Recently went through the process. Mediation is certainly cheaper and less adversarial but that requires both good faith on both sides, and the ability to work together. Which has already been demonstrated is a problem since the marriage is breaking up in the first place. Some divorces are going to have to be adversarial.
But, speaking as someone who had to pay both lawyers sides, and substantial alimony and child support. My best advice - get it over with as soon as humanly possible! Time is the enemy. Not X percent. Lawyers will take it all. You gotta treat it like your future is on fire.
I’d very much be in favor of mandatory pre-nups when getting married. We need to be grown ups and recognize at least half these marriages will break up. It would make the couple confront the possibility and have to state their expectations beforehand.
Prenups aren’t 100% but having gone through the process I saw. Legal contracts matter! This prob won’t happen cause it would also break up a lot of couples before the marriage but that would actually be for the best.
Or here is a neat trick lawyers don’t want you to know: just don’t get married. Why are you involving the government in your love and sex life? Why complicate your financial situation so? If you want to publicly declare your love and commitment for your partner you can still have a ceremony and a party. Model it after hand-fasting ceremonies of old where you commit to each other for a year and a day. Then you can have a renewal party once a year. But soon as you sign a marriage license you are on the hook.
Now sure some will say that there are benefits for marriage such as tax breaks, etc. But the expectation value is against you: what you save on taxes for a few years you will lose in divorce to the lawyers. Ending a romantic relationship is hard. Don’t complicate with marriage/divorce.
Without marriage, you don't have a legal framework for breaking up. I know a couple who broke up after 25+ years, a mortgage, and a child together, who had never married. I think the lack of applicable legal precedent made it even messier to negotiate the split. It's been several years now, they're still negotiating details, and the lawyers aren't any cheaper.
Marriage is a private contract. It is just subject to specific rules. Employment is a private contract too as much as employment is a government sanctioned institution.. Really what the institution of marriage gets you is a tax break. But we also had the mortgage deduction in the past too.
> Or here is a neat trick lawyers don’t want you to know: just don’t get married.
This 100%. Eleven years into our relationship, with now a 7 years old kid. We were raised in non-religious families and we are non-religious, so why get married? Why then bring the "religion of the state" in our lives? We don't need no public servant to officially declare us married. We don't need no state-endorsed paper. We don't need no more administrative burden.
A breakup would, indeed, be bad enough in itself to then add insult to injury by having lawyers on both sides competing to see which of them has the sharpest teeth while they'd be bleeding us dry.
Just curious, what about medical insurance for the family if only one works? what about the signature thing when you need it most(e.g. in hospital that you need some signature), there are many inconvenience in daily life if you opt to not married but staying as partners with kids? there might be a long list of those things other than the marriage tax penalty.
There are something like 1200 rights that get conferred onto you when you get married. Most you can take care of with signing a power of attorney affidavit. Health insurance is a tricky one but the cost of adding a spouse vs getting two single plans is typically not that different.
> Health insurance is a tricky one but the cost of adding a spouse vs getting two single plans is typically not that different.
Sure.
Where being married is cheaper for health insurance is when you have kids, at least with employer group plans.
(Premiums for 2-party plans tend to be about, often exactly, double single plans. Family plans, for 3+, tend to be about 2.5 times. If your coparent isn't eligible on the same plan the marginal cost of each of the first two kids is higher.)
A lot that cover partners cover only registered domestic partnership, which was created as a lesser option to avoid providing same sex marriage, but has generally been retained because it's been adapted to other uses. But it's still a state-defined legal relationship, so if you are against that with marriage...
Custody, possession schedules, who gets to pick the school, who gets to make medical decisions for the kids, who decides if they ought get braces, who decides what extracurricular activities the kids are in and which parent has to take them, which parent can hold the kids passport and what counties can they take them to, geographical restrictions, morality clauses, right of first refusal, and on and on and on...
The vast majority of cases that got to jury trial are custody cases... rarely property issues.
(Indeed, in most states you aren’t even entitled to a jury trial on property issues.)
Well, the simple answer is that marriage is the formal consent that lets you have sex. That's what the "I do" part is all about. (No, it's not just a pretty tradition.)
Consent was very important in the middle ages, and it's making a huge comeback in the 21st century.
(The monetary issues can be settled with standard contracts, but the sex part is what requires a special and distinct form of agreement.)
I wish that governments didn’t do so much to try to force people to get married. I can’t bring my foreign partner to my home country unless we’re married, I pay more taxes if we’re not married, healthcare in the US is more complicated if we’re not married. People should be able to pick and choose how they want to live their lives, and marriage is a pretty much one size fits all solution.
Sounds like a terrible idea to me. You have these minimal commitment relationships that are only incrementally extended. What happens when the commitment ends after you've had kids? The mother and kids are screwed since they have no legal recourse to get you to support them ("sucks to be you, we never got married so I don't owe you anything")?
A healthy society is predicated on strong families and minimal commitment relationships sound like a recipe for weak families.
This is a complete bullshit argument. If you hate the person you are married to, the marriage certificate will not prevent you from leaving. If you love the person who you are with but are not married to you don’t need a marriage certificate to stay. Most jurisdictions will absolutely enforce child support regardless of marital status. The “strong families” argument is decades outdated and has always been designed to oppress women. There is zero reason to follow that logic today.
> The “strong families” argument is decades outdated and has always been designed to oppress women.
So, a legal system - namely marriage - that guarantees a woman a large portion of the property earned by the man during the marriage is “designed to oppress women”?
How is that?
What legal rights is a woman deprived of in a marriage that she would otherwise have being single?
The entire point of marriage is to give the ‘weaker’ member of the relationship rights to the property and earnings of the ‘stronger’ member.
This made a lot more sense imo when rights were less equal and the expectation was for the wife to stay at home. I think as thinks become more equal the more irrelevant an doutdated the current legal expectations are around marriage. Especially because the state will enforce child support regardless of martial status.
At some point the narrative has to change when things are more equal. I think there is a lot of data supporting that they have in many ways changed already. Women are more educated on average and more are completing higher education degrees than men and have been for the last few years.
No offense, but your advice sounds like it's coming from one who doesn't have kids, let alone someone in a long term (10 year+) relationship.
There are far more benefits to marriage than merely child support. There's alimony, spousal support, survivorship, power of attorney, the list goes on.
You can do all of this without being married, of course, but at at that point you might as well be married anyway.
So basically your point is that the government takes your money, and when they return something to you obviously not all that has been taken from you you are grateful.
The gov should be out of your relationship, there is NO valid reason for it to be in there.
Just my opinion of course, but I don't think it's BS. The piece of paper has nothing to do with it. It's the attitude of the two people going into the relationship.
If both people go in prepared for full life commitment through thick and thin you'll get a different outcome on average than two people going in with one foot out the door ready to flee at the first sign of trouble. The latter is a recipe for weak relationships and families - kids deserve to have stable parents who are fully committed to each other, not volatile parents who re-evaluate their commitment every year and break up if either isn't "feeling it".
Marriage is not a chemistry coin toss where the marriage automatically fails due to "irreconcilable differences" if you get bad RNG. That's an excuse. Stable marriages aren't chance, they are hard work. It's like building a house, or software. You have to constantly pour work into it to fix issues, strengthen the foundation, etc, or it will fail under load later. IMO if people looked for partners with the right attitude and committed to each other with the right attitude and put in in the work to back up their commitments, divorce rate would be a tiny fraction of what it is. I argue the divorce rate is so high because the people getting married are doing so with flimsy commitment, unwilling to put in the work required to build a solid foundation. Your solution does not help the commitment problem at all, but exacerbates it by making it even easier for relationships to have flimsy commitment levels ("let's not go all in, let's just commit to each other for one year, and then we'll break up after the honeymoon stage is over").
You can have the attitude without the piece of paper, no? Your point about people getting married without it proves my point: don’t get married. At best all you need is the long vault attitude. At worst it is much easier to end a relationship.
The children are legally entitled to financial support from both parents regardless of custody or marital status. If the mother has custody then she can sue the father for child support in family court even if they were never married. In many states if that mother were to seek public assistance then the government would also initiate a child support case.
> Or here is a neat trick lawyers don’t want you to know: just don’t get married.
Lawyers (except maybe divorce specialist) love that, at least from a driving business point of view. It’s kind of like avoiding the problems that can arise with the a fallout between business partners by not creating a formal legal arrangement at the outset (except every US jurisdiction backstops that with what amounts to “common law partnership” [0], while marriage coverage is more spotty.) Marriage is, for people in a committed relationship of the type it is designed for, a shortcut to things you would need lots of legal documents drawn up to kinda sorta approximate without it.
Including, messy as divorce can be, the relatively easy, straightforward, and predictable unwinding of the partnership compared with one that isn't a marriage but involves the same kind of long term mutual support and resource sharing that marriage is designed to deal with.
[0] mostly, though, for the benefit of predictability for people who might want to sue you.
Terrible advice. Most western countries would treat what you mentioned as a "common-law relationship", which entitles the partners to the same rights as a marriage. Check you local legislation. In Canada if you live with someone for more than 2 years, it's equivalent to a marriage in almost every case.
In my experience proving common-law relationship is tricky because it’s very undefined, and you may think you meet the requirements but the documents authorities will demand (because they do, they don’t just take your word for it) aren’t something most couples think of setting up until the time/need comes. Much easier to just show a marriage certificate.
There may be only seven states that recognize the creation of common law marriages, but all the other states will recognize the existence of a common- law marriage created in one of those seven states.
So… get married because the government has made it inconvenient not to? Aside from the fact that this is factually wrong (see other replies to your comment) this is also an awful reason to marry someone.
How do you get that conclusion from my comment? Lol. If anything, my comment suggested that don't even live together with someone, let alone get married. Because living together is legally the same as getting married in many jurisdictions. I might have been mistaken about the amount of places with such laws, but it's always a good idea to check your local legislation or talk to a family lawyer.
In hospital, or death, there are benefits a spouse gets that a partner doesn't. Visitation, property transfers, etc. It's possible to get contracts a power-of-attorney things but the marriage license has some special legal power (in USA)
If that is your concern then yes get PoA set up. It will be orders of magnitude cheaper than a divorce and infinitely more customizable. The biggest benefit in the US is that you don’t pay estate tax on inheritance. That you can’t contract away. So either get married much later in life or have so much or so little money that it doesn’t matter.
Breaking up without being married is even more work, this is a shortsighted outlook. A partition sale for jointly owned real estate can be more expensive and time consuming than a divorce. And what happens if your non spouse partner dies is a bigger problem
>Why are you involving the government in your love and sex life? Why complicate your financial situation so?
For same-sex couples, the legal ability to complicate their financial situation was hard won. Recall: Only 10 years ago it took an executive order by the President of the United States to prevent hospitals that receive government funding from denying a same-sex partner visitation.
Legal marriage is a cultural legitimizer that has value to some.
I argue that instead of pushing for marriage equality it might have been better to push for marriage to become a private contract matter, with expiration dates, extensions, remedies, and such built in. There is zero reason for the government to treat a couple as a couple rather than as two individuals. In the past it might have made sense, when the expectation was that the man worked and the woman didn’t and gay people didn’t exist. That is not reality. Why are we pretending like there is some kind of virtue in throwing a $30k party and then falling out of love five years later but staying together because divorce is expensive?
>...Instead of pushing for marriage equality it might have been better to push for marriage to become a private contract matter, with expiration dates, extensions, remedies, and such built in.
No, it would not have been better. We were concerned about whether we'd be able to visit our loved ones in the hospital, or make decisions about their critical care when they were incapacitated, or whether we'd be able to legally pass on property. We did not have equal dignity before the law, those of us whose relationships were considered illegitimate. We weren't really concerned, and still aren't concerned, with creating the most libertarian expression of legal coupling. We are still fighting to be treated like everyone else.
