This is an interesting situation from the point of how economy, politics and people work:
If you protect X, you will get less X.
If you protect women in marriage by giving them more assets and custody on divorce, you make it harder for women to find a spouse. Those who already had one, benefit.
If you protect home renters by putting conditions on potential landlords, you will get better conditions for existing renters but worse conditions for new renters.
You thought you can make world better by placing conditions on other people, but it bites the actual demographics you were thought to protect.
If you give courts / child protection services a cut of the child support money, you get more divorces where the fathers are cut out of the children's lives.
If you punish men in divorces, financially ruin them ("imputed income"), and don't let them see their kids, you get a massive increase in male suicide after a divorce.
Sure. But is it really worse for society to have single mothers on welfare than to have mothers trapped in toxic marriages for financial reasons?
Surely this is an empirical question and not a theoretical one. Unfortunately it's hard to measure fairly. Let me offer a clearly flawed first pass.
If you take, just as a reference point, pre 1960 US society and post 1980 US society as exemplars of "lots of toxic marriage" and "lots of welfare mothers", then I think one would be hard pressed to show empirical evidence that the latter is doing any better than the former. Certainly by conventional measures of success, one could argue that the latter is worse (though there are so many confounding variables that I personally don't feel comfortable having an opinion).
My point here is that I don't think we can presume the welfare-single-mother outcome to be, a priori, obviously better than the old toxic-marriage status quo, when measured by society-level outcomes. There is ample evidence that both cases are clearly inferior to stable, non-toxic, two-parent households. So the question is an empirical one of the lesser of two evils, and I don't think we have a clean way to answer it so far.
This one I don't understand how anybody could ever think a good idea.
> If you punish men in divorces,...a massive increase in male suicide
That's external locus ("avoid"). What should be a real concern for ladies that it would greatly dry up their pool of potential mates.
All the Hacker News comments seem to think the Marriage is going down because its not a good deal for high net worth me. This might be true, but was not the point of the story at all.
Marriage is declining among the middle/lower classes. Its women who don't want to marry a man who doesn't have a job that are causing the rate to change.
This does reinforce the cynical point, that in marriage men are only there to supply funds, but the rich men who are opting out are not doing it at a high enough rate to matter.
>find yourself working your entire life to support your wife
You do know that lots of women have careers now right? You can arguably do quite well as a team pooling financial resources and saving for retirement. It also makes you more resilient to changes in employment.
>If you do not wand children there is no point in getting married.
What if you just want to engage in a mutually meaningful tradition?
Why would someone work if they can divorce, keep the kids, and get paid forever?
Other states aren't quite as bad, but they're still bad:
http://tomjameslaw.com/blog/what-judges-really-think-about-f...
A study conducted in 2004 found that although the tender years doctrine had been abolished some time ago, a majority of Indiana family court judges still supported it and decided cases coming before them consistently with it.2 A survey of judges in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee found a clear preference among judges for maternal custody in general.
Even in jurisdictions which have 50/50 custody as the default, judges still overwhelmingly favor one side over the other. i.e. judicial prejudice is well known, wide-spread, in defiance of the law, and ongoing.
See Florida again. Action groups have successfully fought against equal custody by default, because saying "we're for equality" means "fight against equality", apparently.
Because unless your ex is very wealthy AND your alimony increases over time to keep up with inflation, alimony tends to not adequately support a middle class lifestyle by itself.
Because women tend to outlive men and tend to marry men who are older than them (average: about four years). When the ex dies, you will be penniless if you didn't also work.
Because as the kids grow up, if you don't have goals, interests and earned income of your own, your life can wind up very empty.
I'm a divorced single mom (with adult special needs kids who still live with me) who gets alimony. These are some of my reasons for working to build an income of my own.
Why not work? After some time in divorce (immediately perhaps) you are supposed, as an adult, to support for yourself.
Especially considering you're going to send children into their own lives by 50, and retirement is only coming at 65. You definitely look forward for 15 years of work even if you are absolutely devoted to raising kids.
> if you don't have goals, interests and earned income of your own
But we can only put the very latter in alimony. Can't put goals there.
Let's say as a family you decided that the wife would be a stay at home wife to have and support children. Then fifteen years down the line you get divorced.
