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Even if he would be willing to decrease his own QoL, his wifes feelings are something he has to keep in mind. If she would be be intransigent and proclaim she would find replacement husband, willing to provide her with the current lifestyle, he would be broke and on the hook for eyewatering alimony.
As people on the right otherwise often suggest, it’s very unlikely the average, say, 47 year old woman married with three kids is going to get a ‘better deal’ elsewhere unless her husband is a truly incorrigible deadbeat and/or she’s somehow either immensely attractive for her age or has low standards (in which case the problem is less likely to arise at all). If she remarries at all, it’s likely to a substantially older man.
For a woman over 35 or 40 with children, things usually have to be very bad (or one’s dating prospects uncommonly good for a middle aged single mother) for leaving a broke husband to make financial sense.
The "better deal" is to take all the joint assets and most of any of his future income in a divorce, using his failure as the reason he should take nothing.
The point still remains that he’s much more likely to be able to find another partner than she is (not, like, a hot 25 year old obviously, but someone a few years younger and also divorced). In my experience middle aged women who initiate divorce are usually pretty desperate. The reason women initiate most divorces is because men are often perfectly content checking out of the relationship, maybe fucking around or having affairs, spending money on other women, then returning home to a wife who looks after the kids, probably does most domestic chores etc. This can go on for years before she finally decides to accept the humiliation of divorce. The only time it’s usually “worth it” for a man to initiate divorce in my experience is if he finds out she’s cheating, at which point masculine hatred of the idea of being sexually humiliated typically leads to an instant divorce. But provided there’s no (known) infidelity on her part, men tend not to divorce their wives because even if they dislike her, she’s a good deal.
This fundamental disparity leads to a lot of the discourse on divorce that argues women are screwing over men. In reality, it’s just that a bad marriage is today usually a much better deal for men than women.
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This all assumes that she realizes this before abandoning her husband "to get a better deal". The women I know who have done this didn't give up their high standards until after they left and learned it the hard way. Choosing to leave a partner is often more an emotional decision than a rational one and a sudden drop in QoL isn't exactly conducive to rational thinking.
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This was the point I was waiting for. Yes your family often leaves you when you fail. Seen it happen enough.
Sure for a functional adult you can go manage a Taco Bell and probably get 100k or more a year but your dating market prospects are awful.
You can make $100,000 a year managing a Taco Bell??
And if so, are the dating prospects awful because despite your solid income because you work at Taco Bell? I suppose if you restrict yourself to the people that actually come into your store and buy a chalupa things aren't that bad.
Think I’ve seen far higher than that. Like 150 advertised. But that’s still falling a lot in status.
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No, but IIRC fast food managers get paid mostly in the form of bonuses for hitting the metrics that’ve been set by some jackasses with spreadsheets at headquarters(health code, budget, drive through time, etc). So there’s plenty of individual GM’s who make good salaries if not 6-figure level.
But nobody wants to date Taco Bell customers(and Taco Bell customers probably skew very male and very lower income, so that’s predictable).
Tbh it seems like men who make good money at low status jobs do OK on the dating market, but usually have to date a bit below them on the class ladder.
Most managers at Taco Bell would do completely fine with women of their class and background. I suppose the rare formerly PMC down in his luck upper-middle-class guy who manages a Taco Bell might not, but that person is more likely to take a (lower paid) job as a clerk or paralegal or some other bottom tier office job than work for Taco Bell.
I’d guess the average fast food restaurant manager comes from a working class background and fucked around for a few years after high school, is somewhat smarter than their peers, works hard and rises the ranks over a few years until the franchise owner puts them in charge.
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At which point the suicide would seem more understandable. Still not necessarily the best option, but I would find it harder to argue against. And maybe that secretly is exactly what happened and his wife was going to leave him. But frequently that's not the case, and people kill themselves based on the derivative of their quality of life, not the actual level after the decline.
Or even just the fear that that's what his wife would do. Suicidal people often believe everyone else sees them as unkindly as they see themselves.
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