Women Incandescently Angry Over Alimony

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

“I often look in the mirror and wonder whether this whole feminism thing backfired on me.”

The typical narrative around child support and alimony is that, for better or worse, husbands pay it to their ex-wives. But there’s a growing demographic of Washington women who emerge from their marriages as the payers, not the recipients, of this kind of financial restitution. (Some of them have already coined a term for this phenomenon: They joke that they’re paying “galimony.”) And while no one is ever thrilled at the prospect of writing checks to an ex, divorce attorneys around the region report that a rising contingent of these female payers react to the prospect of sending support payments with pure, hot rage.

“What’s noteworthy to me is the fury of the women,” says Heather Hostetter, a prominent divorce lawyer in Bethesda who handles cases in Maryland and DC. “I just don’t experience that as much with men who are confronted with the fact that they have to pay alimony. And part of the fury relates to this idea of ‘What exactly am I paying for?’ ”

Today in Entitled Assholes Expecting Everything To Go Their Way, women who become enraged after they *gasp* have to pay alimony after a divorce!

The article is (unsurprisingly) in favor of the women who are being financially inconvenienced by the normal legal process of paying support, but reading between the lines makes for a rather straight-faced joke of the “She Got The Diamond Mine, I Got The Shaft” variety. What, you expect it to be a huge scandal now that the genders have been flipped?

2

Not sure what the point is here. Are we supposed to pretend men haven’t been outraged to the point of murder over alimony for decades now? Are we supposed to be cackling with glee that finally women are also feeling the hurt? Throw us a bone here.

3

If you don’t want to pay alimoney, just be sure to only marry somebody richer than you.

If you don’t want to pay child support, just be sure to make kids only with somebody richer than you.

Doesn’t matter which gender or sex you are or aren’t; these handy rules will keep you out of trouble. Just don’t forget your (would-be) spouse is following them too.

4

I just find it amusing that equality has gone so far that now, this is the result.

It’s a backhanded compliment to the society, phrased in an amusing fashion.

5

I don’t think that’s how it works. AFAIK child support is due regardless of who’s richer or poorer; and it’s proportional to income. So a poor guy married to a really high income lady who has custody of the kids will still have to pay, but probably not very much.

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Is it?

7

Hmmm, you seem to have omitted a couple of crucial details in your gleeful bothsidesing there. From your linked article:

Surely you can see that a man being incandescently angry over having to pay alimony to an ex-wife who spent years or decades being the primary caregiver to his children and taking care of his home is not quite the same thing as a woman being incandescently angry over having to pay alimony to an ex-husband even though she was the primary caregiver to their children and she took care of their home.

Of course, some ex-wives receiving alimony are just lazy golddiggers who never lifted a finger, and naturally their ex-husbands resent having to continue to support them. And nowadays, as you point out, some ex-husbands receiving alimony are just lazy golddiggers who never lifted a finger, and naturally their ex-wives resent having to continue to support them.

But given the persistence of societal expectations and pressures for women to do disproportionately large amounts of childcare and domestic tasks in a marriage, ISTM it’s probably fair to say that on average, alimony-paying women are more likely to be getting unfairly shafted by alimony laws than alimony-paying men are.

(Mind you, I tend to agree with LSLGuy that in practical terms, “unfairness” is mostly beside the point when it comes to things like alimony and child support. When two people voluntarily enter into a legal contract to be each other’s next of kin and care for each other all their lives, they can’t take it for granted—whatever their gender—that those commitments will conveniently vanish entirely if the party of the second part turns out to be a lazy golddigger. Tough shit and better luck next time, about sums it up.

I’m just noting that alimony-paying ex-husbands are on average more likely than alimony-paying ex-wives to have at least obtained from their ex-spouses during the marriage a reasonable amount of housekeeper/nanny services. It makes a lot more sense for a high-earning ex-wife who did most or all of the housework and childcare in the marriage to be “incandescently angry” about paying alimony to a non-earning ex-husband, than for a high-earning ex-husband who did comparatively little housework and childcare to be “incandescently angry” about paying alimony to a non-earning ex-wife.)

