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Comment by HumanDrivenDev | Hacker News Reader

In 2019, it all looks terribly misogynistic.

No losing your house, no alimony... maybe they were on to something. Let wives also be able to sell their husbands and bring it back!

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If you own a house before marriage, perhaps a prenup would be prudent. Otherwise, it wasn't really your house, it was the family home.

Not everywhere has alimony either. If the money-making wife leaves the husband who has raised kids, he's just out of luck.

> If you own a house before marriage, perhaps a prenup would be prudent. Otherwise, it wasn't really your house, it was the family home.

I don't know how it works in the US, but here in Poland, all your assets from before marriage remain exclusively yours after you marry. They're not subject to split in the case of a divorce.

It's the same in France, I works have thought it was pretty much universal (well, in the West at least).

In Brazil there are three modes you can choose: the full one in which all assets are common, the partial one in which the assets from before marriage are separate but the assets from after marriage are common, and the separate one in which the assets are kept separate. A quick web search tells me that the default was full for marriages until 1977, and since then the default is partial (https://lucenatorres.jusbrasil.com.br/artigos/450042665/os-d...).

Not in places like California, where many HN commentators are. Everything by default becomes common ownership unless you explicitly take steps to establish otherwise, with only a few exceptions (e.g. certain retirement accounts). It’s a state level thing though, so there isn’t one story for the whole US.

>If you own a house before marriage, perhaps a prenup would be prudent.

If you're worried about losing a significant sum of your assets as a result of marriage, the only solution is to not get married. Prenuptials are generally considered to be worthless and any decent lawyer will find a way to get them thrown out. According to point 5 here [1], a case could easily be made that the plaintiff wasn't prepared for having to find a house after divorce, their quality of life is significantly worse than the standard they've come to adapt to after marriage, etc.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jefflanders/2013/04/02/five-rea...

>the only solution is to not get married

You will pay whether you’re married or not: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage

Or marry someone trustworthy, and make an informal agreement about how to split assets upon divorce. And if you don't trust them to keep that agreement, should you really be marrying them?

In that case, why marry at all, since you can't trust them to not divorce you?

Because not everything is possible without marriage. Marriage gives a legal framework to so many facets of life that is can be tricky when one doesn't. For example, medical care. If you aren't married, a "spouse" may not be able to make decisions for your care.

And that's just for folks already living in the same country. I couldn't live with my spouse before marriage because we lived in different countries. While one allowed a fiance visa, it was only good for 6 months, during which the fiance not only couldn't work, but couldn't open a local bank account.

People can't control how they feel, so it's unreasonable to expect someone to stick to something they're no longer enjoying. But people can control whether they stick to their word in financial dealings.

It's not about trust. People change.

People's feelings change, but how much integrity somebody has (whether they keep their word) is a part of their character, and people's character changes less frequently.

No, no. People change. Trust me. Every single man who got divorced was sure he found the one. Every single one.

Especially when there’s even a financial incentive to getting out of a relationship you no longer enjoy. Everybody has a price, and seeing your marriage failing and a financial bonus to getting out of it changes opinions and convictions pretty fast.

This is especially true in countries that openly favour one of the spouses. For exaple ones where the legal framework doesn’t consider the contribution each spose had to the marriage, and one of them will invariably receive financial aid.

Integrity doesn't change, it's either there or it isn't. If you start a business with somebody, then after 10 years they suddenly backstab you and take your business, we don't say "they changed", we say they had no integrity to begin with. Integrity that somebody won't stick to is almost by definition not integrity, as "keeping one's word" implies keeping it unconditionally.

My first marriage ended in divorce, and we settled entirely amicably, out of court, because we both thought it would be pretty horrible to drag the other through the court system just because it turned out we wanted different things in life.

To assess integrity, it's not enough to look at how someone treats you, the person they love. It's also important to look at how they treat things they don't care about, how they treat things they hate, how they approach things they don't want to do but have to do anyway, how they treat people under their power like employees or serving staff. How they treat the promises they don't have to keep. Because if the love dies, that may be how they'll treat you.

Yes, and everyone thinks they're a great judge of character and integrity and they won't get backstabbed. Just the unenlightened and unwashed masses around them who don't know how to really look at a person and determine how trustworthy they are.

Then life goes on and someone who they thought was decent goes through a difficult time in life and backstabs them.

Even ignoring the very simple fact that people do change, there's the undeniable fact that the circumstances around a person change and it can and does push people to do things that they typically wouldn't do.

People who've lived comfortable lives and never had money troubles think they'll always be fine, but the minute their finances take a slight dip, they panic. It's a problem they never expected and it's probable they'll make some irrational decisions. Or maybe that person you've trusted all your life found out their brother has cancer and they're desperate to do anything to pay for the bills.

Shit happens. People try to adapt to it however they can. Thinking you'll avoid problems just by judging their integrity with a firm handshake and getting to know them is setting yourself up to be screwed over by people who know how to find an easy target, if not setting yourself up to be one of those virtuous people who screws over other people because your motives are good and theirs aren't.

Integrity, like any human characteristic, is a distribution; some people have more of it than others. If you just view everybody as the same, you're more likely to end up with somebody with average integrity, as opposed to if you actively searched for people displaying greater integrity. Similarly, assessing people is a skill that varies greatly among people, and if you just take the view that everybody is the same at it, you'll have no motivation to develop that skill yourself.

Will you vet them for a decade before committing for a few decades? if not, how would you know the agreement will be honored after longer time than you know them? Can you be sure of that with anyone?

I suppose it depends on how much confidence you have in your ability to assess somebody's character.

As anecdata, I remember getting the same legal advice as well years ago: prenups get thrown out by the judge all the time, so you might as well not bother having one.

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