In many jurisdictions, the default law on how to handle assets and debts upon marriage failure is to equalize the net growths that the parties had during the marriage. For example, if both parties started the marriage with only the shirts on their backs, but by the end of the marriage Fred had $100,000 in assets and $80,000 in debts, his net growth during the marriage would be $20,000 and he would hand over $10,000 of that to Wilma. If by the end of the marriage Wilma had $70,000 in assets and $20,000 in debts, her net growth in the marriage would be $50,000 and she would hand over $25,000 to Fred. This would leave Fred with $35,000 and Wilma with $35,000. This approach is based on a sharing of everything throughout the marriage. Note that this is very different from sharing the assets/debts at date of separation without giving consideration to what the assets and debts there were at date of marriage.
Different jurisdictions have different laws, and sometimes people are not happy with this equalization of net family properties approach, so the smart money is on making a marriage contract, rather than blindly jumping into making what often is the single greatest financial commitment of one’s life, but most people do not make an informed decision on this when they enter their first marriage because they are in lurve, and often have no significant assets at that time. Folks on the second go-round often look into making a marriage contract so that they can tailor the terms to their situation rather than get whatever the jurisdiction’s default is.
what I love about this thread is all the thoughtful posts with experiences and insights and so on. quality stuff on a timely topic.
because from the OP’s Title I feel like we are back in 1962, in the writer’s room of the Alan Brady Show and Rose Marie - I mean Sally - is telling us how much she wants a husband. She is a smart, talented woman with a great job and appears to have a wonderful life anyway you slice it - BUT NO HUSBAND. oh, woe.
things will get even worse for poor Sally if we, as a society, don’t stop scaring men!
Now let’s compare marriage verses living together in a conjugal relationship of some permanence. Very often, the law on how to deal with property upon the failure of a conjugal relationship of some permanence is a mess. If there is no domestic contract in play, then usually the default is what’s his is his and what’s her’s is her’s – that is until equitable relief such as remedial constructive trust and/or unjust enrichment comes into play. Such uncertainty concerning how the equities will play out begs one to make a domestic contract prior to or during the cohabitation rather that enter “who-the-fuck-knows” territory upon separation.
There’s been movement in some jurisdictions (e.g. Manitoba) toward putting formal property division schemes similar to those used for married people in place for such relationships, and I expect that this trend will continue, for at its most fundamental level, family law over the decades has tended to move toward being reasonable rather than leaving homemakers and children out in the cold, so now equity (and to some degree statute law) has been stepping in to bring reasonableness to family law as it applies to the separation of parties who have been in a conjugal relationship of some permanence – in short, moving toward catching up to where the law is not concerning separated married parties. People who prefer mine-is-mine and yours-is-yours would be wise to execute a domestic contract rather than assume that the present state of the law as it applies to the separation of non-married couples will remain the same in the future.
When it comes to support, the treatment of child and spousal support often does not significantly differ whether the relationship was one of marriage or not. The bottom line is that when people are destitute, they become a burden for the state, so the state ensures that the provider during the relationship continues to reasonably provide following the separation of the parties. To reduce the power imbalance that comes into play when determining quantum of support, some jurisdictions have come up with support tables that are tied to income levels. For example, in Canada, child support is based on the support payor’s pre-tax income and the standard of living for a family of such income, and spousal support is based on equalizing the parties’s after tax incomes. The formulas are constantly being tinkered with, for a one-size-fits-all approach will never fit everyone, and parties are able to argue that in their matter a formula is not appropriate, but overall, this approach reduces the ability of nutters to use their pocket book to out-litigate their spouse and/or child.
> . . . from the OP’s Title I feel like we are back in 1962, in the writer’s room of the Alan Brady Show and Rose Marie - I mean Sally - is
> telling us how much she wants a husband. She is a smart, talented woman with a great job and appears to have a wonderful life anyway
> you slice it - BUT NO HUSBAND. oh, woe . . .
I realize this is a digression, but if you’re a fan of Rose Marie’s role as Sally Rogers in The Dick Van Dyke Show, you should see the movie Wait for Your Laugh. It’s a documentary about Rose Marie’s life. Yes, she’s still alive, and the movie has a lot of her comments on her life. When I saw it, after the showing the filmmakers did an interview by phone with Rose Marie. She has been working in show business since 1926, when she was three years old. She talks, for instance, about how she met Al Capone at one point. He promised her that if she need any help, she could come to see him. Her life is almost a history of the entertainment industry in the U.S.
In the pre-student loan days, it was very common for medical students to do this. I live in a city with a college of chiropractic, and I worked for a while with a woman who, as a young woman in the 1970s, worked with a lot of women who were similarly victimized; they married chiropractic students, and many had a child or two, who served those women with divorce papers the day after graduation, and usually signed away all the rights to their child(ren) as well.
:eek: :mad:
She estimated that the divorce rate for these couples was at least 90%, and of course none of those women thought it would happen to them.
I’m finding that hard to understand. The man planned all along to leave her, so why in hell have kids? What possible reason would he agree to that? Were the women financially supporting the men? Who was providing child care? How long is chiropractor school?
