Do Women Love Their Husbands?

On the Evolutionary Asymmetry of Bonding Between Men and Women

I’m delighted that David Shackleton has agreed to give readers of this Substack an exclusive preview of some of his forthcoming work. I found this essay both fascinating and deeply thought-provoking.

If you’d like a broader introduction to David’s ideas in Matrisensus, I recommend watching the discussion featuring David, Warren Farrell, Lisa Britton, Janice Fiamengo, and myself.

I also highly recommend reading David’s book Matrisensus: Masculine Collapse and Feminine Shadow.

Men Are Good

by David Shackleton

This essay is excerpted and adapted from Matrisensus: Masculine Collapse and Feminine Shadow, Second Edition (Take2Now, forthcoming).

This is a question most people prefer not to ask directly. The answer, examined honestly, is more complicated than we usually allow — and understanding it may be one of the more important things we can do for the future of men, women, and the families they form together.

Let me be clear at the outset about what I am and am not arguing. I am not arguing that women are incapable of love, or that women are deficient, or that women are to blame for the difficulties between the sexes. I am arguing something at once simpler and more consequential: that the word love, as we use it in modern culture, conceals two psychologically distinct bonding structures — and that confusing them has caused, and continues to cause, serious harm to both men and women.

One Word, Two Different Things

Modern culture uses a single word — love — to describe what a mother feels for her child, what a husband feels for his wife, and what a wife feels for her husband. This linguistic uniformity is not harmless. It obscures a structural reality that shapes the experience of millions of men and women across the span of their intimate lives.

Not all bonds called love are the same kind of thing.

The love a mother feels for her child is, at its core, unconditional. It precedes the child’s competence, strength, usefulness, or social standing. It does not depend on the child’s performance. It does not dissolve when the child fails. It was there before the child could earn anything, and in most cases it remains long after the child has done nothing to deserve it. This is love organized around being, not doing.

The attachment that most women form with their husbands is organized differently. It is real. It can be deep, enduring, and genuinely felt. But its structure is different: it is built around respect, admiration, trust, erotic polarity, and faith in masculine capability. These are not trivial things. But they are contingent in a way that maternal love is not. They depend on the continued presence of the qualities upon which the bond was built. When a man’s strength falters permanently, when his competence collapses, when his authority dissolves, or perhaps just when a better candidate appears — the bond is strained at its root. Not because the woman is cruel, but because the bond was never organized around unconditional acceptance. It was organized around WHAT he is, not simply THAT he is.

Most women, asked whether they love their husbands, will sincerely say yes. They are not lying. But what they are describing, examined carefully, is something closer to the logic of respect than of unconditional love. And that distinction matters — enormously — for what happens when life becomes difficult.

What the Evidence Shows

This is not merely a theoretical observation. There are several converging lines of evidence, drawn from across the human experience, that point to the same underlying reality.

Men who are dying call for their mothers, not their wives.

This is widely observed by hospice workers, military chaplains, and emergency physicians. Russell Moore, who has attended many deaths, writes that men in their final moments frequently move past other loved ones and cry out for their mothers — using words of childhood familiarity: “Mama,” “Mommy.”[^1] At the threshold of death, when all social performance falls away and the deepest attachments reveal themselves, men reach back toward the bond they experienced as unconditional. The mother’s love, received in infancy before the child could earn or deserve anything, is identity-level and non-reciprocal. It is the archetype of unconditional attachment. The wife’s love, experienced later and organized around respect and capability, does not command the same final loyalty from the depths of a man’s soul.

Men are far more likely to die after losing a wife than women are after losing a husband.

