So them uppity women really had it coming?
Alimony has nothing to do with children. Alimony and child support are two different things.
I’m strongly with @Kimstu on this. There are many men who are angry about paying their wives child support because their wives never worked outside the home or didn’t earn much. On the other hand, many of those women gave up opportunities to work to fully support their husbands’ domestic lives in a partnership. Once divorced, the men effectively admitted what they always thought: the “housework” wasn’t worthless “women’s work” not worthy of recognition as part of their partnership.
Women in the workforce face penalties when they become mothers because, almost invariably, they face greater household and parenting duties even when they work. To use just one example, men are more likely to be promoted in the year after they have a baby but women are less likely. Women are more likely to take unpaid time off from the labor force when having a child. Having children hurts women’s careers more than it hurts men’s. The women in this story already faced this labor force penalty in their careers when they had children and now they are facing the burden of paying alimony to unproductive spouses. Their complaint isn’t that they don’t value their husband’s contributions to the marriage; it’s that their husbands’ truly weren’t making any because they too thought of that as worthless “women’s work.”
Yes, and I stand corrected. So let me adjust my statement accordingly.
Weird. I think the board is broken and it’s displaying a thread from 1999.
Yes, Heather, that’s right. Men famously have no problem with paying alimony. It’s not like they are “incandescently angry” about child support and spousal support, things which are even more clearly needed. And they simply love alimony.
It seems to me the real point of this article is that spouses need to really sit down and talk about roles and responsibilities if one of them is going to “stay at home”. You can’t just wing it and assume that the non-primary earner is going to do all of the housework/childcare.
The “incandescent rage” at alimony is just a secondary effect to allowing an unhealthy imbalance develop and fester in the marriage. Various social changes have made this “reverse imbalance” more common, and some of those are related to gender norms (men that stay at home may feel they have to do less than a similarly-situation woman would).
Men being pissed at having to pay alimony to an ex-wife that ‘stopped doing the housework’ (or maybe never did it) has been going on forever.
Unproductive spouses who never had to face a gender penalty in the workforce.
I imagine there are plenty of women who receive alimony even though they made the decision not to work and contributed little to running the household. But I suspect a man who complains about having to pay alimony to such a woman is likely to be viewed in a negative light. i.e. He’s going to be lumped in with all the men who make such complaints whether his is valid or not. So I don’t think most people assume it’s because he’s got some hard-wired internal code that says women are carers, I think most people assume he’s a misogynistic jerk or something along those lines.
The women interviwed who are “incandescently” angry over having to pay alimony have very good reason for their anger in my opinion. You finally get rid of a deadbeat only to find that millstone is still hanging from your neck. Maybe we need to rethink how alimony works given the changes we’ve seen over the past 50 years or so.
I will say that I find it odd that there are so many men who don’t work and seem perfectly content at the situation. I guess I was just inculcated with the belief that men work and if they’re not working then they’re looking for a job. Has it become more socially acceptable for men to just lay on the couch and watch television all day?
I don’t. I’m 59 years old and I know no one my age who received long-term alimony whether they contributed to the household or not. Some who didn’t work for pay received alimony for a couple of years , but that’s it. I suppose it’s possible that someone my age who hasn’t worked in 40 years might get alimony until death or remarriage - but most people, male or female are going to get it for a couple of years at most, and that makes the numbers smaller.
It seems to me that these posters
May be missing the point that we are talking about a subset of divorces. Healthy marriages differ from divorces in a number of ways, including communication and following through on promises and…
I had a coworker whose husband didn’t do shit. He didn’t work, didn’t care for the kids, and couldn’t move his arse off the couch to move the car in the middle of the day for street cleaning. (If you park on the street in NYC you need to move the car a couple times a week when the cleaner comes through. In addition to cleaning the streets of litter, this cleans the streets of abandoned cars.) That wasn’t a healthy marriage. If they split and she got stuck paying alimony, she would have had every excuse to be furious.
I hear about men (and less often, women) like this somewhat frequently. But those aren’t good marriages. And “we should talk about this” doesn’t fix those marriages.
I don’t remember saying “we should talk about this” in the context of trying to fix those marriages. I said may be we need to rethink how alimony works given all the changes made over the last 50 years.
Sounds to me like the unfairness of the system is being applied equally in divorces without regard to gender. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? Everyone should be incandescently angry, or at least fluorescently unsatisfied with this crude system of equitizing marriage, and perhaps that will be the incentive to get rid of this messy approach altogether.
Yes, it is, in that women now have the potential to earn more than men, which was flatly impossible for a lot of human history. If you earn more than your partner, you pay alimony when you split, simple as that, and women paying alimony now means that women have, in some sense, arrived economically. Our society still has a ways to go, but when you see progress, it’s good to celebrate it.
I feel this is the key point. Some people have been getting outraged over paying alimony since the concept began. The only new factor is that it’s sometimes women who are now paying and being outraged over it.
And this is another way society is getting better, in that fewer people are defined by their jobs.
“What do you do?” shouldn’t just be answered with “What is your economic function?” because humans are more, and do more, than work.
I’m sorry, but it being more socially acceptable for men to just lay on the couch and watch teleivsion all day is not an improvement.
I’m wondering if there really is a biologically based asymmetry between the sexes wrt work. The idea of a man “sponging” off a woman is frowned upon; is that perhaps because in the absence of mitigating factors there is a tendency for just that to happen? Think of the cliché of the hillbilly laying in a hammock on the front porch of his shack while his wife does the plowing.* Men work because they take personal pride in a career, or because they’re encultured to feel guilty if they don’t provide for their loved ones, or because they just plain have to if they don’t want to go hungry. Take those motivations away and it’s conceivable that what’s left are losers, slackers and man-children who never matured beyond the expectation that mommy would take care of them. IOW, I’m wondering if this is a direction that men are predisposed to degenerate to if not prevented.
*I suppose the modern version would be Bubba sitting in a lounge chair in his trailer drinking beer or Jack Daniels while his wife works a shift at the diner or the convenience store.
And i didn’t mean to imply you had.
Jas09 said that.
But you said
And my observation is that that’s fairly common in broken marriages. And alimony only comes up after the marriage breaks.
I think there is definitely a non-zero chance of that being the case. I don’t think there’s really anything to do with that information.
(The truly modern version is a guy playing video games, smoking weed and posting on Twitter and Reddit while his partner works all day, though, and I have known quite a few couples of that flavor.)
I don’t know about plenty, but the classic example that people frown upon is the woman who married money and then let the cook take care of meals, the maid take care of cleaning the house, and the nanny take care of the children. Eddie Murphy did an entire skit about the Johnny Carson divorce, basically asking wtf did Mrs. Carson ever bring to the marriage to deserve a 9-figures settlement.