Why I Wish Every Woman Getting a Divorce was Divorcing "The Good Guy"

Part 1 - Historical Context: Women’s freedom and rising standards are redefining what marriage must be — and why the 'good guy' isn’t always enough.

Oct 01, 2025

man and woman holding each other's hands — Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

Yes, I know this sounds paradoxical.

Why on earth would anyone ever want to divorce a “good guy,” but as I’m now six years out from doing exactly this and watching as many of my clients and community members struggle with this particular hang-up, I’d like to shed some light on this conundrum for the sneakily-hidden, patriarchally-conditioned, and male-centered drama that I now believe it to be.

But, before I dive deeply into that, we must begin by laying down a couple of historical anchor points.

First, although many of the women alive today grew up in and have only ever known a world where, in the US, women can vote, work outside the home, and own property, we must remember that women being treated as human beings is massively recent in human history.

We only gained the right to vote in the US in 1920, to open bank accounts in 1974, and marital rape wasn’t made illegal in all 50 states until as recently as 1993 (all of this within the last 105 years compared to the approximately 5,000 years we have of recorded human history).

And prior to this, women were literally forced by law to be dependent on men for our food, shelter, and existence. For thousands of years of human history, women have been treated as property and traded as such. In the book, “The Tragedy of Heterosexuality,” author Jane Ward breaks this history down powerfully and emphasizes that we come from generations of ancestral lineage where men viewed women as a commodity and misogyny was as normal as the air they breathed. In fact, loving women and seeing them as equal human beings was far more rare and even disparaged and looked down on.

Thus, the effects of thousands of years of this dynamic do not go away overnight. And although many women in the “good guy” conundrum may have a husband that is perhaps decent, has shared values, provides financial security etc., they often find that what is missing is a deep sense of truly being “seen, understood, and known,” sometimes psychologically, sometimes emotionally, sometimes sexually, and oftentimes all of the above.

This is the kind of connection that many women experience with their best friends or in a work environment that they truly love. There, they find a level of reciprocity, mutuality, and equality that allows for utter freedom of expression, connection, and soul-sharing. It produces a quality of being able to truly “be yourself”- uninhibited and uncontained - when you are with that person or in that environment.

And this way of getting to ‘be yourself’ and move through the world in that energy is what men living in patriarchal societies are BORN into. It is a type of privilege given by the mere virtue of being born male in a patriarchal society to have a baseline identity of autonomy, freedom to move through the world, a sense of power to create and succeed, along with sovereignty over your choices. Yes, there are men that experience limitations in other ways due to areas where they are granted less privilege (race, economic status, able-bodied, etc.), but in a patriarchy, this is the unacknowledged and unaccounted for water that men grow up swimming in, also known as “unmarked privilege.”

This is what many women are now waking up to in today’s world. More women than ever before in the history of recorded humanity are experiencing what it feels like to move through the world with autonomy, to achieve in their personal careers and passions, and to feel the power and desire to create and succeed; to want MORE. And surprise surprise, just like men have for centuries, they enjoy it too.

Turns out a significant amount of women like having rights and freedoms. Many women like not being traded as property and treated like live-in housekeepers, nannies, and cooks. A significant amount of women like being able to decide for themselves and create lives that are actually theirs rather than just support for others’ dreams. And even if one is a woman who wants to be a married stay-at-home-mom and enjoys that life, she is still coming to that from a place of choice rather than it being her only option.

Even in the smallest ways we can think of right now - of girls going to school, or participating in sports teams, of getting a HS job, or seeing women on the TV who are outspoken, or watching mothers who work - girls are learning that they have something innate within them that is valuable enough to be cultivated in school, acknowledged in the media, and paid for in the workforce. (Yes, we still have a huge way to go, but we must see the gains right in front of our eyes as well in order to keep them.)

Here’s the shift that comes with all of this though; along with this expansion of women’s realms and the amount of growth possible in our lifetimes as women, came the hidden subconscious realization that when we are no longer dependent on a man for our existence, we find ourselves questioning: “Why am I married to this specific person? Why am I married at all?”

We find ourselves longing for deeper connection, intimacy, and experiences that we scarcely have the language for, and at times terrify us, because to feel and want like this is not something that was given as our birthright.

From here we must now embark on the difficult journey of reexamining this decision of who we married from a vastly different and often unnerving vantage point. A decision that we may very well have made when we were young and knew ourselves and what we wanted much less intimately.

