially apparent when theuncoupling experiences of men and women violate dominant cultural associationssurrounding masculinity and femininity. For some initiating women, there maybe a tension between claiming control and accounting to a socially constructeddefinition of themselves as women. And for non-initiating men—a population thathas been referred to in clinical literature as “angry, abandoned husbands” (Myers1986)—there may be a tension in not having had the control that men are supposedto have.

Just as gender rigidity in marital and parenting roles may jeopardize marriage,gender accountability in post-marital roles is also risky. There is evidence, forexample, that non-initiating partners may try to regain power through post-maritalstruggles, most unfortunately, around children (Hopper 2001a). The man whomwe first cited in this article telephoned a couple of years after his initial interviewto report that he had “nuked” his wife in their custody battle; she was “toast.” Thisinformant was among the people we interviewed who called on initiator rhetoric inthe context of a narrative that suggested he had not chosen to end his marriage. Hisstatus as a man, jeopardized by his ex-wife’s dissatisfaction with their relationship,was perhaps re-established (from his perspective) through his use of aggressionand intimidation in court (see Pierce 1995).

Conversely, women who finally end a marriage may not always narrate theiractions as the assertive acts of self-fulfillment previously identified in initiator ac-counts. Rather, several of the women that we interviewed tended to frame divorce

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as a last-resort response to men’s behavior (see also Ahrons 1994 and Kurz 1995),with the consequences of men’s behavior for children figuring especially promi-nently in some of their accounts. In this sense, “doing” divorce, like “doing gender”through housework (see South and Spitze 1994), may for some women initiatorsbe another way in which they take disproportionate responsibility for cleaning upfamily messes.

Our analysis is supported by other research that identifies the role of gen-dered experiences and expectations in divorce. In a quantitative analysis, Pettitand Bloom (1984) find an interaction between sex and initiation in whether aspouse’s problems with children were identified as a determinant of divorce. Inother words, women initiators in their sample cited their partners’ relationshipswith children as a factor in their divorces while men did not. Men may save faceon the other side of divorce with the masculinist discourse that Arendell (1995)identifies, in which they blame ex-wives for alienation in their own relationshipswith their children. Kurz (1995) argues that women leave marriages, in largepart, because of conditions and behavior associated with the conventional malerole (see also Riessman 1990). A majority of Kurz’s representative sample ofdivorced women cited husbands’ violence, infidelities, and “hard living” (alco-holism, absenteeism, and other negative behaviors) as reasons for their divorcesas opposed to personal dissatisfaction per se. Ahrons (1994, p. 93) also points outthat women frequently describe their divorce as an action to which they are finallyled by husbands’ behavior: “Stories of years of abuse, betrayal, or absenteeism bytheir ex-husband are rife.” Many women say that they left “because they had nochoice.”

In some respects this is what makes the differing example of Melanie and Lyleso instructive. Although initially on the road to a conventional male initiator/femalenon-initiator narrative, they regrouped in a way that allowed Lyle’s narrative toinclude empathy for his wife and accountability to his children, and for Melanie’sto reflect that she had made a choice based on her own needs and with a sense ofcontrol over her own life. Perhaps because of the adjustments they made that werereflected in their uncoupling narratives, they did not have to assert control througha custody battle or contempt for each other. Although people may not always beable to identify the perils of gender accountability as they live them in marriage,identifying them after the fact may allow uncoupling to unfold with both partners’faces intact and less strife for their children.

We also suggest that identifying differences by gender in divorce accountsprovides further perspective on the tendency, in the aggregate, for women to bereported as initiators of divorce. While analyses of uncoupling discourse suggestan equation of initiation with self-focus, we suggest that a missing piece of thestory is the gender imbalances in marriage that result in interactions and behaviorthat become unacceptable for families as collectives and that push women to endmarriages they are not easily inclined to end (see also Hackstaff 1999). For people

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who privilege the norm of individualism, the self-focus and control previouslyidentified in initiator narratives are congruent with justifying divorce. People whoanswer to expectations that they will consider the needs of others experience moretension around initiating and accounting for the end of a marriage. Ironically, itmay be this very concern that motivates their actions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 94th AnnualMeeting of the American Sociological Association. Our research was funded by aFaculty Development Grant from Skidmore College. We thank John Brueggemann,Michael Ennis-McMillan, Frances Hoffmann, David Karp, Jennifer Pierce, GlennaSpitze, Christopher Wellin, Robert Zussman and one anonymous reviewer fortheir helpful comments and Jessica Dorrance, Cynthia Ferguson Wheeler, SarahWinslow and Elizabeth Umbro for research assistance. A special thanks to JosephHopper for providing us with useful consultation and data.

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