i get it but in reality in many families someone is sacrificing their career for the family unit. i don’t think it’s unfair to take that opportunity cost into consideration
I can 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.
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 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.
I'd say this was the bigger risk. But as with everything, it's always hard to say for sure from a distance.
If the other party remarries I'm free, but I don't think anyone else is dumb enough to marry them.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do wonder about our priorities here. It seems we are choosing economic output over everything else.
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.
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.