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While there certainly is fear porn, I think there really is more risk in some ways for modern women simply because being a deadbeat dad carries way less stigma than it used to, and everyone is highly mobile.
You can get married and have a kid with a guy who seems great. Then 5 years into the marriage he gets bored and cheats, there's some mild tut-tutting but in current year there is no shared, deeply-rooted community that you both belong to, and neither of you are particularly religious, so he has no reputation to preserve and suffers little to no personal, professional, or moral consequence. And what few consequences he does suffer simply evaporate when he moves two states away to live with his new wife and family. This is in fact exactly what happened to aunt of mine who was an all around decent middle class person. Her husband simply got bored and left, and that was it.
Uh, you know that up until very recently if you moved a state away there was absolutely no way for anyone to know what you did in the town you used to live in? "I moved to take a job- I heard the mill was hiring". Today due to facebook the 'avoiding your other family' is harder to hide, and outside of a small slice of the PMC Americans are less mobile, not more. In the fifties the guy who moved to town to see if the mill was hiring was commonplace; now it's limited to boomtowns like Midland. And of course back then there was no way for the average person to tell if his story was truthful or not.
'Shared, deeply rooted communities' are not some ancient tradition in America. They have, as far as anyone can tell, never been a thing here.
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I often hear this trope about husbands getting bored and leaving their wives, but I have a hard time conceiving how that actually works. Surely he would be on the hook for child support at the very least, and if the impetus for him leaving was cheating-related, surely that would result in a very favorable judgement in the divorce. I'm aware that in many cases the man is "judgement-proof" in the sense that he has few assets or income to extract, but in this case you've mentioned that your aunt is a middle-class person, so presumably her ex-husband is as well, and therefore not judgement proof.
This is obviously not an ideal outcome for the woman, especially socially, but it's much better than is commonly portrayed, where a woman has pinned her entire economic future on a man only to see him abandon her and condemn her to a life of eternal poverty.
The problem is that good outcomes in the law go to people who can afford good lawyers. So maybe the divorce actually was cheating-related, but if he has control of all the accounts, a robust community network and is willing to pay up for the absolute best legal representation, then how is his wife going to afford enough representation to gather evidence and make that case? It sounds like OP's uncle was relatively easygoing and generous, but that is not the modal attitude among divorcing spouses.
Similarly, post-divorce, being awarded child support/spousal support and actually collecting said support are extremely different things, and I assume affording good representation makes a substantial difference there, too. There are a lot of ways that someone with good lawyers can bully a less well-connected person into making custody or financial concessions.
Even if child support is awarded and collected, it may or may not match the actual expense of raising the children, a gap which the ex-wife will struggle to close with the wages of the kind of low-skill, entry-level work you can pick up as a 42-year-old job-seeking for the first time.
I agree that good outcomes go to the well-resourced in both law and life, but the average wife is much better resourced than the average husband. The median American woman is, famously, much better socially connected than the median American man, and when we're considering a married couple, their wealth at the point of divorce is by definition equal. That, combined with the well-known bias for women and against men of divorce courts, should mean that the average woman is getting a better deal out of the divorce than the facts normally would suggest by the letter of the law. The common story that comes out of divorce court is that it's the men who are being bullied into making custody or financial concessions, not the women.
I don't know, I feel like there's a severe disconnect between what we perceive to be normal. Having non-joint accounts in a marriage, for example, seems insane to me unless both partners work and have similar earnings, and the other stipulations in your post seem like severe outliers that one could reliably detect ahead of time if a woman were truly afraid of being abandoned.
I've had relatives and friends who've gone through this, so I'm weighting their experiences. One friend was able to reclaim her life after her husband became abusive and floridly unfaithful only because she was the one who kept the family accounts, hence had access to funds to secure an attorney. She also took the advice of friends at work, could use her relative independence of movement to make the necessary consultations, knew something about the process and could assess the attorney's advice because she was well-educated, etc. Her husband continued to spiral downward and there was definitely no spousal support on the table, but after the divorce, she just kept working her existing middle-class job, got a nice little apartment and did fine.
