Couple marry. The expectations and spoken agreements are that there is to be no children and both professional people will work throughout the marriage and enjoy the fruits of their combined labors.
The first two years go the way both partners envision it. After that, one spouse decides he/she doesn’t like his/her chosen career. To follow is ten years of jobs sought, jobs lost or quit, multiple classes taken to find some kind of career that would be enjoyable, Lather, rinse, repeat resulting in spouse number two actually working less than 1/3 of the time and the working spouse supporting all the bills and expenses of the couple throughout most of the marriage.
After two full years of no work at all from spouse number two, spouse number one has had it and files for divorce. Spouse number two requests life time spousal support in the divorce settlement along with half of all assets due to the 15 year marriage.
Should spouse number two be entitled to it in your opinion? If not lifetime, temporary support of some length and if so, how long? Does it matter if spouse number two is male or female? Should spouse number two be entitled to half the assets accumulated during the marriage even though he/she didn’t hold up his/her part of the deal?
I think there should be no spousal support - not wanting to work steadily is not a disability. I do think the assets should be split 50/50 - a spouse who is working part-time or not working at all usually still contributes to the household. Also, Spouse Number One had an option of getting out of the marriage much sooner if they didn’t like how things were going - how they were paying for the lion’s share of those assets. After a couple of years, I think they probably had a good idea who they were married to.
I never liked alimony, especially for the long term. If there are kids, there should be enough child support to maintain the kids standard of living (as much as possible when you have split 1 household into 2), but spousal support seems obsolete when everyone is welcome to join the workforce.
I think temporary spousal support is OK if one spouse was the agreed upon stay-at-home. Yes, everyone can join the workforce but if a person has stayed out of the workforce for a long time it will take some time to get to an income that will be livable. In most cases I would think 3-5 years at the most and not full support, just enough to help.
If the children are really young, not school age, I think it could be longer. Get 2 or 3 kids and it often doesn’t pay to work and there wouldn’t be time for developing a career until most of the kids are in school.
It’s always amusing how marriage distorts what should be simple math.
Instead of spousing #2 getting post-divorce financial support, it should actually be the opposite. Spouse #2 actually should pay the missing 2/3rds income back to spouse #1. Spouse #2 also should not get 1/2 the house – it should be prorated based on actual contribution to the mortgage. Getting 1/2 the equity of the house would be another insult to spouse #1.
That would be the ideal situation. However, if spouse #2 is a female, she’ll get the benefit of sympathy from the courts just because of her gender and the 2/3 missing income will be irrelevant.
Too bad these financial details aren’t fully worked out ahead of time before the wedding. All 50 states should make a prenup mandatory for getting a marriage certificate.
This did happen to a couple I know and spouse two was awarded permanent support that can be reevaluated should spouse two have an income change. (or get a job of some sort) The divorce was in California. Spouse one was a coworker of mine. The judge basically said what Cat Whisperer said. Spouse one should have left earlier before it became the norm in their marriage that spouse one supports spouse two.
This - kinda - happened to a friend of mine. Not so much that she didn’t work (she did) but that her husband was a high powered TV exec who earned a LOT more than she did - like 8 times more. He had paid the mortgage whilst she had paid the utility bills. She had also assisted his career to some extent through doing all the housework, entertaining his clients etc. She also paid half for meals out, holidays and so on. So at the end of their marriage, he was loaded and she was broke.
She got 1/3 the value of their home and that’s it. But this is the UK, where I get the impression that the divorce courts are a bit less liberal with the rich spouse’s cash than in the US.
Spoken agreements, bah! Spouse #2 gets support (though I agree with the other posters that permanent support would be rather unusual). Shoulda gotten a pre-nup.
I guess if people both start with nothing, they don’t think a prenup is necessary. Spouse one had to give up half of the company 401K too which I think was the worst part. Money that spouse one put away, company matched and had to give half away to spouse two who should have had a 401K of their own by now.
Sounds like spouse 1 should have never gotten married, because that’s what marriage is…a sharing of everything.
Before my children get married, I am going to insist that they and their fiance’s go and spend a day in Family Court listening to all the petty disagreements, issues that arise when two people are calling it quits. Hopefully that will open their eyes and help them understand what marriage is really about.
This is exactly the sort of situation why I think legal marriage as it currently exists is broken, forget the whole “gay marriage” debate or what have you; the legal part of it should essentially boil down to a contract, perhaps a relatively standardized one, to remove a lot of these sorts of ambiguities, and divorce is just a breech of contract or a mutually agreed upon termination or adjustment of the contract.
Anyway, in this case, it sounds like they’re entering the marriage almost entirely for purposes of pooling their resources to get more bang for their buck. As such, I’d expect that they’d have a pre-nup that lays the rules out pretty explicitly. Or, if we go on the assumption of what “should” happen, then I’d say that, providing the working spouse can reasonably prove that that was the intention going into the marriage, particularly since there’s no children involved, then the assets should be divided up accordingly such that each gets a portion of the marital assets roughly in proportion to their contributions.
Now, the problem comes in how one would judge their contributions. The contributions of one spouse cannot be judged solely based upon wages earned. Hopefully, the spouse that wasn’t working consistently was still doing SOMETHING during that time, like hopefully keeping house, which may or may not be equal, but is at least greater than zero.
So, in this case, I would say the non-working spouse is in the wrong to request that much, barring the working spouse’s impatience somehow being seen as being invalid under their mutual agreement. Even in cases of blatant violations of a marriage, I think it’s hard to justify any spousal support, except for perhaps some type of “damages”, but even that is relatively limited. And, of course, the marital assets should be broken up according to contributions, thus favoring the working spouse.
Uh… the legal part does boil down to a contract. And standardized contracts are, for the most part, no more or less ambiguous than non-standardized ones. Except in limited cases, what’s on paper may be irrelevant depending on the conduct of the parties.
Spouse2 hasn’t worked full time in over 12 years (if I read the OP correctly) and spouse1 has let it ride. It took 2 years of non-work for spouse1 to decide that the original contract isn’t working. While I don’t have much sympathy for #2, I have to wonder what discussions have gone on in those years. Spouse2 could have reasonably assumed at this point that spouse1 is OK with the lack of work. Being thrown out on his/her ear at could be difficult.
I would say that the judge should assess the ability of the spouse2 to find work and maybe award temporary support. Assets split 50/50.
The situation the OP describes fits a typical childless marriage of yesteryear I would say and the courts of the day felt that spousal support was a good idea.
Pretty much agree with this - except that in the marriages of yesteryear the opportunities for the woman in the workplace were extremely limited, and there was more of an expectation that the wife would quit her job, so support was much more reasonable to expect.
This is a bit vague, possibly too vague even for a hypothetical situation. Because this does happen. Someone chooses the wrong degree in the wrong industry. Or goes through depression. Or loses a job because their spouse needs to move (and, explicitly or not, one spouse’s career or job often takes priority). Or just has bad luck.