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Deep down, there are certain gender roles that are hard-wired into many people. “Men are providers” is one of them. And so the notion that a woman has to pay a man alimony violates that hard-wired internal code, hence the fury.

It’s not that men don’t get pissed, but for a woman to do it feels unnatural.

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Meh. My husband dropped out of the career path to care for our children. If we’d split up, i would have expected to pay alimony. And i know plenty of men who were pissed to be paying alimony to women they’d dumped.

This is one of those much ado about nothing puff pieces that’s designed to support the patriarchy.

10

Exactly.

I don’t know what the court found the facts to be in these cases. I presume, at least for the sake of argument, that there are some men who really do take on the role of “homemaker” and take all or almost all of that burden off of their wife’s shoulders. Those men would be entitled to spousal support for the exact same reasons that women have been.

But if it was never the plan or the agreement that the husband would do that, he never actually did it, and wife was consistently urging him to get a job, and she was either doing it or paying someone else to do it, then I’m not sure why he would be entitled to spousal support.

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No, on all counts.

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I think you might be reaching for over-elaborate subconscious psychological explanations here, when a far simpler one is adequate: namely, that a number of high-earning alimony-paying ex-wives are angry because they had to carry both the traditionally “male” burden of being the main breadwinner and the traditionally “female” one of being the main care provider, while their husbands were doing not much of either.

Some additional pertinent quotes from the OP’s linked article:

I don’t think we need to postulate any speculative “hard-wired internal code” about “men are providers”* to explain this reaction. The anger these women are feeling seems to be due not to some mystical instinctual “violation” of some unreasoning “code”, but simply to the fact that they were working their asses off at both office and home for the benefit of a freeloader who didn’t step up for his half of either income-earning or domestic responsibilities.

I mean, when you hear a divorced man complaining about paying alimony to an ex-wife who didn’t earn her living and didn’t do housework or childcare, do you assume that he’s mad because “deep down”, the situation “violates” his “hard-wired internal code” that “women are carers”, etc.?

Or do you simply infer that he’s (understandably) mad because he had to do significantly more than his share in the marriage, both career-wise and domestically? If so, then why do you reach for different explanations based on hypothesized irrational emotional “internal codes” when it’s a woman in a similar situation?

* (Which in terms of actual human evolution—if we’re talking about actual evo-psych here and not merely pre-Women’s Lib social conventions about gender roles—is pretty much bullshit anyway. AFAICT, anthropologists seem basically in agreement that among prehistoric humans, women worked just as hard as men at providing food—and no less successfully. In fact, female gathering/scavenging typically provided at least as much of the community’s caloric input as male hunting did. There is no human “hard-wired internal code” from prehistory that singles out men as “providers” of resources, because AFAICT there hasn’t been any prehistoric human society where that was actually the case.)

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I suppose another bit of LSL’s Rules For Life apply here:

Rule #1: Do not marry a jerk or a lazy useless person.
Rule #2: If you totally F*** up and violate Rule#1, be damn sure to not make baby(s) with that person.

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But the point of the headline, and probably of the article, is so people can nod their heads and think “oh yes, people are wired for these roles”.

:face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

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Hey, are you incandescently angry?

16

Who, me? No. There was a time when our marriage was struggling, and had we split i fully expected to pay alimony, and it would have been fair. And it’s pretty hard to be “incandescently angry” about stuff that happens to someone else.

I’m annoyed that an article that apparently reports the totally banal situation of some women getting screwed over in divorce and being angry about it is somehow getting traction as evidence that gender roles are hardwired. But “incandescently angry” is grossly overstating my annoyance.

17

I was just trying to joke about that incandescently angry emoji that you used.

As someone mentioned above, it’s not like men don’t get angry to the point of murder because of alimony and child support. Maybe it should be “humans get angry when they have to pay anything to their exes.” Not that interesting, I guess.

18

I haven’t had my tea yet this morning. :upside_down_face:

19

Jeez, caffeine will just make you more angry!!

I had a nice Assam today, but from a bag. The loose Assam only comes out on the weekends.

20

Agreed! Alimony and who pays it should depend on who has custody of the child(ren) and the financial circumstances of both parties involved. It should have nothing to do with gender.