32 ms·

Divorce in the rich world is getting less nasty

154 points by rustoo 5y ago

alpineidyll3 5y ago
The idea of marriage is statistically, demonstrably overdue for an overhaul. It doesn't work for at least half of people, and definitely shouldn't be a disaster when it predictably fails. We need sane legal agreements for each dimension of marriage, child rearing, property division etc. And support systems to humanely shepherd people through life changes. Instead we try to preserve the illusion of a life where everyone is guaranteed a partner who will always be there. I am grateful every day for my no contest divorce. If anyone is near divorce my advice is bend and shoot for no contest. Try to focus on mutual well being. Courts can do nothing but transfer assets to lawyers.
entropicgravity 5y ago
If you look at the divorce process in various countries it becomes clear that the process in the Five Eyes (US, UK, Can, AUS, NZ) is much more onerous and court intensive than in other countries. One has to wonder if it's the legal profession, who benefit most, that is behind lobbying for the laws that benefit their members to the detriment of families.
sleepingadmin 5y ago
Prenuptials are extremely popular and marriage is at historic lows. This also has little to do with women. It's men who grew up in the last few decades watching the absolute disaster that is marriage. You literally gain nothing by getting married and you seem to lose significantly every time.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
In the Netherlands they finally changed divorce law to end the practice of alimony payments. This is also an incentive for both parties to pursue a career lest you fall into poverty after divorce.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  You have free medical coverage, good child care, and free education in the Netherlands?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- AdrianB1 5y ago
  In Romania alimony did not exist until a few years ago, so we are going in the opposite direction with the excuse "this is how it's done in EU".
- asdf333 5y ago
  i get it but in reality in many families someone is sacrificing their career for the family unit. i don’t think it’s unfair to take that opportunity cost into consideration
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Only if you have kids, which less people are doing. Having kids and a partner myself, if I have to choose between fixed child care costs for a window of time, or perpetual alimony and splitting assets in half, I'd prefer the former purely from an economic perspective. Marriage itself is the opportunity cost, and it's crucial to contain/insure against liability to ensure life sucess. 67 percent of relationships fail [1], so when asked for advice, I advise people not to get married (and the data shows cohorts adopting such choices [2]). Live together (non community property jurisdiction), have kids together (if you accept the financial and parental liability), but getting married is betting half your stuff and a substantial amount of future earnings things will work out (when the data shows it does not work out the majority of the time). [1] The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love (Page 13, https://web.archive.org/web/20220122024837/https://i.redd.it/9uq1ytbcovr71.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20220122024837/https://i.redd.it...) [2] https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces#marriages-are-becoming-less-common https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces#marriages-... (edit: US centric)
cowpig 5y ago
I hope the practice of using non-adversarial processes spreads to spaces that really need it like the our legislative system.
eric4smith 5y ago
Also, what would make divorces less nasty is the horrible practice of making one party pay for the legal fees of both parties. Also, 50/50 custody as a norm. 50/50 Child support as a norm. Maybe 90% of the nastiness would absolutely disappear.
- novok 5y ago
  Remove custody percentages as a part of support payments and the financial incentive that drives a lot of this behavior goes away. In other countries where support payments are not a major thing, a lot of the nastyness of divorce also goes away too. I like this section of the book "real world divorce" about it: http://www.realworlddivorce.com/International http://www.realworlddivorce.com/International
  - Talanes 5y ago
    The standardizing of support payments that a lot of these countries (and it looks like some US states) do seems like a fair way to reduce the potential exploitability too. The price of raising a child isn't tied to income, so why should the payer's income matter beyond reducing payments (ideally with the state stepping in like the Danish system) for those who can't make the normal amount?
    - closeparen 5y ago
      The idea is that the wife and children should not experience any decline in their standard of living as a result of the divorce. They are entitled to live the way they would have lived had the marriage continued; if the husband is rich then that includes owning a nice house in an expensive city, luxury cars, private schools, etc. If the system’s goal were merely to ensure that they land on their feet, it would look very different.
      - Talanes 5y ago
        Well, that's the idea behind alimony, which is sometimes mixed in with child support. But child support is mostly rooted in the idea that raising a child requires more support than a single individual can provide. If it were just about continuation of lifestyle, my mother wouldn't have been entitled to anything as my parents were never together.
evolve2k 5y ago
Most of the divorced parents around me in Australia do this week on week off thing with the kids which actually seems quite glorious. As a separated parent you get focussed time with the kids and in the off week you get a good bunch of me/adult time. Looking in it seems a great setup for mature ex’s.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  I highly recommend this book called "if you're in my office it's too late" by a divorce attorney. One of the things he recommends is parenting a bit like you're separated, trading off long stretches of time looking after the kid just like a divorced couple might do, but without the separate houses and finances.
- javajosh 5y ago
