Currently reading Community Board. I wouldn’t have picked it up had it clearly stated in the summary that the MC’s husband was going to leave her. This is now the fourth book in a row that I have read where husband leaving wife is a major plot line. Cue helpful/ unhelpful friends and whining. The MC is almost always in their late twenties or early thirties. I’m so done with this plot line.
And please for the love of God, if the inciting incident is the husband leaving the wife, please mention it in the summary so that I don’t pick it up.
I hate DNfing books so there’s that too.
by waitisaidmaybe
17 Comments
Maybe the author is divorced? So they put it in their novels.
Eh, it’s a source of conflict that feels relatable to some folk.
Harder to get people engaged in things that are too mundane (“will my husband remember to buy eggs?”) or too outlandish, (“how many eggs will it take to drown my husband?”)
Seems like you could use [doesthedogdie.com](https://doesthedogdie.com) for books.
Maybe because in real life it happens a lot.
Maybe the internet is trying to tell you something. For the love of God, Carrol, get a divorce lawyer. Chris is leaving you, you just don’t know it yet.
real life…
Writing about happy couples who get along is hard. You’ve got one too many protagonists now, and if they get along there’s no drama. That’s why you have lots of stories that start with couples who hate each other, but they get together at the end. I would say this happens a lot more.
Right now I keep reading books where the woman has sex for the first time and gets pregnant. Sure it happens but I’m growing weary if it.
Last year I kept reading books where a character falls and hits their head and dies. Sometimes these things just line up.
Divorce rate is very high. It’s an experience a lot of people easily relate to. Either being divorced themselves. Or coming from a household with divorced parents.
Art reflects life
Funny thing is that 80% of divorces are started by women.
But I guess that the fact that a lot of women have a desire to “find themselves” and go to a tropical island with two besties is not literary worthy.
I think that, for whatever reason, you’re picking up books that have a theme built in for specific audiences.
Whether that’s the circles you run in or the algorithms that run you, who can say. But that’s my guess.
I can’t remember ever reading a single book with this plot. You must be reading from a certain genre. Or the apps you’re using to pick books are suggesting other books to you with similar themes.
Generally because it’s an easy way to add drama and tension into a female protagonist’s life, but not in a way that makes her at fault or implies she’s not a good person. This also plays into traditional gender roles, where the man leaving is framed as abandonment of his marital duty to his wife.
These stories usually have other elements on top of that to make the wife more sympathetic or the husband less so, such as:
* The husband incites the breakup for petty or superficial reasons
* The husband’s shortcomings are moral or behavioral, while the wife’s are out of her personal control
* He breaks up to pursue another woman, or causes her to divorce him because of his infidelity
* His new girlfriend/wife is younger (often with a noticeable age gap), more conventionally attractive, and/or emotionally shallow
* The husband moves on quickly, while the wife takes a longer time before resuming dating (barring the intervention of a male protagonist, of course)
* Even in cases where the wife initiated the divorce, it’s usually framed as her being driven to do it by her husband’s actions rather than her bringing it upon herself
The only exceptions I can think of in media are cases where the father is the protagonist, there’s kids involved, and the mother wants full custody.
Read different types of books then?
I feel like a lot of books have wives leave their husband / oppressive family life as well, sometimes as far as faking their death. Goes both ways.
I feel that way about dead parents. Every single book I have read has at least one main character with a dead parent. Lazy character and plot devices.