Recognizing domestic violence and spousal rape as outside the bounds of acceptable behavior and/or grounds for redress is also a new development, in the grand scheme of things.

Do you have any evidence do suggest this is actually a leading cause of divorce, as opposed to other things like personality clashes, financial stress, etc.

Everything I've read seems to suggest that incompatible personalities and finances are the main reasons people in our society split up - which would seem to debunk your theory.

Do you seriously think that all the fights and demonstrations to get the right to divorce were mostly because of "incompatible personalities and finances"?

Do you think those fights would have been possible without the possibility of financial independence?

Yes, there is no correlation between the ability to fight and one of the possible outcomes of the fight

If it's happened so much as once (and I don't think that's controversial), then it's a good thing we let people get divorced instead of telling them they had better find ways to love their partners.

I don't see where the comment you are replying to claims that domestic violence and spousal rape are the leading cause of divorce or even a leading cause.

Large populations expecting or knowing longevity are new. Never forget we count down from Depression hysteresis and post-WW2 50% share of global wealth. We have horrible diet and health statistics here. People are wise to not marry. By way of comparison Japan's population falls faster than their economic deflation.

Say what? Absent warfare and epidemics and with proper hygiene someone who had survived childhood could expect to live to 70.

Compare Psalm 90: "The days of our years are threescore years and ten"

For most of Western history commoners lived to 28F/32M. Average age rose to around 40 by 1800 in France. I used to work for Futures Group in the early 90's (inherited Robert Tappan Morris's code) spending US taxpayer dollars on global demographic engineering. Human biomass is now way too high. Being fruitful multiplying is not such a great game plan anymore. Adjust lifespan expectations for pathologies we fuel with VAST profitable supply chains consumers only imagine are personal moral failings. We run full court presses against more making of us. I signed no security clearances. These are not really secrets. Maybe security via obscurity was more popular before the Net became popular.

If female: survived to 40 - dying in childbirth was a very large risk until the 1930s in the US and other western countries.

Granted, most of the risk was due to midwives and doctors (especially doctors) not understanding or carrying out proper hygiene.