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"

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.