I also have a friend who's a SAHM in a more patriarchal setup where the husband keeps track of the money (after all, it's his, he earned it) and doles out an allowance for household shopping, reads and pays his wife's credit card bills, works from home where he can incidentally observe her comings and goings, is the final word in decisions of household policy (his money, his call). Her husband is a nice guy and she's able to hold her own because she worked for a while before having kids and has a reasonable perspective on things. But if she had gotten married to him at 20, wrangled toddlers full-time for a decade or so and then encountered the family crisis that my first friend did? I really think she would have been screwed. At minimum, she would have stayed in a worsening situation for far too long out of sheer exhaustion, dearth of resources and fear of the unknown.
I'm not sure I see how your examples support your view.
Example 1 is a couple where both partners earned money, presumably in approximately equal amounts, yet only one partner (the wife) managed the accounts. This pretty directly disproves that earning money yourself shields you from not having access to money to hire a lawyer with, since judging by your wording, the husband was earning some of the money during their marriage and yet it was the wife who controlled the accounts. That is, in a universe where it was your friend who was abusive and her husband the victim, he would have had no recourse despite earning money himself. This means that having a job doesn't actually protect one from this type of abuse!
Example 2 is a couple where everything is going great and the problem only exists after a series of hypotheticals. There are a few assertions about how the husband holds the power, but power doesn't exist unless it is exercised and you can't know who actually has the power until a conflict happens. In particular, these quotes make me suspicious:
I've only ever encountered this kind of reasoning in situations where someone wants to paint the man as a powerful abuser and the woman as a powerless victim for the purposes of legitimizing some sort of benefit given to women. If it was truly a principle that whoever earns the money gets more say in how it is spent, you'd see that principle used in other contexts, which I don't. For example, try imagining this exchange actually happening:
Maybe that's normal in your circles, but it's unthinkable among anyone I've ever known.
My point is, it might very well be that your friend's husband handles the finances in their marriage, but that probably has more to do with the fact that handling finances is a household chore that get assigned and less to do with the fact that he's the breadwinner. In a breadwinner-homemaker relationship, there is very little the breadwinner can do to leverage their position against the homemaker short of threatening to go on "strike" by quitting their job. In contrast, the homemaker typically has a lot of leverage due to their greater influence on the children and greater control over the home environment.
In the first friend's case, both spouses had their own individual accounts (which is how he'd funded various peccadillos already), and she managed the joint household budget because she was more organized-- so both of them ended up getting lawyers. It does illustrate that access to funds at the level of individual accounts is important, though, and while I'd recommend that no SAH or working spouse of either gender give their partner absolute control of the finances, I don't see how you avoid this if the sole employed partner wants it that way. In the case of a breadwinning spouse who says "It's my money, I'll deposit it in my account and you just let me know how much you need for the groceries" or "sorry, we don't have enough money for Timmy's braces," what is the SAH spouse's counterargument supposed to be?
This is an actual dispute that has arisen in a SAHM family I know. In that case, nobody explicitly said "you have no right to complain," but the working spouse said "OK, I'll work on it, I'll let you know when I think we can afford it," and then somehow they never could afford it, even as a series of other things he valued got afforded just fine. There again, I don't know how the non-working spouse's counterargument is supposed to go. "Why are you buying ___ when we can't have a bigger house so Janie can have a yard to play in?" "I told you we couldn't afford the house, and stop nagging me about how I spend my money."
I definitely agree that control over the accounts is important. I just don't see how that's related to being a breadwinner or a homemaker. Just because someone is the person who performs the labor that leads to money being deposited in an account doesn't mean they're the one who controls said account. In East Asia, for example, the traditional arrangement is that the husband works outside the home to earn a salary and the wife manages the finances, giving him an allowance to spend. So to answer
"We are married and therefore equal stakeholders of this marriage and should have equal say over how our money is spent. If you don't agree with this, I will tell my friends and your reputation will be harmed. If you still do not accede, I will take you to court and you will lose because every institution that deals with this sort of thing recognizes financial abuse as a real and horrible thing, especially when done by a man to a woman, and you will incur their wrath."
