Hacker News Reader

Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

A note to any single folks out there with the potential to earn more than their future spouse: understand family law in your jurisdiction and understand what you are signing up for when you get legally married.

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.

View on HN

An example that surprised me: a friend of mine is unable to quit his stressful, unfulfilling high paying job due to alimony from a contentious divorce. Depending on jurisdiction, alimony payment amounts can be based on your earning potential, not your current income. So if you can earn lot you may be stuck in a job you hate.

That sounds like the literal definition of indentured servitude.

I simply cannot imagine giving another person this kind of power. If you’re going to risk such a catastrophic failure of the rest of your life for a neuro-chemical experience, heroin seems safer than romance.

Married people live 7 years longer on average, whereas the same cannot be the same for heroin users. So the two are probably not interchangeable!

Married people. People who stay married. What happens when you include the third of marriages that end in divorce?

That doesn't sound appealing. Taking a huge risk for something that can potentially ruin my finances for an extended period of time in exchange for maybe 7 more years of living.

No thanks. That is not a good deal.

Correlation vs causation. Also, those statistics are from a different time. Let's compare divorced vs never-married to get a fairer picture.

Its probably not the heroin but the lifestyle attached to an expensive illegal drug

So sounds like the futuristic studies on human longevity could be directed to research on keeping people married longer.

> heroin seems safer than romance

You can’t propagate the human species with heroin

Very true, but you also don't need romance to propogate the human species either - a good old fashioned fuck will do the trick, romance optional!

Slightly immature comment, but I'll bite. Chances of affair with heroin ending up being a nice story is absolutely 0. Chances of marriage being the one of the best decision in your life and ongoing source of content and happiness is pretty high, much higher than some comments here suggest. It can be something basic for few close friends and family, not those rather pathetic overblown mega weddings.

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.

I think everything is tradeoffs, but there will probably come a time when divorcing a higher-earning spouse is on balance a very good move for you. Perhaps some combination of your magnanimity or your spouse's devotion means you won't actually capitalize on this. But you could, and you both know it, and that power dynamic is extreme. Extreme enough to drown out any feelings of contentment or satisfaction, even if they manage to keep you happy. And obviously you have no obligations to their feelings, with this kind of leverage.

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.

Canada has one of the highest suicide rates among divorced men because of their even more draconian alimony/child support payments.

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.

Or it sounds like working hard to earn money to give your children a better life. Which is pretty common!

Alimony is not child support. Alimony is paid to the ex-spouse to maintain their lifestyle. You would need to pay child support in addition to the alimony.

Oops, you are correct, I misread.

The last lawyer I consulted with basically said they can't force my wife to work because that's slavery. I then asked why they can force me to work and he just went silent. Everyone in that industry knows it's bullshit but they're rich, connected, and unwilling to let it change.

Seems entirely broken system. In fair and just one the person could have quit, and have the other partner support him for rest of the life...

tldr; Your friend should talk to an attorney.

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.

"any single folks with the potential to earn" == if you're a man "understand family law" == you can do nothing, don't kid yourself

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.

It's not specifically advice for men. I use gender neutral pronouns for a reason. It applies to high earning women as well. My friend is a VP making good money. Her ex was a mostly out of work machinist with drug problems. She faced the same risks.

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.

Just going by the numbers and the outcomes, your high-earning VP woman is a LOT LOT rarer than the average lovestruck engineer who doesn't look before he leaps.

Yes of course both sexes can theoretically face the same thing, but in practice it is very biased.

I'll add to this: you don't necessarily have to get married for this to apply. In most (all?) Australian jurisdictions, living with someone for enough time is enough to establish you as defacto - which for almost all intents and purposes is just like being married.

Also worth noting is that Australia doesn't have alimony, nor do we seem to have the ridiculous child support arrangements that people get into overseas.

Australia absolutely does have laws on the books for alimony, aka spousal maintenance.

Holy shit, we do. Never actually met anyone who had to pay it, though.

It is hilarious that you confidently assert something completely wrong that could have been researched with a simple google search.

We have both of those things here.

We have child support but I assume by ridiculous arrangements they meant were don’t have uncapped child support and it’s also income based not earning potential based.

No getting trapped in a job you hate. No pretending it costs hundreds of thousands a year to raise a kid.

>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.

Of course you should understand what you are getting into before marriage and prepare also for a possible breakup.

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.

This is based on a lot of assumptions. First that there are children. Second, that one of the parties actually put forth effort to raise the children.

> "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.

Somehow I doubt your friend would look at these commenters and consider them to be fellow travelers. There does seem to be an undercurrent of hostility to women in some of them.

The point of the advice is to come up with a reasonable division of responsibilities that work for your partnership, rather than accepting the default agreement handed to you by the state without even understanding what it is.

Unvested RSU??

Restricted Stock Unit; a form of compensation that a company may provide.

Such stock is subject to a vesting period, where you only gain the stock after a period of time.

I'm aware but I don't think unvested RSUs are subject to divorce asset splitting. Unvested RSU is like unearned salary. It's not an asset to split.

Maybe you mean vested but not released RSUs in pre-IPO companies.

You give family court too much credit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com