The wife gave up fifteen years of career and career advancement for the family. Alimony is a damn appropriate compensation for that sacrifice, since it's likely that as you start working you're going to be getting minimum wage (and your ex husband, presumably, had those fifteen years of career advancement).
Was career a sacrifice or something that she was happy to get rid of in exchange to support?
I think I can find men who would be happy to do chores if a woman would be supporting them with high-paying job, and essentially zero women who will agree to such arrangement.
Staying at home without working is a bad decision and you certainly can't chain man over it when it doesn't work. Promising of life-time alimony, in some extreme cases for a wife who never had any children even, is just pushing women into making this bad decision.
Does not really matter what sort of words you want to call it. She still gave up her earning potential for the family. These decisions are made by two people, not one. And now, as a result of that, in divorce, they are woefully uneven going forward. Alimony is there to balance those scales. Don't like it? Don't have a stay at home family.
> I think I can find men who would be happy to do chores if a woman would be supporting them with high-paying job, and essentially zero women who will agree to such arrangement.
My friend group alone includes one planned stay at home husband, so you are quite incorrect on this point.
> Staying at home without working is a bad decision
Then don't do it.
> and you certainly can't chain man over it when it doesn't work.
Why all the concern for the man here and none for the woman? She's "chained" to lower earnings for the rest of her life as a result of this.
But they are affecting one of those people more than the other. So they should factor it in.
There should be implicit thinking "if we get separated later in life, then what?"
> Don't like it? Don't have a stay at home family.
I have no trust that alimony will only be applied to stay at home mothers, and not extended to any women with any earning capability.
And that is a trust issue right there that is damaging marriage as an institution.
But we can only put the very latter in alimony. Can't put goals there.
If you got married and started a family because raising a family was a goal, alimony is related to that. Women have historically been provided for by husbands. For women, marriage has historically been a viable alternative to getting a job.
It isn't like buying a lottery ticket. Being a wife and mom involves a great deal of work. Raising kids well is a goal. Once they are raised, women need to find other things to do.
This seems to be lost on a great many men. Even women seem to often not see it. But it is a reality.
I hope you know that women were also historically accompanied by dowry? Just the woman herself, with her raising a family, was not considered sufficient offering to match the groom.
If you hope to find a husband that would provide you towards the end of your life, you should (a) choose very carefully, and (b) have solid understanding of your own contribution. Otherwise, once your husband decides he doesn't want to spend the rest of life with you, it falls apart.
There's no doubt why alimony should be paid to support underage children. There's no reason why alimony should be paid to support an adult, a healthy woman of working age.
B) I spent two decades supporting my husband's career. When we divorced, he still had a well paid job and twenty years work experience. I was starting over from scratch and was "lucky" to get a better-than-minimum-wage job to start.
It aggravates me that the world as a whole acts like having kids and raising them is only a financial cost to men. The fact that women give birth and then take more time off for family responsibilities helps suppress the incomes of most women. Then people don't act like this is a real cost to them.
Furthermore, if you just don't want children at all, there are several viable solutions:
1) Remain celibate
2) Get a vasectomy
3) Have only homosexual sex
A lot of men seem to desire sex with women, who can then have their entire life derailed due to an unexpected pregnancy, even if they use birth control, which is not 100% reliable. And then they act like women are just overentitled and lazy for wanting compensation for the very real cost to themselves.
I'm a woman. I like sex with men. I have been celibate for more than 12 years for medical reasons. The difficulty involved in finding a man who is not just cavalierly willing to ruin my life for his convenience and then walk away makes me wonder if I will ever get laid again. That whole "sleeping with me will destroy your entire future" vibe is a distinct turn off for me.
This is a weasel right here. You claim you did something, but never specify what.
Indeed, successful women are not lining for men who will "support their careers" for a chunk of income.
I want children and I have, with a responsible woman who is a self-sufficient person herself. That's what makes marriage work. Not the good intentions, but objective and subjective value of spouses to each other.
Your comment comes awfully close to a personal attack. Given that you have a successful two career couple arrangement, I fail to comprehend the hostility. Your ability to make it work in no way negates the very real challenges involved in establishing a two career couple and also having children. Most people find that having one spouse with a serious career and one spouse who may work, but whose career takes a back seat to family needs, is simply much more viable.