It doesn’t add up. Maybe chiropractor school is just horribly stressful and leads often to divorce. Everyone retcons after divorce to make their ex into the most evil person possible, but it’s not usually the case.
I’ve heard of “starter wives” before, and believe the phenomenon is real, but that doesn’t mean there’s malicious intent behind it. It means people grow apart after approximately as long as it takes to complete grad school. The 7 year itch.
The spouse’s feelings about being discarded are understandable. I’d have been pissed if my husband wanted a divorce after all that stuff I did to support him. But it doesn’t mean the one asking for divorce planned it all along.
I totally believe it. The kids might come from one or the other party’s desire, or even as a way for the woman to try to keep the guy, with an attachment.
As for the guy, he probably feels like he could do better after he gets his degree and therefore lots of money. Maybe this was planned, but maybe not.
My wife’s best friend thought she was dumb for marrying me when I was a poor grad student. She was more interested in chasing after guys who owned Rolls Royces. They were not interested in her for the long term, and she wound up marrying a very nice teacher long after she could have children - which disappointed her.
Anyhow it seems similar to the case of someone who broke through in show business and then promptly ditches a spouse.
I am too young to have known a lot of people who did this- but my impression is that it wasn’t planned all along, but neither was it really just “growing apart”. It was growing apart in a particular way, where the wife didn’t go to college or dropped out before she finished to take a relatively low-paying job and put the husband through school. And maybe has a couple of kids along the way. Then after the husband finished his education/training, he has “grown away” from his less educated wife who can’t even have an interesting conversation anymore. Of course, the reasons he “grew away” from her were not entirely unrelated to the fact that she put her own education on hold to support him through his and often took on most of the household/childcare burden.
One thing I remember her telling me was that most of the women to whom this happened were not especially intelligent, but they worked as telephone operators, which at the time was pretty much the best-paying job a woman could get without a degree, and they thought they had really snagged a catch by marrying a Future Doctor, whether they realized or not that he was just using her. :rolleyes:
Oh, no, the men planned all along to ditch their wives as soon as they graduated. The kids? They’re hers because she had them. :eek: That’s why the men sought out women who were not their intellectual equals. The few who didn’t get divorced were the ones who married due to genuine love.
The phenomenon even had a name: “Ph.T.” for Put Hubby Through. Nowadays, it could just as often be “Pw.T” for Put Wife Through, and in fact the first time I ever heard of someone doing this, it was indeed a woman who did that to her husband as soon as she graduated from veterinary school.
I post on a board for health care professionals, and most of them had never witnessed anything like this, although older colleagues said it wasn’t uncommon. I knew a woman in pharmacy school who was a few years behind me, and she did indeed divorce her husband as soon as she graduated because he was an alcoholic who did not co-parent, but she had been married to him and had at least one of her kids before she went back to school. (In the meantime, I found out that she was probably as dysfunctional as he was, which honestly didn’t surprise me.)
Random/just curious:
How hard was it for a woman to support herself in the 70s? I mean, was it particularly difficult to be single and living on your own?
Didn’t make the edit deadline: The veterinarian and her ex-husband did not have children. Thank God!
I had a few classes with medical students, and that section of the room looked like a Lamaze class. Most of the pregnancies were planned, no less; the women wanted to have their children before they did rotations or residency.
A woman could support herself in a certain level of poverty, but keep in mind it wasn’t that long since paying women less for the same work had been made illegal (1963, if you’re wondering) so there was a still a lot of structural/institutional bias towards paying women less, even if that wasn’t legal; it wasn’t until 1974 that it was made illegal to deny a woman credit based on her gender; requiring a male co-signer on a loan or mortgage was commonplace; it was still common to fire a single woman who married, a married woman who became pregnant, and Og help a pregnant, unmarried woman; getting higher education could be difficult and an Ivy-league one almost impossible (Yale and Princeton didn’t accept women until 1969 or 1970, Harvard not until 1977); you could be forced into retirement as young as your early 30’s (Pam Am stewardesses were required to retire at 32); and entire categories of employment were off limit to women based solely on their gender (airline pilot, police officer, etc.).
So yes, a woman could, potentially, support herself but there were real and significant obstacles to doing so above the poverty line. And yes, it was particularly difficult to be single and living on your own. Unmarried women living alone were suspect on moral grounds. In many places you couldn’t get credit or buy a house so everything would have to be cash/check and you’d have to rent an apartment as opposed to buying real estate. Your wages would most likely be on the low side so you’d be more likely to wind up living in a dodgy neighborhood.
All of this is nearly incomprehensible to me. It’s insane what women of my generation (born 1983) tend to take for granted. Now my Mom got some serious shit for being a woman engineer in the 1980s, such that she left the field altogether, but I can’t remember ever, my entire life, feeling that I was limited in what I could do professionally. It never even occurred to me.
