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Comment by geewee | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an oddly woman-hostile take that's only very tangentially related to the study.

It’s not intended to be woman-hostile at all. It’s opposed to a specific system of incentives that encourages immoral and socially destructive behavior. It just happens to be that the system of incentives is itself designed to operate unequally and so it affects the participants in families differently.

If a similar system of incentives were created that strongly benefitted fathers in ways that fathers would respond to, we would probably see similar dysfunctional behavior from fathers.

It seems women-hostile because:

1) It doesn't seem to follow from the paper. Which states that the wealthier partner tends to retain most of the married wealth.

> While the richer spouse redistributes some assets to the poorer spouse in the typical settlement, the amount of redistribution is smaller than the amount required to ensure an equal split of the assets. This empirical finding suggests that the <lottery winning> spouses in our samples may anticipate retaining a larger share of the prize money in the event of divorce

2) If the only thing keeping a marriage together is the lack of wealth necessary for one party (the woman) to adequately survive after the divorce, then this is not a stable marriage.

You seem to have come into this with an already formed opinion. Which is fine, but the opinion seems to be about circumstances not addressed by this study.

This is silly. If your marriage is falling apart, you can’t wait for “the incentive system” to be changed. By whom, anyway? Also, many women will not leave the father of their children just for financial incentives. If there is the case, you gotta ask yourself what your marriage was based on in the first place. I agree that social pressure does play a role. For instance, I just saw a New York Times article that said “My husband doesn’t want sex anymore, do I divorce him?“. I agree with you that that is a disgusting framework of entitlement and replacability. But: If such cultural messages have more influence in your wife’s behavior than you, you gotta ask yourself… If you choose to believe what you just said, you’re gonna be a divorced Joe Rogan subscribing expat in Thailand pretty soon.

I have seen similar advice to men too. Dead bedroom in a long term destroys marriages ir is a sign of an issue in marriage.

Intimacy matters to people.

Intimacy, like love, isn’t something you get. It’s something you do. Getting the mental model wrong about this is a guarantee for disappointment. And for silly drama triangle thinking in terms of victim, perpetrator and savior (which does make for good clickbait).

I don't know of any empirical data supporting your assertions, they all seem rather speculative.

> like an oddly woman-hostile take

Noone cared about alimony until women started having to pay and now there's suddenly a movement to remove it.

If anyone thinks there's "suddenly" a social movement, it's likely that they just didn't notice that it has been happening for a long time.

You could say woman-hostile. You could also say victim mentality.

He who is being left usually has walked away first.

Down-vote and move on. That’s exactly what you’re blaming women for, isn’t it?

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