If it's just two people having an argument, no arguments matter. It doesn't matter who's correct unless one of them can use their correctness to convince the other, which is a strategy easily defeated by refusing to be convinced. The only time anything matters is when other people get involved. Therefore, the winning argument is to go to a third party and say "My husband is doing the dictionary definition of financial abuse to me. Please smite him." And unless that third party agrees with the husband that it's his money and not their money (which they won't, as was the point of my hypothetical "You have no right to complain" conversation), the wife easily emerges victorious.
That is fascinating, because I was honestly about to make the same argument in the opposite direction: that regardless of how far orders could actually be enforced in a case of open resistance, people mostly obey when they believe the other person has a legitimate authority to give the orders. A husband's being able to say "Come on, I'm happy to support you because I love you, but I sweated for this money while you were baking cookies with the kids, it is the product of my labor and skill" - well, that's a somewhat psychologically compelling way to claim authority over the family funds. And "I gave you this material thing, now you owe me something back" is pretty universally effective as a coercion tactic, so much so that street scammers use it on tourists all the time.
Respecting my friend's example, I was only imagining that it illustrated how having an independent income can ensure your children get what they need even if your husband is a skinflint - I'm pretty well up in modern PMC/HR-type attitudes, but it never occurred to me that her predicament was textbook financial abuse or that she should call him out on it, so it's really interesting that you find it obviously unacceptable. Knowing the wife, I'm fairly sure she also just thinks "well, so he feels possessive about the money, no use starting a big fight about it," so preserves family harmony while being a little sad about what she is and isn't able to do for the kids.
At least one relative she consulted in my hearing also had the reaction that it was unkind of him to keep refusing the house (so, not "you have no right to complain"), but without any instinctive sense that his behavior was actually violating her financial rights, so I'm not as optimistic about the informal third-party community intervention as you are. And I do think that taking things all the way to separation over something like low-level bullying would be obviously disastrous for a mom with no money and small kids who adore their dad.
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I think your suspicion is reasonable, and I can't speak to how common my aunt's case was. But AFAIK he simply ate the child support costs and straight up handed over the kids to my aunt. I think they had a relatively amicable divorce because he gave my aunt most of their assets (house, car, etc). He had already knocked up his new girlfriend and has since started a second family. I admit I don't know how alimony works, but my aunt is middle class and white collar, while he comes from a working class background and, I suspect, made considerably less money than she did (during the time of the divorce -- I don't think it was so when they got married).
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It happens. Usually it seems to be either:
My point was slightly different—I fully understand why a husband would want to leave his wife, but what I don't get is how that leads to such a disastrous outcome for the wife that it warrants any significant amount of fear. It just seems to me that the relatively low odds of it happening combined with how mild the downside is means that it shouldn't be a major factor in a woman's decision of whether to marry.
Well, in the hypothetical that was brought up, there was infidelity involved -- which is obviously hurtful. I think restricting the possible downsides to the economic ones really limits your ability to understand how difficult this situation would be for people to handle. There are a lot of people who would rather be single and lonely than coupled and vulnerable to the hurt and rejection of infidelity or loss-of-love.
I think the risk is relatively low as well, but people are increasingly terrified even of small chances of hurt. And men do this too, I've heard of men breaking up with their girlfriends because they're terrified she'll use social media to hurt his reputation someday, for some unknown reason; just the raw possibility of a power imbalance is so fearful.
And there's that term again: power imbalance. We're living through a time where any and all power is being questioned, "the rapists are in the sacred institutions", "the media can't be trusted", "the deep state controls the world", "the President is a
vegetablefascist", "the billionares are taking over the world", "the bosses are all entitled boomers", "you have to jump ship to get a promotion", "corporations want cattle and not pets"... the very concept of two people in a relationship that involves any sort of power relations instantly conjures to mind images of exploitation, unfairness, and abuse. The just leader is unthinkable. And the very nature of a marriage is that the two members hold power over each other: "For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does."Given that we live in such a time of profound social doubt, isolation, and distrust in institutions and human virtue, is it any wonder that people have such fears about entering into a lifelong spiritual, sexual, and economic union with another human being?
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Sorry, I misread you. Thought you were saying that the husband is on the hook so generally he won’t leave. Which is certainly sometimes the case, but as I say, not always.
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