Here is some information I found in various blogs, that I am not sure how true it is and whether it is so in whole USA or only in some states. Please tell me which of the following is true, or rather where and how much it is true:
After divorce, a man must financially support not only his children, but also his ex-wife.
The money paid to his ex-wife may easily exceed 50% of his income. For example, if the man’s income increases, the judge will increase the payment to the ex, but if the income decreases, the payment remains the same.
A judge may decide to ignore the prenup, and there is no way to defend against it.
Different states have different rules for divorce, which can be abused by filing for divorce in a different state where the rules are more on your side.
And, if you are in a munchkin mood:
As a young woman, if you marry someone and divorce him, you have unlocked the Early Retirement Extreme achievement, and as long as the man lives and has a decent income, you don’t have to work anymore. You should avoid getting married again, unless you want to level up to a man with better income. But living with a boyfriend and having children with him is okay.
How much of this is true say in California or in New York? (This question includes the possibility that the woman will try to get a divorce in another state, if that is possible.)
Because if this would all be true, I think no rational man would marry under such conditions, ever.
Well, everyone who gets married is irrationally overoptimistic about the likelihood of divorce.
Also, part of the problem is that nobody knows what divorce law actually says—I’m an American, but I’m not any better informed about divorce law than you are. Studying up on divorce law in preparation for marriage is just not something people do.
Well, everyone who gets married is irrationally overoptimistic about the likelihood of divorce.
Are they? One puzzle is that statistics show divorce to be relatively uncommon, at least for mid-to-upper class folks. So perhaps the moral hazard problem isn’t quite as terrible as it looks at first glance, given this institutional framework. Maybe judges don’t really ignore pre-nup agreements in many cases; maybe the tradcons are right and “character”, “morality” etc. work well enough as a precommitment mechanism. Who knows. Of course the probabilities are still bad enough that reasonable guys arguably should not marry; the question is why they aren’t worse.
Perhaps not everyone, but definitely most. Most people, from my experience, view divorce as 10% likely. The ‘relatively uncommon’ statistics you reference above are on the order of 50%. That’s a pretty big gap.
You’re comparing the general population 50% with Bogus’s “at least for mid-to-upper class folks.” It makes a big difference, though I don’t have statistics in directly comparable form.
It also seems to be based on a statistical misinterpretation. The divorce rate and marriage rate per 1000 people have both been declining for decades, and the divorce rate hovers around half of the marriage rate, but this doesn’t equate to 50% of marriages ending in divorce. Since divorces generally occur a significant time after the marriage, and the marriage rate is also declining, comparing the present rate of divorce to the present rate of marriage results in a misleading figure.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate any raw statistics which would allow me to discern the true rate. This writer paints a much rosier picture, but he also doesn’t link to the actual statistics he used or what process he used to determine the rates he gives, so I’d be wary about taking it at face value. I haven’t found any other resource so far that attempts to put numbers to the true rate, although I have found some others which note the problems with the conventional statistics.
My number is from from Stevenson-Wolfers (altalt), particularly Figure 2, page 37. It is not a misinterpretation. To be more precise, about 50% of first marriages from the 70s made it to 25 years. First marriages from 80s appear to a do a little better, heading for maybe 55%, but it is too soon to tell [this previously said that it was too soon only because of binning decisions, but that’s wrong; the problem is that the data was collected in 2001].
That paper also reflects the consensus of all the other resources I’ve been able to find in that the rate of divorce seems to be declining since the 70s; it may be too early to be overwhelmingly certain, but the evidence suggests that not only are the odds better for a marriage in the 1980s than the 1970s, but that the odds are better still in the 1990s, and then better than that in the 2000s.
That the rate has continued to fall through the 2000s I did not take from that paper, but from the other sources I encountered while searching for the raw statistics. A bit more searching suggests some disagreement on the state of the trend between different agencies.
Because if this would all be true, I think no rational man would marry under such conditions, ever.
Have you considered making a LW poll to test this? State these facts and ask men whether they would be willing to legally marry under modern circumstances. For extra fun, make another poll a few years later and ask how many men who said “no” in the original poll are now married.
EDIT: Though, come to think of it, this probably tells us more about the level of rationality of the average LW user than about what a truly rational man would do in this situation.
After divorce, a man must financially support not only his children, but also his ex-wife.
