The Link Between Sexual Disagreements and Separation Proneness: Differences Between Men and Women in a Culturally Diverse Sample

ABSTRACT

Traditional gender ideologies suggest that sexual disagreements are associated with union instability more strongly among men than among women. Previous studies of this topic were based on one panel survey initiated in the United States in the late 1980s and they provided contradictory results. We revisited this issue using the Generations and Gender Survey, a more recent panel that interviewed 19,446 respondents (43.3% were male and 56.7% were female; M age = 44.72, SD = 13.49) in mixed-sex partnerships in seven European countries. The results show that the association between sexual disagreements and separation proneness is stronger among women than among men. This conclusion contradicts expectations based on traditional feminine and masculine ideologies and indicates that the role of sexual disagreements in union instability deviates from traditional expectations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2023.2270508.

Notes

¹ While some studies use the term “divorce proneness,” we prefer “separation proneness,” since our study included both married and unmarried couples.

² We needed to limit our sample in this manner so that we could assess change within respondents over time. To determine whether selective panel attrition could distort our estimates, we also carried out an analysis of the determinants of dropout between waves. This analysis confirmed that panel attrition was completely unrelated to separation proneness measured at Wave 1. Moreover, panel attrition was only very weakly associated with sexual disagreements measured in Wave 1.

³ Respondents in same-sex couples were not included in the analysis for practical reasons. There were only 37 participants who reported they had a same-sex partner and they were concentrated in 4 countries − 22 in France, 9 in Germany, 4 in Austria, and 2 in Bulgaria.

⁴ In France, there was one additional country-specific option. The question was “not asked when another person was present during the interview.” These respondents (n = 1,647) were excluded from the sample – they were not included in the total of 19,446 participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation under Grant no. GA20-12364S.