The “widowhood effect” — the increased mortality risk following the death of a spouse — is well established in medical research. But it is not symmetrical. A large study published in PLOS ONE, analyzing data from nearly one million Danish citizens, found that men aged 65 to 69 were 70 percent more likely to die within a year of losing a spouse, while women in the same age group faced only a 27 percent increased risk.[^2] A major analysis by Christakis and Elwert, drawing on data from more than 370,000 couples, found that the death of a wife produced an 18 percent increase in all-cause male mortality, while the death of a husband produced a 16 percent increase in female mortality — a smaller gap but consistent in direction.[^3] Research also shows that men whose wives died unexpectedly faced nearly 70 percent higher risk of dying than men whose wives’ deaths were expected, while women showed greater resilience when a husband’s death was sudden.[^4] The very language we use encodes this asymmetry. Of all gendered role pairs in English — master/mistress, actor/actress, host/hostess — “widow” is the sole example where the root form is feminine. “Widower” is the derived, marked form, the exception requiring its own suffix. This is not coincidence. It is etymology as fossil record: in the ancestral environment, the spouse who died first was so reliably the man that the word for surviving spouse was built around the woman. The masculine form had to be invented as a special case. Language remembered what evolution had arranged.

The interpretation offered by researchers is telling: marriage, for most men, represents their primary source of social and emotional support, while women typically maintain broader support networks.[^5] When a man’s wife dies, he loses something irreplaceable. When a woman’s husband dies, her grief is real but her support structure is more intact.

Veterans report that the bonds formed in combat often surpass any other love they have known.

War journalist and author Sebastian Junger, in his extensive work with combat veterans, documents that many soldiers describe the bond formed under fire as the most profound love of their lives — more intense than romantic love, more unshakeable than friendship. “The willingness to die for another person,” Junger writes, “is a form of love, and is a profound and essential part of the experience.”[^6] Veterans frequently report that what they miss most about war is not the danger or the purpose, but the connection with the men beside them. This bond is forged through the ultimate proof of love: the willingness to give one’s life. Men know, at some deep level, that love of this depth is rare — and that it is not, for most of them, what they receive in their marriages.

Men risk their lives for their wives and their children; women typically risk their lives for their children, but not for their husbands.

This asymmetry is visible in the human record across cultures and eras. A father facing mortal danger will typically sacrifice himself for both partner and children. A mother in the same situation will sacrifice herself for her children — but there is no equivalent cross-cultural pattern of women dying for their husbands. She will grieve him, she will miss him, but his survival does not command the same instinctive sacrificial response that her children’s survival does. This is not a moral deficiency. It is an evolutionary signal pointing directly at where each sex’s unconditional bond actually resides.

Nature encodes this asymmetry in the bodies of other species.

In the majority of bird species, males carry bright, vivid plumage while females are drab and camouflaged. This is not aesthetic accident. It reflects deep reproductive logic: when a predator attacks, the male’s coloration draws the threat toward him and away from the female on the nest. The male is, in the starkest biological sense, more expendable to the survival of his offspring than the female is. A mother who dies cannot nurse, protect, or raise her young. A father who dies leaves offspring who may survive if the mother lives. Evolution arranged matters so that the male absorbs danger. His disposability in extremis is not incidental. It is structural — written into his feathers.

The Evolutionary Logic

The asymmetry described above is not a flaw in women. It is an adaptation — a bonding strategy selected across millions of years of human evolution because it worked.

Throughout most of human prehistory, women faced a survival challenge that men did not face in the same form: the father of their children might die, be killed, or be displaced. Warfare, disease, predation, accident, and displacement were constant threats. A woman whose bond to her husband was so unconditional that she could not quickly transfer her attachment to a new protector — one who would feed and defend her children — was at a severe reproductive disadvantage. Even in the most extreme conditions — conquest, displacement, the violent removal of the men of a community — women who could form bonds with new protectors gave their children a chance at survival. This capacity was not weakness or betrayal. It was adaptation. The women who survived, and whose children survived, were those capable of redirecting attachment when circumstances demanded it.

Men faced a complementary pressure. A man whose attachment to his partner was easily dissolved — when she aged, weakened, or became dependent after childbirth — was less likely to see his children survive to adulthood. Sustained, unconditional investment in one woman and her children was reproductively adaptive for men in a way it was not equally adaptive for women.

Evolution therefore selected for asymmetric bonding strategies. Women evolved an attachment to partners organized around respect and continued fitness — not because women are incapable of deeper love, but because contingent attachment kept their children alive. Men evolved toward more unconditional investment in a particular family — not because men are sentimental, but because sustained commitment to one woman and her offspring was the strategy that kept their children alive.