This depends very, very heavily on state. At least by statute, the rule is gender-invariant, and focuses on the income of both parties and any disparity between the two (there’s a belief that family law judges seem biased toward women in heterosexual unions, and toward caregivers in homosexual ones, but I’m unaware of trustworthy studies on this). Most states have fairly strict statutory limitations on alimony, generally limiting the duration of payments and the minimum length of a union. Some states, including New York and California, however, leave more discretion to the judge.
A judge may decide to ignore the prenup, and there is no way to defend against it.
Prenups are civil contracts, and like all civil contracts can be voided in certain circumstances, but there are defenses. The most relevant way to void a prenup is to show that it was signed without knowledge (in which case, you can defend yourself by showing that you demonstrated reasonable information) or that the prenup was unconscionable (in which case, you can defend yourself by showing that the prenup was not highly lopsided. Jurisdiction matters on this one, though: “unconscionable” varies highly from state to state.)
The money paid to his ex-wife may easily exceed 50% of his income. For example, if the man’s income increases, the judge will increase the payment to the ex, but if the income decreases, the payment remains the same.
Again, depends on state. Many states limit combined alimony to a certain percentage of income, and while most states will set alimony based on the expectation of higher income potential, most don’t allow post-divorce recalculation of alimony without a “significant change of circumstances”, which as a term of art doesn’t cover the alimony-payer getting a raise. The few states that do allow it, require that the change in income be somehow related to sacrifices by the alimony-receiver during the marriage—helping pay for college classes is the prototypical example.
Different states have different rules for divorce, which can be abused by filing for divorce in a different state where the rules are more on your side.
Different states have different rules, but the filing processes are not as simple as just looking in a legal atlas. States only have jurisdiction over a divorce when one of the parties is currently domiciled in that state. In most cases, this requires that the plaintiff live in that state for a minimum of a six months (usually a year). If you live in Texas, and your husband or wife tries to establish residency in California and New York, this is pretty obvious.
As a young woman, if you marry someone and divorce him, you have unlocked the Early Retirement Extreme achievement, and as long as the man lives and has a decent income, you don’t have to work anymore. You should avoid getting married again, unless you want to level up to a man with better income. But living with a boyfriend and having children with him is okay.
In New York and California (as well as a large number of other states), alimony generally terminates on evidence of cohabitation, excepting extenuating circumstances. So this /probably/ only works if you’re willing to give up the live-in boyfriend.
Alimony is not in perpetuity everywhere, either (although it is in Massachusetts). I’m very happy to report that in Virginia, it only lasts for half the length of the marriage.
After divorce, a man must financially support not only his children, but also his ex-wife.
This is not true in general. This may be true in certain cases.
The money paid to his ex-wife may easily exceed 50% of his income.
Not “easily”. It is theoretically possible but not very likely.
A judge may decide to ignore the prenup, and there is no way to defend against it.
Well, you can “defend against it” by the usual courtroom arguments, but yes, you cannot choose to ignore court decisions just because your private agreement with another party said something.
Different states have different rules for divorce, which can be abused by filing for divorce in a different state where the rules are more on your side.
True, though filing in a different state is not trivially easy.
I think no rational man would marry under such conditions, ever.
Unfortunately, you need not select merely for folk who won’t be “a bitch”, but either for folk who won’t divorce at all, won’t benefit much from a divorce, or who won’t respond to fairly significant incentives. The difference between even moderate legal tactics and weak ones can easily make the difference of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year—and if you ask family lawyers, you’ll quickly find that “amicable divorces” are for most practical definitions a contradiction in terms.
Someone being “a bitch” can be much, much worse, certainly. ((And the monetary issues are only one out of many problems, if either party goes for the dirty tricks playbook.)) But neither party needs to be evil for it to be a major concern.
either for folk who won’t divorce at all, won’t benefit much from a divorce, or who won’t respond to fairly significant incentives.
You’re missing a large and important subset: people with value systems in which moderately large amounts of money are not as important as a variety of inner emotional states.
To give an example from a different sphere, let’s assume that there is a riskless way to cheat on your taxes. There are people who will do it and people who won’t. It is not particularly useful to describe the latter as not responding “to fairly significant incentives”.
True, though I’d somewhat wrapped them more under “won’t benefit”, since the economic benefits would be outweighed by the emotional costs. At the same time and to state the obvious, people are aware of and overestimate the chances of future emotional states being positive.
And, obviously, neither partner need be or become “bitch” for a relationship to result in an overall positive experience, or less-positive-than-readily-possible experience, and humans do not seem to have good established tools for estimating future emotional states on this long of a timeframe.
