As much as I hate this schmuck, the proposed law isn't bad on the surface. I'd be furious if I had to work past retirement to keep supporting an ex wife whom I divorced decades prior. Like I get the intent of alimony, but to me it seems quite a bit outdated when most working households have both adults having their own careers. And if a couple divorces, why should the breadwinner have to pay to maintain the other's lifestyle instead of a stipend until the other gets on their feet. I'd be raging if I was busting my ass to keep making money, and her insta feed is nothing but her going shopping and having spa days on my dime.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Like I get the intent of alimony, but to me it seems quite a bit outdated when most working households have both adults having their own careers.
I don't think you do. If both people have the same level of income, there's no alimony. Alimony is meant to allow someone who has been a house spouse for years (decades) to think about divorce, so they are not trapped by finances.
How easy do you think it is to get a job after working part time (or not working) for 20 years? Older with no recent experience is not going to get you any jobs.
Wich is precisely the point of this sham of a law. I think Republicans know that they are decades away from revoking no-fault divorce, but they can erode a woman's ability to leave an unhappy marriage. This, abortion bans, school choice, it's all about turning the clock back before women's lib, ERA, etc.
That's all fine, and like I said, that's where alimony does make sense. But I've heard of cases where two spouses both have careers, albeit one makes substantially more than another, and alimony is awarded to the lower earner for lifestyle offset or something like that, basically that one spouse is accustomed to a certain lifestyle and therefore the higher earning spouse offsets the discrepancy. That's where I think it's ridiculous.
My brother tells that story. His wife had a career also and could make much more money if she switched job locations. But he now has to pay her because she won't move.
The truth is she did have a career and it was sidelined by their children, while his was not, and he continued up the ladder. She could move(like they did for his career once already, as a family) but doing so takes the children more than 100 miles away and she could lose custody and/or child support for breaking the parenting agreement.
Generally my brothers an ok guy, but his vision and view on this is objectively wrong, and viewed through a lense the divorce created in him.
Guess which version everyone in his small town knows, and what gets repeated...
Except even in dual income households a lot of times, the lower earner in the relationship has made career sacrifices to enable the higher earner, be it
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taking a roles with lower responsibility to have increased flexibility
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accepting jobs in new locations with limited growth opportunity when the higher earner moves for a promotion
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foregoing growth opportunities / education earlier in life to support raising a family
Relationships are a partnership, working together for a collective goal. When one partner "makes substantially more than the other" that probably wasn't achieved alone
You mean how some people put their careers on hold to raise their kid(s) until they're old enough to go to school because the cost of child care is too expensive and thus their earnings and retirement suffered for over half a decade at least and then they get divorced and the stay at home dad is awarded some alimony because yeah, his earnings went way down after he re-entered the work force and thus was awarded alimony for making sure his wife and kids were taken care of and she was supported as she continued to work and move up?
But yeah, it's totally unfair that the wife was made to pay alimony even though they both had careers at the time of the divorce but she made much more money.
Alimony shouldn't exist.
But we should also have social safety nets in place such that alimony isn't necessary.
The idea of alimony, though, has morphed over the years from allowing someone to, as you say, consider divorce without being trapped by finances, to replacing a stay-at-home spouse's potential income had they not been the stay-at-home spouse. That change makes me pretty uncomfortable, especially the government stepping in requiring an ex spouse to pay what the other person might have made.
In Germany there is this net. But you still have to pay alimony.
Yeah, I’m conflicted on this one, absolutely hate DeSantis, but this doesn’t sound bad. There’s a lot of laws/policies that unfairly punish one group over another in divorces, custody, and child support. The pendulum on that front swung too far from one end of the spectrum to the other and needs to be equalized.
Have to agree. It's a relic of a much different time. With more women in the workforce and marriage rates dropping, being a divorcee no longer carries the stigma that it once did.
I'm okay with familial support being weighted to whomever has primary custody of any children.
And if there was a major discrepancy in net worth, like the Bezos fiasco, it seems fair to split things up more evenly.
It's a very touchy subject. I don't want to be even remotely associated with the "men's rights" shitstorm. But I would like to see more of these antiquated, gender-based laws get modernized.