Ah okay thanks for replying. That's great to hear you're speaking from experience then. Did you need to convince your spouse of it or was your spouse for it all along? Sometime I think having these conversations is hard. Also do you act as if you're married or is the relationship "looser" in many ways (like living apart)? I'm genuinely curious because I do think the institution of marriage is a little dated in many ways.
It is operationally the same as being married, the relationships are not looser in any sense. Unless a longtime couple tells you about it, you often don't know. People assume you are married because you "look" and act how people expect married people to. Anecdotally, this is most common among people who were previously married, and therefore often have pragmatic and non-idealistic views of marriage, and both professionals; they already did it once and don't see the purpose or benefit. I know several couples that I discovered have been in this state for decades.
I do think this selects for relatively affluent couples who gain limited leverage by combining assets. For people with few assets, the benefits of combined economics are much higher.
Probably the biggest difference is that assets are not commingled by default and asset transactions do not require the signatures of both parties. Finances aren't just practically separate but also literally separate. Joint purchases are explicitly contracted as such. However, many well-off professional married couples also keep their finances approximately independent in practice, so this isn't unique though messier if they split up.
My situation is somewhat more interesting than most, but no I didn’t need to convince my partner(s) of any of this and everyone thinks of it the same way. That was one of the things that attracted me to the person with whom I have been living for the past several years.
People like to throw that number out there but mostly I think they’re just innumerate or justifying their own marital failures. Sure, 50% of marriages end in divorce. But that’s just one dumb average, and when you look at the underlying factors that affect divorce rates you’ll find they’re not that surprising.
Getting married very young, getting married due to a kid, getting married after dating for a short period, working in shitty jobs, living in certain states, marrying someone who has ever been unfaithful, marrying someone who has ever experienced a divorce before.
Not trying suggest one should not necessarily avoid anyone who falls into the above. But, while I cannot find any raw datasets to try and estimate this for myself, most of this have independent effects of double digit drops. Assuming a practical amount of multicollinearity, I would wager my best predicted probability of divorce is lower than 10% without considering any personal beliefs on our relationship.
Heck just looking at single variable analyses from various studies I see reason to believe my predicted divorce rate is 30-60% lower than baseline.
Nope. That is the opposite of what I just said. I said ignoring the state of my relationship, the odds are vastly in my favor. Average is not your friend.
First marriages have an average divorce rate that is 20% lower than the average rate. Marriages in my state have an average divorce rate that is half the US average.
You can do much better than the top level average.
But more seriously… if you aren’t willing to take a guaranteed decently large pay increase (which scales with future income growth) with the added chance of losing more to legal fees and arbitration later on… you probably shouldn’t get married. You’re probably correct that for a middle class family the pure fiscal return will likely be positive if your marriage lasts just a handful of years.
You're 100% right. Most functional divorces I have seen, are those where process end up quickly, especially if there are children. For the sake of their kids it's the best thing that can happen.
The movie "Marriage Story" it's a great reflection of your point, in how the lawyers weaponize resentment in relationships (affairs, deadbedrooms, chores neglect, etc) to get the process going for as long as possible with the promise of getting the best %... but in the end, their funds are eaten away by legal fees.
#NotAllLawyers of course, they already have (with some exceptions) an underserved bad rap, and I have meet some with an ethic code of steel. But it's better the be aware that can still happen.
Yeah, certainly not trying to bash lawyers. I'm a billable consultant myself. I don't think our lawyers were trying to do anything wrong.
This was the process. Exchange information, Negotiate, if negotiation fails - meet w judge for pre-trial opinion (what they would rule with current information). If still contested, Discovery building up to Trial.
If they were milking us, they'd be pushing for the trial, cause the discovery is the real billable hours killer.
But, I had to take the responsibility when it looks like the negotiation is going badly - let's get this in front of the judge NOW. Discovery/trial legal bills would have wiped out most of our assets at the time.
No, as a lawyer who personally just completed this process, my faith in my profession will never be the same after witnessing the toxic mix of bad faith and incompetence of the opposing lawyer, collusive ineffectiveness of the retired judge we hired to act as mediator, and virtually everything else about the process. The first 10 months were wasted with those two failing to read past page 1 of a critical document to find the operative language and being unable to craft a coherent plan as a result. That was just the start.
The lesson I learned was it doesn't matter how high-minded your rules, principles and processes are, the matrimonial bar and bench seems to be a magnet for just craven incompence, mean spiritedness, and, when you get past all of that, in the best case, indifference to the unnecessary suffering they cause. So while I appreciate the optimism of the article, and in general I agree with the principle that lawyers are unnecessarily "bashed", when it comes to the matrimonial bar some higher level of regulation, self regulation or other form of redress is required.
A lawyer friend who has colleagues working in Family Law says they (the family lawyers) describe their practice as "Feelings Court". The law itself is a guideline, adherence to the rules for e.g. contents of filings is on a meh-effort basis (beyond things that are completely objective such as tax returns).
Yeah from what I've heard, family court is super wonky and does not follow the same standards that normal courts do, yet still have the same full force of law! It's crazy and makes me want to stay away from them with a 10 foot pole.
Agreed, in my case I offered a settlement early on for uncontested divorce, literally dividing everything in half. My spouse hired an attorney whose website says he knows how to find the money the other side is hiding. Well, tens of thousands of dollars and 18 months later, we arrive at mediation and settle on the identical division, which just about everyone thinks is unfair because she took all the cash and home equity I get just the business assets. Risk doesn't really get priced in.
But one of the worst things about it is that the mediator said she looked in really bad shape, like she'd been through the wringer. And we had complied with alacrity with her attorney's requests. I found that very inhumane of the attorney.
Edit: I think I meant to reply to the child comment.
I did a prenup with my wife. Wasnt easy because im an immigrant in China and she s Chinese, so when I proclaimed that a good mariage prepares for divorce, like we do now in France where separation of wealth is a trivial matter my family did for generations, I was met with defiance.
How big a fortune must I have for being so protective :D But in the end we did it, it made total sense to her: what she works for and buys with her money is hers, and vice versa.
Now we never have money issue or anything: she bought an appartment I have no stakes in nor claim to and she loves this financial independence. If we divorce, Ill prob pay an alemony since we have a child, but we wont tear each other over splitting possession: it s dealt with since the get go.
I think it helps mariages to do that. Especially multi cultural ones like ours where there's a lot of small traps along the way.
Different strokes I suppose, but my wife and I went all in when we married, with combined bank accounts, credit, car and home titles, etc. Our marriage feels stronger for that by signalling the commitment. (Married >20 years)
There's no reason to "prepare for divorce" when both my wife and I made a vow before God to each other til we die.
The problem is that alot of people don't mean it. They don't mean their vow "for worse, for sickness, for poorer until death do us part". People forget there is a 100% chance of worse, sickness, and poorer.
People change over time, and the people who made that vow at the age of 20 are probably not going to be the same people at the age of 40. If all goes well, the people that they have changed into will remain compatible with each other. But, sadly, all does not always go well. I know multiple older people who are trapped in miserable, loveless, emotionally destructive marriages that they feel they cannot leave solely because their 20 year-old selves made that vow before God. It's not that these people didn't "mean it", it's that they (like all of us) could not perfectly predict the future.
Of course I can't comment on your particular situation nor do I wish you bad luck, but religious couples are as likely or more likely to get divorced compared to non-religious couples [0].
Or at least the majority of divorces in the US are among the religious (according to this particular poll).
Maybe "biased" because marriage is something more encouraged by religions in the first place.
What he said is true: the vow has some strong words in it that a lot of people are not taking so seriously. Yes, just as many or more people who identify with a religion get divorced, but just because they identify that way on a form does not mean they are giving as much weight to the vow that some of us do. For us, our pastors counsel us at length to think through the commitment in advance—possible differences/preferences in many scenarios, including finances. We are taught to think of marriage as hard, and to take important steps to guard it along the way. Passively identifying with a faith is not the same as actively trying to let it guide your everyday life.
Extremely tragic. I do not want to diminish your situation at all. The difference is that so many of the dozens and dozens of divorces I’m personally connected to had no tragedy such as yours and the people involved were not going into marriage prepared for the road ahead (something they could have enjoyed if they’d been in a more supportive community that taught them more). So many I know end the marriage for far less difficult situations than yours.
To me, it's like student loans - giving those "permanent vows" when you are 18 is like making an 18 year old sign up for $50,000 of debt to start a career with no future guarantee.
When I got divorced, I would have happily paid a huge one-time settlement payment to my wife to avoid going through the whole process. I had a lot of high value assets from before, that did not appreciate much during our marriage. (In Canada, you only have to pay 50% of the increase in asset value from wedding day to separation day). I intimated this to my wife. She took that as a sign of weakness and dragged me through the courts (with encouragement from some social workers). At the end of the legal process she ended up getting a paltry sum (as compared to my initial offer). Also since our marriage lasted very small period of time, her alimony came out to be zero. My initial offer was 5x the amount she got in end. But I had to pay the lawyers a lot. I would have rather given that money to her. Also, by the time the whole process ended, my assets had significantly grown in value, so I had to liquidate a smaller amount to pay her share.
Mandatory prenups that have to be approved by a judge along with the marriage license.
Mandatory coursework on what divorce looks like.
Affirmative renewal of the marriage every 7 years.
Marriage is nothing more than an implied legal contract, whose terms are set upon dissolution, and a lawyer would be disbarred for advising their client to enter into such agreements.
I rather stupidly wrote my experience without reading all the comments, but wish I'd read this quote first. This is exactly how I'd sum up how to treat it!
> Prenups aren’t 100% but having gone through the process I saw. Legal contracts matter!
this. The whole point of making a contract is to agree how to disagree. The best contracts spell out the edge cases. If both can be mature enough very early to talk about these, then it's a basis that predicts the ending to be civilized in the first place.
In reality motivation for marriage is a lot more complex than what can be spelled out in a contract. In my case how would I have put on paper the edge cases that came with wanting to get married to a manipulative, deeply broken, drama queen which was the only reference model my bi-polar, suicidal and abusive mother equipped me with. Or how would a young woman from a wife-beating father chose her spouse.
In my case marriage accelerated my own demise (a path that I was already on) but I needed that crash (without knowing it back then) to figure out the problem in the first place.
I've seen in myself and many friends (both smart and dumb, poor and rich) no matter how intelligent, prudent and sensible in other areas of life, people abandon all reason with love. Like it's the most powerful and destructive drugs of them all when taken by people who haven't fixed their own issues. Like women who go into it as a way of "fixing him" or guys who need somebody to "complete them" (or a million other ways to destroy themselves).
No amount of risk management can help you when your goal is to jump off a cliff.
Oddly couples never see it themselves. It's always the friends or a stranger who can tell with shocking accuracy by looking at the couple for only a few minutes why their dynamic is f'ed up.
When I got married the prenup was just a checkbox (yes/no) on the application form. I ticked yes of course, because I don't know anyone in Europe who in their sound mind would want to lose half of what they have (or more?) during a divorce. It's an archaic system leftover from a time when women did not work and so it served as a lifeline for them, but that isn't the case anymore, at least not in Europe as far as I've observed. And so while yes I am aware that most marriages will fail, and mine might just be one of them, I'm not afraid for the divorce process at all.
It's not usually the assets that cause a problem. It's future income that's the issue and usually in the context of a woman who raised kids and a man that worked.
Prenups only matter when you have significant assets pre-marriage. With the price of housing these days, most people won't have any significant financial security until they're borderline infertile; how do prenups benefit these marriages?