This largely matches what I understood as well. The only real difference is the prenup, which as I understand it will generally hold up if it’s not insane and you throw enough lawyer time at it.
However: IANAL, and only did a cursory investigation when I was considering marriage. I do not know how much different states vary in their laws.
End result: I decided to not get married or have children under the current regime, and did an initial investigation on how to transfer and hide my resources to keep them safe should the situation arise.
Here is some information I found in various blogs, that I am not sure how true it is and whether it is so in whole USA or only in some states. Please tell me which of the following is true, or rather where and how much it is true:
After divorce, a man must financially support not only his children, but also his ex-wife.
The money paid to his ex-wife may easily exceed 50% of his income. For example, if the man’s income increases, the judge will increase the payment to the ex, but if the income decreases, the payment remains the same.
A judge may decide to ignore the prenup, and there is no way to defend against it.
Different states have different rules for divorce, which can be abused by filing for divorce in a different state where the rules are more on your side.
And, if you are in a munchkin mood:
As a young woman, if you marry someone and divorce him, you have unlocked the Early Retirement Extreme achievement, and as long as the man lives and has a decent income, you don’t have to work anymore. You should avoid getting married again, unless you want to level up to a man with better income. But living with a boyfriend and having children with him is okay.
How much of this is true say in California or in New York? (This question includes the possibility that the woman will try to get a divorce in another state, if that is possible.)
Because if this would all be true, I think no rational man would marry under such conditions, ever.
EDIT: See these videos on Youtube; they seem to confirm what I wrote here.
Well, everyone who gets married is irrationally overoptimistic about the likelihood of divorce.
Also, part of the problem is that nobody knows what divorce law actually says—I’m an American, but I’m not any better informed about divorce law than you are. Studying up on divorce law in preparation for marriage is just not something people do.
Are they? One puzzle is that statistics show divorce to be relatively uncommon, at least for mid-to-upper class folks. So perhaps the moral hazard problem isn’t quite as terrible as it looks at first glance, given this institutional framework. Maybe judges don’t really ignore pre-nup agreements in many cases; maybe the tradcons are right and “character”, “morality” etc. work well enough as a precommitment mechanism. Who knows. Of course the probabilities are still bad enough that reasonable guys arguably should not marry; the question is why they aren’t worse.
Perhaps not everyone, but definitely most. Most people, from my experience, view divorce as 10% likely. The ‘relatively uncommon’ statistics you reference above are on the order of 50%. That’s a pretty big gap.
You’re comparing the general population 50% with Bogus’s “at least for mid-to-upper class folks.” It makes a big difference, though I don’t have statistics in directly comparable form.
I suspect there’s a small part of the population which keeps getting married and divorced, and they skew the statistics.
The 50% divorce by 25 years statistic is for first marriages.
It also seems to be based on a statistical misinterpretation. The divorce rate and marriage rate per 1000 people have both been declining for decades, and the divorce rate hovers around half of the marriage rate, but this doesn’t equate to 50% of marriages ending in divorce. Since divorces generally occur a significant time after the marriage, and the marriage rate is also declining, comparing the present rate of divorce to the present rate of marriage results in a misleading figure.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate any raw statistics which would allow me to discern the true rate. This writer paints a much rosier picture, but he also doesn’t link to the actual statistics he used or what process he used to determine the rates he gives, so I’d be wary about taking it at face value. I haven’t found any other resource so far that attempts to put numbers to the true rate, although I have found some others which note the problems with the conventional statistics.
My number is from from Stevenson-Wolfers (alt alt), particularly Figure 2, page 37. It is not a misinterpretation. To be more precise, about 50% of first marriages from the 70s made it to 25 years. First marriages from 80s appear to a do a little better, heading for maybe 55%, but it is too soon to tell [this previously said that it was too soon only because of binning decisions, but that’s wrong; the problem is that the data was collected in 2001].
That paper also reflects the consensus of all the other resources I’ve been able to find in that the rate of divorce seems to be declining since the 70s; it may be too early to be overwhelmingly certain, but the evidence suggests that not only are the odds better for a marriage in the 1980s than the 1970s, but that the odds are better still in the 1990s, and then better than that in the 2000s.
Could you point to the comparison of the 2000s to the 1990s? As to the 90s vs the 80s, the difference is trivial.
That the rate has continued to fall through the 2000s I did not take from that paper, but from the other sources I encountered while searching for the raw statistics. A bit more searching suggests some disagreement on the state of the trend between different agencies.
