I’m very familiar with taking care of kids, so no need.
Everyone is different, and different women feel differently about career/housekeeping, and you can’t just generalize from your own experience and feelings to other people & situations.
My original point was that while women in divorce situations are incentivised to present their decision as being driven by their ex-husband’s desires, this is not necessarily the case in many situations. I’m surprised if people disagree with this - this is very widespread.
[In addition, I should also note that it’s not just about children. For example, there was once an administrative assistant in my office who told me she had been a sales manager with 6 people working under her, but traded this in for a secretarial job because she wanted to “get out of the rat race” (her husband was an engineer). A man does not have this option available without severe social cost. Interestingly, when I pointed this out to her she reflected a bit and remarked that her BIL was an illustration of this - he quit a higher pressure job to become a small time pilot, and the whole family considered him a loser.)]
No, so they should learn how to be self sufficient BEFORE they leave. Why should a spouse have to pay to support an ex spouse that they already supported throughout the length of the marriage? Since this still mainly applied to women, I have to wonder why, in this day and age, a woman would choose to put herself in a position that she is dependent on a man for survival.
Personally, I would award support to only two groups.
Those who have children under 5 and have yet to reenter the work force would be entitled to temporary support if the marriage lasted longer than ten years.
Those women who were married before 1970 and have never worked a day in their life would be entitled to lifelong support since it is unlikely they could ever support themselves.
Why would a man choose to put himself in the position of having to pay alimony? It’s not a solo decision.
I love your terribly generous number 1 exception - it’s an exception because you accept that the woman would have difficulty returning to work with such young kids, but if they’ve been married less than ten years she can starve.
It’s not at all unreasonable to want to cohabitate in a relationship for a period of three years with someone who has a lower income than you. In some jurisdictions (e.g.: Ontario), that can be sufficient to trigger alimony.
Because they do the math: if their earning potential + their spouses is LESS than their spouses’ earning potential if there is a full-time housekeeper, child-manager, bookkeeper, and general life-manager, it’s a rational decision for both and results in a higher quality of life for both. Potential alimony is the only thing that lets people take the risk to make this sort of plan that benefits everyone much of the time–why shouldn’t we allow them to?
My husband is going to quit his job and stay home when our baby is born in October. I really don’t see that as me supporting him “throughout the length of the marriage”. I see it as me supporting the household financially and him supporting the household in terms of practical administration. I couldn’t ask him to take that risk if he didn’t have the legal protection from me just kicking him to the curb whenever.
I haven’t read the thread yet, but need to get my post in. I chose: No, the practice of alimony is still relevant today.
I pay alimony (known as spousal maintenance in Washington State). We negotiated a $300 per month support payment for 4 years after the date the divorce became final. While we were separated, I paid half the mortgage (he lived in the house til we sold it), all insurance premiums, and $150 per month in support.
This is equitable because my husband became disabled towards the end of our marriage and I made more money than he did (and have better future earning potential). He needed time to come to terms with his new situation and this gives him the space to do that.
Nice sentiment, but it gets into a sticky mess pretty quickly. After all, if you’re the sole earner but you will be expected to support two households after a divorce, you may not be able to afford to leave, either.
Having a single income is risky for both parties. People can choose to do it, but they should be aware of the risks rather than just thinking the courts are going to take care of them somehow and it will all work out.
If they both worked for the benefit of one person, the other basically has invested time on that person, and like any investment, if it works they should have their share. That said as the person is no longer investing time in the other person, that return should be diminishing over time.
But also for alimony to be considered the marriage would need to be structured that they were acting as one person financially, with funds going into a ‘general’ fund for both their use. If there are separate finances it does show intent to keep finances separate during the marriage and the time invested would not have the expectation of a financial return.
But for a very, very long time and up until very recent times, marriage was designed to mitigate the risk of being abandoned by the wage-earner. This was one of the primary reasons for marriage: marriage was a legal claim to on-going financial support. That function of marriage–that implication of marriage–is fading, which is why alimony as an institution is fading, but it’s too soon to pronounce it dead, or to say that it’s such a radical idea that a separate legal contract, above and beyond the marriage itself, is needed to create it. The marriage IS that contract, or was for a very, very long time.
When Pa got out the shotgun and said “You’re going to marry my girl”, he didn’t mean “You’re going to love and cherish her”, he meant “You’re going to support her”.
Yeah, this is fair enough. It’s changing (I know maybe two couples like that in my generation, but zero in my parents’ generation) but we’re certainly not there yet. I’ve always thought that it’s an annoying double standard, and what I’d like is for it to be just as okay for men to stay home with the kids (or have a less demanding career, etc.) as for women.
Yes, in the past that was true. In the present, that’s much less true. I assume that when people make decisions right now, they are best served by making them based on the present, not the past.
Except that 1) the marriages we are talking about occurred in the past and 2) the alimony laws are still on the books today, so a couple getting married today is getting married in a present where that implication of marriage still stands to some degree. It may be less true, but it’s not yet false.
