Iwonder, I have obviously used gross generalizations and my own experience is nothing like this. But to be bewildered at "what happens to men" in divorce seems unconvincingly naive.

kuru, you also deserve a better reply than I can give so I'll need to come back to this later, but let me suggest that divorce is horrible for everybody involved. To state that it is only horrible for men seems ridiculously biased.

Now I know that you may have read that I never shed one tear over my divorce, and that's true. But I shed so many over my marriage that, by the time I left, I was done crying. There was nothing left to cry about. But that was MY marriage and MY divorce, and I would guess that there's a wide range of experiences with both marriage and divorce.

Still I've seen many good marriages, but never a good divorce. The best you can do after a divorce is take care of your children if you have them and move on as quickly as you can. That's what I did, but it wasn't easy getting there, and the best that I could say once I'd gotten there was that all of us were much, much better off, which isn't the same as saying that we had something to celebrate.

Regarding the statistics about how men and women fare financially following a divorce, I've read that women are typically much worse off than men are initially, but women generally do much better one year out, while men stay about the same. That only stands to reason, though, when taken together with statistics on income disparities between men and women, given that men and women earn about the same when all variables are considered save one - married men far outstrip married women in earnings. It stands to reason then, when those formerly married women have to support themselves, they overcome the disparity, but there is a cost involved.

Just think about what I've posted, though. Please don't reply yet because I don't have a lot of time to reply right now and would not do any reply you could give justice, and there is still a lot I could say about what you've already posted.