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Welcome back to Lez Hang Out, the podcast that fully supports you U-Hauling with your girlfriend of two weeks. 

This week, co-hosts Leigh (@lshfoster) and Ellie (@elliebrigida) hang out and talk about the lesbian divorce rate discourse. If you spend any time on Reneé Rapp’s internet you likely have seen some variation of this so-called “fact” going around about married lesbian couples having a 70% divorce rate. You may even have taken this fact at face-value. We’re not statisticians and we won’t say we did all that much deep research for this episode, but the claim is absolutely a myth. And it very much misrepresents the findings of that study. The world of statistics is a mess and it’s challenging to get a clear analysis of lesbian divorce rates when women have only been legally allowed to marry each other in this country for like a decade. It’s only natural that it will take time for marriage and divorce rates to stabilize, especially with LGBTQ+ rights in constant flux. With all this confusing back-and-forth, we wanted to take some time to look into some of these studies and give our two cents on what the reasons may be for lesbian couples having a higher divorce rate (if true). 

Through our super professional research we discovered a few factors that might be at play. First off, lesbian couples get married at higher rates than gay male couples and tend to be more monogamous. That coupled with the fact that women of all sexualities are more likely to initiate divorce than men leads us to believe this statistic is likely true. Next, time moves differently for queer couples. We have to consider things that straight couples simply never have to worry about, like whether we’ll legally be allowed to get married if we choose to wait. This can lead to lesbians jumping into marriages faster and discovering incompatibility afterward. We also are shown to be less likely to “stay for the kids”, probably because queer women are more inclined to co-parent equally after a divorce. However, we can’t completely ignore the flaws in the existing studies. Many include queer women who have divorced men in the past or include such a disproportionate sample size of queer couples to straight couples that it invalidates the results.

While there are obvious issues with the way the research has largely been approached (mainly because the straights do not understand how we operate), we will concede that everything seems to be pointing to it being true that lesbians divorce at a higher rate than both heterosexual and gay male couples. However, we also choose to believe the studies that show that lesbian couples have higher rates of satisfaction in our marriages and lower rates of cheating than other couples. Plus, lesbians who do U-Haul prior to getting married have lower rates of divorce. So really, we’re still the best and the straights can just keep crying about it. 

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Give us your own answers to our Q & Gay on Instagram and follow along on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and BlueSky @lezhangoutpod. Email us @[email protected]. Connect with us individually: Ellie Brigida (@elliebrigida). Leigh Holmes Foster (@lshfoster).

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