In case you weren't depressed enough about being unemployed, poor, and lacking in career prospects this recession, don't worry: soon your relationship will fail too.
It shouldn't come as too big of a surprise that unemployment, foreclosures, and the realization that middle age will be spent caring for aging parents abandoned by social security aren’t exactly conducive to romance and love-making.
Just before valentine's day, American Public Media's Marketplace interviewed someone from the National Foundation for Credit Counseling who confirmed that through the years, the court documents have shown that financial distress is one of the major causes of divorce. In Forbes magazine, University of Chicago Business School economist Gary Becker agreed that, "recession has always been a factor raising divorce rates."
This TIME magazine article explains a few different theories for the link between recession and divorce. And as this article tells it, many women are bailing because their moneybags husbands aren't worth so much any more (by now many of you have heard about these girls, who were ready to call it quits as soon as their banker boyfriends got laid off). But it turns out, the breadwinners are just as likely to initiate the divorce, since they have less to lose now on alimony. One divorce lawyer quoted in the article said "I've had several clients come to me recently and say, 'I've wanted to get divorced for years but didn't want to give up half of my business. Now that my business is not worth anything, wouldn't it be a good time to do it?'"
For richer and what now?
Gary Becker, whom you quote above, consistently has enriching and startling insights. He won his Nobel for applying economic logic to things like courting, marriage, crime, and other social phenomena, with enlightening results. He now has a blog together with Jurist Richard Posner, (a practicing appeals court judge who has written a book about sex, among many other things) the becker-posner blog, http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/.
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