Do Husbands Really Abandon Their Sick Wives? The Viral Study Unpacked

It makes for grim listening: “If a man becomes terminally ill, and his wife becomes the caretaker, there is a 2.9% separation rate,” Stephen Barlett read on his podcast Diary Of A CEO. 

“If the woman is terminally ill, and their male partner becomes the caretaker, they leave at a 21% rate – which basically means that men are approximately 624% more likely to separate from a woman if the woman gets sick.”

I’m not usually much of a Stephen Bartlett fan, but it’s a sentiment I’d heard over and over again in various TikToks from creators I love. 

The soundbite comes from a 2009 study which found, “A woman is six times more likely to be separated or divorced soon after a diagnosis of cancer or multiple sclerosis than if a man in the relationship is the patient,” and a subsequent 2015 study.

So, I asked family lawyer Raiford Dalton Palmer, managing shareholder at STG Divorce Law and author of I Just Want This Done: How Smart, Successful People Get Divorced Without Losing Their Kids, Money, and Minds, how that affects the cases he sees – and was amazed by his answer. 

The 2015 study was withdrawn due to huge errors

“I am sure there is a vibe among some people that men tend to be less loyal and more selfish than women and, therefore, more likely to divorce when their wives get seriously ill,” Palmer told us.

But he says “From the limited research I’ve seen, I’m not convinced.” 

The 2015 study was retracted due to an error in which, to the researchers’ “horror”, “their algorithm counted people who quit the study as getting divorced.” 

Speaking of the 2009 study, Palmer said: “This study was only 515 people, a very small sample size from which to draw such a serious societal conclusion.” 

The lawyer added, “it is unclear whether financial considerations played a role (eg, as a hypothetical, at the time of the study, more females were financially dependent on their seriously ill husbands, thus tended to remain married, not out of altruism but due to financial considerations).” 

Palmer doesn’t say that’s definitely true: “I am merely making the point that the researchers have no realistic way to control for these other factors.

“Also, interestingly, the authors of this study state in the abstract that “the risk of divorce is not higher in cancer patients,” he continued. 

What about his experience as a family and divorce lawyer?

I had originally asked Palmer to describe how the fallout the 2009 study suggested – which I figured would surely seep into divorce cases if true – squared up with his experience of clients. 

But his initial response was, “I have not seen this, and we have not seen this in the law firm.

“We have cases where one party has an illness or a terminal illness, but these are too few to yield any useful information in terms of any kind of ‘trend’. I am not aware of any statistics on this and don’t know how these data would be collected.” 

None of this is to say that sick wives never get abandoned by their husbands, that that’s not devastating, or even that there are no disparities between the levels of divorce among men with sick wives and women with sick husbands. 

However, so far as this divorce and family lawyer is concerned, he’s simply not “convinced” enough by the existing research.