I suspect that the assumption that alimony is fading - expressed by many in this thread - is incorrect, at least as applied to long term marriages.
Where it is probably true is as applied to short term marriages - which is the type that most posters to this board have familiarity with. But as applied to long term marriages, I believe that alimony is if anything even tougher than it was. Because my impression is that the old-time notion that a husband merely needed to support his ex-wife. Now it’s that the ex-wife is herself has a virtually equal claim on his future earnings, which is a different principle.
[This is one of the fundamental ways in which the money-earner is disadvantaged in a divorce situation. The nature of money is that it can be easily separated from the earner, more so than services. So if you have a situation where one spouse supplies the cash and the other spouses does the housekeeping, after the divorce the money supplier is expected to keep supplying the money but the housekeeping one is not required to keep supplying the housekeeping. So in the typical husband-wife situation, the husband’s obligations may never end, while the wife’s stop dead at the termination of marriage. Hard to know what to do about it, though.]
Well, if all you have to do is live with someone for three years, not get married, have no kids and never expect your lower-earning spouse to stay lower-earning because it helps your job, then I agree it would be an unfair law. I think I’d need proof that this actually happens, though; it would apply to such a huge number of relationships that I’m sceptical.
And it would then be a case of a bad law, not of someone going into a marriage intending not to support themselves.
I believe the kid factor has changed recently. Certainly in years past the woman gave up her independent lifestyle (generally- a job or career) when the child came along. This was considered a predictable consequence of marriage.
Now days, not so much. Both spouses have options and both spouses are making choices.
It is entirely possible that the mom could go back to work and split the child rearing 50/50. Maybe not optimum, but possible.
It is possible that mom could stay home and raise the child.
It is possible that dad could stay home and raise the child.
It is possible that
you get the idea.
If mom stays home with the kids, great. I am impressed with their choice. But it is a choice. If the marriage doesn’t work out, both spouses made a choice and made sacrifices. Alimony, as opposed to child support, is not required. The other spouse made sacrifices as well. Compensating one spouse with money from the other spouse for the choice both made isn’t fair. A powerful argument is that the stay-at-home spouse invested in the financial success of the working spouse. Lets grant that. And the go-to-work spouse invested a lot in the nurturing and child relationship success of the stay-at-home spouse. Alimony by itself doesn’t contemplate compensate the go-to-work spouse for that investment. Again, both made choices and sometimes the roles could have reversed-by choice.
slight hijack
Congrats, and Hallelujah for you and hubby, now I won’t feel like so much of a freak KNOWING im not the only stay at home dad. It will be subtle, but he will feel definately odd(imo based on me:D). times are changing, slowly, but seems like its still “the man’s job” to be the bread winner.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread:D
So whats considered spousal support? In ID (non spousal support state) I am responsible for 3/4 of child care (based on real and imputed income) presumably so that ex can get retrained and educated and get a job, is that child support or is that (tacit) spousal support?
You were rhetorically asking why a man would choose to put himself in a position to pay alimony. If a man doesn’t want to pay alimony, what do you recommend he do that would be sufficient to prevent an alimony obligation?
It’s just that I’m really sceptical that alimony would be paid just because a couple had lived together and their incomes were different. Do you have a cite that shows this actually happens?
Also, that’s not what I was asking. I was stating that having one partner stay home and support the other partner/look after the children is a decision of the working partner as well as the at-home partner. Unless the working partners are being forced to do this, that’s pretty obvious, I would’ve thought.
The spousal support advisory guidelines used in Canada.
More specifically:
“Although the doctrine of spousal support which focuses on equitable sharing does not guarantee to either party the marital standard of living enjoyed during the marriage, this standard is far from irrelevant to support entitlement… As marriage should be regarded as a joint endeavour, the longer the relationship endures, the closer the economic union, the greater will be the presumptive claim to equal standards of living upon its dissolution.”
" On this broad reading of Bracklow, which many courts have accepted, need is not confined to situations of absolute economic necessity, but is a relative concept related to the previous marital standard of living.66 On this view entitlement to non-compensatory support arises whenever a lower income spouse experiences a significant drop in standard of living after marriage breakdown as a result of loss of access to the other spouse’s income, with amount and duration resolved by an individual judge’s sense of fairness."
There’s also the Divorce Act, section 15.2
The objectives of spousal support are:
"(6) An order made under subsection (1) or an interim order under subsection (2) that provides for the support of a spouse should
(a) recognize any economic advantages or disadvantages to the spouses arising from the marriage or its breakdown;
(b) apportion between the spouses any financial consequences arising from the care of any child of the marriage over and above any obligation for the support of any child of the marriage;
(c) relieve any economic hardship of the spouses arising from the breakdown of the marriage; and
(d) in so far as practicable, promote the economic self-sufficiency of each spouse within a reasonable period of time"
Note subparagraph (6) (a); Recognizing the economic disadvantages arising from the breakdown of the marriage. If I make 50K and the person I’m with makes 100K, I’m living on 150K for 2 people. Going back to 50K is an economic disadvantage to me.