I know a few people here in Cyprus who are here because they did not want to divorce (the other side made it clear it won't be amicable for them, with full intention of taking over all property). Instead, they just vanished to surface here :) (legal loopholes due to collisions between church vs civil marriage enables it to marry again while being married elsewhere). Of course, after that you got to be very careful about safeguarding your assets, but the infrastructure offered by this place - a former offshore tax haven - makes it easy even in much harder cases than "some dude who owes his wife an alimony".
In many jurisdictions, common law relationships after a certain period of cohabitation are very similar to marriage when it comes to splitting up. I'm guessing you're not advocating not staying with someone for more than, say 2 years.
Edit3: also note, married couples don't automatically have "Lasting power of attorney" which grants partners a say in their medical care, and being "Next of Kin" is not an equivalent.
Isn’t it the same as a defector relationship? Australia also has a system where you don’t have to be married to be considered as a couple for some legal purposes.
"The courts can make an order for the division of any property that you own together or separately. They may also order a split of any superannuation, or that one party pay spousal maintenance.
The net asset pool will include anything acquired before, during, or after separation. It does not matter whether the property was owned jointly or individually. When determining a property settlement, the court evaluates the types of contributions – financial and non-financial – made by either person, as well as their future needs."
Edit: this applies to AU "de facto relationship" vs UK "common law marriage" terms... it might be different when discussing different countries.
Yes in the provice of Ontario common-law spouses have the same rights to spousal support as married couples if they have been living together for at least three years, or if they have a child together and have been living together in a relationship of some permanence.
So you can’t be a room mate with the opposite sex without being considered common law married after that time period? I feel like any decent lawyer could blow that to pieces.
CA doesn't have common law marriage, so it is more accurate to say that it doesn't apply to same sex couples in the same way that it doesn't to oppozit5-sex couples.
> Correct, but CA recognizes common law marriage where it was triggered in other jurisdictions.
Every US state recognizes common law marriage from other jurisdictions, and (because of federal Cobstitutional rulings) does so without regard to the gender of participants.
In the very few places where common law marriage is allowed, it still requires the couple to hold themselves out in public as married. It does not "trick" people into getting married if they don't treat themselves as married.
There can be complications if one party claims to be common-law married and the other does not, especially during divorces.
Those factors can be, amongst others: joint financial accounts, mortgage, title to assets, children, vehicle insurance policies, reciprocal wills, reciprocal beneficiaries of life insurance, health coverage, intimacy, etc.
What I’m getting at is that it’s not that hard to hold yourself out as married when you’ve got so much “entanglement.”
That’s not always the case. Here in Ontario there was a case of a relationship being declared common law by a court despite not cohabitating. That is quite unusual, but simply living together for 3 years (or 1 year with a child) is the normal yardstick courts use.
or depending on your gender swap jurisdiction when you see it's going pear shaped. France sees quite a bit of divorce tourism from UK and other European countries because they're "less progressive". So if you have a lot of money to lose move the whole family to France and after 2 or 3 years get divorced there.
Unfortunately, that requires exercising your say ahead of time, through contraception, vasectomy, or the radical step of making sure that your long-term goals are aligned with those of your partner.
Being required to agree on something in advance with your prospective spouse would be different from agreeing to go with the default. It means learning a bit about what is standard, and putting some thought into whether what you want is different from that. It would also remove the negative signal of asking for a prenup: if everyone is required to talk and agree on something, then you aren't doing something that indicates low confidence in the success of your marriage.
A divorce after 20 years of marriage, or a divorce that took 20 from initiation to conclusion? (In normal context, I’d read it as the former; in this specific context, it seems ambiguous.)
> I’d very much be in favor of mandatory pre-nups when getting married.
Isn't this basically what happened everywhere in the civilized world? People used to just dump their families so now you're legally required to support spouses and children (even if not legally married).
This then leads to shock headlines like "Billionaire forced to share unearned fortune with the person they agreed to legally conjoin themselves with"
What are you proposing that's different from that?
Maybe pre-nup has a different meaning where you live. I'm in the US, and here a pre-nup is an agreement that defines custom rules for a marriage and divorce that are override, add to, and/or clarify the rules of the default marital contract. So, not everyone has one.
Wikipedia defines it well:
> Couples enter into a written prenuptial agreement to supersede many of the default marital laws that would otherwise apply in the event of divorce, such as the laws that govern the division of property, retirement benefits, savings, and the right to seek alimony (spousal support) with agreed-upon terms that provide certainty and clarify their marital rights.
Everywhere? The point of an explicit pre-nuptial is to opt out of what would happen by default. It's opt-out, not opt-in. If you don't have a pre-nup, then you get the standard pre-nup terms which have usually been established over a long period of time, with detailed rules about homes, children, property etc.
Well, that's why I asked my question, ("What are you proposing that's different from that?") because I don't know what he means by mandatory pre-nups, because we already have a mandatory pre-nuptial agreement, and indeed it sometimes kicks in literally before any nuptials.
Clearly they intend something else than a mandatory agreement you sign up for before marraige, because that exists, but they're not really providing any details on how it would differ?
A note to any single folks out there with the potential to earn more than their future spouse: understand family law in your jurisdiction and understand what you are signing up for when you get legally married.
Divorce can leave you liable for more support payments than you can even afford. The other party can walk away with half of your property, including unvested RSUs(!!!), and it doesn't matter if they cheated or failed to contribute to the marriage. If you think you're being nice by trying to make the marriage work and tolerating it, you may be just setting yourself up for even more pain down the road.
An example that surprised me: a friend of mine is unable to quit his stressful, unfulfilling high paying job due to alimony from a contentious divorce. Depending on jurisdiction, alimony payment amounts can be based on your earning potential, not your current income. So if you can earn lot you may be stuck in a job you hate.
I simply cannot imagine giving another person this kind of power. If you’re going to risk such a catastrophic failure of the rest of your life for a neuro-chemical experience, heroin seems safer than romance.
That doesn't sound appealing. Taking a huge risk for something that can potentially ruin my finances for an extended period of time in exchange for maybe 7 more years of living.
Slightly immature comment, but I'll bite. Chances of affair with heroin ending up being a nice story is absolutely 0. Chances of marriage being the one of the best decision in your life and ongoing source of content and happiness is pretty high, much higher than some comments here suggest. It can be something basic for few close friends and family, not those rather pathetic overblown mega weddings.
And yes it changes things - I didn't believe so myself, but it did, for the better. And that's without kids. Anytime I see non-married couple with their kids, its mostly the guy. Women often say they are OK with that but then tell their close friends how they wish they could be married. All I see is insecure person - and literally everybody I've ever met in that situation is insecure, you just have to look close enough.
But it became a bit of an art to marry well and of course its never 100%, but then what in life is. It can't be done for physical attraction alone. I would say that the SO needs to be a damn nice person to live with (for you at least) if you remove any physical attractiveness. There are tons of people who have naturally and genuinely good heart. Marry those, and only those. The chances for good marriage compared to average just jumped through the roof.
The second part is at least equally hard - be a good partner and father, consistently even if not truly permanently. Family takes priority about any pathetic career you consider so important and awesome. Any party, trips, plans, and so on. Don't lose yourself in marriage/parenthood and keep something that makes you feel alive, but be ready to postpone/downtune it. Chances now are even higher.
The last part is to be sure both sides are actually, truly, long term compatible. This takes time to find out. Similar personalities are much easier to work with compared to opposites. It can be speeded up by spending a lot of time together, tough and challenging time. Long active travels are great, if not possible a lot of small intense travel helps. Don't extinguish arguments (but don't provoke them), and watch how other side reacts. How both your reaction combine. How you both handle de-escalation. Ideal is to find passions that you truly share, the more the better. I for example wouldn't be able to live long term with a lady which doesn't share with me some mountain/adrenaline sports. Mine shares all of them but it took quite some time to find her.
Most couples these days, married or not, fail at least some time in at least 1 of those aspects. Over time, its source of wedge that cracks relationships that seem perfect in the beginning. But they are perfect only through the lens of emotions, which change over time. Cold, hard facts about persons changes much less often if ever.
I think everything is tradeoffs, but there will probably come a time when divorcing a higher-earning spouse is on balance a very good move for you. Perhaps some combination of your magnanimity or your spouse's devotion means you won't actually capitalize on this. But you could, and you both know it, and that power dynamic is extreme. Extreme enough to drown out any feelings of contentment or satisfaction, even if they manage to keep you happy. And obviously you have no obligations to their feelings, with this kind of leverage.
Perhaps this is immature. I'm not totally averse to responsibility. I have a career and a mortgage, and getting fired or going into default would be very bad. But it would be bad in a way that I'd recover from. An acrimonious divorce with an alimony award would really seem to make the rest of my life not worth living. Even a 5% chance of that is crazy.
The last lawyer I consulted with basically said they can't force my wife to work because that's slavery. I then asked why they can force me to work and he just went silent. Everyone in that industry knows it's bullshit but they're rich, connected, and unwilling to let it change.
Alimony is not child support. Alimony is paid to the ex-spouse to maintain their lifestyle. You would need to pay child support in addition to the alimony.
Canada has one of the highest suicide rates among divorced men because of their even more draconian alimony/child support payments.
Long story short, don't get married in Canada. Dave Foley on the Joe Rogan Podcasts (in like the 0-200's episodes) went through his divorce and explained how absurd it was.
Yes your ex can argue that you could make more but he could take a similar job with the same skill set that is less stressful. Or if he moves, less by cost of living adjustments etc...
But he should be able to quit, there's no forced employment. Obviously, the employer is not a party to the contract either that they have to keep him employed. So he would have to file a motion to decrease the alimony support unless things have been locked in by a separate joint agreement: MN calls this a Karon waiver. If the job is too stressful and impacting his mental health then he should present that evidence with justification from medical experts to the judge... That process could be stressful no doubt but should be worth it.
Alimony is also not always criminally enforceable like child support is. A judge could hold you in contempt but it's not going to do much to get you to work if there's no motivation to work. Then the judge would have the additional problem of you being in jail and not being able to work or having to explain to your employer or a new employer why you were in jail.
"any single folks with the potential to earn" == if you're a man
"understand family law" == you can do nothing, don't kid yourself
This is an unusually serious topic for this forum. Those of you who are too young to believe it can happen to you or assume the financially raped were exceptionally stupid or unlucky. Do your future self a favor and think twice. The men you hear about were once like you. You're just earlier in the lifecycle. With every generation is's getting worse and not linearly. At the very least
* marriage is for only if you're in your 30s and want to have a child within a year
* make sure your parents unanimously approve of the woman
Also, the older you get the easier it gets to get laid without the paperwork. Marriage is a guaranteed loss for a man.
It's not specifically advice for men. I use gender neutral pronouns for a reason. It applies to high earning women as well. My friend is a VP making good money. Her ex was a mostly out of work machinist with drug problems. She faced the same risks.
Your risk is much less when you've made your money before the marriage. You can still be on the hook for alimony, but at least you won't lose half of everything you've ever worked for. In either case, understand the law. Marriage is a legal contract enforced by the state. It, legally speaking, has nothing to do with love, commitment, marital duties, fidelity, etc.
Just going by the numbers and the outcomes, your high-earning VP woman is a LOT LOT rarer than the average lovestruck engineer who doesn't look before he leaps.
Yes of course both sexes can theoretically face the same thing, but in practice it is very biased.
I'll add to this: you don't necessarily have to get married for this to apply. In most (all?) Australian jurisdictions, living with someone for enough time is enough to establish you as defacto - which for almost all intents and purposes is just like being married.
