this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Leopards Ate My Face
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I am not sure i am fully for alimony. Like child support? Definitely. But alimony is the argument that the spouce, almost exclusively women, are due a certain life style they enjoyed when married at the cost of the one who is working for it. The argument being that a spouse would stay in an abusing relationship because of the fear of losing quality of life. And that assuming that the spouse foregoes a career to raise children is left with low job prospects, and the state would rather not shoulder the burden of a social safety net. And so the working spouse has to pay.
Thats how its been argued to me anyway. I find it not very persuasive. No one is due a quality of life at the expense of other’s. If you divorce, you should toil for your own quality of life. And there should be a comprehensive safety net for those who are too old to hold a job, or can not find one.
There's something to say for it if one party gave up work to become a stay at home parent I guess. You're at a pretty severe disadvantage if you need to enter the job market with a significant gap in your resume. So if you consider marriage a contract wherein one person put themselves at a disadvantage to raise the children o the condition that the other would in turn provide for the both of them, you could argue that they're entitled to some form of compensation when that contract is broken. Whether that compensation should be indefinite I leave on the table.
Yea this is the reason why I believe alimony should be a thing. The longer you had to put your career on hold the longer the alimony should be.
That’s not at all how it was argued to me, and I also find it unconvincing. I think it makes sense when a couple together makes a decision that one person won’t work to take care of the home or kids. Fifteen years later if they divorce, the working person is further in their career than they would have been if they’d had to take off time for sick days and more parenting activities (or if they’d had to think about doing their own dry cleaning and packing their own lunches), while the other person is further behind in their career than they were when they left the workforce, and they won’t ever really be able to get back on track. I think alimony makes sense to balance those effects, and if the effects are permanent, I think it should also be permanent. I don’t think it should be 40% of a paycheck (unless that’s actually substantiated by the couple’s financial situation), but whatever makes sense for the couple’s relative incomes.
My thought is that it’s based on the life style that the provider…provides. And maintaining that expectation of having the same quality of life is absurd, especially concerning that the providers will definitely not be able to maintain that quality of life for themselves. Especially in the case of a childless marriage, the other spouse was never removed from the work force unless they chose to be. And the provider may have been happy to sacrifice their life style at the time, but to force it on them after a divorce is wrong to me. And even if there was a child at one point, but has since become an adult i don’t see how one who was working a career should be on the hook for another forever. This basically prevents the one who pays from moving on to make another family due to financial constraints.
I guess where I disagree is that the working parent presumably benefits from the non working parent’s labor. They decide together how their lives look, agree together that less income is worth it for the other benefits of the person staying home, and then afterwards the partner who stayed home has permanently lowered earning potential. Those are fine decisions to make together, but if you split up, the parent who kept working financially benefits and the other is fucked. I don’t think the goal should be to maintain the same lifestyle, because that is going to be impossible (though if there are kids, their lifestyles should change as little as possible), but trying to equalize their changed earning potentials makes sense to me.