I also have special needs kids and other personal burdens that complicated the situation. Not everyone has a situation that makes a two career couple a viable option. I wanted a career. It didn't happen. I have done a lot of reading to try to figure out where my life went wrong and how to fix it. I expected to have a career. Other people expected me to have a career and make good money. Life does not always go as we expect.
In most jurisdictions, child support is more than the cost of raising a child. In Canada, equalizing incomes was the goal of the latest round of child support guidelines, not "support for the child".
For a US reference, see http://www.divorcecorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/The-Ec...
> I spent two decades supporting my husband's career. When we divorced, he still had a well paid job and twenty years work experience. I was starting over from scratch and was "lucky" to get a better-than-minimum-wage job to start.
And you should get compensated for that. The question is really how much, and how long.
> It aggravates me that the world as a whole acts like having kids and raising them is only a financial cost to men.
In some sense, it is. See research on the wage gap going back to the 1960's. Never-married childless women earn about the same as never-married childless men.
Once people get married and have kids, men take on additional work to pay for their kids. Women take on less work to take care of their kids.
This means men have higher "out of pocket" costs than women do. But women pay the "opportunity cost" of raising kids. Hence alimony.
> if you just don't want children at all, there are several viable solutions:
None of those are truly viable. They're necessary conditions to not having kids. But not sufficient.
In practice, a women can name any man as the father if she wants. No paternity test is necessary in most jurisdictions, and such tests are illegal in parts of Europe! In some states, if the father is notified of such a child and doesn't contest it within 30 days, he's determined to be the father, and has no right to fight it after that.
See any number of cases where men are paying for kids they didn't even know existed, who DNA proves aren't theirs.
The guy doesn't even have to have sex with her. If your girlfriend's room-mate sneaks into the room at night, grabs the used condom, and impregnates herself, well, as the man, you pay for 18 years. No choice, or you go to jail.
> That whole "sleeping with me will destroy your entire future" vibe is a distinct turn off for me.
As it is for men. The reality is that women hold essentially all control over reproduction. Women can choose to get pregnant, and can force any man to pay for their choices, for the next 18 years. At the threat of jail, losing jobs, passport, drivers license, etc.
It is entirely rational to be wary of such side-effects.
The point here is that while your choices have cost you, men don't have some magical happy land of money, cigars, whisky, and bro-hugs. There are costs and benefits to the choices made by both sexes.
Women take on more work too, it is just not paid work. Mothers, whether they have a paid job or not, tend to be chronically short of sleep. Full time moms spend about 60 hours per week on household chores. Working moms spend about 40 hours per week.
I am aware that there are two sides to this story and men have their own concerns. But, the open hostility towards women you are displaying is something I felt a need to give a little pushback to. This is an overwhelmingly male forum. Such comments are often wildly upvoted and cheered on. It does not help bridge the gap. It just deepens the "war of the sexes."
But, I should probably disengage. Your pattern of comments here looks pretty toxic to me. Probably no good will come of engaging you further.
Well, yes. I did say "take care of their kids".
As for paid vs unpaid work, see:: http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=54757
In most western countries, men and women do roughly the same amount of total work. For men, more paid than unpaid. For women, the other way around.
So again, just focussing on "women have it bad" misses a big part of the picture.
> I am aware that there are two sides to this story and men have their own concerns
Apparently not.
> But, the open hostility towards women you are displaying ...
is a self-serving lie.
> Your pattern of comments here looks pretty toxic to me
I acknowledge your position, agree that you deserve alimony, express caution that showing one side of the picture isn't a good approach, and show how the choices men and women make each have their pros and cons.
You show one side of the story, and express shock and outrage that someone dare bring up the other side.
And then you call me hostile and toxic?
Please, that's just pathetic.
Well, yes. I did say "take care of their kids".
This is what you originally said:
Once people get married and have kids, men take on additional work to pay for their kids. Women take on less work to take care of their kids.
You did not say that women do less paid work. You said they take on less work. This framing implicitly suggests that women's work isn't really work. This seems to be a common societal default assumption and that deeply held belief helps drive the feminization of poverty because the mental model is that women's work isn't real work and doesn't really deserve compensation.
The rest of your comment is simply gratuitously ugly, so I am done here.
> Once people get married and have kids, men take on additional work to pay for their kids.
You now claim:
> I also did not say that MEN do more paid work.
???
Pointing out that such interpretations are twisted is redundant.