  This sounds wonderful. But one argument used against 50/50 and in favor of asymmetric time is "kids need continuity". This inevitably favors the mother. "60/40" means the father gets every other weekend and one night a week. Numerically this works out to 80/20 and even young children are quite aware of who their real parent is. It is horrible but it is also SOP for most jurisdictions in the US, and I am not being hyperbolic when I say it's a real, first-world humanitarian crisis. Children do not fair well without fathers, and yet our system degrades the very notion of fatherhood every chance it gets. Furthermore, the bad actors that populate family courts - judges, lawyers, police, therapists, mediators, visitation center workers - they all know the score and as a father you are truly a second-class citizen. You see the children at the whim of your wife, and literally no-one gives a single shit. Why the system is not 50/50 is beyond me, because the argument for continuity is absolutely ridiculous on its face. The real reason it continues is that in family court mothers have far more rights than fathers. Full stop. It's sexist, it's harmful to the children, and yes, I'll even say it's harmful for the father (although you're not supposed to say that, and if you do the system assumes you're lying to be manipulative). This 60/40 aka 80/20 situation is the good outcome for most fathers. It really only gets worse from there. If you give the judge attitude, they will have no problem putting you on supervised visitation indefinitely.
  - 5y ago
imapeopleperson 5y ago
- alvarlagerlof 5y ago
  Focusing on fewer with a better life seems wiser.
  - ralfd 5y ago
    "Fewer" just means they get spoiled/helicoptered; with the added long term affect that families are atomized instead of larger support networks.
    - fwn 5y ago
      That does sound very harsh to me. "Spoiled" can mean being able to afford a better school, private room and options in case of emergency. In wealthy societies money is determinative for how many bullshit time sinks you have to suffer through in childhood. For example: I almost failed Abitur, which is a requirement for university in Germany. (We very rarely have any admission tests for some reason.) Given enough resources you can either add private schooling or arrange alternative pathways. You could get an equivalent (less time consuming) degree from a different country that will be acknowledged in Germany. The no-money route would've cost two or three additional years of standard school stasis in my primes. Anyway, my bland tl;dr: Money really does make a difference that is not all downside.
- LordAtlas 5y ago
  I'm happy that you find joy in it, but some of us are just fine without kids and would like to keep it that way.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Certainly not what I have observed from others. It almost seems like a coping mechanism from people who say this. Lots of people who have given up the last scraps of their free time, money and sanity and "buyers remorse" over it. No doubt many people are very happy with their choices. But it's absurd to claim as a fact that having kids makes everyone happier and more kids is more happiness. It also sounds like something that would have a lot of research behind it, so I'd be interested if anyone has data on it.
akomtu 5y ago
USA should replace marriages with "M corps". Those are special type of corps with just CEO and CFO, capital stock and voting stock, and possibly with more C-suite members (kids) and SVPs (cats, dogs). Alimony would be replaced with golden parachute contracts, if you manage to negotiate it upon forming the corp. Houses, cars and other assets may be made a property of this M corp, but that's subject to negotiations. Same with income: M corp members may invest their incomes into the corp, but don't have to. Whether an LLC can be a member of an M corp, or whether it can have independent investors are all interesting questions that would be resolved by courts.
- flomo 5y ago
  Upper classes already do something like M-corps. One thing about prenups is they might not substantially change the outcome, but at least at least people are reviewing the implied contract up-front with their lawyer.
- gruez 5y ago
  This sounds good if both partners are young professionals with roughly the same earning potential, but what about breadwinner + housewife/househusband situations? Why would the breadwinner want to contribute assets to the M-corp? I imagine the negotiations for forming the M-corp would be pretty awkward.
  - akomtu 5y ago
    Not any more awkward than what we have today. The would-be housewife just demands the CFO position on such and such terms by end of year, or she's out.
- gunshai 5y ago
  This does sound quite interesting, although this would need to be jussed(sp?) a bit. As my partner said when I read this aloud "Well that's romantic".
  - JCharante 5y ago
    Why does everything about marriage have to be romantic? If you're the spouse you'll be the first person the doctors ask if taking them off life support is ever a question. That's not romantic but it's a direct possible consequence.
dpweb 5y ago
Recently went through the process. Mediation is certainly cheaper and less adversarial but that requires both good faith on both sides, and the ability to work together. Which has already been demonstrated is a problem since the marriage is breaking up in the first place. Some divorces are going to have to be adversarial. But, speaking as someone who had to pay both lawyers sides, and substantial alimony and child support. My best advice - get it over with as soon as humanly possible! Time is the enemy. Not X percent. Lawyers will take it all. You gotta treat it like your future is on fire. I’d very much be in favor of mandatory pre-nups when getting married. We need to be grown ups and recognize at least half these marriages will break up. It would make the couple confront the possibility and have to state their expectations beforehand. Prenups aren’t 100% but having gone through the process I saw. Legal contracts matter! This prob won’t happen cause it would also break up a lot of couples before the marriage but that would actually be for the best.
- Arainach 5y ago
  Prenups only matter when you have significant assets pre-marriage. With the price of housing these days, most people won't have any significant financial security until they're borderline infertile; how do prenups benefit these marriages?
  - bitcharmer 5y ago
    Where I live prenups cover assets both: pre and post marriage. There is no such thing as co-owning anything unless both sides explicitly make it so. From what you are saying prenups are not a very good tool in your legal system but I assure you it works differently in many countries.
- scotty79 5y ago
  Or just skip marriage altogether.
  - kspacewalk2 5y ago
    In many jurisdictions, common law relationships after a certain period of cohabitation are very similar to marriage when it comes to splitting up. I'm guessing you're not advocating not staying with someone for more than, say 2 years.
01100011 5y ago