This is how archetypes are formed: not through cultural convention, but through the long selective pressure of survival. The bonding asymmetry between men and women is not a social construct. It is an evolutionary inheritance, encoded in the architecture of desire, attachment, and sacrifice.

The persistence of hypergamy — the consistent cross-cultural finding that women seek partners of higher status, competence, and resources — corroborates this picture. David Buss’s landmark study of over 10,000 people across 37 cultures found that women rated “good financial prospect” higher than men did in every culture studied, and that “ambition and industriousness” of a prospective mate were more important for women than for men in 29 of those samples.[^7] A 45-country replication confirmed that women consistently prefer partners who are older and financially established, while men place more value on youth and physical attractiveness — and these preferences appeared in every country studied, regardless of culture or economic system.[^8] Even high-earning women today consistently seek men who earn more than they do — not because they need the money, but because the underlying psychology has not changed. A woman’s bond to a partner is organized around the sense that he is capable and reliable; that she can trust him; that he is, in the deepest sense, worthy of her respect. Economic independence has not erased this instinct. It has revealed how deep it runs.

The Wisdom Embedded in Traditional Marriage Vows

It is telling that the traditional marriage ceremony attempted to compensate for precisely this asymmetry.

The wedding vow — for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health — is not a romantic flourish. It is a cultural technology. It was designed to bind the conditional to the unconditional, to ask the wife to extend to her husband the kind of loyalty that her deepest nature reserves for her children. That such vows were considered necessary — and were solemnized in public, before witnesses, with the weight of sacred obligation — is itself evidence that the asymmetry was real, widely recognized, and understood to be in need of institutional remedy.

When those vows lost their binding force — legally, socially, morally — the asymmetry they were designed to compensate for was left unaddressed. The institution that had protected men from the consequences of their own evolutionary disposability was dismantled, and the underlying dynamic was left exposed.

What Divorce Behavior Reveals

If the bonding asymmetry is real, we would expect to see its signature in how men and women behave when marriages end. The data are consistent with exactly that prediction.

Women initiate approximately 69 to 70 percent of all divorces in the United States. This finding comes from Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld’s analysis of over 2,500 heterosexual adults, published through the American Sociological Association in 2015.[^9] The pattern has remained stable across decades and multiple replications. Among college-educated women, the figure rises to 90 percent.[^10] Crucially, Rosenfeld found that the gender asymmetry in initiating breakups is unique to marriage: in non-marital relationships, breakups are initiated about equally by men and women. Something about the formal marital bond — the conditions it creates, and what it reveals about when those conditions are no longer met — produces this pronounced asymmetry.

The evolutionary interpretation is straightforward: women’s conditional, respect-based attachment is more sensitive to the perceived failure of the conditions that sustained it. When a woman’s respect for her husband erodes — when she no longer experiences him as capable, reliable, or worthy — the bond loses its structural foundation. She leaves. Men, whose attachment tends toward the unconditional, are more likely to remain even in unhappy marriages.

Women are also less likely to acknowledge their share of responsibility for the marriage’s failure. A survey by Avvo found that 64 percent of women identified their ex-husbands as primarily responsible for the marriage failing, while only 44 percent of men said the same of their ex-wives. When asked whether both spouses should share the blame, 42 percent of men agreed, compared to only 29 percent of women.[^11] This asymmetry is precisely what the evolutionary framework predicts: a woman who has withdrawn respect from her husband has, from her own felt perspective, simply responded to his inadequacy. The dissolution of the bond feels to her like a response to his failure, not a failure of her own commitment.