Also worth noting is that Australia doesn't have alimony, nor do we seem to have the ridiculous child support arrangements that people get into overseas.
We have child support but I assume by ridiculous arrangements they meant were don’t have uncapped child support and it’s also income based not earning potential based.
No getting trapped in a job you hate. No pretending it costs hundreds of thousands a year to raise a kid.
>No getting trapped in a job you hate. No pretending it costs hundreds of thousands a year to raise a kid.
Yeah, this is basically what I meant. You don't see the crazy situations like they have in the US where dads are driven into bankruptcy by obscene alimony/child support payments. At worst, it's a pain in the arse.
Of course you should understand what you are getting into before marriage and prepare also for a possible breakup.
But I don't find this "she took my money" to be a reasonable attitude.
Both parties have responsabilities in a marriage. Maybe the other party didn't make as much money (or made no money at all), but taking care of the house and kids is work too. It also enables the person with a job to concentrate on their carreer.
This is based on a lot of assumptions. First that there are children. Second, that one of the parties actually put forth effort to raise the children.
> "She took my money"
You realize gender is irrelevant now, right? My friend is a VP at a medical device manufacturer and had my situation in reverse. It doesn't just affect men.
Somehow I doubt your friend would look at these commenters and consider them to be fellow travelers. There does seem to be an undercurrent of hostility to women in some of them.
The point of the advice is to come up with a reasonable division of responsibilities that work for your partnership, rather than accepting the default agreement handed to you by the state without even understanding what it is.
I was divorced a decade or so ago. I'm not super rich or anything, regular engineer class well off...
My advice... be amicable if possible. And give the other side more than you, ask them to sign off, and find a cheap attorney to do the paperwork. My divorce was super cheap on paper, even though I lost more than half my net worth. I think it cost about $200.
I had a coworker telling me I was an idiot, and how his lawyer could have gotten me a better deal. Only cost him six figures and many months of time to get it.
Time is your most valuable asset. Get it over as quick as you can.
My parents got divorced, but my Mom had always been a stay at home mom. She had absolutely no working experience, no career, etc. There was no way she could have paid even 99/1 since she didn't even have any income separate from my father. This is probably less common now, but I still know lots of families where the mother does not have a career outside the home (and 1 example of a father not having a career outside the home).
Because the reason the mother doesn't have career experience is because she spend the time contributing to the family in other ways, allowing the husband to focus more on work. Had she not been married, she would have (by necessity if nothing else) had a career outside the home instead. Social security generally provides a bare minimum safety net, if that; it's unreasonable that one spouse should walk away in a far better financial position than the other after both contributed to the marriage.
Mother made the choice to prioritize family over career. That was always an option. I see no reason to punish other person. If the other person forced mother, she should have divorced at that point and gotten on with the career. Abortion and adoption is realistic options for possible children.
I see no reason why such person deserve anymore than bare minimum. That is bare minimum that society considers acceptable. So clearly it should be acceptable for absolutely everyone.
So a couple get married. They (voluntarily) have children. Then they make the decision together that the wife will quit work to spend the majority of her time raising their children and managing the household, while the husband will continue working outside the home, as his earnings are sufficient to support the family. Some time later they divorce. You're saying at this point the husband should now keep his entire income for himself, and the wife should have to rely on social security? She would effectively then have to choose between remaining in the marriage or becoming destitute. How is that reasonable? I guess you're saying that no one should choose to live in a single-income family, to guard against this eventuality?
Yes. And the wife can re-enter the career or start a new one. It is not so hard these days. I see no reason why the wife should be allowed to leech of the husband. And no she won't be destitute. Finding minimum wage work should not be impossible.
Yes, if you want to be sure that you don't end up badly, either accept that minimum standard is social security. Or safe up yourself. Don't expect to be able to exploit someone else for your heightened standard of living.
Maybe it's easier to explain on HN as being about founders. A marriage is a single legal entity, like a startup, where the two founder share equal equity (by default) with no vesting. It doesn't matter that one founder does the sales and brings in revenue and the other builds the product: the equity split is still 50/50.
Obvs prenups etc tweak the split/vesting schedule effectively, and that's fine, but don't expect to be a CEO of a startup, sell £1M of product and be able to walk away with the entire value of the business.
But to follow your analogy, 'keeping the partnership amicable' was traditionally seen as falling more to the person not out bringing money into the business. Divorce was much rarer when single-income arrangements were the norm, there may be some uncertainty as to causality but the two went hand in hand. If it's in someone's job description to keep the family together and they fail to do that - well granted, sometimes they were up against impossible odds, but it seems like the stay-at-home partner is getting the best of two eras, modern responsibility for keeping the marriage together and earlier responsibility for contributing financially.
If two parties agree to something, it doesn't fall to only one of them to make sure everything works out, regardless of the behavior of the other party.
Divorce was indeed lower when women typically had no way of supporting themselves, and therefore were often forced to stay in a marriage. That hardly seems like the better end of the deal.
>If two parties agree to something, it doesn't fall to only one of them to make sure everything works out, regardless of the behavior of the other party.
Sure, that's why I stipulated 'sometime you're up against impossible odds'. But I don't see how there can be talk of an equal partnership when one party is expected to bring in all the money and do half the emotional labour, and typically a good chunk of the housework in the process.
Even if Ekaros is single without children, I don't see how one can grow up in a society without understanding how difficult it would be for a parent to give up their child.
Adoption may be the best option for some people in some situations. I can imagine that. But presenting it as an obvious solution to this problem indicates a glaring gap in their understanding of human beings.
Not everyone has money for divorce. If we really want to make it better, we can lower filing fees or get rid of them entirely. Getting married is cheap in a lot of places, and that means poor folks can have the legal benefits of marriage. It is a shame that poverty can keep you there.
50/50 custody isn't always good for the child, though. I know a kid that really had anxiety issues, in no small part because 50/50 makes for somewhat unstable housing.
There isn't really a such thing as 50/50 child support. The bigger reason for child support is because one parent obviously makes more than the other one, and the support is supposed to ease the burden. I'd rather expand the safety net so that less support is needed. Not only that, but I'd make sure that the support receiver gets the money every month regardless of whether or not the other parent pays. You can pay support to the government instead of directly to the other party. Also of note: Support tends to be higher or lower depending on custody - and to be fair, it applies to never-married relationships as well. I'd also note that we should be sure that both parties can keep up proper residences for the children. Visitation means you need the house space (bedrooms) for the children, for example, and support shouldn't mean that you lose access to your children.
Paying to the government instead of directly to the other party is such an excellent idea it kind of blows my mind that this is the first time I've heard it. So many unnecessary disputes around spousal/child support that could be solved with that measure. The government is already good at collecting and distributing money; that's basically what it's for. Seems blindingly obvious.
I know it is done in other places - and I think you are right. It could simply eliminate some anxiety and arguments - it takes someone's ability to pay out of the picture completely. Anything that makes it easier to be a good parent with one's ex should be encouraged.
That's how it is in Quebec/Canada and I'm surprised it's not the norm. It's indexed to inflation. Either party can request a re-evaluation if their situation has changed.
Here over 50% of kids are born from unmarried parents, and that proportion has steadily increased through the years. 20% of couples separate before their first child is 5 years old. 50/50 parenting is the norm. Might sound scary, but as someone in that situation, it took some time to get used to, but worked out fine.
Common law covers child support but not spousal support. It can be a major risk if one spouse is financially dependent on the other (see Cirque du Soleil, Éric vs Lola).
All of your points are already covered in the linked article.
Except it says that mediation is better than legal fees, regardless of who pays. The article's claim is that this shift away from the adversarial process is probably the biggest factor, though others also contribute.
And 50/50 custody is already the norm in many places, according to the article.
"Laws in Australia, Sweden and some American states require judges to consider splitting custody time more or less down the middle."
The first one started with mediation. The process was highly feminized, and all the mediators were women. I felt very much that they were predisposed to the view that I was "at fault". The process failed, in that we weren't able to agree a settlement. It was useful only in that we were required to perform disclosure, and to discuss the disclosed documents in a fairly non-judicial forum; disclosure would be necessary anyway when the settlement went to court. In court, my solicitor was a woman; my wife's was a woman; and the judge was a woman.
This is the UK; Family Court proceedings were subject to very strict secrecy. The press couldn't report Family Court proceedings, not even anonymized, so basically the public had no idea what kinds of things went on in Family Court. It's become a little looser now, but only a little. It's high time for reform of UK family law.
[Edit] I advised people "don't get married". Then I went into my second marriage, which ended 3 years later. Dogfood much?
I wanted to add that I have also taken part in marriage guidance. That counsellor was also a woman; I remember her describing me as "a tough nut to crack". This was the premier marriage guidance outfit in the UK.
It seems an incredibly stupid thing for a trained counsellor to say; who wants to be "cracked"? It certainly alienated me from that process.
Perhaps most of the men these people encounter from troubled marriages are objectively arseholes, but I doubt it. I don't think many arseholes go to marriage guidance, and I don't think they engage with mediation. I know that many psychotherapists are people who have been through therapy; I wonder if these cousellors and mediators are women who have experienced spousal abuse themselves.
In the UK, Family Court proceedings are secret. I agree that it's wrong; but the rationale is that this kind of court proceeding often needs participants to have confidence that what they say to the court isn't going to be made public. I agree with that too.
I think it's fine to protect the identity of the participants; but I think that if the way these courts work were more widely known, then reform would come quicker. It's a sort of Catch-22.
Remove custody percentages as a part of support payments and the financial incentive that drives a lot of this behavior goes away. In other countries where support payments are not a major thing, a lot of the nastyness of divorce also goes away too. I like this section of the book "real world divorce" about it: http://www.realworlddivorce.com/International
The standardizing of support payments that a lot of these countries (and it looks like some US states) do seems like a fair way to reduce the potential exploitability too. The price of raising a child isn't tied to income, so why should the payer's income matter beyond reducing payments (ideally with the state stepping in like the Danish system) for those who can't make the normal amount?
The idea is that the wife and children should not experience any decline in their standard of living as a result of the divorce. They are entitled to live the way they would have lived had the marriage continued; if the husband is rich then that includes owning a nice house in an expensive city, luxury cars, private schools, etc.
If the system’s goal were merely to ensure that they land on their feet, it would look very different.
> The idea is that the wife and children should not experience any decline in their standard of living as a result of the divorce.
Specifically, in the case of child support, the idea is that the children should not (the idea that the spouse should not tends to be factored in to alimony.) e.g., to quote the California law on child support: “Children should share in the standard of living of both parents.” Family Code § 4053(f)
Well, that's the idea behind alimony, which is sometimes mixed in with child support. But child support is mostly rooted in the idea that raising a child requires more support than a single individual can provide.
If it were just about continuation of lifestyle, my mother wouldn't have been entitled to anything as my parents were never together.
That seems like an impossible goal. If there are 2 houses instead of 1, it's going to require getting cheaper houses, smaller yards, etc. Both parties' standard of living will go down.
Not necessarily. It could result in one house and yard staying the same, and the other one being a one bedroom apartment across town with almost no furniture. In this case, only one party's standard of living goes down.
Sorry--I was making a joke. The implication being that in a middle class divorce (at least in the US), it's pretty common that the standard of living for the mother and children is maintained when it comes to house size, yard, etc. because she ends up keeping it. The stereotype is that he ends up in the crappy apartment and writing the big alimony checks and child support payments.
It's glossing over a bit to not acknowledge that one's standard of living is taking a much bigger hit than the other. It's also not the case that 100% of income in a marriage contributes to standard of living (or equally between spouses), so there absolutely are cases where an ex-wife with sufficient alimony and child support could end up with a nicer house, car, etc. than when she was married. This dichotomy is what drives a lot of the angst that comes up when dealing with these legal processes.
