Related posts:
Stay-at-Home Mom Before Divorce? Don’t expect alimony payments
“I refused alimony” – 3 women’s stories
Why do so few men get alimony?
I recently wrote: Stay-at-Home-Mom Facing Divorce? Don’t expect child support payments on the recent trend of states reconsidering their child support laws. In many states, life support is contested and, like the growing number of (successful, professional) female judges, have little sympathy for women who do not work outside the home and refuse them alimony.
As the many comments show, we are still a long way from abolishing child support payments. The reform comes as a result of petitions from groups who believe child support hurts men by forcing them to pay an unfair sum to wives they are no longer married to and have the opportunity to be financially independent to pay. The reform is just beginning.
But alimony — once seen as a feminist coup for supporting women who otherwise had little financial opportunity — hurts women today.
This new departure from guaranteed lifetime alimony is tough on women who haven’t prepared for the financial realities of divorce and have chosen to be dependent on their husbands. I sympathize with some of these women – those who have disabled children who require intensive and comprehensive care well beyond the age of 18, women who are themselves mentally or physically disabled, and women who are in their 70s and older and are there coming of age really wasn’t economic gender equality.
But for everyone else, I welcome this move to cap child support payments. That’s good for women, and what’s good for women is good for families and the country. Here’s why:
Ending child support would force every able-bodied person to be financially responsible for themselves . Before us, suffragists and feminists have fought bitterly (and hopefully joyfully) for you and I to be financially and legally equal with men. We still have a long way to go, but most women in this country have the ability to fend for themselves. With opportunity comes responsibility. If you choose to be financially dependent on someone else (like a husband), you are taking a risk. If that marriage ends, leaving you with little job opportunity and low earning potential as a result, you must suffer the consequences of the disadvantage of that risk.
Take child support out of the career-planning equation, and we’re forcing women to take full responsibility for their careers and finances from the start of adulthood. This is vital if we are to close the pay gap, which has little to do with sexism in the workplace and has more to do with women choosing lower-paying jobs and abandoning their careers to pursue family life. The issue of women’s financial skills is also addressed. A study found that women’s participation in household finances is directly proportional to their contribution to family income. In other words, The more a woman contributes to the family finances, the more involved she is in administration, a fact that would tie into these alarming numbers on women’s financial literacy from Financial Finesse for the Workplace Wellness Program:
- A third of women are confident about their asset allocation, compared to half of men
- 66% of women say they have a general knowledge of investing versus 85% of men
- 63% of women say they can handle cash versus 78% of men
- 47% of women say they have an emergency fund versus 62% of men
Ending alimony would be a boon to the family’s financial security and a clear, screaming alarm that you need to plan for the very real chance that both spouses’ incomes will likely be vital to the family’s well-being. What will it take for people to realize – and plan – that the divorce rate has been hovering around 50% for decades? And that’s just the risk of divorce. Sustaining a career is about being a responsible member of your family. Even if you have the hottest, most committed marriage to last your life, there are other realities to reckon with:
Unemployment. Nearly four in five American adults will face severe unemployment, poverty, or welfare. Men have been much more likely to suffer from an economic downturn in recent history. During the recession – from December 2007 to June 2009 – men lost 5.4 million jobs while women lost 2.1 million. Again, this is a numbers game. Relying on your husband to support you and your family just isn’t a good financial move.
Disability. Almost 5% of all eligible adults receive disability insurance benefits.
Life. crap happens. Accidents, psychoses, natural disasters and fires. You have no idea what’s in stock. So you do smart things. For example, keeping a career going, which at least doubles the financial security of your family.
One of the most compelling reasons for incentivizing women to pursue careers is that it strengthens marriages and reduces the likelihood of divorce . Researchers from UCLA and Utrecht University in the Netherlands have found that the happiest marriages are those in which both spouses have careers they enjoy. In their book, Getting to 50/50, Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober report that a marriage in which both parties earn about the same amount and do about the same amount of housework and childcare has a 48 percent lower chance of divorce than the average.
But perhaps the number one reason no alimony is great for women is that either party is allowed to get on with their lives without them, which is the whole point of divorce. Living off a check from an ex only keeps you emotionally involved in a marriage that is now over.
I have a friend who gave up a thriving small business she spent 15 years building when she married a successful New York tax attorney and had a baby. The marriage ended. He pays her a sum each month, which she keeps in a three-story, two-bedroom townhouse on the Upper East Side while she struggles to rebuild her business. “Tell your readers never to stop working,” she told me recently. “There’s nothing worse than being dependent on a man you’re trying to break up with.”
Also read Stay-at-Home Mom Before Divorce? Don’t expect alimony payments
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