A note to any single folks out there with the potential to earn more than their future spouse: understand family law in your jurisdiction and understand what you are signing up for when you get legally married. Divorce can leave you liable for more support payments than you can even afford. The other party can walk away with half of your property, including unvested RSUs(!!!), and it doesn't matter if they cheated or failed to contribute to the marriage. If you think you're being nice by trying to make the marriage work and tolerating it, you may be just setting yourself up for even more pain down the road.
- msoad 5y ago
  Unvested RSU??
  - xen0 5y ago
    Restricted Stock Unit; a form of compensation that a company may provide. Such stock is subject to a vesting period, where you only gain the stock after a period of time.
    - msoad 5y ago
      I'm aware but I don't think unvested RSUs are subject to divorce asset splitting. Unvested RSU is like unearned salary. It's not an asset to split. Maybe you mean vested but not released RSUs in pre-IPO companies.
      - llampx 5y ago
        You give family court too much credit.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- 62951413 5y ago
  "any single folks with the potential to earn" == if you're a man "understand family law" == you can do nothing, don't kid yourself This is an unusually serious topic for this forum. Those of you who are too young to believe it can happen to you or assume the financially raped were exceptionally stupid or unlucky. Do your future self a favor and think twice. The men you hear about were once like you. You're just earlier in the lifecycle. With every generation is's getting worse and not linearly. At the very least * marriage is for only if you're in your 30s and want to have a child within a year * make sure your parents unanimously approve of the woman Also, the older you get the easier it gets to get laid without the paperwork. Marriage is a guaranteed loss for a man.
known 5y ago
"Alimony is a system by which, when two make a mistake, one of them keeps paying for it" --Peggy Joyce (b. 1893)
isamuel 5y ago
silisili 5y ago
I was divorced a decade or so ago. I'm not super rich or anything, regular engineer class well off... My advice... be amicable if possible. And give the other side more than you, ask them to sign off, and find a cheap attorney to do the paperwork. My divorce was super cheap on paper, even though I lost more than half my net worth. I think it cost about $200. I had a coworker telling me I was an idiot, and how his lawyer could have gotten me a better deal. Only cost him six figures and many months of time to get it. Time is your most valuable asset. Get it over as quick as you can.
antisthenes 5y ago
What utter nonsense from the Economist. Can't believe I used to read it nearly religiously back in college. Having this stance gets me a lot of flak from my liberal-leaning friends but here goes: What kind of cognitive dissonance does it take to look at the graph where there are now 3x times more kids born out of wedlock, and try to spin something positive out of it, like "no fault divorce policies makes the situation suck slightly less during the divorce proceedings" This is a complete disaster not only for the children, who are now falling behind peers in nuclear households, but for society as a whole as well, since it teaches people that nothing is ever their fault, including important commitments like creating a family unit and raising a child in a complex world. If you're going to sing praises to cooperation and mediation, how about you try to get people to do that during marriage? You know, to reconcile their differences and stay together for the sake of raising a well-adapted future member of society. Honestly, no matter how you look at it, divorce is overall net-negative and usually a negative for most parties, except one (usually, the lawyers) Is it any wonder that Asians excel in western society, coming from a cultural norm of keeping the family together at all costs?
- rupi 5y ago
  You must be in the US. In certain parts of Europe, it is becoming very common for couples to not get "married" but still form a nuclear family and from what I have seen, a lot of them are doing a lot better than some of my married friends. Also, if you had spent any time in Asia, you wouldn't be singing the praises of the cultural norm of keeping the family together. Growing up, I saw a lot of cases of frequent abuse (even beatings) but the woman was supposed to keep the family together. Did you know divorce is not allowed in Philippines, please read about the impact that has. Asians in the US typically are better educated and education has more to do with lower divorce rates than an ethnicity. edit: this is coming from a married person, in the US
  - moduspol 5y ago
    > education has more to do with lower divorce rates than an ethnicity. Perhaps, but correlation doesn't imply causation. It seems at least as plausible that the kind of people able to commit to higher education are more capable of committing to marriage. Or that lower divorce rates result in better outcomes for children, including those children getting more educated. Neither imply that education itself leads to lower divorce rates. I'm also not sure how to reasonably discuss this, but there is a colossal gray area between "drive-through divorce" and "women must legally stay married to husbands who beat them." We should be able to acknowledge positive results of some cultural norms without presuming they are intrinsically linked to the worst edge cases.
isolli 5y ago
Related: I read in the Economist a few years ago that for international couples, there is a first-mover advantage. The person initiating the divorce can decide to file in any country: the country where they have citizenship, the one where their spouse has citizenship, or the one where they got married. By shopping for the most favorable jurisdiction, they can turn the divorce to their advantage. I hope I'm never in a position to use this knowledge!
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  Not as easily as you think it is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Convention_on_the_International_Recovery_of_Child_Support_and_Other_Forms_of_Family_Maintenance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Convention_on_the_Inte... Even if you're a billionaire: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/magazine/how-to-hide-400-million.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/magazine/how-to-hide-400-...
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/Tmqxz https://archive.is/Tmqxz
david38 5y ago
- rndgermandude 5y ago
