Divorce in the rich world is getting less nasty
economist.com
economist.com
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.
From what you are saying prenups are not a very good tool in your legal system but I assure you it works differently in many countries.
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.
These laws are awful and need to be changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clandestine_Marriages_Act_1753
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/family/living-together-mar...
https://www.familylives.org.uk/advice/your-family/relationsh...
Edit: also a related term, parental responsibility...
https://www.bma.org.uk/media/1840/bma-parental-responsibilit...
Edit2: also you can assign each other as "Next of Kin".
https://www.royalfree.nhs.uk/patients-visitors/advice-and-su...
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.
https://www.ageuk.org.uk/information-advice/money-legal/lega...
So... don't get married, sign your name on the birth certificate, and fill in that NHS card
https://www.gotocourt.com.au/family-law/de-facto-relationshi...
"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.
Canada too.
There can be complications if one party claims to be common-law married and the other does not, especially during divorces.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7327501/couple-no-home-no-kids-sp...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Parents went through a 20 year divorce and indeed the lawyers bled them dry.
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!
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.
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?
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?
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.
Everyone already gets a mandatory pre-nup when they get married. It's <whatever the default divorce law of the land in your jurisdiction> is.
IANAL, but as I understand it, having a pre-nup, in most jurisdiction is not a great shield against vindictive litigation.
There are other good reasons to get one, though.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/marital-s...
Because that’s one of many instances that led to me getting a divorce.
I took the vow quite seriously, but treating it like a suicide pact is not a good move either.
Maybe? Ha. An entire thread of non- or semi-religious people arrogantly mocking the need for marriage...
And you think there is ‘maybe’ bias?
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.
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 screw that entire system.
some company does provide medical insurance for "partners", but most probably don't, and that's a big headache.
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.)
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.)
It’s the children and fights over custody that cause the greatest drama and attorneys fees.
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.)
There is a lot of existing precedent with marriage that can provide some of that, but it’s terrible. It is something though, no question about it.
Kids, child support and custody is handled separately (kinda) anyway, but if they didn’t already have that discussed or worked out, also yikes.
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.
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 if you save up an entire year's salary after a few years, that should be more than enough for some lawyers...
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.
Edit: not clear if a once-wed person marrying a newbie counts as a first or second though. I’d imagine that could be significant.
A healthy society is predicated on strong families and minimal commitment relationships sound like a recipe for weak families.
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.
The gov should be out of your relationship, there is NO valid reason for it to be in there.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
So it's definitely a minority.
10/51 States (including D.C. as a state) per your source.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Such stock is subject to a vesting period, where you only gain the stock after a period of time.
Maybe you mean vested but not released RSUs in pre-IPO companies.
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.
No thanks. That is not a good deal.
You can’t propagate the human species with heroin
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.
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.
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.
The courts really want a win:win here.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
Yes of course both sexes can theoretically face the same thing, but in practice it is very biased.
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.
Also, 50/50 custody as a norm.
50/50 Child support as a norm.
Maybe 90% of the nastiness would absolutely disappear.
If the system’s goal were merely to ensure that they land on their feet, it would look very different.
If it were just about continuation of lifestyle, my mother wouldn't have been entitled to anything as my parents were never together.
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)
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.
Maybe in a few decades we will recognize that you should incentivize both parents to be active in the child's life.
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.
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'm forbidden to say any more.
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.
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.
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.
Abortion, ok.
But do you mean putting your own, healthy kids up for adoption???
And there are different degrees of "more important". "Throwing the kids away" is a super extreme measure few would take.
I hate it when during internet discussions, suddenly the other side slides on a slippery slope all the way to Level 99.
Your single without children?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The reason is that that's the standard marriage contract both of them signed. If they wanted a custom pre-nup, they could have done that instead.
Of course, the default contract itself could be changed, but I think your ideas are pretty far from most people would consider fair or reasonable.
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.
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.
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).
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).
[1] The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love (Page 13, https://web.archive.org/web/20220122024837/https://i.redd.it...)
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces#marriages-...
(edit: US centric)
Exactly. It's greater risk for a greater reward.
Also divorce rates are significantly lower (seeing ~20% on Google) for this with a college degree
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.
[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5018.html
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-h...
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.
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.
or a wealthier male is more likely to be able to get married, and thus also be healthier (due to the wealth, not the marriage).
To me, happiness is the ability to do what you wish, and not have responsibility or obligations to anyone.
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.
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.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/4/18650969/married...
There's no need to keep on searching. You have everything you'll ever need right here.
I'll also add - a feeling of stability I didn't think was possible for me (mega high anxiety) to experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the other party remarries I'm free, but I don't think anyone else is dumb enough to marry them.
I'd say this was the bigger risk. But as with everything, it's always hard to say for sure from a distance.
I doubt alimony is a significant contribution to assortive mating among the then-wealthy.
He was ordered to pay 50k a month (900k a year) for 10 years. Not even many wealthy would be able to handle that type of alimony.
And what do you mean no end in sight? Child alimentation stops at certain places after some age threshold is reached, certainly there must be a limit.
If your salary is 80gross or net and you pay half , do the math what you'd get in another country and leave if it makes sense.
If you make much more than that, I would suck it up.
I think they don't have any kids. So the alimony is going fully to his ex? (what he is complaining about).
I do wonder about our priorities here. It seems we are choosing economic output over everything else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Strikes me as a negative.. raising kids is a lot of work
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.
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”.
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.
As a separated parent you get focussed time with the kids and in the off week you get a good bunch of me/adult time.
Looking in it seems a great setup for mature ex’s.
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 is incredibly sad.
Edit:
I was curious and I shouldn't have been: https://www.custodyxchange.com/topics/research/dads-custody-...
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.
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.
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.
This is the only government data I found: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are there particular ages where it's especially disruptive (eg teen years where being physically distant from friends houses is more of a problem)?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
It seems more stable, but only from the outside.
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.
Although, sometimes situations like that make you perversely stronger/more flexible/more mature. Adversity is a forge, in the right doses.
You may not feel you owe divorced parents better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
We don't really know the situation and everyone's is different.
Not so glorious for kids who are constantly having to pack their bags and move between houses, never able to feel at home.
This way children get stable home while parents get rest and adult space for themselves and have a chance of missing their kids.
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.
The kids lose a family unit and now float between two where their place isn’t even certain.
I’ve met many adult fucked up by that experience as a kid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Convention_on_the_Inte...
Even if you're a billionaire: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/magazine/how-to-hide-400-...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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".
What makes you think that people don't do that?
I would imagine that most people don't divorce for fun but because it's the best of all the sucky remaining options.
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.