# Women Incandescently Angry Over Alimony **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [April 30, 2023, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391 "2023-04-30T21:33:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2023, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/1 "2023-04-30T21:33:03Z")
[“I often look in the mirror and wonder whether this whole feminism thing backfired on me.”](https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/12/03/more-and-more-women-are-paying-alimony-to-failure-to-launch-ex-husbands-and-theyre-really-really-not-happy-about-it/) > 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? ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2023, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/2 "2023-04-30T23:49:17Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2023, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/3 "2023-04-30T23:55:55Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 2:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/4 "2023-05-01T02:16:08Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/5 "2023-05-01T03:01:15Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > If you don’t want to pay child support, just be sure to make kids only with somebody richer than you. 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. ---
**Author:** ![madmonk28](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/madmonk28/32/20811_2.png) [@madmonk28](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madmonk28)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/6 "2023-05-01T03:03:48Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > It’s a backhanded compliment to the society, phrased in an amusing fashion Is it? ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/7 "2023-05-01T03:22:12Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > Today in Entitled Assholes Expecting Everything To Go Their Way, women who become enraged after they **gasp** have to pay alimony after a divorce! […] > > What, you expect it to be a huge scandal now that the genders have been flipped? […] > > I just find it amusing that equality has gone so far that now, this is the result. Hmmm, you seem to have omitted a couple of crucial details in your gleeful bothsidesing there. From your linked article: > [@](#): > > “All I could think to myself was: I divorced my first husband, had his child, and had less than $300 a month in child support from him,” she says. “And I was going to be paying nearly four times as much in alimony to [her second husband] with whom I had _not_ had a child and had supported this _whole time_ while I begged him to get a job! I couldn’t believe it.” […] > > Not to suggest that every divorcée responds that way—some, especially those with kids, feel just fine about providing financial support—but that there’s a subset who do. […] > > Historically, a woman had alimony rights because she had no property rights during marriage—an interesting tradeoff, that—and zero ability to earn her own money. (Alimony, then and now, wasn’t really about the woman’s well-being so much as protecting the state from the undue “burden” of taking care of her when her husband didn’t want to provide for her anymore.) In 1979, citing the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court determined that this “unequal treatment,” wherein men are always payers and women the inevitable payees, was unconstitutional […] > > So why does alimony—a.k.a. spousal support—still exist? The modern justification is threefold: One, if a couple has children, the court doesn’t think it’s in the kids’ best interest for their quality of life to seesaw wildly between their parents’ homes. Two, a person without an income could very well end up relying on resources such as food stamps or other kinds of government support. The court is not so hot on that prospect. The deal is, hey, you married them—you don’t get to make them the state’s problem just because you don’t like them anymore. And three: A lot of spouses—typically wives—sacrificed earning power in order to do the bulk of the home-front labor, a career penalty for which alimony might compensate. […] > > Hostetter calls the men in the most enraging of woman-pays-out divorces “failure-to-launch exes,” and she hears about them all the time. “For sure in the last ten years, I’ve seen and represented many more women who fall into what I’d say is a very specific category: The wife is the breadwinner, but the husband is not necessarily performing the services of the traditional stay-at-home spouse.” > > It’s not just that these women are out-earning their husbands. They’re out-parenting their husbands. They’re out-homemaking their husbands. They’re out-everythinging their husbands. 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.) ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/8 "2023-05-01T03:31:25Z")
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_. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/9 "2023-05-01T03:48:23Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![eschrodinger](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschrodinger/32/122_2.png) [@eschrodinger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschrodinger)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 4:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/10 "2023-05-01T04:57:38Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > 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.) 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. ---
**Author:** ![Roderick\_Femm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/roderick_femm/32/14875_2.png) [@Roderick\_Femm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roderick_Femm)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/11 "2023-05-01T05:06:55Z")
> [@madmonk28](#): > > Is it? No, on all counts. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 6:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/12 "2023-05-01T06:01:47Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > 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. 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: > [@](#): > > It was “a struggle to even keep [my husband] employed,” says Elizabeth, a communications exec who pays her ex child support in “the high-single-digit thousands.” But he did virtually no domestic labor: “If he emptied the dishwasher, he wanted a parade. . . . He once said that he wasn’t going to do—and he literally did air quotes—‘all the mommy things.’ That sucked. […] I blindly went into it thinking, ‘Okay, I’ll do 50 percent and he’ll do 50 percent, and it’ll be a partnership,’ and it was not. It ended up being the single mother of three children instead of two. And that was a shock to me: that I had to do everything, including earn all the money. But you also have to walk on eggshells because you can’t be a threat to their masculinity.” […] > > One woman in the Maryland suburbs recalled that […] “My mom, even though she’d been a stay-at-home mom, she’d say, ‘You can be whatever you want to be in life. It’s truly an option for you.’ And she raised me to expect that,” she says. “But I think at the same time, my husband’s mom raised him to expect the same treatment in the household as our fathers received. That he could make money and his wife would take care of home.” The message: “Girls, go out and live in an egalitarian world! Guys, don’t worry about ever having to do your laundry.” […] > > Stephanie, who lives in Northern Virginia, found herself in a similar situation. After she had kids and went back to school, her earnings kept rising and she eventually became an executive—but her husband’s plateaued. Including bonuses, she tells me, she was making about two and a half times his take-home pay. Yet even as she climbed professionally, “the worrying and bottom line of what had to happen for our kids and family at home still fell to me.” > > “I feel my spouse picked and chose what he wanted to do,” Stephanie says, leaving her to handle both the taxing mental labor and the unglamorous grunt work of parenting. “Take the vomiting child, for example . . . or the really awful school fundraiser.” […] > > It’s not like every woman paying her ex resents him. But for those who know they’ve been killing it at their jobs while their husbands flopped at domestic tasks like grocery shopping or parenting their own children, the prospect of ponying up makes these women “_super_ -extra-mad,” says New. […] > > “This group of women, they’re like, ‘Okay, let me get this straight,’ ” says Hostetter. “ ‘I’m at a board meeting, faking a trip to the bathroom to rectify why Suzie is not at her enrichment activity like she’s supposed to be. And my husband is at home ‘working.’ I did it all! I had to have a nanny, childcare, but I was the house manager. I paid the bills, I organized all the activities, I did the Halloween party at school, _and_ I worked this crazy job, it’s super-successful. What did he bring to the table? And you’re saying I have to pay him alimony?" […] > > Tara, who has a top job in sales, was unaccustomed to failure. […] "I realized, wow, I am making more money now and I’m still the wife! I’m still doing all the stay-at-home-mom stuff! I’m breaking my neck to get to the grocery store before the nanny has to get her bus so I can pick up groceries, dry cleaning, and do errands, because I didn’t want to do that on the weekends.” 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.) ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 10:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/13 "2023-05-01T10:26:17Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/14 "2023-05-01T11:30:12Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > > [@Velocity](#): > > > > 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. > > 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. 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”. 🤬 ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 11:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/15 "2023-05-01T11:32:58Z")
Hey, are you incandescently angry? ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 11:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/16 "2023-05-01T11:59:53Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 12:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/17 "2023-05-01T12:04:56Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 12:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/18 "2023-05-01T12:07:03Z")
> [@RitterSport](#): > > I was just trying to joke about that incandescently angry emoji that you used. I haven’t had my tea yet this morning. 🙃 ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 12:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/19 "2023-05-01T12:08:51Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2023, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391/20 "2023-05-01T12:18:18Z")
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. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-incandescently-angry-over-alimony/983391.md?page=2)