  I disagree, and I wouldn't say "victim" either, but helpless used to be somewhat on point in certain regards. If I look at my parents' generation, the "normal" thing was that one partner was the breadwinner (usually men) and one partner was the homemaker (doing all the cooking, cleaning, raising kids, etc; this was usually women). Essentially that generation was doing well enough that one partner could stay at home (as opposed to e.g. my grandparents' generation, where both my grandmas had to work as young married women just after the war, and only later in life could afford to switch to a breadwinner/homemaker model). This however meant that the homemaker partner was very ill-equipped to reenter the labor market after a split: no career, no (current) marketable qualifications, big black hole of "nothing" in the middle of the cv, and so on. This guaranteed in a lot of cases that the homemaker partner would stay rather poor and economically struggling unless they found a new breadwinner partner. It turned out this breadwinner/homemaker model works pretty well while the partnership works as a whole, but horribly falls apart when the partnership splits. This in turn lead to a lot of situations where divorce was not a real (economic) option for the homemaker partner, so a lot of homemakers partners stayed around in bad or even outright abusive partnerships. It was a situation were they could only lose. "I sacrificed my career for you (and the kids)" is a thing you often hear from homemakers, which is actually quite true a lot of times, while at the same time the breadwinner made scarifies as well, but in dimensions other than the economical/labor one. Society eventually recognized this to be a problem and came up with divorce laws that were supposed to restore some fairer outcomes, and this was achieved to a degree, especially in the economical dimension. The problem now is that these divorce laws were made with a pretty specific model in mind, said breadwinner/homemaker model, and that courts dealing almost excursively with this model may have developed certain biases. But the current generations of young and mid-aged people do not necessarily use that model anymore; e.g. two-breadwinner relationships are far more common now than they used to be. It will take some time to tweak divorce laws to account for that as well and get biases out of courts again. Of course, what will remain a problem and cause fights is the question of how to split up resources and wealth cooperatively created in a relationship, and how to value each partners contributions. E.g. you cannot just split a physical house in half (most of the time), so who gets to stay in the nice home (if anybody) both partners invested a lot to make will remain a question with no easy solution.
david38 5y ago
IMO, the problem with divorce is that the payout is given at the time of betrayal/leaving not the time of loyalty. Hear me out. Imagine you work at a company. You do good work. You get a salary and some stock. The company is not publicly traded, but rather buys back the shares you own when you leave. The salary part makes sense - you are getting paid while being with the company. The second part does not. The company is rewarding you just as you’re walking out the door! Even worse if you’re fired for performance, theft, consulting on the side, etc. This is exactly what divorce often looks like. Suppose he makes a lot more than she. She could never afford the house herself. She is a loyal wife, makes him feel at home, etc. He is a loyal husband, works hard, provides enough for a decent home, etc. She earns what she gets above her salary through her domestic work. This is often quoted by feminist groups. Now at some point she wants to leave, turning his life upside down. It is at this point he must reward her! Or worse, he catches her cheating, and now must reward her when she wasn’t even doing the most basic thing to deserve living in the house to begin with! It would be far better if her compensation was complete as time went by. Like now, a company pays you ever two weeks grants you stock every month or so. There is no significant payout on your last day. This is how marriage should be. Ideally there would be some agreed upon value of her labor that she would collect every month or so. It could be cash, or payment to some insurance that would pay for housing and job training for her upon a divorce. The point is, for the most part, when they split, she had a predefined benefit, enough to start her life again and reflect the value of her work. Most importantly, there would be a stronger sense that it was earned on both sides because she accrued the money while in good standing. Obviously switch the sexes as the situation permits, etc. This should be the default, not part of a prenup that puts you on the defensive for “predicting a divorce”.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  People can be just as irrational in the "good times", this way can still end up with an unfair distribution.
- dTal 5y ago
  I suspect you're being downvoted because this is a highly capitalist and unromantic way of viewing a marriage. But of course it's only an extension of the capitalist and unromantic logic behind alimony in the first place. At worst you have written a piercing satire in the spirit of "A Modest Proposal", and at best you may have the beginnings of an actual idea.
ggm 5y ago
Insufficient input from lawyers and mediators here. More than sufficient input from victims of unjust, unequal or unwelcome settlements.
dijonman2 5y ago
Courts strongly favor women, until men have equal rights we must vigorously protect our assets. A friend of mine divorced in New York. She agreed to $0 and signed, but later contested the agreement and sued. He lost everything and she’s set for life. Absolutely disgusting.
ldiracdelta 5y ago
Why is no-fault divorce better? If you detonate the marriage, you should get much less.
onos 5y ago
Interesting to consider the downside of making divorce easier. There seems to be an implicit purpose in marriage of making breakup difficult: we know going in that difficult periods can occur and to better assure we will make it though them we agree to enforcing a harsh penalty to doing this. presumably we do this because we expect most tough periods to eventually end, allowing the relationship to be positive once again.
- DaltonCoffee 5y ago
  The marriage tradition doesn't seem well suited to many modern relationships and people. People now change jobs and relationships more than predecessor generations. It's unfair to hold people to old standards designed for different societal norms.
- hogrider 5y ago
  But it's only a penalty for the "breadwinner", it seems to me for the other side it's a massive profit for a few years of marriage.
patheticis 5y ago