Parental alienation — the systematic denigration of one parent to children after separation — is predominantly a female behavior. Multiple lines of research converge on this finding, though the literature is contested. A review by Richard Warshak published by the Institute for Family Studies found that in ten smaller-sample studies, mothers were identified as the alienating parent more often than fathers, with fathers constituting roughly one third of alienating parents.[^12] Research published in the Journal of Family Violence by Jennifer Harman and colleagues found that mothers engaged significantly more often in indirect alienating behaviors — denigrating the father in front of the child, spreading negative narratives, manipulating the child’s perceptions — while fathers used more direct forms.[^13] A Nordic study found that parental alienation was most frequently directed at fathers, though it described the behavior as not strictly gender-specific.[^14] Court data from analyses of Canadian custody cases found that approximately 68 percent of confirmed alienating parents were mothers.[^15]

The evolutionary logic here is also interpretable. A woman transferring attachment away from a former partner — a process that evolution selected for, for the reasons described above — may unconsciously seek to secure her children’s alignment with her new relational reality. Denigrating the former partner serves that purpose, however destructively for the children. This is not a defense of the behavior. It is an explanation of its roots.

What This Means — and What It Does Not Mean

This analysis does not mean women are incapable of love, or that women are heartless, or that individual women cannot form deep, lasting, genuinely devoted bonds with their husbands. Some do. The asymmetry described here is archetypal and statistical — it describes a central tendency, not a universal fate.

It does not mean that men are morally superior. Men carry their own evolutionary shadows, including tendencies toward status-seeking, dominance, and the treatment of women as objects of utility. The point is not that one sex is better, but that the two sexes love differently, and that those differences have deep roots.

What it does mean is this:

When a man’s competence collapses, his wife’s attachment is endangered at its structural root — not because she is cruel, but because her bond was never organized around unconditional acceptance.

When a marriage dissolves, men are more likely to have remained committed to the end, and more likely to be devastated by the loss.

When custody battles become ugly, fathers are statistically more likely to be the target of denigration than the perpetrators of it.

When a man dies, he is more likely to have relied on his wife as his primary emotional lifeline than she relied on him.

And when a man is on his deathbed, it is not his wife he calls for.

None of these facts are the fault of women. They are the product of an evolutionary history in which men and women developed complementary but asymmetric bonding strategies because those strategies worked. Understanding this clearly — without blame and without illusion — is the beginning of building something better.

A Note on What Could Heal This

If the bonding asymmetry is evolutionary rather than merely cultural, it cannot be wished away. But it can be navigated consciously. Several things follow from the analysis above.

Men need to understand that the bond their wives offer is real, but conditional in a specific way. A man who allows himself to collapse permanently — in competence, in direction, in visible effort — is not simply failing his wife emotionally. He is eroding the very conditions upon which her attachment depends. This is not an argument for suppressing vulnerability, but for understanding the difference between temporary weakness and permanent abdication.

Women need to understand that the love they offer their husbands, however genuine it feels, has a different structure than the love they offer their children — and that this difference has consequences. The man who stays committed through her worst years deserves recognition that his love was organized differently, and more unconditionally, than her own.

Both need to understand that the traditional vow — for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health — was not an arbitrary ritual. It was the accumulated wisdom of many generations who understood this asymmetry and tried to build an institution capable of containing it. The dismantling of that institution, without any replacement, has left men particularly exposed to the evolutionary reality that was always there beneath the ceremony.

These are not comfortable observations. But discomfort is sometimes the price of clarity. And clarity, in this territory, is overdue.

The Archetype Is the Default, Not the Ceiling

One final and important clarification is needed. This paper describes an archetypal pattern — the evolved template for human matrimonial bonding that has been shaped by millions of years of selective pressure. As an archetype, it is the default form: the pattern that most people enact most of the time, not because they have chosen it consciously, but because it is written into the deep structure of human psychology and desire.

Archetypes are defaults, not destinies.

Human beings are unique among animals in their capacity for psychological development — for becoming conscious of the templates they enact, examining them, and in some cases choosing differently. A person who does the serious work of self-knowledge, who grieves what needs to be grieved, who takes genuine responsibility for their inner life, who moves beyond the unconscious governance of inherited patterns — such a person becomes capable of something the archetype does not automatically provide.

