>I wonder how much of this is because more women are joining the workforce. If men are leaving the workforce by their own free will because their wife is working and they are staying home with the kids, both of these facts could be true
Not what's happening. For one, marriages are decreasing too and marriage age increases.
Legal marriage is decreasing. You can draw on more benefits as single from the System. Legal marriage also leads to pathological complications in terms of seperation in some states.
A substantial population of men are also deeply concerned that a legal marriage will end in a costly, lopsided, and devastating divorce. It is no secret that women have the advantage in such proceedings.
For the breadwinner the outcome isn't very gendered, except for the conditions of custody of any children.
And although not very gendered, it is a shitty contract where the worst clauses have extremely high rates of occurring. Even when isolating to later aged upper middle class economic equals, a 10% rate of triggering the worst clauses in a financial contract is extremely bad.
You simply can't decouple the financial aspects of a financial contract just because how someone might have been conditioned to romanticize an overarching concept.
> For the breadwinner the outcome isn't very gendered
This is a distinction without a difference. Even today, with women's educational attainment and workforce compensation skyrocketing, they still strongly marry "up". In the aggregate, this leaves the situation arguably even worse than before:
1. More men are pushed out of the marriage market.
2. Men who are in the marriage market still face financial devastation when the wife decides it's time to "find herself" in a no-fault divorce state (e.g. nearly all of them).
> Even today, with women's educational attainment and workforce compensation skyrocketing, they still strongly marry "up".
Yes, while the delta between spousal earnings is much smaller which also leads to a third observation:
3. Economic equals that are stable are marrying each other for the first time/generation, which increases inequality for the people (mostly for the other remaining women) that have nobody to marry up to.
The women aren't interested in being in an unstable situation and are also not interested in taking care of a man, both genders in this binary situation are opting to avoid marriage (or merely consider it unattainable) if there is no stability. And of course there is my observation that it's also a bad contract.
And the power dynamic this creates puts men in a state of walking on eggshells to unrealistic expectations from a partner who can take them to the cleaners for any reason, which is highly destructive to relationships, and a massive reason why so many are opting out of relationships and spend their life online
> I definitely think (particularly young) people should be better educated about what a marriage contract is and isn't before they get into it.
I agree, but I think the HN crowd might grossly underestimate how difficult it is for lay people to get accurate, actionable advice that is also fully understood.
The default takeaway for a not small number of people is “don’t get married if you are successful and like financial security”.
Correction: Don't get married at all, regardless of economic status. If you are rich, you can lose almost everything you've worked for. If you're poor you have a good chance of ending in a de facto debtors' prison.
> “don’t get married if you are successful and like financial security”.
But that's terrible advice really, and doesn't follow reality. So I think there is something more going on.
I don't think simple, actionable advice is that hard really, but there is a lot of political and ideological noise around the subject that confuses people.
It certainly does follow reality. You just haven't talked to the large number of financially ruined men that the family courts system has let be abused by vindictive women.
It's common. The root problem is presuppositions in the marriage contract are wrong.
The reality is most relationships don't last forever for lots of reasons and most reasons being benign.
But the penalties in the marriage contract are based on the fallacy that relationships should last forever and if they don't it's the provider's penalty and the provider's life energy should be consumed forever to pay for it.
Obviously there's some reasons it was setup that way such as providing for kids, but it's out of balanced and been abused for so long it's now a stereotype.
This is a major cause for lack of relationship formation! Because a failed relationship can demolish your future many hardworking smart men have moved the goalposts so high that we can see statistically they are less likely to have children.
Those who didn't work hard and have nothing to lose are not being punished they are instead given welfare.
Won't someone think of the children and fix this stupid law driven power imbalance that's driving us toward the future warned in the idiocracy movies.
In civilised jurisdictions these rules apply to unmarried couples too. The amount of economic violence, historically, perpetrated by men over women has been huge.
> In civilised jurisdictions these rules apply to unmarried couples too. The amount of economic violence, historically, perpetrated by men over women has been huge.
I’m guessing we are talking about two different things.
I will also add that, in my circle, women are getting screwed as much by this as men, so “the worm has turned” might better be “be careful what you wish for”.
I largely have no issues with approximately equal division of assets acquired during a marriage.
The two main issues I have are:
1. Determining what counts as an asset.
2. The method of contesting anything in a contested divorce.
For 1, appreciation of any asset counts as an asset that should be divided.
If you came into a marriage with $1 million in ETFs and a $1.5m house free and clear, and those go up to $1.7m etfs and $2.5m house, spouse gets half of $1.7m asset appreciation for…. I struggle to answer this question in a way that us not “being lucky”.
Note that they do not owe half of losses if assets lose value.
Meanwhile, somehow inheritance is treated as largely untouchable money. How does that make sense?
For 2, if a divorce is not amicable, sometimes the party that feels scorned takes a scorched earth approach and basically is willing to give a ton of money to lawyers (“spouse doesn’t get it!”) while also freezing assets.
I’ve seen some very asset rich people be cash poor because their former spouse just wouldn’t let them sell anything, even when they split the proceeds. This was just nothing other than malice. Sure, you can go to court to force them to let you sell for cash, but this is just another example of a pathological aspect of our current system.
This aspect can also create complications in things like limited partnerships and other businesses in which it can be really hard to assign values to the asset and even harder divide the value of the asset without simultaneously destroying that value.
Pre-nups can help, but they largely make the outcome slightly more certain while still leaving much to be contested via litigation if the party that feels scorned chooses to do so.
I know a lot of these rules are in place because of the historical economic shenanigans that men have subjected women to, but that doesn’t mean that the system is reasonable, fair, or not pathological for certain (perhaps many or even most) cases.
>Meanwhile, somehow inheritance is treated as largely untouchable money. How does that make sense?
That depends on how one's finances are set up beforehand. There are quite a few financial instruments that are almost always untouchable. One such instrument is the irrevocable trust. In short, an irrevocable trust isn't owned by the trustee/divorcée. As a result, anything awarded from it is not subject to property division.
What do you mean by "civilized jurisdictions"? I don't know any place that explicitly adjudicates the separation of unmarried couples as though it was legally equivalent to a formal divorce. You'll have to be more specific.
Unmarried couples may fall into one of two types: common-law marriages and meretricious relationships. In the US, the former is approved by a vanishingly small number of states. The latter has no legal rights to property division or palimony without an explicit cohabitation contract. Even then, many states don't recognize palimony at all.
Not what's happening. For one, marriages are decreasing too and marriage age increases.