Tragic Thought for the Day
9th July 2026
James Lileks, recently divorced, not by his choice:
They’re going to Rome soon and wanted some recommendations, and when I went home I dived into the archives to get some routes and points of interest, and was reminded again of last summer’s wonderful trip, and had the familiar reaction: divorce sours a thousand photos. But I knew I’d done a good job arranging that family vacation, and everyone had a marvelous time, and if it was the last, well, that wasn’t my doing. I didn’t decide to haul out the bolt cutter. Found a photo of me and my daughter toasting my new retired future in a Trastevere restaurant. No poison there. We’ll be happy in Rome some day again.
Wife was a lawyer married to a journalist. (Income imbalance.) Only one child. (Declining birth rate.) When she retired, she decided to end the marriage. (Status imbalance.) He’s coping as well as he can (beta male simp) but the bitterness occasionally breaks through. (Reality does that.)
Conventional wisdom is that over 50% of marriages in the U.S. end in divorce. 69% of divorces in the U.S. are initiated by the wife.
Divorced men have about 2.4 times the suicide rate of married men. Divorced men are 8 times more likely to die of suicide than divorced women.
In the U.S., suicide deaths are much higher among men than women: in 2022, the age-adjusted suicide rate was 23.0 per 100,000 for males and 5.9 per 100,000 for females, so the male rate was about 3 to 4 times higher.
Thank you, feminism.