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.