> Both parties' standard of living will go down.
This isn't quite true is all I'm saying. The higher earner's standard of living almost certainly will go down. The other spouse's standard of living may or may not.
I agree I was wrong in that they both will go down 100% of the time. It's possible to come up with rare situations in which one or the other will go up.
But to me it seems that if one of them is going to go up, it's more likely to be the higher earner whose standard will go up. The divorce caused the higher earner to lose access to a lower income (possibly zero), so thus possibly not much financial downside. The divorce caused the lower earner to lose access to a higher income, so a large financial downside.
> It's also not the case that 100% of income in a marriage contributes to standard of living
Are you saying a divorce could lead to more efficient use of money? That doesn't seem like the case to me. When married they were in 1 bedroom in 1 house. Now they're in 2 bedrooms in 2 houses. Less efficient. If there are kids and shared custody, the kids need double the bedrooms as well.
>(or equally between spouses)
Ok, I sort of get that point. If for example while married the higher earner spent 60% of his/her income on hobbies that didn't benefit the lower earner, then the lower earner was given 50% of the higher earner's income as alimony, that would mean the lower earner could possibly benefit. But those numbers are crazy. Most money is spent on housing, which benefits both spouses. To spend such a giant amount on a single spouse's hobbies is very unusual.
If you start from the premise that maintaining the children's quality of life is the top priority (which I believe) then it follows pretty logically from there. Keep the kids in the house, with the parent most able to care for them. Unfortunately, this is usually the mother; in a more perfect world, it would be the father just as often.
It also implies the other spouse (usually father), shouldn't be an equal active co-parent and have autonomy over where the money for the child goes, and it goes only to the other parent.
Maybe in a few decades we will recognize that you should incentivize both parents to be active in the child's life.
Sounds like the worst possible outcome for the kids. A constant state of chaos in your life, even if both parents are reasonably good at taking care of a kid, interested in it, have the financial means, etc.
Yeah, I remember as a kid the one dude in our trailer park who had a 50/50 arrangement with their other parent in town. Poor kid never had any of us go over to their house to seek them out, because we didn't know the schedule. Childhood social structures can be fragile things that are invisible to adults.
In the Netherlands they finally changed divorce law to end the practice of alimony payments. This is also an incentive for both parties to pursue a career lest you fall into poverty after divorce.
i get it but in reality in many families someone is sacrificing their career for the family unit. i don’t think it’s unfair to take that opportunity cost into consideration
I can only speak to my reality, which is that I am paying $40k/year to someone who never had kids, never tried to better themselves, and who quit their low-skilled job to pursue an endless series of expensive hobby jobs(purse making, painting, selling weed edibles).
I can try to reduce my payments, but lawyers say there's a risk they'll actually go up because I'm making more now(because I couldn't afford to live in my old town due to alimony). The other party has an inactive form of cancer, but the primary tumor was removed over 30 years ago while I was still in junior high school, and a vocational evaluation , which consulted with their doctors, found there is no reason not to work full time.
I've been paying for over 5 years now and there's no end in sight. The system is forcing me to pay a lazy person to sit at home all day long without any obligation to work.
Yes I've considered leaving many times. I only have alimony, not child support(no kids), so failing to pay isn't serious enough to revoke my passport. Depending on how things work out, I may have to retire overseas.
It's a huge risk because the system makes it a huge risk, that's exactly the point under discussion. An unseen negative effect of alimony laws is that wealthy people are less likely to marry "beneath their station", which promotes and entrenches social inequality.
> never tried to better themselves, and who quit their low-skilled job to pursue an endless series of expensive hobby jobs(purse making, painting, selling weed edibles)
I'd say this was the bigger risk. But as with everything, it's always hard to say for sure from a distance.
Contempt of court I believe. It's basically like defying any other court order. From what I hear, you go to jail for a bit and just keep repeating that cycle every few months until you start working and paying.
Only if you have kids, which less people are doing. Having kids and a partner myself, if I have to choose between fixed child care costs for a window of time, or perpetual alimony and splitting assets in half, I'd prefer the former purely from an economic perspective. Marriage itself is the opportunity cost, and it's crucial to contain/insure against liability to ensure life sucess.
67 percent of relationships fail [1], so when asked for advice, I advise people not to get married (and the data shows cohorts adopting such choices [2]). Live together (non community property jurisdiction), have kids together (if you accept the financial and parental liability), but getting married is betting half your stuff and a substantial amount of future earnings things will work out (when the data shows it does not work out the majority of the time).
Your source [1] commits several data errors in the first sentence. Having a divorce rate of 60% does not mean that 60% of married couples are unhappy (even though the divorce rate is not 60%, as your link [2] shows -- the peak divorce rate is for marriages originating in the 1970s, of which 48% did not last 25 years). Marriages are not distributed uniformly: many people will have none, many will have one, and some may rack up more than a few. By definition people with many marriages will account for more than their fair share of the "divorce rate" (even in the 48%), and you can't simply swap "people" or "couples" in for "marriages" in the denominator of that statistic. Yet, why are there some people who keep getting married and failing? Their passion and decision-making that causes them to marry is probably related to the reasons they end. I think if you're so dispassionate that you can consider all the reasons to not get married, then you're probably the sort of person whose marriage would be carefully calculated and not end in flames quickly.
Your second link has much more meaningful data on this: yes, marriages are getting later in life and more people and choosing not to marry. However, divorce rates are lower than the 70s and marriages are generally lasting longer. If you consistently advise people not to get married out of some misplaced fear of having to split assets in half, that seems a bit myopic. It seems like a more complex issue.
Disagree. Willingness to move where you receive the best job offers is one of the key factors to strong career progress and earning potential.
Unless you happen to both be in the same line of work and have that line of work be centralised in one city so hard that your best offers are pretty much always going to be there anyway, you can only maximise one of your careers. The other person is turning down offers they otherwise could have taken, moving to locations they otherwise would not have, at times when they otherwise would not have. It's a huge sacrifice even if both people are full time employed and no kids are in the picture.
Deciding to try to spend the rest of your life living with another person is the opportunity cost. Marriage and alimony are the tools that try to balance that out and make it fairer.
Agree, but you need to remember that in some places you don't need to be married to pay alimony: some USA states have common law marriages and in Canada you don't even need to cohabitate to be legally responsible for alimony (there was a very famous case 1 year ago with 2 people that never lived together).
I suppose you can still have a prenup explicitly sharing wealth 50/50 if one party will take care of the kids and home while the other will earn money.
The problem with all of this is always intangible wealth, and unpaid contributions to the household. Person A got a degree while person B sweated away to keep a roof over their heads. If they divorce the day Person A graduates, with zero net assets, Person B gets the raw end of that deal (Unless it's a degree in Latin poetry.)
Or, person A made money, while person B did all the unpaid housemaking, childcare, etc. Or, person A made the money, did the housemaking, childcare, while person B bummed around, drunk all day.
All of these are special cases, and none of them can be covered by a one-size-fits-all policy. It's why divorce litigation is necessary, as a safety valve, and why pre-nups aren't ironclad.
There is some evidence that male marriage participants live longer and are healthier [1] than non married counterparts. Conversely, there is also evidence that single, childless women are the happiest subpopulation [2].
With regards to data about happiness, you can make a case for whatever your position is based on picking your choice of longitudinal study. Happiness is a crapshoot.
I know this is anecdata, but almost all women I know wanted kids very badly, and they were ok with a bad career but a nice family. Those that are childless despite their desire don’t look that happy to me.
Sure, I know women who’re childless and single by choice and they’re perfecly happy with that.
But I wonder whether we’re just cherrypicking a peculiar and yet uncommon population slice.
I'm fairly certain we are all capable of the google search and you can and will find the multitude of studies, anecdotes, memes and conversations about:
- women's unpaid labor at home, with their children, in their community and for aging relatives/relatives who need care
- women's thwarted ability to get promoted
- women's inability to negotiate as easily for a raise bc when you're aggressive you're a bitch and when you're not you dont get a raise
- women's emotional labor in relationships as men in our specific (NA/Euro) societies tend to have limited social circles as they age
Single childless women are happier for structural and social reasons. It is not in fact just a crapshoot.
The promotion and negotiation problems will negatively affect single childless women too, right? So those would make that group less happy compared to the male groups.
Anecdotal opinion: it is easier to keep finding new strategies to deal with my career, including building my own business, when I'm not drained by my personal life.
It was widely covered in the media that unmarried women are the happiest subgroup. However, the reported study may have misinterpreted some data.
The study reported that married women were happier only when their spouse was in the room. When their spouse was absent their response was miserable. The problem is that the original survey defined absence as a spouse no longer living in the household.
I think the point is to incentivize people not to sacrifice their career for the family. Of course this also requires further investments from the state (mandatory parental leave, cheap/free childcare, good early education), which I assume Netherlands also prioritizes.
Netherlands doesn't, it costs around €1.3k/month for a 5 day a week daycare. It's very expensive to raise kids in the Netherlands and most women work only 3 days a week, and some men 4, making it so the child can stay at home with one of the parents so the costs are lower. This makes it difficult to raise kids if both parents want to work full time.
Divorces still work out in many countries without any adult-to-adult alimonies.
You get divorced, you split your combined assets (excluding prenups), the child support vector will be based on the relative net income of each parent (and beyond certain basic level of income the vector just settles at 50/50). The stay-at-home parent will find work or failing that gets unemployment/welfare benefits. The standard of living is expected to drop for both spouses after a divorce because it's cheaper to live together in any case. Nevertheless, securing the children's upkeep comes first. If one parent can't or won't pay child support the state provides it for the other parent so that the kids can live on something, and later collects the payments from the first parent the same way it will collect other debts such as back taxes.
For the stay-at-home spouse it's still a choice with pre-known potential disadvantages, and thus smart couples can draw a contract at the decision time to even out the tally. They can split the income of the high-earning parent at point each month, or they can formulate a mechanism to give the stay-at-home spouse a higher proportion of the combined assets in case of a divorce, and have that indexed by the number of years that spouse remained home, or anything else that works out well. It's all doable so that upon a divorce both spouses get their fair share.
The worst thing is not to pre-plan anything, then get divorced at once and find yourself in a completely new situation with no preparations. But there's nothing that prevents either partner from being proactive regarding this. The law doesn't need to enforce any hand-holding here: it's not the fifties anymore. Most people, both men and women, have their own career and get married as adults and divorce as adults.
> i get it but in reality in many families someone is sacrificing their career for the family unit.
Is this some "western developed country" thing that I just don't get?
All throughout my childhood, both of my parents had to work. Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to support me and my sister. But I was growing up in an (post-) communist state and it was quite the norm.
It had nothing to do with ambitions or building your career, just pure economics.
Agreed, this seems like an older relic. If anything you see this situation more often in non- western countries where women aren't as involved in the workforce. In America, for example, it's not uncommon that not only do both spouses work, but they both must work to support the family. The assumption that one spouse is unable to work feels like a rather dated convention. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, it certainly does, but it's no longer the default.
It's also a relic of a time when maintaining a house was a lot of work and reasonably analogous to a full time job. That is when chicken soup involved plucking and preparing a chicken instead of buying stuff from the store and throwing it in a instapot.
Who took care of you? Given it's an ex-communist country, I wouldn't be surprised if child care was cheap/free.
Here in Switzerland, "full-time childcare costs are around two-thirds of an average Swiss salary" apparently, so quite often people prefer to do it themselves rather than work mostly to pay someone to take care of their child.
