Are women more likely than men to end a relationship?

In 2005, sociologists presented their findings on divorce initiation at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America using data from the National Survey of Families and Households from the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Demography. They found that when men said their wives’ desire to end the relationship was stronger than their own, 6 percent of those ex-wives disagreed, saying it was their husbands who wanted the divorce instead. Conversely, when men said they were the ones with the greater desire to end the relationship, 16 percent of their ex-wives disagreed, saying they themselves wanted the divorce more.

It’s not just marriages. I also have data on breakups of long-term relationships, and the overall takeaway is the same: Women are more likely to dump a partner (to use the brutal common expression) than to get dumped by one.

A YouGov survey of nearly 1,000 U.S. adults last month found that 1 in 5 women said she had only ever been the one to end a long-term romantic relationship, compared with 1 in 14 men. (YouGov didn’t ask about sexual orientation, so some of the responses probably refer to same-sex relationships.) Overall, though, a third of all men and a third of all women surveyed said they had experienced being both the dumper and the dumpee.