In any game, including life you face a choice: Play by the established rules or don’t.
If you choose Door #2 you get to suffer whatever consequences the referees eventually come up with. In addition to generally forfeiting your right to have the referees enforce penalties on the other team.
If the world is as you (mostly mistakenly) believe it is, and the referees are stacked in favor of women, why would you think it’s smart to cheat in an obviously provable way? That’s just handing The Law a stick to beat you with.
Lastly, choosing to blow off the rules means changing the game from complying with the law into out douche-bagging your competitor; in this case your ex-wife. If you don’t out-douche her, she wins.
If in fact you (any you) are a decent person you’ll discover that trying to out douche a genuine douche is very hard work, and not at all satisfying. It just makes you emotionally exhausted and dirty feeling.
In all, doing the vigilante no-payment thing is the cowards’ way to lose.
I hate deadbeat moms too. There are more of them than many people would think.
I had a friend in high school whose mom was always hauling her dad into court for nonpayment of support, and I’m not defending what he did because he was breaking the law, but knowing what I do now, I can understand why he did that because her mom was using the child support money for Bingo, and yes, this was something she would do before paying bills. :mad: Her dad did support her, by buying clothes for her, paying for school activities, and even the deductible on the hospital bill when she got really sick even though he was not obligated to do so.
In cases like this, parents should make arrangements to pay certain bills, and then pay them. I have a friend who has dealt with this kind of thing for many years; he was supposed to pay the kids’ uninsured medical bills and he has said he doesn’t have to because he paid child support. Or at least that’s what she told me; I know that pretty much anything a woman says about her ex is to be taken with a grain of salt.
From what I’ve seen, most support non-payers in recent years involved couples who were never married, and if they were married, that parent didn’t support the kids when they lived with them, and didn’t pay any of their other bills either.
No, it was a shitty move by an asshole who’d worked for his father’s business all his life, to avoid paying alimony to the woman who raised his children. No “family assets” were at stake other than part of his income. There were no golddiggers in this story, just someone trying to avoid alimony. You’re making up stuff to fit your hoped-for scenario.
Actually just 2 different situations. I agree in your scenario it sounds more like the man was just avoiding paying child support or alimony and his family helped him out.
But then, when you think about it, thats kind of what families do. They protect each other even when their person is in the wrong. I know it sucks.
Twelve years ago, I gave up my good-paying job to move for my wife’s work. Six months later, she divorced me. It devastated me financially. I wasn’t homeless, but I could see it from there. The year after my divorce was the worst of my life, no question.
Five years down the road, though, I was in a much better position than my ex. Our story played out exactly as the story above posits: her income went down, mine went up. We had no children, and she had never stopped working. That’s just the way things went.
I could be full of crap on this, but perhaps more men get “screwed by the divorce” in the short term - i.e., they leave the marriage in worse shape than they were when they went in, or could have reasonably expected to be had the marriage and divorce never happened, and they feel the got pummeled by the process. A few years down the road, though, most men tend to be better off than their ex-wives.
My gf got screwed royally. Her ex went through some sort of midlife crisis, but got caught repeatedly. After three affairs he finally agreed they should divorce. He suggested she keep the house and he keep the better of their cars. But, when he spoke to a lawyer, he discovered he could get alimony, since she had earned much more than him. She ended up writing a check for a lump sum, in exchange for his written agreement to never contact her.
In my divorce, I got screwed royally. I moved out when the kids were still young. We worked out a shared custody agreement. My ex was concerned about the kids and finances (as was I). She suggested I pay her a grossly inflated child support and then, when the kids turned 18 she would walk away happy, signing whatever my attorney wrote up. I got a second job to be able to afford her support. When the kids turned 18, she yelled, “SUCKER” and filed for divorce with a demand for a ridiculous amount of alimony. Our oral agreement meant nothing.
To answer the OP: I think I am a little scared to get married. I’ll be 48 in a couple of months and don’t have a good track record with relationships. If I got married and divorced, I could really stand to lose a lot. I know that I would likely end up better off than she would, but I also might end up worse off than I need to be.
Love and marriage constitute a risky business. To get serious in a relationship is to open yourself up to vulnerability. For some people - arguably most people - the rewards outweigh the risks. For other folks, not so much.
Very few people these days pay or receive alimony; that’s intended to support the ex-spouse and is taxable income. The people who get it nowadays usually get a pittance for a short time, generally a few hundred dollars a month for a couple of years and they lose it if they remarry, and is most commonly awarded to women who did not work outside the home for many years to get them back on their feet. Back when I worked at the grocery store pharmacy, I had several middle-aged women customers who got divorced and their ex-husbands had to provide health insurance for them for a specified time, usually a year, and that counts too.
I personally don’t believe that people are obligated to support their ex-spouses. Their children are another story.
That said, I have a friend who has no biological children, and he pays $700 a month in alimony to his ex-wife. :eek: He’s not exactly wealthy (the money comes out of his military pension) and any further details are 110% none of my business.
FWIW, falling in love was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to me. It was well worth the risk, but that is a real risk. You are charged with being vulnerable not just emotionally but in every sense, as your lives become more tightly intertwined.
