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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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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”