Why Breakups Are Harder For Men

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**Dr. Olo Kanoja** (0:48)
Hey chat, welcome to the HealthyGamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Olo Konoja, but you can call me Dr. K.
I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of HealthyGamer.
On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.
We as men have been taught that in order to be a good man, you have to be independent, you have to be self-sufficient, and a huge marker of your worth as a man is being able to find a partner, support a partner, sustain a relationship. So when we lose that partner, we lose a sense of identity. Today, we're going to talk about how to survive breakup and divorce as a dude. My name is Dr. Olo Kanoja. I got interested in male mental health issues back in 2015, when I was still training at Harvard Medical School. And over the last 10 years, I've helped dozens of men go through breakups and divorce. And I'd love to boil down to you how you actually survive these processes, and ideally thrive after work. The first thing we gotta ask is, why are we making a video about men instead of surviving breakup for men and women, or making a video for women? We have a ton of amazing women in our audience. Thank you for being here. And the reason we're making this video first is because there are actually fewer resources for men available when it comes to break up and divorce. There's a lot less emotional support, and there's even evidence that there's bias from clinicians. Clinicians, mental health workers, therapists are actually less likely and less able to help men go through divorce and breakup than they are with women. So we're making this because we actually feel like there's fewer resources for men. And the second reason we're making this video, and this is gonna be a hot take, but there's data to support this, is that breakups and divorce are potentially more harmful to men than women. Now, I know that we have this belief in society that everything is equally harmful for everyone, right? And that women can really struggle with divorce or breakup, and I'm not saying that they can't struggle, but there's actually good data that shows that breakup and divorce is more damaging to men. As a simple example, in the aftermath of a divorce, a man has a 27% increase in all-cause mortality. So that means that the likelihood of dying for a man after a divorce goes up by about 27%.
It goes up by about 15% for women. Now, this is a significant amount for both of these groups of people, and yet the number is still way higher for men. There's another scary statistic, which is that 70% of divorces are initiated by women. Now, you all may think, does that mean that 30% are initiated by men? The number is actually even lower than that. 15% of divorces are mutual, and 15% of divorces are initiated by men.
So if we're not careful here, we can slip down the toxic masculinity rabbit hole of blaming women for divorcing men. Oh my God, it's so unfair. But we need to take a step back and understand if a man is less likely to initiate divorce, why is that? What is a man gaining from the relationship that they are likely to lose if the relationship goes away, versus what is a woman likely to lose? And this is where things get really interesting, because a man loses way more in a relationship than a woman does. Now, I know that this sounds very toxic masculinity, but bear with me, I'm just sort of saying this from a scientific perspective, okay? So I think this has changed a lot in the last 50 years, because in the past, what would happen is that, a man would provide for their family and all that kind of stuff. So they would provide economic stability, and a woman would be the caretaker of the home, provide emotional support. So this was sort of a situation where a woman was not, could not pay her own bills, and a man could not provide their own emotional support, so there was somewhat of an exchange. What we know now is that women are, this is a good thing, by the way, I'm a father of daughters, I'm really glad that we live in a world where women can be financially independent. I think this is a good thing. This is not evil.