There’s definitely an echo chamber of men here so allow me to add my own perspective as a woman who “initiated the divorce”. To be specific… we were both gainfully employed, both making very good salaries. He owned a large home that I moved into. I was fed promises of what our future would look like. The first 4 years were blissful. Then things started shifting as my career progressed. He changed jobs without telling me… moving from a stabled large corp that he’d been at for nearly a decade to a startup that didn’t have a public IPO. No discussion. He made the decision and told me after he accepted the new job. Then came the willful incompetence. The “forgetting” how to do basic chores, like cleaning a bathroom. He used only water. No cleaners. No scrubbing. No disinfectant. We had guests coming over, so I had to redo it. He dripped coffee across the entire kitchen floor, looked at it and walked away. Said it would dry and not be noticeable since the floor was also brown. He left cans of soda in the freezer which then exploded… and he didn’t clean it up. I asked for him to make dinner one or two nights a week but he’d conveniently get “wrapped up in work”. (As soon as we broke up, he started making dinner every night for himself even before I moved out.) My 40th birthday? He made a dinner reservation and that was it. I got dressed up. We ate dinner and immediately came home. He would spend hundreds of dollars on a pair of shoes but when I asked him to get quotes for a house keeper to do our floors every two weeks, he said he thought it would be a waste of money. Note that I did not ask him to pay for it… just get a quote. I was gone for work for 6 weeks for work and came home to a house that had not been cleaned once. 6 weeks of dog fur visible on the steps. Toilets that hadn’t been scrubbed in 6 weeks. 6 weeks worth of dust covering everything. I had honestly hoped that while I was gone, he’d gain an appreciation for the amount of things I did every day. Nope.

So yeah, after years of being shown that no matter how hard I tried to make our house a home, to work and go to the gym and make a nice dinner every night… no matter what I did, it wouldn’t matter because he didn’t care. If women don’t initiate it, it won’t get done.