> Who took care of you? Given it's an ex-communist country, I wouldn't be surprised if child care was cheap/free.
Mostly my grandma. And once I was 5 or so I went to kindergarten. This was already in the post- times. But my first 3 years were still in a communist state.
Depends where you are on the income spectrum. If you earn enough, there's a point where hiring a full-time nanny becomes cheaper than marrying a stay-at-home spouse and then getting divorced.
Nanny costs have an upper limit, alimony and child support can grow unbounded with your income.
The Netherlands seems to generally do a better job of supporting women's rights. For one thing, they seem to do a better job of providing healthcare coverage for all residents than we do here in the US and that's significant in terms of protecting people from financial hardship, regardless of their socioeconomic class, and making it easier to leave a relationship than the American policy of providing coverage through the employed spouse's job without providing real protection in that regard for financially dependent a stay-at-home parent.
It's best not to have your own pet dog. Find a neighbor with a dog and befriend them. You can be there for all the fun without having to pick up the dog's excrement. Plus you'll be your own kid's cool uncle.
Wait what? When did it happen? I know the cap was changed from 12 years max to 5 (or until younger child turns 12, or whatever else), but definitely not abolished alimony completely.
Yes, but the Netherlands also has a pretty strong social safety net, which is certainly a factor when they changed the law. Nobody wants to see their material circumstances get worse, of course, but there is a big difference between having no career and no alimony payments in the Netherlands and in the United States.
In California I think alimony for marriages under ten years is usually half the duration of the marriage. Expectation is that the dependent partner is expected eventually to support themselves. That seems generally fair to me.
IMO, the problem with divorce is that the payout is given at the time of betrayal/leaving not the time of loyalty.
Hear me out. Imagine you work at a company. You do good work. You get a salary and some stock. The company is not publicly traded, but rather buys back the shares you own when you leave. The salary part makes sense - you are getting paid while being with the company. The second part does not. The company is rewarding you just as you’re walking out the door! Even worse if you’re fired for performance, theft, consulting on the side, etc.
This is exactly what divorce often looks like. Suppose he makes a lot more than she. She could never afford the house herself. She is a loyal wife, makes him feel at home, etc. He is a loyal husband, works hard, provides enough for a decent home, etc. She earns what she gets above her salary through her domestic work. This is often quoted by feminist groups.
Now at some point she wants to leave, turning his life upside down. It is at this point he must reward her! Or worse, he catches her cheating, and now must reward her when she wasn’t even doing the most basic thing to deserve living in the house to begin with!
It would be far better if her compensation was complete as time went by. Like now, a company pays you ever two weeks grants you stock every month or so. There is no significant payout on your last day. This is how marriage should be.
Ideally there would be some agreed upon value of her labor that she would collect every month or so. It could be cash, or payment to some insurance that would pay for housing and job training for her upon a divorce. The point is, for the most part, when they split, she had a predefined benefit, enough to start her life again and reflect the value of her work.
Most importantly, there would be a stronger sense that it was earned on both sides because she accrued the money while in good standing.
Obviously switch the sexes as the situation permits, etc.
This should be the default, not part of a prenup that puts you on the defensive for “predicting a divorce”.
This is already how it works. Your suggestion is analogous to working at a bank, putting your salary and savings in the same bank that you work at for decades and when you leave for a better job the bank gets pissy about you taking "their" money out of the bank to take with you.
The mistake is in your premise that the husband is "rewarding" the wife at the time of her departure, that he is giving her something that is "his".
The reality is that the husband and wife both own 50% of the house the entire time, and either party can choose to divorce and cash out their half.
Every day that you are married, you are saying that whatever assets or debts come into the marital unit that day are 50% owned by both parties. In that sense, nothing is actually "redistributed" at the time of dissolution.
I suspect you're being downvoted because this is a highly capitalist and unromantic way of viewing a marriage. But of course it's only an extension of the capitalist and unromantic logic behind alimony in the first place. At worst you have written a piercing satire in the spirit of "A Modest Proposal", and at best you may have the beginnings of an actual idea.
I grew up with divorced parents, my mom was married for the third time by the time I was 10. It wasn't glorious. It was the furthest thing from glorious. They're all dead now and I'm old and I'm still pissed off about it.
If you can't commit to bringing up a kid together then don't have a kid.
I am so pissed off even writing this, I've just got to say it, fuck parents like you.
That's fine, but we need you not to post like that to this site. "Fuck parents like you" is egregiously against the HN guidelines, no matter how legitimate your experience has been. (I have no doubt that it is completely legitimate.)
Reading some of the comments here, I'm reminded of a story I read about several couples renting a summer house, sending all the kids from all the families there for the summer and the parents taking turns spending their vacation there to supervise.
Some outsider was like "Oh, God, spending my two weeks of vacation tending to so many children sounds like a nightmare." And then someone pointed out that for the parents, the vacation was the other six weeks or whatever getting to live like a childless couple.
(Please don't aim your anger at me. I'm on your side here.)
I guess it depends on the age of the children, but beyond a certain age wouldn't it be fun to spend a few weeks with a bunch of other kids in a summer home?
The kids apparently had a blast. I don't recall the age ranges.
I think the only criticism was along the lines of "Well, that's great for the kids. But the poor parents! What in earth were they thinking?!" not realizing that the parents got a different kind of break in addition to doing something wonderful for the children who all got to spend like eight whole weeks at a lake house instead of just two and got to do it with lots of built-in friends to play with, rather than being lonely on an adult vacation away from their friends.
So I’m not sure what exactly are you finding bad about this? Or did I misinterpret your post (specifically about the “anger”, why should describing a positive experience all around elicit anger)?
I think you probably are misinterpreting something.
I'm not saying it's bad. Just that the part that was good for the kids was different from the parts that were good for the parents.
People here saying "That sounds glorious" about 50/50 custody arrangements strike me as thinking about it from the point of view of how the parents experience it and not how the children are likely to experience that.
Everything I've read suggests that shuffling the kids back and forth like that ends up being distinctly negative for the children in most cases.
Thanks for explaining! I guess I expected a more tight/direct analogy to the original divorce scenario (kids feeling neglected because their parents left them with other adults in the lake house?)
Parents also vary a lot in how they feel about having kids around. Spending a two-week vacation with my kids and their cousins/friends is something that I personally would find really fun! And I know many parents that wouldn't feel that way.
Right there with you, my mother entered marriage number four as I turned 10 (not a competition - at least not one I feel I won).
Hearing parents talk about how they went the extra mile to make things better for the kids after the divorce honestly strikes me about like John Wilkes Booth offering Lincoln some gauze for his head wound. Like, it's a nice gesture, but he'd probably have been better off if you hadn't shot him in the first place.
Staying together "for the sake of the kids" isn't generally considered helpful (to the kids). Teenagers know exactly what's going on with their parents. Trying to make out that everything's fine is a hopeless mission.
Incidentally: both of my kids were quite pleased that we divorced; most of their friends were from "blended" families of one kind or another, and once we divorced, they felt that they fitted-in better.
Do you think growing up with parents that would rather not live together would have given you a better experience? Not asking cynically, genuinely curious. Nobody marries expecting to divorce.
Oh absolutely! The psychological safety benefits of having a stable home, the ability to "be a kid" with emotional support from parents instead of having to grow up way too soon and serve as their emotional support, the luxury of not always feeling like you're waiting for "the other shoe to drop" when things are going well, having fond memories of holidays instead of anxiety-inducing split days where you feel guilty for not spending them evenly between households. Not to mention all of the logistical nightmares (never time to spend with friends because you're in transit or the parent wants to have "their" time with the kids, different rules in different households, schoolwork getting mixed up/dropped between cracks, clothing, etc.).
Even for married parents that have struggles and disagreements, the fact that they stay together serves as a rock-solid signal to a child that the family as a whole is important and that ultimately the parents care about the child even more than they care about themselves.
Except in cases of physical violence, I believe it's always better for the children if the parents stay together. And it's not close.
Also, while I'm certainly jealous of people raised in married households, I don't blame them in the slightest for not having much of a sense of how the other half lives. The only way to know is to live through it, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
This may be a grass is greener situation, but my personal experience basically differs from yours completely. My parents should have been divorced long before they actually did. They stuck together because Chinese parents were expected to do so for their children. They got along ok as long as if they treated each other as regular acquaintances, but I never got a hint that they liked each other at all and they often fought when they had to cooperate. I always felt a sense of unease on vacation unless if I was traveling with other friends and could just ignore my parents. I treat people I'm close to worse than they deserve, and I think part of that reason is because my parents were so cold to each other.
> Except in cases of physical violence
This reminds me that my mom blames my dad for making her angry, and taking it out on me. Part of it was her being a Tiger Mom and I think she genuinely has some anger management issues, but I think there was some truth in this. If she had another partner, they probably have an easier time controlling her emotions.
To be fair, my situation was unique because they had barely known each other before they had gotten married, and I think they were simply fundamentally incompatible with each other, like oil and water. I'm completely baffled about why they decided to get married in the first place, but thinking about this more, it might have been a shotgun marriage.
Honestly I have a very similar experience, but the opposite conclusion. Two parents from an Asian country who don't really get along and are very different. I'm glad they stayed together. First of all I know my mother wouldn't have fared very well alone, with outdated skills in a country foreign to her. I also don't think my father would have really done so great either given how different he is from the greater culture-- Asian culture is just so far from western culture that after a certain age you have an impossibly hard time trying to fit in. They may be like oil and water, but I'm glad they have each other. Despite the arguments they both have their needs met and provide a stable home for their kids(and are rewarded for it with regular visits from grandkids during which all their distance seems to evaporate).
I also think their marriage can seem strange, but given where they come from I just don't think marriages based on love were common. Heck it's basically a modern convention. It's nice that we have the(some of us anyways), but it's by no means the norm for humanity. Even today many people get married to people they don't know well. For a lot of people staying single and just feelings things out isn't doable.
Also, while I'm certainly jealous of people raised in ~~married~~ divorced households, I don't blame them in the slightest for not having much of a sense of how the other half lives. The only way to know is to live through it, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
As someone who spent their childhood wishing their parents would get a divorce already, I felt like I was in an upside down world reading your comment.
- I have never in my life gone to my parents for emotional support. They would come to me to tell me how horrible the other parent or my siblings were. And I was constantly tending to my siblings after they had been upset by my parents. Plus the normal things I heard them argue about, mostly my father stressed about losing his job and my mother spending too much money.
- I was constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop via 1) one of them directly blows up at me 2) blow up at each other and then take it out on me 3) blow up at my siblings, who would then take it out on me.
- We didn't take holidays, but even them driving together to the dentist was extremely stressful as they were guaranteed to start fighting over nothing (see above point).
- There were no logistical nightmares because we all lived in the same house. No argument there.
- I assumed they stayed together not because they cared about us, but for the same reason they treated us like burdens to kick when they were down: their culture taught them that a certain hierarchy and structure in life was more important than stupid American values like happiness, especially the happiness of children. Also my mother couldn't financially support herself without my father's income.
And, yes, there was almost no physical aspect to this unhappiness for me. My older sibling, who did suffer physical abuse, said that, both growing up and to this day, they preferred it to all the emotional injuries.
Much as you may idealise married households, perhaps I'm idealising divorced ones. If my parents had divorced, maybe I would have written your comment.
I remember reading a paper which argued that the impact of divorce on children is determined by pre-divorce family functioning level. Children in low-functioning families often experience parental divorce as a relief, it removes them from conflict/violence/abuse/harm, and it can have a positive impact on their lives; by contrast, in high-functioning families, the parents do a good job of hiding their marital issues from their children, and the children often experience divorce as an unexpected, even traumatic, event, which disrupts the stability of their world, and can produce lasting (even lifelong) psychological harm. I think using that model is a good way of integrating the kinds of contrary experiences expressed in this thread.