Well in the case of kids, that's where child support comes in, and is a different story from alimony. In my view, barring a prenuptial agreement, it seems like the martial assets should be split, and that's that. In the case where one spouse dropped out of the workforce to raise a family, alimony does have some merit, but it shouldn't be a permanent monthly stipend; it may make sense to require some support for a couple years, but a breadwinner shouldn't be required to support an ex spouse in perpetuity.
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As slimy and nasty as DeSantis is, this doesn't sound crazy. Who thought permanent alimony was a good idea on the first place? So you divorce, ex-spouse pays you, and they never get to retire or quit their job because you want their money until you die? Why not allow compromises or change? Even paying child support isn't permanent.
Okay so let me offer some context here to shed light on a few things you said. Please know that the Venn diagram between me and DeSantis is razor thin, and the only thing (I think) we have in common is that we are carbon-based life forms. I also see some common sense items in what was described in the article, but I have my larger misgivings, which I'll explain much further below.
Why alimony is important and necessary
Here's why alimony is important for the rest of an ex-spouse's life. I want to be clear that I believe a spouse of any gender should have access to alimony, but the most traditional situation is a woman who forfeited having a career outside of the home to be a mother and homemaker, while a man furthered his career for - let's just say - a long enough time that once the divorce occurs, it's too late for the woman to reasonably start a career and expect to rise to the same level the man is at in his career at time of divorce. Let's use an arbitrary number like 20 years for my example. Let's assume these two people met and married no later than 25 years old for the sake of my example, as well. Alimony is not relevant for couples married for very short periods (less than 5 years), nor is it relevant if both spouses worked full-time jobs.
So in my example here, both people are about 40-45 years old. Retirement age is going to vary by industry, but roughly let's say 65 years old. By this point, the man has paid into either a 401k, pension, a Roth IRA, or some other retirement financial tool for 20+ years as well as a federal retirement program, usually Social Security. One of the stipulations of paying into these financial tools is that you have to have a job in which you're submitting W-2/I-9 documentation. A stipulation of receiving the money you paid into Social Security in specific, is that you have to make enough dollar-amount SS contributions that amount to a little more than 10 years of working a W-2/I-9 kind of job/career. And to boot, the amount of SS you get paid after retiring is based on your highest earning 35 years of your lifetime of work.
So when a woman has skipped college, not worked outside the home, hasn't gained job skills, etc. etc. for 20 years, she is now coming back to the job market with zero tools and equipment to get into a career (though obviously could enter the workforce through a paycheck-to-paycheck poverty wages kind of job), has no Social Security credits for a retirement that is just about as far away for her as it is for her ex-spouse, and has no savings or other financial resources because she was a homemaker and didn't earn money as her compensation for her labor. She is also now going into new situations at a time in life in which we have all lost neuroplasticity and may find it difficult to learn new things or go back to college. And we should also be realistic about the subtle/legal ways in which older people are discriminated against in the hiring process.
This is why alimony exists. It helps to make up for the opportunity-cost in an adult's older career years and for lack of retirement security. When the members of the First Wives Association and other ex-spouses seek lifetime alimony, it's because they either will never have access to their own Social Security benefits, or will have access to extremely scant benefits whenever they do retire.
Here are my concerns about this bill, regardless of some common sense aspects of it
After Roe v Wade was overturned, there were a series of news articles this past year about what the next play for conservatives would be to further erode women's right, now that a woman's autonomy over her own reproductive choices was no longer enshrined. A lot of writers started pointing to quieter movements in states like Texas and Florida to abolish "no fault" divorces.
Remember a few months ago when Steven Crowder was pissing and moaning about how his wife initiated their divorce and the thing that seemed to really miff him the most was how "apparently in the state of Texas, she can do that"? The issue as far as he is articulating it isn't necessarily the stress of a divorce but that he couldn't exert control over the situation or over her - she had the legal right to dissolve their marriage all of her own volition. That is unacceptable to men who will always want control over women. The fact that conservatives want to come after this legal autonomy after already "winning" the war on women's bodily autonomy shouldn't be glossed over.
