Everything is ok now. My kids are adults. I have to keep them on my health insurance until they age out but child support ended a while ago. It ended a few years after the divorce when they came to live with me full time. The alimony ended when she got remarried but it was for 5 years anyway. The worst most lasting impact was the fact that when we separated I started off from zero again. I had worked hard for years but had nothing to show for it. All the money was gone and we were underwater on the house. That’s a hole that is hard to get out of. I’m fine now but I would be doing much better if I didn’t have that reset in the middle of my life.
There are tons of examples of policies that are applied equally but produce unequal outcomes.
I’m of the age where I now know a lot of divorced couples, and if we’re going to stereotype them, the men were the deadbeats in the relationship more often than not.
I think anyone who reads the article in the OP and identifies with the men in it are just telling on themselves.
To be fair, even in the case of the so-called “slacker” or “failure-to-launch” husbands that the OP’s linked article is mostly about, I have some nonzero amount of sympathy with them for the societal pressures that exacerbate their issues.
Men do get bombarded with a lot of pervasive social messaging about how career success is necessary for “manliness”, and that being less successful than a woman by almost any metric is “unmanly”. That right there immediately causes some psychological stress for a lot of husbands whose wives are earning more than they are.
Add to that the fact that domestic tasks of housekeeping and childrearing, being socially coded female, are still to some extent perceived as undermining a husband’s masculinity. While a wife who hasn’t achieved a prosperous career can get a fair bit of social validation and approval by devoting her energies to homemaking/caregiving instead, a husband who takes that path is often disparaged and looked down on.
So it might seem, to an unemployed or minimally employed husband of a high-earning wife, that resisting or refusing the “househusband” role in their marriage is about the only validation of conventional masculinity he’s got left. It’s not surprising, therefore, that it may be more likely for a non-earning husband than a non-earning wife to become a “domestic deadbeat” or “slacker” who won’t hold up their end of the household chores.
That acknowledged, I do think that anybody who considers themself mature enough to get married, much less to become a parent, really ought to have thought through their issues and expectations about gender roles in advance, and figured out what they are or aren’t willing to put up with. I get that it might not be easy to stick to your principles if you think your brothers-in-law or your wealthy neighbors are making fun of you behind your back for “wearing the apron in the family”, but ultimately a grown man needs to have the courage of his convictions.