Yes, I know they're twisted. That was the point FFS.
I'll also note you don't seem to have a problem with her twisted interpretation of things. Which is the hypocrisy I was trying to point out.
I mean honestly... read this quote:
Once people get married and have kids, men take on additional work to pay for their kids. Women take on less work to take care of their kids.
and try to explain how any rational person would conclude I was somehow nefariously assuming that women were not doing paid work.
In some cultures. In some cultures, the groom (or his family) paid her family a bride price, and in some cultures the groom paid her (personally, not her family) a dower. In some cultures, in fact, a combination of these existed simultaneously.
Of course, pretending that dowry alone was the dominant tradition is necessary to your argument that what the wife brought was viewed as insufficient value on its own, but it's not actually accurate.
Should it?
I mean, let's say we have a happy "leave it beaver" family with 2.2 kids, a white picket fence, a dad who works, and a mom who doesn't. Due to no fault in particular, they get divorced. They now have two households to maintain instead of one.
Why would both people deserve a "middle class lifestyle"? Their expenses have each gone up, and the total income hasn't changed. How can you split one "middle class lifestyle" into two, and obtain two of the same thing?
Comments like yours are essentially twisting my intent to an extreme degree. I did not expect to have people pile on and act like I am some overentitled lazy bum for explaining some of my reasons why I also work, in addition to getting alimony. Geez.
Edit: It appears you are that someone. So, which is it? Alimony is a cushy free ride? Or not?
... if she wants to maintain the same lifestyle. If she's willing to take on a lower standard of living, perhaps not.
> Comments like yours are essentially twisting my intent to an extreme degree.
That's just untrue.
> I did not expect to have people pile on and act like I am some overentitled lazy bum
I did no such thing.
> Edit: It appears you are that someone.
Nope. You're not reading my comments. I clearly said that alimony is deserved compensation.
I understand your frustration that people are taking a somewhat counter position. But the point here is to not blame you or to say you "deserve" to be poor.
The point is to have a discussion on responsibility. Why are people being compensated? How much should they be compensated? For how long should that be paid?
For me, if you're married for 2 years, and pay alimony for 50, that's abusive and wrong. Saying so shouldn't be interpreted as an attack on you personally.
Please learn to distinguish a discussion on the topic of alimony from a personal attack on you. There are absolutely not the same thing.
It would be paradoxical if marriage rates were declining because men don't want to commit to supporting a wife and family even as the amount of money women bring into the family unit is increasing. The correlation might even suggest the opposite: women do not see the need to get married because they no longer need men to support them.
(Also, even including the older generations, very little alimony is paid. Americans pay about $10 billion in alimony, almost all by men. But there are about 25 million divorced men in the country, resulting about $33 per month in alimony on average.)
There's an emotional reason to get married, formalizing a life long commitment. That's a big one for a lot of folks (citation: my marriage).
But lets say you're not a feelings type of person, and those arguments fall on deaf ears. If you live in a community property state marriage makes inheriting assets ridiculously easy and avoids all sorts of taxes. (otherwise you're down the road of setting up trusts which will incur lawyer and trust management fees).
Taxes are another one - if there's an income disparity. Filing jointly with a single income does wonders for what you don't have to pay.
Your spouse can also not be compelled to testify against you, which depending on how paranoid you want to be might make you sleep better at night.
To say there's no point is missing the point though - as much as marriage is enshrined in legal rights which are unavailable to those who do not marry, the institution of marriage is centuries old and exists in many religions. There's an emotional reason to do so, and that's point enough.
Filing singly with a single income does even more assuming you have no dependents. Marrying someone with no income definitely doesn't result in a net increase in free cash flow. Taxes don't offset the cost of supporting an adult.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to marriage nor to the concept of a stay-at-home spouse (of either gender), but it's not a net gain financially if the spouse doesn't work. It's not a guaranteed net gain even in the case where both work.
We have a fanancial planner and have gone through multi excersizes tracking our spending. The end result is the work my spouse does saves around $50k a year in expenditure alone, not to mention the physical and mental health improvements.
I think we often forget what work means.