No-fault divorce is an alternative to fault divorces. For states that permit no-fault divorce, people can still cite a fault. A no-fault divorce means that either party can initiate divorce proceedings without having to cite fault of the other spouse, usually physical abuse, infidelity, or inability to bear children.
However throughout the '50s, '60s, and '70s, if you were a woman being abused or raped by your spouse, it was exceptionally difficult to prove that abuse or to gain sympathy over that abuse in order to follow through with a fault divorce. And if your husband isn't cheating on you and you have children, you can't cite the other typical reasons for divorce. So a lot of women were trapped in domestic violence for hundreds of years in America because of these divorce laws.
Only in the late '60s, when California enacted a no-fault divorce law in 1969, did women's rights around this matter advance. This is why divorce "skyrocketed" in the 1970s. I want to be clear that I believe that no-fault divorce should power all genders of spouses, but relating to the Women's Empowerment movement of the 1970s, this was absolutely key to women starting to rebuild their lives away from being daddy's little girl who was transferred like property to becoming Mrs. John Smith. This is one of a few key moments in American history that allowed women the opportunities to eventually become CEOs, Supreme Court Justices, congresspeople, and homemakers.
Though people tend to focus heavily on divorce rates as a metric of failure of a relationship (or failure of "family values"), the reality is that women in today's era are technically better positioned to willingly enter into marriage knowing there are legal mechanisms in place should that marriage turn sour. If women understood that by entering into a marriage, there would be an almost impossible chance to escape it if something arose, then I think we will see many more educated women never accepting marriage at all for themselves. Educated women were already less likely to marry as young as uneducated women. The most vulnerable population affected are uneducated women who marry young to conservative spouses and are manipulated into (or socialized into valuing) being homemakers.
Hence even though there are common sense elements in this legislation coming out of Florida, there are very real harms that will come out of this 20 years from now that impact conservative women getting married in 2024. I also worry about the larger "give them an inch, and they invade Poland" posture of the Republican party as this alimony law could eventually lead to an erosion of no-fault divorce laws, as well.
Coming from my perspective of "currently researching a divorce case from the mid 1800s", there are also parallels between divorce access and abortion access. In the 1800s, if you were rich enough you could travel to a state with less restrictive divorce laws, set up residency (ranging from a few months to 3 years) and file for divorce in your new home state.
Similarly, people with money and/or connections can afford to travel for medical procedures.
(I'm still figuring out how alimony worked in my 1872 Connecticut case-- I think she just got a default 1/3 of their combined assets and he skipped the state, never to pay a drop of support to his ex-wife or child.)
Thanks for adding this info!
For what it's worth, this still happens in the 2020s, but as you point out, only for affluent couples. I'm picturing here how high earners can (or may be required by state divorce law) take a trial separation for a predetermined amount of time and establish residency in a new state. That second state may have more favorable laws to one parent over the other for child custody or may have no-fault protection whereas the first state doesn't. Alimony is less of a concern for these scenarios, but family law for child custody usually gets very complicated when two states are involved.
Obviously spouses who have been homemakers can't access these relocation measures, which further highlights who exactly is vulnerable under this law.
This is a really good analysis, thank you.
I feel like the "marriage" is an entity into itself that might need to be considered, much like a corporation. The whole deal with a "breadwinner + homemaker" arrangement (increasingly difficult to achieve in America) is that the "breadwinner" can focus more on their career, presumably advancing farther, making more money, etc. because the homemaker is taking care of basically everything outside of that effort.
That's all an investment, not a one time thing. There's a reasonable expectation of a "return" on that homemakers investment.
I feel like there must be a fair way to recognize that in a divorce, and I don't think it's "once the breadwinner decides to retire, the homemaker is cut off." People share in retirement, too.
Perhaps the alimony should change to a reasonable share of the retiree's retirement income instead of whatever the pre retirement along was? Like based on how long the marriage was or something.