Women can love their husbands unconditionally. Not all women do, and the majority operating within the default archetypal template will not — not because they are unwilling, but because the evolutionary architecture of their bonding does not spontaneously produce it. But women who undertake genuine psychological development, who become conscious of their own conditional attachments and choose to extend something deeper, are not constrained by the archetype. They can offer their husbands a love that does not dissolve when respect falters — a love organized not merely around what he is but around the irreducible fact that he is.

This is not easy. It requires exactly the kind of inner work that our culture does not encourage and rarely even names. But it is possible. And the marriages in which it happens — where a woman has consciously chosen to love beyond the default template — are among the most profound and sustaining partnerships human beings can form.

The archetype describes where most people begin. Psychological development describes where some people arrive. This paper has been concerned with the former, because understanding the default is the necessary foundation for transcending it. You cannot choose something different from what you are enacting unconsciously. Awareness precedes choice. And choice, freely made, is where the deepest love becomes possible.

David Shackleton is the author of The Hand That Rocks the World: An Inquiry Into Truth, Power and Gender (2015), Daughters of Feminism: Women Supporting Men’s Equality (2017), and Matrisensus: Masculine Collapse and Feminine Shadow (Take2Now, 2026). He writes on men’s psychology, gender dynamics, and cultural healing. The second edition of Matrisensus is forthcoming.

Notes

[^1]: Moore, Russell. “Why Do Dying Men Call for ‘Mama’?” RussellMoore.com, May 8, 2019. https://www.russellmoore.com/2019/05/08/why-do-dying-men-call-for-mama/

[^2]: “Men in this age group are up to 70% more likely to die 1 year after losing a spouse.” Time, March 24, 2023. https://time.com/6265173/men-dying-after-spouse-dies/

[^3]: Christakis, N.A. and Elwert, F. “The Effect of Widowhood on Mortality by the Causes of Death of Both Spouses.” American Journal of Public Health, 2008. PMC2636447. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2636447/

[^4]: “Patterns of Widowhood Mortality.” PMC / NIH. PMC3968855. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3968855/

[^5]: “I Can’t Live Without Her: Why Widowed Men Die.” Psychology Today, April 7, 2023. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-asymmetric-brain/202304/i-cant-live-without-her-when-grieving-men-die

[^6]: Junger, Sebastian, quoted in “Closer than a Brother — Learning from Bonds Forged in War.” rcg.org, June 2022. https://rcg.org/pillar/2206pp-ctablfbfiw.html

[^7]: Buss, David M. “Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1989. Summarized in Wikipedia, “Hypergamy.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy

[^8]: “Is Hypergamy Real? What the Evidence Shows.” ScienceInsights.org, March 2026. https://scienceinsights.org/is-hypergamy-real-what-the-evidence-shows/

[^9]: Rosenfeld, Michael J. “Women More Likely Than Men to Initiate Divorces, But Not Non-Marital Breakups.” American Sociological Association, 2015. https://www.asanet.org/women-more-likely-men-initiate-divorces-not-non-marital-breakups/

[^10]: “3 Reasons Why Women Initiate Divorce More Often Than Men.” The Whitley Law Firm, 2020. https://www.whitleylawfirmpc.com/3-reasons-why-women-initiate-divorce-more-often-than-men/

[^11]: “Women divorce better than men: They’re happier, more confident and less likely to self-destruct.” Salon, July 2016. https://www.salon.com/2016/07/01/women_divorce_better_than_men_theyre_happier_more_confident_and_less_likely_to_self_destruct_partner/

[^12]: Warshak, Richard A. “New Research on the Science of Parental Alienation.” Institute for Family Studies, September 2022. https://ifstudies.org/blog/new-research-on-the-science-of-parental-alienation

[^13]: Harman, Jennifer J. et al. “Whether direct or indirect, parental alienation harms families.” Journal of Family Violence, reported in ScienceDaily, November 2019. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191104144131.htm

[^14]: “Parental alienation — a valid experience?” PMC, 2024. PMC11292963. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11292963/

[^15]: “Incidence and Prevalence of Parental Alienation.” Joshi, Attorneys + Counselors. https://www.joshiattorneys.com/parental-alienation/incidence-and-prevalence-of-parental-alienation/