In the old days, it was understood as the division of responsibility - one of the spouse, mostly the male, would be responsibile to earn and provide for the family, while the other would be in charge of managing the finance and other household responsibilities.

My point is that it is a modern perspective to paint the "house wife" / "home maker" (mostly the wife due to tradition) as someone who just does menial chores and as an "unproductive" member of society - just because she doesn't earn capital. Where as if you see it from the perspectibe of a family member, she / he as a home maker has different but equally important responsibilities too and plays a vital role in a family unit / society.

Depends where and when "old days" means, but half the population not working was pretty rare. Farms had lots and lots of different kinds of labor, in and outside the house, in different seasons, but everybody worked hard. Victorian mining and mill towns had huge "putting-out" industries, sometimes bigger than the visible ones, organised work for cash but physically distributed. And (as you said) cooking & cleaning was massively more labor-intensive, as well as being much more important before antibiotics etc.

That's very true - I was speaking more from the upper middle class urban perspective I grew up in, where most married women who opted to stay at home only managed the household finance and day to day chores of looking after the needs of their family members. (Which, in India at that time, was no easy task even with maids, as we are talking about joint families living together.)

My grandparents fom my father's side were rural farmers however, and yes, like you rightly pointed, these women really had more responsibilities. I recall that my grandmother, at one point had to manage a household of around 40 people (including the labourers who worked in their farm)!

What if the agreement was that both parties would work, then one of the parties lost their job, never finds a new one and after a while completely stopped looking? Even if the other party really wanted them to and hated having to work full time? What if eventually that was the cause for the marriage breakdown?

I see your point but if we're talking here about a lengthy marriage, where the stakes are really life-changing: the sharing of a mortgage-free home, life insurance policies, savings - that all takes 20-30 years. I would hope, that of after decades of co-habitation there is a breakdown, the friendship between the partners should carry through to a reasonable conclusion. If the breakdown happens in the first few years, there is little to lose.

It is seriously possible that a couple could be married 2-3 years, have it break down because of unreasonable causes e.g one person shows their true self, and then the other person must pay alimony the rest of their lives? If this is the case, then sure I'm in agreement with that being absolutely stupid.

That is the case, and it is absolutely stupid. It is also one of the reasons marriage rates have plummeted. There is a tremendous need for reform of alimony and child support laws to reflect the social changes that have happened in the last few decades.

It's not true. Alimony formulas are on a sliding scale based on years of marriage and employment history.

People in this conversation need to be more discerning about what kind of person they marry in the first place...

right, surely lack of discernment about marriage deserves a little prison-time.

I admit I've never been in a divorce but the idea of marrying someone who could come to respect me so little as to ruin my life would be a non starter.

You'd be surprised how much people can change over a decade, even 5 years. Hell even over a year.

Watch the Amanda and Rob segments of A Different Brain by Louis Theroux. (available in the usual places). https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07c6fjk

If it was agreed by both parties that the spouse wouldn’t work. The woman leaving their job because they now have a husband that supports her was never supposed to be part of the deal.

When it’s part of the deal, it is supposed to be temporary while the children grow up, not a permanent right of the wife to cease supporting her lifestyle.

It was supposed to help the children. Marriage was for the children initially.

It seems plausible to me that societies that developed a marriage type situation could have benefited from more stability due to men being more settled (or at least having the veneer of being settled) and not competing with each other for every woman they see.

Otherwise, it seems possible we could end up with a situation where 20% of men get 80% of women like many other species and the males have to keep fighting each other to determine who gets them.

I wonder whether traditional marriage is the cause of western style society rather than a product of it.

If only the Alpha males get to reproduce then you only select for Alpha male type characteristics. You don't select for the gene sets that will produce new inventions, good craftspeople, or people who can work at administration of larger groups.

There is no alpha male. The original study confused the father in a family of wolves as a general "alpha". The original author retracted the results, but it still lives on.

https://www.businessinsider.com/no-such-thing-alpha-male-201...

Substitute "alpha" with "cad", then. The fact remains that when transaction costs are reduced (as with mobile app dating), polygamy increases to that number of 20% of males mating with 80% of the females, with reproduxtio mitigated by modern birth control.

We've outlawed dueling yet we've also dismantled the traditional institution of marriage. These are very strange times.

The traditional institution of marriage is less changed than you might assume. Historically, it’s varied quite a bit from any given norm, the largest change is simply longer lifespans and less cheating.

The most important change in the last 50 years compared to any time before is that women now have the option to be self sufficient.

Even accepting your premise, which I don't...

Is it ethical to require half of the species to be dependent just for societal stability?

I never insinuated that half the species should be dependent for social stability. In a previous comment, I mentioned it was plausible a one woman-one man (or any 1 to 1 partnership ignoring genders) results in more stable societies due to less competition.

It lasts longer but less cheating happens? How? Has marriage actually become stronger?

Not one of your downvoters, but some discussion: many countries used to have the concept of a guilty party in divorces and only abandoned it after a considerable buildup of painful experience. Divorces don't get less ugly when you force the judge to pick a winner.

On the flip side, in England and Wales there's no such thing as a 'no fault divorce', which is crazy.

Typically assets are split evenly and that's it - unless children are involved.

Haven't downvoted, but I'll discuss it if you're still around.

Seeing it as being about breadwinner at all is, to my mind, rather beside the point. If a partner hasn't worked in years, they are dependent on the working partner's income.

Alimony isn't usually unlimited and exists in principle (and often in practice) to support the dependent partner until their financial situation is resolved. The alternative would be state support, not nothing. There's no mechanism in a modern state to leave someone without financial support (although there are substantial failures in practice).

Having taxpayers pay for things that can be arranged privately is generally avoided, and given that people are in broad strokes aware of alimony laws, they've tacitly agreed to such support by marrying.

So I suppose I'd ask what you'd propose as an alternative system?

So if a man has an affair with his secretary, the wife can kick him out and claim all the combined assets and income for the rest of time?

That would be an improvement over the current situation, yes.

Ideally, joint assets remain joint and there are no claims against future income.

Except where there are kids involved this is almost entirely the case in the UK so I struggle to see the reality of a world that's different.

I guess it's rather unfair to the stay-at-home husband though, who's given up his career to look after the kids, and thus has lost 10 years of continual work and training out of the job market. When income differences are extreme (say wife on $150ka a year and husband having given up a high paying profession 10 years earlier), it would make sense for the husband to get a 'get back on your feet' sort of stipend.

There are more dimensions to this relationship than just monetary. By your logic, the working party should be able to deduct from any support the cost of a housekeeper, a babysitter, a home cook, and a prostitute once a week/month depending on the usual "schedule".

Divorce is the end of an arrangement. If one party is risking losing half of what they built with their spouse plus support in perpetuity then what does the other party risk?