You raise a great point of view here on investment on behalf of the homemaker. Stay at home spouses pursue this avenue over a career under the assumption that they will be financially provided for for the rest of their lives, including at retirement age. Homemakers wouldn't opt to do this for 20+ years if there was the guarantee that they will be dumped and abandoned in their twilight years, and there goes the financial plans and security as well. Even when you talk to young adults about all the "What if...?" scenarios that are anything other than both spouses dying peacefully side by side in their sleep at age 95, the socialization in favor of "family values" creates such a deep resistance to believing it could ever happen to me.
I also have been very intentional to stay as gender neutral in this discussion as possible because I think there is a slowly rising tide of stay at home husbands/dads in American society that are also opting out of a career in order to be homemakers, and they could eventually be harmed by the erosion of ex-spousal rights. I don't think anyone is really talking about the implications on this dynamic. For a connection to history, the first gender-discrimination case Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court was Moritz to expand a tax refund program "for care takers" to include men because it is discriminatory to assume that only women are caretakers and deny access to federal rights to men because of it.
This is something that I've been putting more thought into which has previously been a generalized "the patriarchy hurts men, too" concern. But this Florida law in specific could have surprising consequences for a demographic in society (men) who haven't historically accepted being screwed over by the system this damn badly.
This may vary by state but generally speaking, the assets and debts of a marriage are divided equally. This includes retirement accounts and pensions. I’m not 100% on what happens to social security benefits. The rest are definitely to be divided equally. Neither spouse can horde it all. Loss of earnings potential due to one spouse raising a family is definitely a reason for alimony. In my state, OH, it isn’t strictly required but is customary based on number of years married. It is a finite time. When I first heard about this practice from a guy in Virginia he told me how his ex wife just lived with another man rather than marrying him because he made a lot of money and marrying the new guy would significantly impact her income.
I appreciate you writing this out, I honestly didn't even thing about it like that at first. That makes so much sense, definitely not a good thing to happen then as their lives will be upended. I hate that guy
Permanent alimony is a relic from when women stayed home and cooked and cleaned. It prevented them from being kicked to the curb without two pennies to rub together.
Now that women are more independent and have joined the work force I think they should be responsible for their own backup plan
So NOW they’re worried about “family values”
I am still always surprised when reporters find women who vote Republican. How can they not see that to them they are either viewed as property or second class citizens?
I am not from the US but I always interept it as, "Fellow American, I see these politicians are putting policies in place that are making your life hard, they don't affect me as I've put things in place to avoid what happened to you from happening to me so I will support these people who continue to do things to affect groups of people as I've done well enough for myself thus far".
Until of course the same politicians do something that affects them personally and then their tune changes to, "Why would they do this to me? I've always supported them!"
LGBTQ Republicans and Black Republicans really baffle me.
Party that constantly votes against their own interest suddenly aware of losing their rights.
Who’d have guessed it would have taken these idiots this long to figure it all out?
It's only a problem when it affects them
You mean I jave to carry the rotting fetus to term? I didn't mean for this to apply toe in aby way. The GOP wants to manipulate and control everyone, especially women. Yet there are still women voting republican because "the democrats will raise my taxes" or "the democrats give welfare to everyone". I'm not saying the democrats ate great, or even really a leftist party, but the GOP has gone full Christian nationalist. Any woman voting republican has bought a huge serving of "those other poor people, the ones who deserve it".
Here's the difference between today's conservatives/Republicans and liberals/Democrats that I think will explain a lot of the whole, "how can they consistently vote against their own interests‽":
As a liberal I saw this article and immediately started asking questions (in my head). I wanted to know the far-reaching effects, unintended consequences, etc. I went to the comments to see some different perspectives--knowing full well there could be some total Nazis commenting as well. Fundamentally, I don't trust politicians statements about things like this. Whether it's a Democrat or a Republican... I want the truth (especially in regards to just who is pushing for any given legislation and what their motives are).
Conservatives/Republicans don't do that. They'll turn to their trusted sources to form their opinions. If their trusted sources are actually trustworthy and weren't pushing some agenda that method would be totally fine. In fact, it used to be totally fine! For a very long time there weren't outrage machines in mass media that exist solely to manipulate people (and we now have one mass media company who was forced to admit under oath that's exactly what they do).