154 points by rustoo 5y ago

The idea of marriage is statistically, demonstrably overdue for an overhaul. It doesn't work for at least half of people, and definitely shouldn't be a disaster when it predictably fails. We need sane legal agreements for each dimension of marriage, child rearing, property division etc. And support systems to humanely shepherd people through life changes. Instead we try to preserve the illusion of a life where everyone is guaranteed a partner who will always be there. I am grateful every day for my no contest divorce. If anyone is near divorce my advice is bend and shoot for no contest. Try to focus on mutual well being. Courts can do nothing but transfer assets to lawyers.

entropicgravity 5y ago

If you look at the divorce process in various countries it becomes clear that the process in the Five Eyes (US, UK, Can, AUS, NZ) is much more onerous and court intensive than in other countries. One has to wonder if it's the legal profession, who benefit most, that is behind lobbying for the laws that benefit their members to the detriment of families.

sleepingadmin 5y ago

Prenuptials are extremely popular and marriage is at historic lows. This also has little to do with women. It's men who grew up in the last few decades watching the absolute disaster that is marriage. You literally gain nothing by getting married and you seem to lose significantly every time.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

In the Netherlands they finally changed divorce law to end the practice of alimony payments. This is also an incentive for both parties to pursue a career lest you fall into poverty after divorce.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
You have free medical coverage, good child care, and free education in the Netherlands?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
AdrianB1 5y ago
In Romania alimony did not exist until a few years ago, so we are going in the opposite direction with the excuse "this is how it's done in EU".
asdf333 5y ago
i get it but in reality in many families someone is sacrificing their career for the family unit. i don’t think it’s unfair to take that opportunity cost into consideration
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Only if you have kids, which less people are doing. Having kids and a partner myself, if I have to choose between fixed child care costs for a window of time, or perpetual alimony and splitting assets in half, I'd prefer the former purely from an economic perspective. Marriage itself is the opportunity cost, and it's crucial to contain/insure against liability to ensure life sucess. 67 percent of relationships fail [1], so when asked for advice, I advise people not to get married (and the data shows cohorts adopting such choices [2]). Live together (non community property jurisdiction), have kids together (if you accept the financial and parental liability), but getting married is betting half your stuff and a substantial amount of future earnings things will work out (when the data shows it does not work out the majority of the time). [1] The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love (Page 13, https://web.archive.org/web/20220122024837/https://i.redd.it/9uq1ytbcovr71.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20220122024837/https://i.redd.it...) [2] https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces#marriages-are-becoming-less-common https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces#marriages-... (edit: US centric)

cowpig 5y ago

I hope the practice of using non-adversarial processes spreads to spaces that really need it like the our legislative system.

eric4smith 5y ago

Also, what would make divorces less nasty is the horrible practice of making one party pay for the legal fees of both parties. Also, 50/50 custody as a norm. 50/50 Child support as a norm. Maybe 90% of the nastiness would absolutely disappear.

novok 5y ago
Remove custody percentages as a part of support payments and the financial incentive that drives a lot of this behavior goes away. In other countries where support payments are not a major thing, a lot of the nastyness of divorce also goes away too. I like this section of the book "real world divorce" about it: http://www.realworlddivorce.com/International http://www.realworlddivorce.com/International
- Talanes 5y ago
  The standardizing of support payments that a lot of these countries (and it looks like some US states) do seems like a fair way to reduce the potential exploitability too. The price of raising a child isn't tied to income, so why should the payer's income matter beyond reducing payments (ideally with the state stepping in like the Danish system) for those who can't make the normal amount?
  - closeparen 5y ago
    The idea is that the wife and children should not experience any decline in their standard of living as a result of the divorce. They are entitled to live the way they would have lived had the marriage continued; if the husband is rich then that includes owning a nice house in an expensive city, luxury cars, private schools, etc. If the system’s goal were merely to ensure that they land on their feet, it would look very different.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      Well, that's the idea behind alimony, which is sometimes mixed in with child support. But child support is mostly rooted in the idea that raising a child requires more support than a single individual can provide. If it were just about continuation of lifestyle, my mother wouldn't have been entitled to anything as my parents were never together.

evolve2k 5y ago

Most of the divorced parents around me in Australia do this week on week off thing with the kids which actually seems quite glorious. As a separated parent you get focussed time with the kids and in the off week you get a good bunch of me/adult time. Looking in it seems a great setup for mature ex’s.