It’s just weird to me how gendered issues play themselves out today even in well-meaning egalitarian marriages. I supported my husband through grad school at the expense of my own career, which pays less, because it is a female-dominated profession, so it makes no economical sense to prioritize my job. I put off childbearing until age 32 for his career, and then we lost the baby anyway, so I am now 34, waiting to adopt a kid… and due to the time demands of his career, I’ll be doing most of the caretaking… And I’m not particularly upset about taking on that role, I feel the Mom thing is long overdue, but it’s not exactly the life I envisioned when I started college. Certainly, if you had asked me, at age 18, ''Are you cool with marrying a guy and then letting his career aspirations dominate the trajectory of your life?" I would say ‘‘hell, no.’’ And yet here we are.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not unhappy. It’s just much closer to traditional gender roles than I ever would have guessed, in a marriage between two staunch feminists.
Staunch feminism doesn’t rule out more traditional gender roles in a marriage or a woman who devotes her life to being a mother and homemaker, what staunch feminism wants is for that to be an actual CHOICE and not a default or something people are pressured into due to bias baked into society.
In a perfectly egalitarian system it may work out that many women CHOOSE a traditional mom/homemaker role, but it leaves the way open for those who want to choose something else. That’s been one of the biggest PR failings of feminism, this notion that it wants to abolish the old gender roles, or motherhood, or homemakers. It just wants to make those paths in life an actual choice.
My mother was a stewardess for United in the early 1960s, when she was single (and in her early 20s). As I understand it, at that time, not only was it legal for the airlines to force retirement of stewardesses in their 30s, but it was also legal for them to fire stewardesses who got married, or became pregnant (my mother left the job in 1963, when she got married).
Several of her friends / roommates from those days were determined to make careers out of being stewardesses (later flight attendants), and were involved in the lawsuits in the 1960s and 1970s that led to removal of those rules.
(By the way, here’s a 1986 Chicago Tribune article, noting that United Airlines had just settled a 20-year-old lawsuit regarding flight attendants who had been fired for getting married.)
Oh, I totally agree. I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to say, but I think what I’m saying is that stuff just kind of happens that knocks you off the path of what you want, or think you want. And a lot of the stuff that ‘‘just kind of happens’’ happens because of existing gender norms and social pressures that may not have anything to do with your individual intent. I didn’t want a life that revolved around my husband’s identity. He didn’t want that, either. Neither of us wanted it, but at a certain point, it became a really difficult thing to avoid.
And you can easily say, oh, I chose that path, but I only chose it in the sense that I could decide between abandoning the person I loved most in the world or sacrificing a lot of what I wanted in that moment. There wasn’t much middle ground in that scenario. Grad school systematically pscyhologically destroyed him, but he refused to quit the program. We compromised to the extent that we could - he moved farther from school so I could attend grad school myself, and then when he applied for his internship, he gave me control over how we ranked preferences - but every year it seemed like I was sacrificing more and more while he was getting more and more miserable.
The final straw was that last and final year he was in grad school, it was supposed to be our big break. We moved to Florida – his first choice – and he fucking hated his internship. I became pregnant and violently ill, I hated my new job, I became severely depressed, I quit, and four days after I quit, I miscarried.
And that’s when the shit hit the fan. We were floundering in grief, he was pissed I quit my job, and I was pissed about everything.
See, we had agreed to adopt, but he put off kids for years. Finally, he said he wasn’t ready to adopt, but agreed to do it the old-fashioned way. I never wanted to get pregnant or give birth, it was a lot of physical and emotional stress on me due to medical complications, but I went with it because I really wanted a kid. And then we lost the kid, and it was like, shit, do I ever get anything I want in this relationship? I had just put myself through an assload of suffering for nothing. If he were happy with his choices it would have been a different story, but I felt like I was sacrificing so much of what I wanted so that he could have a career that made him utterly miserable. He was breaking down in tears on a monthly and sometimes weekly basis and yet he wouldn’t do anything proactive to get himself out of it, for seven straight years. I’m talking about a process that nearly destroyed him psychologically, and yet I’m supposed to be supportive and keep sacrificing so that he can continue to be miserable on his own terms.
It wasn’t because he was selfish. Even in his misery, my husband is a saint. And it didn’t have to do with any sort of assumption he had that as the male his career would come first. And my decision to support him and sacrifice had nothing to do with my gender, either. But we still ended up there, and it still resulted in bitterness.
So after he graduated, he decided to leave academia, and life changed for the better in an infinite number of ways, we are both eager to have children, and he loves his job, but his job still has way more of a time demand than mine. I’m gonna be much more of a homemaker sort of Mom than I ever would have envisioned. And I’m fine with it. It’s like when you get something great out of something terrible and you can’t wish the terrible thing never happened, because the greatness is so great. I don’t regret the choices I made. But I never would have guessed that I would have had to make them.
Ultimately this is a story about how two well-meaning people with a very strong relationship can nearly lose everything because that’s just how life is.
Haven’t read the whole thread but not letting that stop me from giving my .02 worth. About the same time I got divorced, around 1986, I started a new job. I was working on a crew with about six other guys. They were all going through child support issues. That was all I heard, all day, everyday. Ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, one night stand, taking them to court for more child support, back child support, visitation issues…on and on and on. Granted, I was only getting one side of the story but it made a huge impression on me. I was determined to never be “that guy”. Ended a few relationships because I was not willing to risk an unanticipated pregnancy.
Scared me away from marriage? Damn straight!