If divorce laws were written to put the welfare of children first, they’d make divorce easy for the first kind of family and difficult for the second. However, I don’t think children’s welfare is really a priority for most contemporary divorce laws.
My heart breaks for you and your siblings, I'm so terribly sorry. I wonder if a better delineation might be "broken" households (divorced or not) versus functional/happy ones.
One thing I didn't mention is that as kids growing up in broken households, we often have no frame of reference so our lives feel "normal", and it's only later in life that we piece together the damage our narcissistic parents have wrought. It sounds like this may not have been the case for you and your siblings though - extremely curious as to how you see it and how your perspective has changed over time (if at all).
As someone who grew up with two parents who shouldn't be together and stayed together to provide stability for their kids, it's not better. It actually just trains you to deal with your SO in a disrespectful, passive aggressive way and bury things to make the situation bearable. It's destructive in an insidious way.
For some more anecdata, an ex of mine grew up with parents who had a terrible relationship but stayed together anyway. She once told me she wishes they had just gotten divorced. She can’t know for sure what that particular hell would’ve been like, but the fact that she said that means parents staying together isn’t obviously always better.
My parents would scream their lungs out at each other and I had the same thought a few times growing up. Interestingly once my father passed away my mother started insisting he was the love of her life & a great husband, and that she will never again find such a man.
I think the worst thing for the child is that they aren't settled anywhere. It's one week, then you move and... do you have all your toiletries, what clothes do you have at this parent's, what different schedule and rules, how do I see my friends here, what's around this neighborhood.
Although, sometimes situations like that make you perversely stronger/more flexible/more mature. Adversity is a forge, in the right doses.
If the relationship is genial, what is the real problem with being a child if divorce? I have no doubt about your experience, I'm asking from a place of "I don't know and can't really imagine it." I was very, very lucky with the family lottery, so this is pretty foreign to me.
I understand where you're coming from, but the alternative to getting a divorce might be even worse, two adults constantly abusing each other within the household and the child in close proximity to it with no escape.
We don't really know the situation and everyone's is different.
I'm sorry if this drudges up unpleasant memories, but can you elaborate about what was terrible about it? Was it about having to change homes every week?
Edit: you have a long history of posting flamewar comments here and otherwise breaking the site guidelines. You've been continuing to do it a lot, unfortunately. If you don't stop this, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review the site guidelines and stick to them from now on (that means all the time, in every post), we'd really appreciate it.
This sounds wonderful. But one argument used against 50/50 and in favor of asymmetric time is "kids need continuity". This inevitably favors the mother. "60/40" means the father gets every other weekend and one night a week. Numerically this works out to 80/20 and even young children are quite aware of who their real parent is. It is horrible but it is also SOP for most jurisdictions in the US, and I am not being hyperbolic when I say it's a real, first-world humanitarian crisis. Children do not fair well without fathers, and yet our system degrades the very notion of fatherhood every chance it gets. Furthermore, the bad actors that populate family courts - judges, lawyers, police, therapists, mediators, visitation center workers - they all know the score and as a father you are truly a second-class citizen. You see the children at the whim of your wife, and literally no-one gives a single shit. Why the system is not 50/50 is beyond me, because the argument for continuity is absolutely ridiculous on its face. The real reason it continues is that in family court mothers have far more rights than fathers. Full stop. It's sexist, it's harmful to the children, and yes, I'll even say it's harmful for the father (although you're not supposed to say that, and if you do the system assumes you're lying to be manipulative).
This 60/40 aka 80/20 situation is the good outcome for most fathers. It really only gets worse from there. If you give the judge attitude, they will have no problem putting you on supervised visitation indefinitely.
> This 60/40 aka 80/20 situation is the good outcome for most fathers. It really only gets worse from there. If you give the judge attitude, they will have no problem putting you on supervised visitation indefinitely.
> The research was conducted over a four month period by talking to legal professionals in every state to find out what the most commonly awarded schedule is for their state.
So, they didn't study actual custody awards, but lawyers opinions about what was “most common”.
So, it's not really a study of what the reality of custody time is, but a study of expert opinion is of what that actual study of the ground truth would find if someone bothered to do it.
I didn't notice that bit, so good find. I was bummed to see that most studies don't actually try to ascertain who usually wins when both parents want custody and there are no extenuating circumstances. That seems like an obvious metric to track the health of custody laws.
> I was bummed to see that most studies don't actually try to ascertain who usually wins when both parents want custody and there are no extenuating circumstances
The problem is that if there is a custody dispute, then probably at least one, and usually both, sides will be pleading circumstances which pull one way or the other. And any court is likely to issue fact findings that lean the same direction as the custody order. So, if you are going to find what bias exists in the court system you can't look at just custody orders and legally determined facts, you've got to separately readjudicate the fact disputes with an unbiased process. Which is...problematic.
I agree that re-adjudicating cases would be costly and would not be perceived as fair even if it were righting a wrong.
That said, instead of changing individual decisions you can punish the state for outcomes whether they be intended or unintended. Disparate impact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact) is one such tool the courts are already familiar with. There's more nuance to that which can't be ignored - a person can sue an entity for disparate impact but disparate impact is also calculated regularly with respect to lending. The same could be done for custody.
> I agree that re-adjudicating cases would be costly and would not be perceived as fair even if it were righting a wrong.
No, I mean the study would have to readjudicate the cases (not change the legal outcome, but redivining the actual facts from the trial record) to identify differing treatment in different factual circumstances between states.
I've heard people say a couple things about this that I don't know are true. One is that fathers don't get custody because they don't ask for it. The other is that most custody arrangements are worked out before anyone ever steps into a courtroom.
Does anybody know if these things are fact or fiction? If either or both of those are true, it seems like you can't really blame "the system" for these results.
If you read some of the synopsis at the bottom it explains it. It's a mix of laws and societal attitudes.
This data is also further simplified:
> The percentages in the study reflect cases in which both parents want custody and no complicating circumstances exist ― such as criminal convictions or long-distance separation. It demonstrates the most commonly awarded visitation schedules given to a noncustodial parent by state.
There's a lot of outright misinformation out there - one of the commoner misleading claims is that 50% of fathers who seek custody get it, usually used to trick people into thinking that actually both parents are treated equally and all the complaints are just from men thinking "equality" should mean they get better treatment. The thing is, that 50% figure includes joint custody which can be as little as one weekend a fortnight with the kids in some juristictions, and I think also cases in which the kids' mother isn't actually seeking custody. So a better framing of the same stat is that amongst a self-selected sample of those fathers who think they stand the best chance of obtaining custody, half fail to even get joint custody (which could well mean never seeing their kids again, especially in juristictions where visitation isn't well enforced). That's probably a good explaination for why few fight for it.
Anecdotally, the system was 50/50 for my sister when she got divorced.
There was definitely no court bias for the mother, which was a surprise given that this is the popular culture stereotype. And child support was purely formula based.
The most annoying thing was domiciliary parent designation, even with 50/50 joint custody, as the domiciliary parent had more decision power which allowed for unnecessary drama.
One thing to note is that all of this is state (and country) specific and states might vary significantly.
Or they don't trust the father to put in his fair share of doctor's visits, buying clothes, etc. The upside of paying child support is that the other party is assumedly taking point on all of those expenses.
It used to be women being stuck in bad marriages because otherwise they would lose their source of income. Increasingly, it's men stuck in bad marriages because otherwise they will lose access to their children.
Or worse: men who don't realize how dangerous divorce is to their relationship with their children, and believe that the system is basically fair. It is not.
My buddy used to do 80/20 but on alternating months. So he’s go to his dad’s on weekends on one month and then the next month he’d do weeks at his dad’s. Worked reasonably well IMHO. Guess I should ask him how he felt.
That’s what I do with my ex but I can’t escape the hurt, depression, and uncertainty during the weeks when they are with my ex.
I think most parents fully expect to be parents 100% of the time once they have kids.
I don’t want, don’t need, don’t enjoy the “me/adult” time at all. I just want to make dinner for my kids, help with homework, watch a show together, take them to practice, play games, watch them grow, have conversations, hear their voices.
I coach everything just so I can see them on my off weeks. I am president of the pta so I can see them more often too.
It’s awful in every way for me. I can’t stand it when they are gone.
EDIT: Add in my ex bringing boyfriends around which makes me physically ill. I don’t sleep or eat. I feel miserable. I just hope my kids are getting through this okay, but it’s so hard to tell. I don’t want to ask if they feel bad because then they might think they are supposed to be feeling bad. So I just do what I can to make them feel happy and loved.
If you're not already getting help from a qualified therapist, please do so ASAP! They can really help you get through this dark period. I have no doubt the love you feel for your kids is 100% genuine, but the dynamic you describe tells me that you're also using them as an emotional crutch after the divorce. In the long run this will not be good for either them or you. Another reply suggested that you date again, which would be a good step eventually. But it does not sound like you'd be able to get into a healthy relationship yet. You don't have to commit to a therapist right away. Just look up a few near you, set up an initial appointment with each and treat it like interviews where you're the hiring manager. Go talk to them, and then maybe go back to the one you're most comfortable with. Things will get better for you, but you need a hand to pull you out of the ditch right now. Do it for yourself and your kids. They need you to show them what resilience looks like.
My younger siblings had this and I had it for one summer before I left home. It really sucked. Maybe it would be better if the parent and living conditions were equal, but that was not the case. So one week you have a nice bed and your own room in a house you know, and the next you are in a bed with bad sheets, in a shared room with siblings in a house you hate. Friends have a whole summer together, but you are only around every other week. You have to readjust to a new routine every other week. One parent made significantly more than the other so one week would be middle class and the next week would be poor. I guess that is better than always, but it was really jarring.
It's incredibly expensive but it's possible to have three homes and have the parents move around. Each parent gets their own home that they live in during their non-custodial time, and they move into the third home during their custodial time.
I highly recommend this book called "if you're in my office it's too late" by a divorce attorney. One of the things he recommends is parenting a bit like you're separated, trading off long stretches of time looking after the kid just like a divorced couple might do, but without the separate houses and finances.
I wonder if some married parents operate like that. Where they time share childcare. One spends a week in family home while the other lives some distance apart in a studio and they swap after a week.
This way children get stable home while parents get rest and adult space for themselves and have a chance of missing their kids.
Related: I read in the Economist a few years ago that for international couples, there is a first-mover advantage. The person initiating the divorce can decide to file in any country: the country where they have citizenship, the one where their spouse has citizenship, or the one where they got married. By shopping for the most favorable jurisdiction, they can turn the divorce to their advantage. I hope I'm never in a position to use this knowledge!
Courts strongly favor women, until men have equal rights we must vigorously protect our assets.
A friend of mine divorced in New York. She agreed to $0 and signed, but later contested the agreement and sued. He lost everything and she’s set for life. Absolutely disgusting.
The idea of marriage is statistically, demonstrably overdue for an overhaul. It doesn't work for at least half of people, and definitely shouldn't be a disaster when it predictably fails.
We need sane legal agreements for each dimension of marriage, child rearing, property division etc. And support systems to humanely shepherd people through life changes. Instead we try to preserve the illusion of a life where everyone is guaranteed a partner who will always be there.
I am grateful every day for my no contest divorce. If anyone is near divorce my advice is bend and shoot for no contest. Try to focus on mutual well being. Courts can do nothing but transfer assets to lawyers.