ashtonkem 5y ago
I highly recommend this book called "if you're in my office it's too late" by a divorce attorney. One of the things he recommends is parenting a bit like you're separated, trading off long stretches of time looking after the kid just like a divorced couple might do, but without the separate houses and finances.
javajosh 5y ago
This sounds wonderful. But one argument used against 50/50 and in favor of asymmetric time is "kids need continuity". This inevitably favors the mother. "60/40" means the father gets every other weekend and one night a week. Numerically this works out to 80/20 and even young children are quite aware of who their real parent is. It is horrible but it is also SOP for most jurisdictions in the US, and I am not being hyperbolic when I say it's a real, first-world humanitarian crisis. Children do not fair well without fathers, and yet our system degrades the very notion of fatherhood every chance it gets. Furthermore, the bad actors that populate family courts - judges, lawyers, police, therapists, mediators, visitation center workers - they all know the score and as a father you are truly a second-class citizen. You see the children at the whim of your wife, and literally no-one gives a single shit. Why the system is not 50/50 is beyond me, because the argument for continuity is absolutely ridiculous on its face. The real reason it continues is that in family court mothers have far more rights than fathers. Full stop. It's sexist, it's harmful to the children, and yes, I'll even say it's harmful for the father (although you're not supposed to say that, and if you do the system assumes you're lying to be manipulative). This 60/40 aka 80/20 situation is the good outcome for most fathers. It really only gets worse from there. If you give the judge attitude, they will have no problem putting you on supervised visitation indefinitely.
- 5y ago

imapeopleperson 5y ago

alvarlagerlof 5y ago
Focusing on fewer with a better life seems wiser.
- ralfd 5y ago
  "Fewer" just means they get spoiled/helicoptered; with the added long term affect that families are atomized instead of larger support networks.
  - fwn 5y ago
    That does sound very harsh to me. "Spoiled" can mean being able to afford a better school, private room and options in case of emergency. In wealthy societies money is determinative for how many bullshit time sinks you have to suffer through in childhood. For example: I almost failed Abitur, which is a requirement for university in Germany. (We very rarely have any admission tests for some reason.) Given enough resources you can either add private schooling or arrange alternative pathways. You could get an equivalent (less time consuming) degree from a different country that will be acknowledged in Germany. The no-money route would've cost two or three additional years of standard school stasis in my primes. Anyway, my bland tl;dr: Money really does make a difference that is not all downside.
LordAtlas 5y ago
I'm happy that you find joy in it, but some of us are just fine without kids and would like to keep it that way.
Gigachad 5y ago
Certainly not what I have observed from others. It almost seems like a coping mechanism from people who say this. Lots of people who have given up the last scraps of their free time, money and sanity and "buyers remorse" over it. No doubt many people are very happy with their choices. But it's absurd to claim as a fact that having kids makes everyone happier and more kids is more happiness. It also sounds like something that would have a lot of research behind it, so I'd be interested if anyone has data on it.

akomtu 5y ago

USA should replace marriages with "M corps". Those are special type of corps with just CEO and CFO, capital stock and voting stock, and possibly with more C-suite members (kids) and SVPs (cats, dogs). Alimony would be replaced with golden parachute contracts, if you manage to negotiate it upon forming the corp. Houses, cars and other assets may be made a property of this M corp, but that's subject to negotiations. Same with income: M corp members may invest their incomes into the corp, but don't have to. Whether an LLC can be a member of an M corp, or whether it can have independent investors are all interesting questions that would be resolved by courts.

flomo 5y ago
Upper classes already do something like M-corps. One thing about prenups is they might not substantially change the outcome, but at least at least people are reviewing the implied contract up-front with their lawyer.
gruez 5y ago
This sounds good if both partners are young professionals with roughly the same earning potential, but what about breadwinner + housewife/househusband situations? Why would the breadwinner want to contribute assets to the M-corp? I imagine the negotiations for forming the M-corp would be pretty awkward.
- akomtu 5y ago
  Not any more awkward than what we have today. The would-be housewife just demands the CFO position on such and such terms by end of year, or she's out.
gunshai 5y ago
This does sound quite interesting, although this would need to be jussed(sp?) a bit. As my partner said when I read this aloud "Well that's romantic".
- JCharante 5y ago
  Why does everything about marriage have to be romantic? If you're the spouse you'll be the first person the doctors ask if taking them off life support is ever a question. That's not romantic but it's a direct possible consequence.

dpweb 5y ago

Recently went through the process. Mediation is certainly cheaper and less adversarial but that requires both good faith on both sides, and the ability to work together. Which has already been demonstrated is a problem since the marriage is breaking up in the first place. Some divorces are going to have to be adversarial. But, speaking as someone who had to pay both lawyers sides, and substantial alimony and child support. My best advice - get it over with as soon as humanly possible! Time is the enemy. Not X percent. Lawyers will take it all. You gotta treat it like your future is on fire. I’d very much be in favor of mandatory pre-nups when getting married. We need to be grown ups and recognize at least half these marriages will break up. It would make the couple confront the possibility and have to state their expectations beforehand. Prenups aren’t 100% but having gone through the process I saw. Legal contracts matter! This prob won’t happen cause it would also break up a lot of couples before the marriage but that would actually be for the best.

Arainach 5y ago
Prenups only matter when you have significant assets pre-marriage. With the price of housing these days, most people won't have any significant financial security until they're borderline infertile; how do prenups benefit these marriages?
- bitcharmer 5y ago
  Where I live prenups cover assets both: pre and post marriage. There is no such thing as co-owning anything unless both sides explicitly make it so. From what you are saying prenups are not a very good tool in your legal system but I assure you it works differently in many countries.
scotty79 5y ago
Or just skip marriage altogether.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  In many jurisdictions, common law relationships after a certain period of cohabitation are very similar to marriage when it comes to splitting up. I'm guessing you're not advocating not staying with someone for more than, say 2 years.

