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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

So a couple get married. They (voluntarily) have children. Then they make the decision together that the wife will quit work to spend the majority of her time raising their children and managing the household, while the husband will continue working outside the home, as his earnings are sufficient to support the family. Some time later they divorce. You're saying at this point the husband should now keep his entire income for himself, and the wife should have to rely on social security? She would effectively then have to choose between remaining in the marriage or becoming destitute. How is that reasonable? I guess you're saying that no one should choose to live in a single-income family, to guard against this eventuality?

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Yes. And the wife can re-enter the career or start a new one. It is not so hard these days. I see no reason why the wife should be allowed to leech of the husband. And no she won't be destitute. Finding minimum wage work should not be impossible.

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.

Maybe it's easier to explain on HN as being about founders. A marriage is a single legal entity, like a startup, where the two founder share equal equity (by default) with no vesting. It doesn't matter that one founder does the sales and brings in revenue and the other builds the product: the equity split is still 50/50.

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.

But to follow your analogy, 'keeping the partnership amicable' was traditionally seen as falling more to the person not out bringing money into the business. Divorce was much rarer when single-income arrangements were the norm, there may be some uncertainty as to causality but the two went hand in hand. If it's in someone's job description to keep the family together and they fail to do that - well granted, sometimes they were up against impossible odds, but it seems like the stay-at-home partner is getting the best of two eras, modern responsibility for keeping the marriage together and earlier responsibility for contributing financially.

If two parties agree to something, it doesn't fall to only one of them to make sure everything works out, regardless of the behavior of the other party.

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.

>If two parties agree to something, it doesn't fall to only one of them to make sure everything works out, regardless of the behavior of the other party.

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.

I see no reason why the wife should be allowed to leech of the husband.

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.

Yes, they made their decision together. They could've instead shared managing the house and raising their children.

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