The conservative way of trusting authorities makes a lot of sense! The only problem with it is of course, "who can you trust?" The propagandist's goal is then to convince these people to only trust their messaging. There's a number of ways to manipulate people into this situation such as always being first with your message (humans are hard-wired to trust the first message more than later messages that say something different) and always having rage-inducing reasons as to why any given thing is happening along with scapegoats to blame. This creates something like a hard psychological shell around their version of the message.
The next phase to really lock-in trust of your (completely untrustworthy) authority is conspiracies: Any alternative ideas or messaging must be from "others" who always have an evil agenda. People with power... Come up with boogeymen who may or may not be related to your messaging but have names that most people will recognize but know nothing about. Especially if these people have nothing at all to do with any of it (it makes them more sinister; supposedly inserting their tentacles into other people's lives without good reason).
Now that you've got people to trust you and your messaging you can make them hate whoever you want and by extension, vote however you want. When bad things happen to these people they'll blame your chosen boogeymen (e.g. immigrants, minorities, a particular political party, etc) and certainly not the very people who put them in this position in the first place because they're the saviors; the ones fighting the boogeymen.
Remember that mass media--especially television "news"--is never going to be informative enough to give people all of the information related to any given topic. In fact, the best they will ever do is to give a tiny little slice of the information. A slice, that if chosen properly, can utterly and completely mislead someone to a conclusion that is equally as utterly and completely incorrect.
When you look at the statistics it should become exceedingly clear why Republican women vote the way they do: They put their trust in the wrong sources. Over and over again.
It's always the same story: "How could they do this to me‽ I trusted them!"
When a liberal justice or Democratic politician does something liberals don't like the response from that side of the political isle is always the same as well, "WTF! They're a liar!"
The difference is subtle but it's very important. The liberal/Democrat formed a conclusion based on promises and prior behavior. The opinion of the liberal/Democrat of any given politician or party is based on how they act and what they're claiming to believe in rather than an inherent trust in the individual. The person or party is almost never the authority.
The Democratic party is always infighting. They're very rarely ever 100% in agreement about anything. Because everyone is skeptical and wants to know basically everything that will result from every action. Positions shift and change often because new information could change everything. This makes it difficult to form consensus on anything that hasn't been researched to hell and back.
This is why Democratic primaries are full of politicians referencing statistics and outcomes and Republican primaries are full of politicians making anecdotes and trying to prove that they're on the right side.
When a Republican is voting against their interests it's simply because they trust the authority of the party. Because they truly believe that they're more trustworthy than any alternative. This is also why hypocrisy doesn't really exist in the minds of conservatives/Republicans: The party (and its leaders) are inherently trusted and if they need to change their position it's pretty much always viewed as a mere tactical posture, "for the greater good."
God damn, sucha succinct and thoughtful breakdown. Thank you, Riskable.
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To Floridan Republican Women, "HAVE YOU NOT BEEN PAYING ATTENTION?!"
but I didn’t think the face eating leopard party would eat my face!
BuT nOw iT aFFecTs Meeeeee. So now it’s different!!1!
Expecting right wingers to care about anyone but themselves is like asking a fish to fly. There's a few that can kinda do it briefly, many more that try, but in the end it's just obviously impossible for them.
Yeah, piss off there Republican women. They worked to make sure that women everywhere didn't have a choice and now they're all up in arms now that the Republican party has stripped women of even more protections. Well that's what you get and the only shame is that actual sane women are also going to be hurt by their actions.
I wish someone has a LeopardsAteMyFace on Lemmy
Lmfao they're still gonna vote for him
I've been seeing a lot of reactions to this news that range from "Haha, get what you fuckin' deserve you fucking wannabe tradwives" to "oh sure, NOW they can't stomach being in the Republican party now that they've been impacted" and I totally get it, but I primarily see an opportunity to use this to start to get them to critically evaluate their worldview and beliefs by pointing out how its the result of the things the left opposes.
The problem with that is you’re framing it as something the left opposes. When pandering to the right the correct play is to frame it as something the right supports.
Thoughts and prayers
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