“If I don’t have to be here, if I could make it elsewhere, am I content with making the choice to stay?”

This takes us to my second historical anchor point which is understanding that we also have higher standards than ever before for what marriage represents and what we want it to be for us individually.

In the book “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,” Stephanie Coontz brilliantly breaks down the ways the institution of marriage has functioned historically and how “it was when marriage moved into the emotional sphere in the nineteenth century that it suffered as an institution just as it began to thrive as a personal relationship.”

Many of us are unknowingly living lives with rules and expectations around marriage that are still rooted in its functioning as an “institution” and have not been updated and re-imagined to fit the current-day expectations of it as a “personal relationship,” along with all that that entails.

And nowhere is this becoming more apparent than in the ground-zero of marriages where women are growing up knowing what it feels like to be treated as a human being and then encountering the unconscious internalized misogyny and disconnection with their male partner that is the repercussions of thousands of years of human history where men suppressed women.

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Yes, in some areas it is changing, but the reality is that you cannot erase this programming without conscious effort and internal work. And for the vast majority of men, even the “good guys,” this programming still exists and is to varying degrees and levels, subliminally and inadvertently reinforced all around them from birth onward.

I believe understanding these two key historical points greatly explains the predicament that many of us now find ourselves in when it comes to our marriages. And although it is deeply uncomfortable in the short term to do this work, I have every hope that it will in the long term, help humanity, because it encourages growth amongst both men and women.

Yes, we are seeing a resurgence, especially in the US right now of those who believe that the answer is to go backwards. Who tout the heavily defined gender-stereotyped marriage roles of the 1950s as a nostalgic perfection to return to without understanding the complex economic and political aspects of the time. Yes there are men, especially in positions of political power, who want to keep their privilege at all costs and especially at the expense of women’s expansion and growth. But I ultimately don’t see this as a viable route forward because the cat is out of the bag.

As shown by the recent data on the lowered birth rate in the US, women are evolving and acquiring the skills necessary to take care of and provide for themselves without men. And thus men are being asked to evolve and learn how to treat and see women as actual human beings or they risk becoming dispensable as partners.

I can’t help but wonder, if Darwin was examining our species now, if he might couch all of this in terms of nature and evolution. For example, men are being allowed to experience the natural consequences of what refusing evolution and deciding to dig their heels in around maintaining the status quo, preserving their patriarchal privilege, and not maturing gets them; natural selection is starting to look like more and more women refusing to partner with or have children with men that cannot see and treat them as equal human beings.

Later this weekend I will post the second half of this discussion where I’ll break down:

1. The three things I see the majority of the women I coach struggling with when it comes to this conundrum around divorcing the ‘good guy.’

2. Why indulging in drama over divorcing the ‘good guy’ is its own kind of privilege (one that women facing divorce from ‘bad guys’ do not get to indulge in).

3. How I can unequivocally say that divorcing a good guy is the best-case scenario in the world when it comes to divorce (and why your brain won’t let you admit that.)

Till then.

With love + fire,

Britta Jo

“What You Were Promised” — The History and Hidden Design of Straight Marriage With Quinn Otrera - Part 1

"The Cost of the Lie": Why You Feel Numb, Lonely, and Like You’re Too Much in This System With Quinn Otrera - Part 2

References

National Archives. (n.d.). 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women’s Right to Vote (1920). U.S. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/19th-amendment

Congress.gov. (1974, October 28). H.R.8163 - Equal Credit Opportunity Act. https://www.congress.gov/bill/93rd-congress/house-bill/8163

Russell, D. E. H. (1990). Marital rape: History, research, and practice. National Criminal Justice Reference Service. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/marital-rape-history-research-and-practice

Ward, J. (2020). The tragedy of heterosexuality. New York University Press. https://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Heterosexuality-Sexual-Cultures-56/dp/1479851558

McIntosh, P. (n.d.). Male privilege checklist. National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS). https://nomas.org/male-privilege-checklist/

Coontz, S. (2006). Marriage, a history: How love conquered marriage. Penguin Books. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/291184/marriage-a-history-by-stephanie-coontz/

Day, M. (2025, May 20). How social reactionaries exploit economic nostalgia. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2025/05/1950s-us-class-culture-conservatism

USAFacts Team. (2024, October 25). How have U.S. fertility and birth rates changed over time? USAFacts. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-us-fertility-and-birth-rates-changed-over-time/

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