01100011 5y ago

A note to any single folks out there with the potential to earn more than their future spouse: understand family law in your jurisdiction and understand what you are signing up for when you get legally married. Divorce can leave you liable for more support payments than you can even afford. The other party can walk away with half of your property, including unvested RSUs(!!!), and it doesn't matter if they cheated or failed to contribute to the marriage. If you think you're being nice by trying to make the marriage work and tolerating it, you may be just setting yourself up for even more pain down the road.

msoad 5y ago
Unvested RSU??
- xen0 5y ago
  Restricted Stock Unit; a form of compensation that a company may provide. Such stock is subject to a vesting period, where you only gain the stock after a period of time.
  - msoad 5y ago
    I'm aware but I don't think unvested RSUs are subject to divorce asset splitting. Unvested RSU is like unearned salary. It's not an asset to split. Maybe you mean vested but not released RSUs in pre-IPO companies.
    - llampx 5y ago
      You give family court too much credit.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
62951413 5y ago
"any single folks with the potential to earn" == if you're a man "understand family law" == you can do nothing, don't kid yourself This is an unusually serious topic for this forum. Those of you who are too young to believe it can happen to you or assume the financially raped were exceptionally stupid or unlucky. Do your future self a favor and think twice. The men you hear about were once like you. You're just earlier in the lifecycle. With every generation is's getting worse and not linearly. At the very least * marriage is for only if you're in your 30s and want to have a child within a year * make sure your parents unanimously approve of the woman Also, the older you get the easier it gets to get laid without the paperwork. Marriage is a guaranteed loss for a man.

known 5y ago

"Alimony is a system by which, when two make a mistake, one of them keeps paying for it" --Peggy Joyce (b. 1893)

isamuel 5y ago

silisili 5y ago

I was divorced a decade or so ago. I'm not super rich or anything, regular engineer class well off... My advice... be amicable if possible. And give the other side more than you, ask them to sign off, and find a cheap attorney to do the paperwork. My divorce was super cheap on paper, even though I lost more than half my net worth. I think it cost about $200. I had a coworker telling me I was an idiot, and how his lawyer could have gotten me a better deal. Only cost him six figures and many months of time to get it. Time is your most valuable asset. Get it over as quick as you can.

antisthenes 5y ago

What utter nonsense from the Economist. Can't believe I used to read it nearly religiously back in college. Having this stance gets me a lot of flak from my liberal-leaning friends but here goes: What kind of cognitive dissonance does it take to look at the graph where there are now 3x times more kids born out of wedlock, and try to spin something positive out of it, like "no fault divorce policies makes the situation suck slightly less during the divorce proceedings" This is a complete disaster not only for the children, who are now falling behind peers in nuclear households, but for society as a whole as well, since it teaches people that nothing is ever their fault, including important commitments like creating a family unit and raising a child in a complex world. If you're going to sing praises to cooperation and mediation, how about you try to get people to do that during marriage? You know, to reconcile their differences and stay together for the sake of raising a well-adapted future member of society. Honestly, no matter how you look at it, divorce is overall net-negative and usually a negative for most parties, except one (usually, the lawyers) Is it any wonder that Asians excel in western society, coming from a cultural norm of keeping the family together at all costs?

rupi 5y ago
You must be in the US. In certain parts of Europe, it is becoming very common for couples to not get "married" but still form a nuclear family and from what I have seen, a lot of them are doing a lot better than some of my married friends. Also, if you had spent any time in Asia, you wouldn't be singing the praises of the cultural norm of keeping the family together. Growing up, I saw a lot of cases of frequent abuse (even beatings) but the woman was supposed to keep the family together. Did you know divorce is not allowed in Philippines, please read about the impact that has. Asians in the US typically are better educated and education has more to do with lower divorce rates than an ethnicity. edit: this is coming from a married person, in the US
- moduspol 5y ago
  > education has more to do with lower divorce rates than an ethnicity. Perhaps, but correlation doesn't imply causation. It seems at least as plausible that the kind of people able to commit to higher education are more capable of committing to marriage. Or that lower divorce rates result in better outcomes for children, including those children getting more educated. Neither imply that education itself leads to lower divorce rates. I'm also not sure how to reasonably discuss this, but there is a colossal gray area between "drive-through divorce" and "women must legally stay married to husbands who beat them." We should be able to acknowledge positive results of some cultural norms without presuming they are intrinsically linked to the worst edge cases.

isolli 5y ago

Related: I read in the Economist a few years ago that for international couples, there is a first-mover advantage. The person initiating the divorce can decide to file in any country: the country where they have citizenship, the one where their spouse has citizenship, or the one where they got married. By shopping for the most favorable jurisdiction, they can turn the divorce to their advantage. I hope I'm never in a position to use this knowledge!

Dracophoenix 5y ago
Not as easily as you think it is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Convention_on_the_International_Recovery_of_Child_Support_and_Other_Forms_of_Family_Maintenance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Convention_on_the_Inte... Even if you're a billionaire: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/magazine/how-to-hide-400-million.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/magazine/how-to-hide-400-...

