Social scientists attribute the increase to everything from the number of aging baby-boomers to the growing numbers of women initiating divorce.

That situation doesn't affect the husband's commitment to the marriage, Nock concludes, but it weakens the wife's and makes her more likely to initiate divorce.

Women's right to initiate divorce is often limited compared with that of men in the Middle East.

Married couples live with the wife's mother, and the wife, not the husband, initiates divorce.

The incidence of women splitting from their husbands, initiating divorce or dissolution of a living-together situation, is very much on the rise.

Who initiates divorce in later life?

Women have more legal options for initiating divorce than they had in the past.

It allowed a wife to initiate divorce and required the first wife's permission for a husband to take a second wife.

He forbids divorce, but implicitly accepts that it is a man who initiates divorce, 'the man who divorces his wife.

It'd be nice to see an examination of who initiates divorce - as I understand it, in modern Britain the majority of divorces are initiated by women.