Is Your Spouse More Likely to Divorce You if You Are the Older Partner?
| Author | Paula England,Paul D. Allison,Liana C. Sayer |
| Published date | 01 October 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12314 |
| Date | 01 October 2016 |
P E New York University
P D. A University of Pennsylvania∗
L C. S University of Maryland College Park∗∗
Is Your Spouse More Likely to Divorce You
if You Are the Older Partner?
The authors assessed how the relative age of
spouses affects whether men or women initiate a
divorce, using data from the National Survey of
Families and Households. Ex-spouses’ reports
of who left generally agreed, but not always, so
the analysis used a latent class model embed-
ded in an event-history model with competing
risks that the woman leaves the man or the man
leaves the woman. Support was not found for the
hypothesis that age heterogamy itself increases
the odds of divorce: Even large age differences
did not make men more likely to leave younger
wives, and women’s exits were as likely when
the marriage is homogamous as when she was
older. The main conclusion is that both men and
women are more likely to leave if their spouse is
older than they are. The effectswere stronger for
men, but the gender difference in effect size was
not statistically signicant.
The relative age of spouses may affect how
attractive one seems to the other, who is more
Department of Sociology, New York University, 295
Lafayette St., Floor 4, New York,NY 10012
(pengland@nyu.edu).
∗Department of Sociology, Universityof Pennsylvania,
3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6299.
∗∗Department of Sociology, University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742-1315.
Key Words: ageism, divorce, gender, homogamy.
likely to provide care for the other in old age,
and whether a marriage violates social norms.
Thus, one might expect relative age to affect the
motivation of one partner to divorce the other.
In this study we asked how the relative age of
two spouses affects whether one partner leaves
the other and whether having an older partner
affects men’s divorce decisions differently than
it affects women’s decisions. The second ques-
tion is relevant because marriage is a quintessen-
tially gendered institution, yet most past research
has ignored the issue of whether the relative age
congurations that lead men to leave marriages
are distinct from those that encourage women to
leave. Only one prior study, which used Dutch
data, has explored effects of spouses’ relative
ages on both men’s and women’s initiation of
divorces (Kalmijn & Poortman, 2006). Our anal-
ysis is the rst to explore this question for the
United States, and it will allow us to see if nd-
ings are similar across two afuent nations.
We used data from a longitudinal survey (the
National Survey of Families and Households
[NSFH]; see http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/nsfh/)
that followed both ex-spouses if they divorced
and asked each who had wanted the divorce
more. Taking this response as an indicator of
which spouse left the other or initiated the
divorce, we examined how partners’ relative
age affects either partner’s likelihood of divorc-
ing the other. We examined whether the data
are more consistent with perspectives claim-
ing (a) that age homogamy stabilizes and age
1184 Journal of Marriage and Family 78 (October 2016): 1184–1194
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12314
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