The raw divorce rate might fall purely for demographic reasons, such as the aging population. I think Stevenson and Wolfers talk about this.
Have you considered making a LW poll to test this? State these facts and ask men whether they would be willing to legally marry under modern circumstances. For extra fun, make another poll a few years later and ask how many men who said “no” in the original poll are now married.
EDIT: Though, come to think of it, this probably tells us more about the level of rationality of the average LW user than about what a truly rational man would do in this situation.
This depends very, very heavily on state. At least by statute, the rule is gender-invariant, and focuses on the income of both parties and any disparity between the two (there’s a belief that family law judges seem biased toward women in heterosexual unions, and toward caregivers in homosexual ones, but I’m unaware of trustworthy studies on this). Most states have fairly strict statutory limitations on alimony, generally limiting the duration of payments and the minimum length of a union. Some states, including New York and California, however, leave more discretion to the judge.
Prenups are civil contracts, and like all civil contracts can be voided in certain circumstances, but there are defenses. The most relevant way to void a prenup is to show that it was signed without knowledge (in which case, you can defend yourself by showing that you demonstrated reasonable information) or that the prenup was unconscionable (in which case, you can defend yourself by showing that the prenup was not highly lopsided. Jurisdiction matters on this one, though: “unconscionable” varies highly from state to state.)
Again, depends on state. Many states limit combined alimony to a certain percentage of income, and while most states will set alimony based on the expectation of higher income potential, most don’t allow post-divorce recalculation of alimony without a “significant change of circumstances”, which as a term of art doesn’t cover the alimony-payer getting a raise. The few states that do allow it, require that the change in income be somehow related to sacrifices by the alimony-receiver during the marriage—helping pay for college classes is the prototypical example.
Different states have different rules, but the filing processes are not as simple as just looking in a legal atlas. States only have jurisdiction over a divorce when one of the parties is currently domiciled in that state. In most cases, this requires that the plaintiff live in that state for a minimum of a six months (usually a year). If you live in Texas, and your husband or wife tries to establish residency in California and New York, this is pretty obvious.
In New York and California (as well as a large number of other states), alimony generally terminates on evidence of cohabitation, excepting extenuating circumstances. So this /probably/ only works if you’re willing to give up the live-in boyfriend.
Alimony is not in perpetuity everywhere, either (although it is in Massachusetts). I’m very happy to report that in Virginia, it only lasts for half the length of the marriage.
This is not true in general. This may be true in certain cases.
Not “easily”. It is theoretically possible but not very likely.
Well, you can “defend against it” by the usual courtroom arguments, but yes, you cannot choose to ignore court decisions just because your private agreement with another party said something.
True, though filing in a different state is not trivially easy.
Marry someone you trust wouldn’t be a bitch.
Unfortunately, you need not select merely for folk who won’t be “a bitch”, but either for folk who won’t divorce at all, won’t benefit much from a divorce, or who won’t respond to fairly significant incentives. The difference between even moderate legal tactics and weak ones can easily make the difference of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year—and if you ask family lawyers, you’ll quickly find that “amicable divorces” are for most practical definitions a contradiction in terms.
Someone being “a bitch” can be much, much worse, certainly. ((And the monetary issues are only one out of many problems, if either party goes for the dirty tricks playbook.)) But neither party needs to be evil for it to be a major concern.
You’re missing a large and important subset: people with value systems in which moderately large amounts of money are not as important as a variety of inner emotional states.
To give an example from a different sphere, let’s assume that there is a riskless way to cheat on your taxes. There are people who will do it and people who won’t. It is not particularly useful to describe the latter as not responding “to fairly significant incentives”.
True, though I’d somewhat wrapped them more under “won’t benefit”, since the economic benefits would be outweighed by the emotional costs. At the same time and to state the obvious, people are aware of and overestimate the chances of future emotional states being positive.
And, obviously, neither partner need be or become “bitch” for a relationship to result in an overall positive experience, or less-positive-than-readily-possible experience, and humans do not seem to have good established tools for estimating future emotional states on this long of a timeframe.
This largely matches what I understood as well. The only real difference is the prenup, which as I understand it will generally hold up if it’s not insane and you throw enough lawyer time at it.
However: IANAL, and only did a cursory investigation when I was considering marriage. I do not know how much different states vary in their laws.
End result: I decided to not get married or have children under the current regime, and did an initial investigation on how to transfer and hide my resources to keep them safe should the situation arise.