USA should replace marriages with "M corps". Those are special type of corps with just CEO and CFO, capital stock and voting stock, and possibly with more C-suite members (kids) and SVPs (cats, dogs). Alimony would be replaced with golden parachute contracts, if you manage to negotiate it upon forming the corp. Houses, cars and other assets may be made a property of this M corp, but that's subject to negotiations. Same with income: M corp members may invest their incomes into the corp, but don't have to. Whether an LLC can be a member of an M corp, or whether it can have independent investors are all interesting questions that would be resolved by courts.
You jest, but I think this kind of procreation arrangement might make it to the mainstream. Marriage is just too broken these days. I'd love to fall in love, but the stats don't lie. I'm terrified to try to start a family, much as I might like one.
I like this idea. At the very least, I believe couples should be required to negotiate the terms of their marriage in a legally binding way.
My current model is I think of marriage as a partnership and I accept the assets I brought to the partnership should be distributed equally. What I find unnerving is alimony. For example, what if I was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. Could my spouse divorce me and then demand alimony when my earning potential might have peaked?
I think requiring a legal contract for marriage that forces couples to confront these kinds of questions makes sense.
Upper classes already do something like M-corps. One thing about prenups is they might not substantially change the outcome, but at least at least people are reviewing the implied contract up-front with their lawyer.
This sounds good if both partners are young professionals with roughly the same earning potential, but what about breadwinner + housewife/househusband situations? Why would the breadwinner want to contribute assets to the M-corp? I imagine the negotiations for forming the M-corp would be pretty awkward.
Not any more awkward than what we have today. The would-be housewife just demands the CFO position on such and such terms by end of year, or she's out.
Why does everything about marriage have to be romantic? If you're the spouse you'll be the first person the doctors ask if taking them off life support is ever a question. That's not romantic but it's a direct possible consequence.
Interesting to consider the downside of making divorce easier. There seems to be an implicit purpose in marriage of making breakup difficult: we know going in that difficult periods can occur and to better assure we will make it though them we agree to enforcing a harsh penalty to doing this. presumably we do this because we expect most tough periods to eventually end, allowing the relationship to be positive once again.
The marriage tradition doesn't seem well suited to many modern relationships and people.
People now change jobs and relationships more than predecessor generations.
It's unfair to hold people to old standards designed for different societal norms.
If you look at the divorce process in various countries it becomes clear that the process in the Five Eyes (US, UK, Can, AUS, NZ) is much more onerous and court intensive than in other countries. One has to wonder if it's the legal profession, who benefit most, that is behind lobbying for the laws that benefit their members to the detriment of families.
What utter nonsense from the Economist. Can't believe I used to read it nearly religiously back in college.
Having this stance gets me a lot of flak from my liberal-leaning friends but here goes:
What kind of cognitive dissonance does it take to look at the graph where there are now 3x times more kids born out of wedlock, and try to spin something positive out of it, like "no fault divorce policies makes the situation suck slightly less during the divorce proceedings"
This is a complete disaster not only for the children, who are now falling behind peers in nuclear households, but for society as a whole as well, since it teaches people that nothing is ever their fault, including important commitments like creating a family unit and raising a child in a complex world.
If you're going to sing praises to cooperation and mediation, how about you try to get people to do that during marriage? You know, to reconcile their differences and stay together for the sake of raising a well-adapted future member of society. Honestly, no matter how you look at it, divorce is overall net-negative and usually a negative for most parties, except one (usually, the lawyers)
Is it any wonder that Asians excel in western society, coming from a cultural norm of keeping the family together at all costs?
> If you're going to sing praises to cooperation and mediation, how about you try to get people to do that during marriage?
a lot of people in the western society have come to the conclusion that individual happiness (ala, their own) is paramount, to the point where commitments which they no longer want to honour is acceptable to not honour (such as marriage).
It is rooted in the same psychological base, imho, as individual action over collective action. Divorce is an individual action, to make their own wellbeing better (e.g., they can no longer stand their partner). They are not able to suck it up for the sake of children (at least, until they are of age to leave the household).
I think the recent protesting about health mandates all across "the west" is an allusion to this phenomenon - the age of "me, me, me".
In certain parts of Europe, it is becoming very common for couples to not get "married" but still form a nuclear family and from what I have seen, a lot of them are doing a lot better than some of my married friends.
Also, if you had spent any time in Asia, you wouldn't be singing the praises of the cultural norm of keeping the family together. Growing up, I saw a lot of cases of frequent abuse (even beatings) but the woman was supposed to keep the family together. Did you know divorce is not allowed in Philippines, please read about the impact that has. Asians in the US typically are better educated and education has more to do with lower divorce rates than an ethnicity.
edit: this is coming from a married person, in the US
> education has more to do with lower divorce rates than an ethnicity.
Perhaps, but correlation doesn't imply causation.
It seems at least as plausible that the kind of people able to commit to higher education are more capable of committing to marriage. Or that lower divorce rates result in better outcomes for children, including those children getting more educated. Neither imply that education itself leads to lower divorce rates.
I'm also not sure how to reasonably discuss this, but there is a colossal gray area between "drive-through divorce" and "women must legally stay married to husbands who beat them." We should be able to acknowledge positive results of some cultural norms without presuming they are intrinsically linked to the worst edge cases.
Prenuptials are extremely popular and marriage is at historic lows.
This also has little to do with women. It's men who grew up in the last few decades watching the absolute disaster that is marriage. You literally gain nothing by getting married and you seem to lose significantly every time.
Two kids is the hard limit for me, and that's two kids who are healthy, "easy" to deal with, and I've had a great marriage with no economic or any other adverse events. I just would not have adequate time in the 24 hour day to work, sleep, give them enough attention and have some time for myself. Giving any of that up seems unwise.
I'm friends with a pair of brothers whose parents adopted two girls when the brothers were in high school. So you can go above two, you just have to stagger in a second pair around when the first pair start to invest more of their time away from you.
All of those are important factors, and I’m amazed at a friend who has 4.
But it also seems like the more educated and higher income, the more neurotic parents get over raising their kid (myself included). You try and optimize a demanding career AND offer your kid every opportunity to learn and engage.
My friends with 4 don’t do that. The kids get engagement from each other, so fine in public school and there is no expectation they’ll go to an Ivey League school.
That does sound very harsh to me. "Spoiled" can mean being able to afford a better school, private room and options in case of emergency.
In wealthy societies money is determinative for how many bullshit time sinks you have to suffer through in childhood.
For example: I almost failed Abitur, which is a requirement for university in Germany. (We very rarely have any admission tests for some reason.)
Given enough resources you can either add private schooling or arrange alternative pathways. You could get an equivalent (less time consuming) degree from a different country that will be acknowledged in Germany.
The no-money route would've cost two or three additional years of standard school stasis in my primes.
Anyway, my bland tl;dr: Money really does make a difference that is not all downside.
Certainly not what I have observed from others. It almost seems like a coping mechanism from people who say this. Lots of people who have given up the last scraps of their free time, money and sanity and "buyers remorse" over it. No doubt many people are very happy with their choices. But it's absurd to claim as a fact that having kids makes everyone happier and more kids is more happiness.
It also sounds like something that would have a lot of research behind it, so I'd be interested if anyone has data on it.
There is happiness, satisfaction, stress, purpose … etc all which can be desirable in their own way and still conflict.
> When you ask people about their life’s meaning and purpose, parents say that their lives have more meaning than those of nonparents. A study by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that the more time people spent taking care of children, the more meaningful they said their life was—even though they reported that their life was no happier.
I disagree, and I wouldn't say "victim" either, but helpless used to be somewhat on point in certain regards.
If I look at my parents' generation, the "normal" thing was that one partner was the breadwinner (usually men) and one partner was the homemaker (doing all the cooking, cleaning, raising kids, etc; this was usually women). Essentially that generation was doing well enough that one partner could stay at home (as opposed to e.g. my grandparents' generation, where both my grandmas had to work as young married women just after the war, and only later in life could afford to switch to a breadwinner/homemaker model). This however meant that the homemaker partner was very ill-equipped to reenter the labor market after a split: no career, no (current) marketable qualifications, big black hole of "nothing" in the middle of the cv, and so on. This guaranteed in a lot of cases that the homemaker partner would stay rather poor and economically struggling unless they found a new breadwinner partner.
It turned out this breadwinner/homemaker model works pretty well while the partnership works as a whole, but horribly falls apart when the partnership splits. This in turn lead to a lot of situations where divorce was not a real (economic) option for the homemaker partner, so a lot of homemakers partners stayed around in bad or even outright abusive partnerships. It was a situation were they could only lose.
"I sacrificed my career for you (and the kids)" is a thing you often hear from homemakers, which is actually quite true a lot of times, while at the same time the breadwinner made scarifies as well, but in dimensions other than the economical/labor one.
Society eventually recognized this to be a problem and came up with divorce laws that were supposed to restore some fairer outcomes, and this was achieved to a degree, especially in the economical dimension.
The problem now is that these divorce laws were made with a pretty specific model in mind, said breadwinner/homemaker model, and that courts dealing almost excursively with this model may have developed certain biases. But the current generations of young and mid-aged people do not necessarily use that model anymore; e.g. two-breadwinner relationships are far more common now than they used to be. It will take some time to tweak divorce laws to account for that as well and get biases out of courts again.
Of course, what will remain a problem and cause fights is the question of how to split up resources and wealth cooperatively created in a relationship, and how to value each partners contributions. E.g. you cannot just split a physical house in half (most of the time), so who gets to stay in the nice home (if anybody) both partners invested a lot to make will remain a question with no easy solution.
> The problem now is that these divorce laws were made with a pretty specific model in mind, said breadwinner/homemaker model, and that courts dealing almost excursively with this model may have developed certain biases.
The law does code for the two-breadwinner model, and all the sliding scale between breadwinner and homemaker. E.g. Probably the most common model now a days (gens x and y) is the breadwinnerhomemaker/breadwinner (frequently a woman pulling "double shift" while a man focuses 100% on work), and that is dealt perfectly by the law.
That "problem" you described is mostly a fabrication of social media discussions. Most frequently someone loud who is living on a breadwinnerhomemaker/breadwinner model but don't recognize the spouse homemaker contributions, therefore would like the court to rule as if it was a two-breadwinner model.
> e.g. two-breadwinner relationships are far more common now than they used to be
Far more common is an understatement :-)
From all the people I know, maybe 3-5 out of hundreds still use the old model. I'd bet on the old model, for any couple younger than 50, is maybe used in 1% of couples, at best.
Modern life is just too expensive. And few people want to completely give up their independence/peace of mind.
I still know quite a few people that have some form of breadwinner/homemaker deal going on - that's the late 20 to late 30 bracket mostly. As soon as kids enter the picture, I'd estimate a majority of people in my field of vision, actually. Quite often the mother - sometimes the father - will work a part time job while kids are in kindergarten or school, while the other partner will work full time. For some people this is an economic necessity, other people do it because "just being a homemaker" is too boring and unfulfilling for them.
Given that the average number of kids per family goes down, the age of when people have kids goes up (and a later age usually means a more sound career/financial situation), there are a lot of somewhat affordable options for child care, and technology makes life easier on a whole[0], the effective work a "homemaker" has to do may have gone down significantly over time, at least for the "middle class" and better.
The part-time-breadwinner-part-time-homemaker partner would still have worse prospects in the fulltime job market after a split up, and those part time jobs usually do not come with a career track either.
[0] My grandparent's gen couldn't afford a washing machine when they were young adults, my parents' gen couldn't afford amenities like a dish washer or tumbler when they were young.
I disagree, the two-breadwinner model is mostly overstated. The new common model is the breadwinnerhomemaker/breadwinner, that is, one spouse working and doing most of the house/kids stuff, while the other spouse focuses solely on work.