Just a recent issue that came up financially is student loans. We’ve been working on paying down his loans using our combined income. His have the highest interest rates so it makes logical sense to start there. But I have this crazy fear that we’ll spend years paying off his loans, then something terrible will happen, and I’ll end up alone, on a significantly lower income than him, stuck with all of my loans. He recognized that as a legitimate fear so we’ve been brainstorming ways to ensure we are each financially protected, should the worst occur. But it goes to show there is risk, including financial risk, in joining your life with another person.
Not everybody should have kids, not everybody should be married, and bless those who recognize it.
Because it’s more complex than that, it’s hard to make a generalization about what one should expect. That said, if something were entirely genetic, then you would NOT NECESSARILY expect to see the rates being the same around the world, just like you would not expect to see the percentage of people with blue eyes or red hair everywhere in the world. Today, people are more capable of travel and we’ve seen big upheavals in population over the years. But we are not (currently) so homogeneous that you could make that kind of generalization. It’s CONCEIVABLE that you are correct with regards to depression. But beyond that, I think we are in the land of the unknown.
Let’s not forget that environment has a significant impact on the expression of genes. With depression, this may be particularly the case for environmental factors before the age of 25 - roughly when the human brain ends its major developmental phase. By the same token, biologically based mental illnesses are impacted by both environment and behavior. It’s often not easy to tease apart what comes “naturally” and what has an environmental context. Environment also primes certain cognitive (dys)functions. There’s a lot going on that makes it difficult to distinguish genetics from culture.
Has anyone else noticed that whenever a woman keeps repeating on social media, or in a blog, how WONDERFUL her husband is and how she’s SO LUCKY to have him, over and over again, that the marriage almost always ends very abruptly, and very badly? That was true before we had social media - that she’s obviously in huge denial.
I also kinda sorta feel the same way about moms who go on and on about how much they love their children. We get it, okay? WE.GET.IT. (And how does she act the rest of the time?) :rolleyes:
In Ontario, for couples who lived together in a conjual relationship but had not married, property issues are dealt with by remedial constructive trust and unjust enrichment. (I expect that someday it will eventually move to an equalization regime similar to the equalization of the during-marriage growth of net family properties during marriage.)
Throughout Canada, spousal support quantum is not written in stone, but a guideline that is taken very seriously (as in do not even think of arguing over quantum without showing the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines calculations). The quantum is presented in a range – high, mid-point or low support. The mid-point is based on both parties’ annual incomes being tossed into the same pot, both parties’ taxes being paid, and the remaing pot of combined net income being divided between the parties 50/50. Where the misunderstanding comes in is that regular periodic support is deductible to the payor and taxable to the recipient. The reason for this is to reduce the combined taxes of the parties so that they both come out with more at the expense of the tax man. Conceptually, it is income splitting to reduce taxes by way of moving some of the income of the party with the higher tax rate into the hands of the party with the lower tax rate, but bumping up the amount being paid in support. Unfortunately, most folks simply see one party deducting support from pre-tax income and the other party paying tax on support income, without understanding that the after-tax amount being paid is higher than it would have been had the income not been split. Folks wanting to learn more about this should read up on the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines and run some simulations.
A former coworker who was married a few months ago does this all the time. It’s like she has no other interests, no other outlet. Given that all her previous relationships ended in disasters, though, I can kind of understand why her insecurity drives her to keep declaring it.
My college roommate sings the praises of her husband every so often. In her case, she has every right to because of who he is and how they’ve merged their lives. He doesn’t do social media, so the only way anyone in her sphere who doesn’t already know him can only rely on her posts about him.
I can see both sides. When I was on social media I wasn’t prone to doing that sort of thing, but I’m effusive by nature. I can never shut up about what I’m passionate about. I can’t begrudge other people spouting off about their own passions. And I’m a hopeless romantic. I love to see people loving each other. I agree that sometimes it can mask larger issues. But I often think it can just as easily be sour grapes that makes people hate it.
This is an issue with social media in general. Many people treat it like a highlight reel of their life which can make a user feel bad about their own life for not having all those wonderful things. People who use social media have a higher risk of depression. Everyone has struggles and challenges even if they don’t show up on Facebook.
Yeah and with so many people having student loans I think we will hear of more cases of people marrying others just to get rid of their student loans. Just like I have known cases where someone put their spouse thru college and then that spouse up and divorced them.
I mean, if you marry someone with outstanding student loans, those loans are now your debt too arent they?
If they are federal loans, they aren’t your spouse’s debt unless you privately consolidate them (and even then I’m not sure.) I don’t believe anyone would marry someone just to put them through school. The ex would not be on the hook for loans. It’s more likely that the stress of graduate school ruined the marriage. Just speaking from the experience of having supported my spouse through 7 years of graduate school hell at the expense of my own career and living out of state. Our relationship was great until the final year of grad school and the miscarriage, then all that festering resentment bubbled to the surface and for the first time in our 12 years together, we had serious problems. But we got over them. If you think I don’t have a share in his income after what I went through to get him there, well, you’re wrong. And he disagrees. Now that he has his PhD and a steady job, I get to pursue my dream, which is not the most lucrative.
That’s the way of marriage. Sometimes you give and sometimes you take. But if you only take or give for too long, you’re going to run into problems.