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/Tmqxz https://archive.is/Tmqxz

david38 5y ago

rndgermandude 5y ago
I disagree, and I wouldn't say "victim" either, but helpless used to be somewhat on point in certain regards. If I look at my parents' generation, the "normal" thing was that one partner was the breadwinner (usually men) and one partner was the homemaker (doing all the cooking, cleaning, raising kids, etc; this was usually women). Essentially that generation was doing well enough that one partner could stay at home (as opposed to e.g. my grandparents' generation, where both my grandmas had to work as young married women just after the war, and only later in life could afford to switch to a breadwinner/homemaker model). This however meant that the homemaker partner was very ill-equipped to reenter the labor market after a split: no career, no (current) marketable qualifications, big black hole of "nothing" in the middle of the cv, and so on. This guaranteed in a lot of cases that the homemaker partner would stay rather poor and economically struggling unless they found a new breadwinner partner. It turned out this breadwinner/homemaker model works pretty well while the partnership works as a whole, but horribly falls apart when the partnership splits. This in turn lead to a lot of situations where divorce was not a real (economic) option for the homemaker partner, so a lot of homemakers partners stayed around in bad or even outright abusive partnerships. It was a situation were they could only lose. "I sacrificed my career for you (and the kids)" is a thing you often hear from homemakers, which is actually quite true a lot of times, while at the same time the breadwinner made scarifies as well, but in dimensions other than the economical/labor one. Society eventually recognized this to be a problem and came up with divorce laws that were supposed to restore some fairer outcomes, and this was achieved to a degree, especially in the economical dimension. The problem now is that these divorce laws were made with a pretty specific model in mind, said breadwinner/homemaker model, and that courts dealing almost excursively with this model may have developed certain biases. But the current generations of young and mid-aged people do not necessarily use that model anymore; e.g. two-breadwinner relationships are far more common now than they used to be. It will take some time to tweak divorce laws to account for that as well and get biases out of courts again. Of course, what will remain a problem and cause fights is the question of how to split up resources and wealth cooperatively created in a relationship, and how to value each partners contributions. E.g. you cannot just split a physical house in half (most of the time), so who gets to stay in the nice home (if anybody) both partners invested a lot to make will remain a question with no easy solution.

david38 5y ago

IMO, the problem with divorce is that the payout is given at the time of betrayal/leaving not the time of loyalty. Hear me out. Imagine you work at a company. You do good work. You get a salary and some stock. The company is not publicly traded, but rather buys back the shares you own when you leave. The salary part makes sense - you are getting paid while being with the company. The second part does not. The company is rewarding you just as you’re walking out the door! Even worse if you’re fired for performance, theft, consulting on the side, etc. This is exactly what divorce often looks like. Suppose he makes a lot more than she. She could never afford the house herself. She is a loyal wife, makes him feel at home, etc. He is a loyal husband, works hard, provides enough for a decent home, etc. She earns what she gets above her salary through her domestic work. This is often quoted by feminist groups. Now at some point she wants to leave, turning his life upside down. It is at this point he must reward her! Or worse, he catches her cheating, and now must reward her when she wasn’t even doing the most basic thing to deserve living in the house to begin with! It would be far better if her compensation was complete as time went by. Like now, a company pays you ever two weeks grants you stock every month or so. There is no significant payout on your last day. This is how marriage should be. Ideally there would be some agreed upon value of her labor that she would collect every month or so. It could be cash, or payment to some insurance that would pay for housing and job training for her upon a divorce. The point is, for the most part, when they split, she had a predefined benefit, enough to start her life again and reflect the value of her work. Most importantly, there would be a stronger sense that it was earned on both sides because she accrued the money while in good standing. Obviously switch the sexes as the situation permits, etc. This should be the default, not part of a prenup that puts you on the defensive for “predicting a divorce”.

HPsquared 5y ago
People can be just as irrational in the "good times", this way can still end up with an unfair distribution.
dTal 5y ago
I suspect you're being downvoted because this is a highly capitalist and unromantic way of viewing a marriage. But of course it's only an extension of the capitalist and unromantic logic behind alimony in the first place. At worst you have written a piercing satire in the spirit of "A Modest Proposal", and at best you may have the beginnings of an actual idea.

ggm 5y ago

Insufficient input from lawyers and mediators here. More than sufficient input from victims of unjust, unequal or unwelcome settlements.

dijonman2 5y ago

Courts strongly favor women, until men have equal rights we must vigorously protect our assets. A friend of mine divorced in New York. She agreed to $0 and signed, but later contested the agreement and sued. He lost everything and she’s set for life. Absolutely disgusting.

ldiracdelta 5y ago

Why is no-fault divorce better? If you detonate the marriage, you should get much less.

onos 5y ago

Interesting to consider the downside of making divorce easier. There seems to be an implicit purpose in marriage of making breakup difficult: we know going in that difficult periods can occur and to better assure we will make it though them we agree to enforcing a harsh penalty to doing this. presumably we do this because we expect most tough periods to eventually end, allowing the relationship to be positive once again.

DaltonCoffee 5y ago
The marriage tradition doesn't seem well suited to many modern relationships and people. People now change jobs and relationships more than predecessor generations. It's unfair to hold people to old standards designed for different societal norms.
hogrider 5y ago
But it's only a penalty for the "breadwinner", it seems to me for the other side it's a massive profit for a few years of marriage.

patheticis 5y ago