Most of the time I am, in real life, polite. But it is an effort. The current political correct culture stultifies. But there is a theory out there that has a certain face validity. If you subsidize something, you will get more of it.
If you subsidize divorce and separation — by having benefits for solo mothers, child support and custody laws that favour mothers — then there is an incentive to separate, to divorce.
And if you don’t want this to happen, stop subsidizing it.
Now, most women are somewhat rational. If they will be subsidized and they will remain within the accepted and polite part of society — the barriers to divorce decrease. Although I discussed how men are disposable yesterday, most women, like most men, do not hit, nor murder. But they can and do dissolve relationships. Unsurprising: JB did the math in the USA and in over 90% of divorces the woman ends up with the kids, and the man having to pay her child support with the full force of the law to back her up.
Women initiate 70% of divorces and at least half of women have no intention of staying with the father in the first place or getting married. So many of them follow the ‘Honey Boo Boo’ model – have 3 different children by 3 different fathers so they can collect 3 times the amount of money they can get from staying with just one man. I know SO many women like this including my sister.
But the number one aspect of all of this that people need to get through their thick skulls is that men have NO POWER IN ANY OF IT AT ALL.
Imagine a home where a husband and wife have 2 children. One day the wife says, “I’m tired of you and I want a divorce because I’m no longer ‘in’ love with you.” The father then says, “NO! I’m staying here for my children!! I’m not leaving!!” LOL. In the next 20 minutes he’s going to be escorted out in a new matching pair of handcuffs, prob with a restraining order and probably NEVER get to see his children again.
Fathers can’t ‘MAN UP’ even if they want to because they have NO POWER AT ALL legally or otherwise. This notion that men are to blame is INSANE and it’s nauseating that our entire society is still stuck in 1965 with their notions about single motherhood- ‘Papa was a Rolling Stone’ and all of that nonsense from another TIME- another ERA. There IS no where to go or run even if you wanted to. If you’re a father, you can’t just fly off to the other side of the country – they’ll track you down and garnish your wages and throw you in jail no matter WHERE you go. Even if you flee to most other 1st world countries!
The formula is simple: If you as a man do not make significantly more than the State can pay her to live without you, you’re OUT. Period. Most women are that cold, cruel and cut and dried and we all know it.
This has consequences. I see them daily: I’m a solo Dad. Most of the time, people are surprised to know that I have kids and that they live with me. The fact that many women see this as a turnoff is a useful filter — I will not bring any woman into the family unless they are stable, godly and sane.
And my boys do not go out and date: they call those who sleep around fools. They have seen the consequences of marital down up close and personal. There are many men like me: solvent, fit, fertile, heterosexual and single. Because you have to screen like crazy. Particularly if you make more than the basic benefit.
But without such an infrastructure… things would change.
It took me about two seconds to think of another plausible explanation: women’s perception of their post-divorce prospects has changed. With economies worsening, their country being invaded by a hostile subculture, a general sense of uncertainty about the future, and regular stories about men losing interest in marriage, the natural threat-point has moved. Consciously or not, some women are sensing that life after divorce might not be a non-stop Sex and the City party after all, and that raises their estimation of their husbands’ value by comparison and their willingness to put up with imperfection.
That’s much more likely than that husbands have suddenly gotten “better,” especially in the sense that this writer would probably mean the term.
The divorce rate of a society is determined by one thing, and one thing only :
Will the woman’s anticipated/perceived standard of living go down after divorce, or not?
If yes via natural order, that country has a low divorce rate.
If no, due to rigged laws, that country has a high divorce rate.That is all there is to it. All the retroactive rationalizations of “I was not haaaaapy” or “we grew apart” are just excuses for the cold financial decision.
Societies where men can toss out the wife with little cost (few of these remain) have a very low divorce rate. Why? Because men put the well-being of children above their own, while women do not. Men tend to be responsible adults that way.
Now, you may know of exceptions. So do I: I am one. But the costs of divorce are not merely financial. Marital breakdown is expensive for a society. It may be better to have security for children: that their parents will stay together barring the death of a parent.
And that was always considered a tragedy. There is a reason that the stepmothers in fairy tales are cruel, and the new husband of the widowed woman a brute to her children from the first marriage.
What to do? Well if married, stay so. If single, don’t marry unless you have really and truly tested the fidelity of your beloved. It’s not about what she is like in bed: it is about how she runs the bank account. How she keeps her word.
Consider where you live and what the culture is. I’m not saying this because NZ is a paradise and Godly (It isn’t and it is not). But consider the rules. Over here, we don’t put men who lose their jobs in jail for not paying child support. We assume women are adults, and can support themselves. In the USA, women are still seen as deserving alimony: the courts are far harsher.
If you cannot live in a conservative society — the EU is making sure these fall in Europe — then live somewhere where there is some attempts to minimize the harms (to you) if your wife turns faithless.
What we need is for the culture to change to make staying within a marriage the aim and goal of all women. Not trading up, staying. Regardless of the laws. For in the end, the laws will follow behind the fashions around morality and life.
But in the meantime, don’t marry the feckless, the faithless and the foolish. And the best prediction of this is a person’s past behaviour.