I'll be honest, though, I think your financial planner is telling you what you want to hear. $50k reduction in expenses is huge, especially given that you didn't even mention childcare. You essentially listed food, cleaning, and labor for small home projects. And you only reduced your eating out by 50%. I'd be interested in seeing the numbers because I can't imagine how you're saving the equivalent of a ~$70k salary every year by cleaning your own house, doing your own small home projects (Is your wife really hanging drywall during the day while you're at work? If you're doing these home projects on nights/weekends, you're double counting.), and cutting your eating out budget by 50%. Do you eat at Michelin star restaurants multiple times per week?
If you are both between 30 & 34, and it's the first marriage for both, the divorce rate is 10%. Between 25 & 29 it's 14%.
If you both have college degrees, it drops even further.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201...
Your assets will only be taken from you if they were earned during the marriage. So for anybody that wanted to work on something, like a house, any time between now and the next 30 years, then yeah marriage with the non-negligible probability of divorce will destroy the equity you dumped into it, no matter what proportion you and your spouse contributed.
If you already had properties, even income producing ones, they can go in a trust before hand, and you don't even have to worry about the stigma of a "pre-nup", and nothing of consequence will be split from you in a divorce.
Then you have the flexibility to actually enjoy the marriage, make any number of conditions to actually use the money or support a family or make grand children set, and if it falls apart, the financial things you worked for are still in place and hopefully A LOT more valuable.
A trust can also help keep alimony and child support payments restricted to amounts that even the bread winner would find reasonable.
This article talks about how marriage is declining amongst the poor, and staying steady amongst the privileged. It makes a few assumptions about why such as "women don't want men that can't provide", while my analysis has been devoid of gender. All around, it looks like education around how bad the default contract is has taken hold, even amongst the poor and uneducated, who previously had been greatly skewing the marriage and divorce rates.
It should be more like forming an LLC wherein you make a partnership agreement. Called a prenuptial agreement in the US, I assume it's more popular amongst the wealthy.
I'd want a solid contract wherein there would be no alimony, separate finances, and rational child support meaning no, you don't get X percentage of my income, you get 50% of the actual cost of raising the children.
Should be much easier this way. Say the wife contributes 35% of the mortgage payment on a monthly basis, 35% of the home is hers in a divorce.
If she stays home to watch the kids, you "pay" her a portion of your salary to account for this.
Maybe we can crowd source some niche accounting software to make this trivial.
> Who would've thought of women as humans, right?
Is that really necessary?
You do realize the vast majority of marriages happen between men and women, and if only a "tiny minority" of women didn't want to get married, then by necessity only a "tiny minority" of men wouldn't be married?
So either the article is overstating the phenomenon (by saying it's incredibly popular) or a similar amount of men and women must be choosing not to get married.
> Is that really necessary?
The OP was making the argument that "men choose not to get married because reasons." Seems like they never bothered to consider there's a significant amount of professional women that are not interested in getting married until later in life. There's been a lot of thinly veiled (and sometimes pretty blatant) misogyny around HN of late, that's why I made the joke about them probably having something do with it.
Are they required to mention a woman's perspective in every instance where they mentions a man's perspective to not be a woman hater?
This is incredibly cynical. I'm pretty happy to work to support people that I love. It might be easier in some ways to be single, but it's not a "no win situation."
Chances of our marriage ending are very low according to the statistics. People always view marriage as this binary thing where you are either being completely and utterly scientific about things, or you are just being naive and jumping in. I love/d my wife deeply when we got married, but I was also aware of her flaws and my own. If you don't have any empathy or like living your life for yourself, don't get married (and probably don't date), it won't end well for you.
1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/heart-the-matter/201704...
If people could accurately judge character they wouldn't be getting divorced.
Nobody enters a relationship thinking their partner will cheat yet it happens all the time.
College graduates have a divorce rate closer to 25%
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor...
In particular, since fewer people are getting married than used to (the whole point of the article), this is overstating the divorce rate.
There's also a growing body of research on practices and habits of healthy satisfying marriages. Raw average divorce rates don't really capture what's possible with forethought and discipline.
The rates are high, and it's worth considering how many marriages should be divorced but instead forcibly stay unhappy for things like traditional or religious reasons.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201...
This point of view has interesting implications for gender specific mating strategies, since women can only conceive every 1-4 years and men can impregnate every 3 days.
I'd argue that a marriage and children shouldn't be lumped together be default. You can raise children perfectly well without being (legally or common law) married.
If you do not wand children there is no point in getting married.