Force consistent rules at the federal level. Make childless divorces straightforward and fair. Eliminate the notion that a former spouse is responsible for maintaining a 'standard of living' established during the marriage. If two adults want to part ways, make them responsible for being adults.

To anyone not married, please understand what you are agreeing to by getting married. It is a legally binding contract that has nothing to do with romanticized notions of true love. There is an industry of people looking to profit from you and exploit you. Be extremely careful who you enter into that contract with.

We need sane legal agreements for each dimension of marriage, child rearing, property division etc. And support systems to humanely shepherd people through life changes. Instead we try to preserve the illusion of a life where everyone is guaranteed a partner who will always be there.

I am grateful every day for my no contest divorce. If anyone is near divorce my advice is bend and shoot for no contest. Try to focus on mutual well being. Courts can do nothing but transfer assets to lawyers.

That would solve the child support problem for married couples, reduce the divorce rate and incentivise stable families.

Alimony was not obvious to me as a 21 year old introverted virgin getting married.

If you want a specific arrangement then you should draft it in your marriage contract. It should not be the default assumption imposed by the state under the threat of incarceration.

Alimony is an antiquated concept based on outdated gender stereotypes and not in line with the modern workforce. Alimony seeks to create equality when none should exist. Alimony rewards deadbeats and forces exploitative relationships to continue, often indefinitely or without end. It is abusive to many, it is unjust, and it must be reformed.

That means a half of it is beyond my control. I can try to be a great partner. And I can find someone who seems like they would be a reliable partner. But no one can perfectly predict other people; sometimes people change. And if my partner happens to meet someone more attractive and decides to upgrade... there is not much I can do about it. I have seen people who seemed like happy couples, then one of them met someone else and decided they no longer felt happy in the existing relationship.

> You pay child support if you are married too, it just is called "parenthood" rather than child support. [...] And again, you pay alimony if you are married too. It is just called "supporting my stay-at-home spouse".

You are right that a married man contributes financially to his family. But he is also involved in the decisions. At the very least, after the children grow up, he can encourage his wife to take a part-time job again, and maybe a full-time job later. If instead, depending on the specific laws at given state, he is legally required to pay his ex-wife indefinitely, she has no reason to change the situation.

Also, it is cheaper to live together, and more expensive to live apart. Two houses are usually more expensive than one, even if they are small ones. You can save a lot of money by cooking together, sharing household appliances, maybe sharing a car, etc. So the divorce naturally increases the total costs of living of the people involved. Paying half of the increased costs is more expensive than paying half of the original costs.

Then there is also the fact that in marriage the man gets something in return. Like, he brings home the salary, but his wife cooks for them both. After divorce, he keeps paying, but now he is getting nothing in return.

tl;dr - divorce is more expensive than marriage, and it is partially out of your control whether it happens

1) Marriage is a contract, but unlike most contracts, its terms and conditions can change at any time without the consent or knowledge of either party. That is to say, politicians decide the terms and conditions, and your marriage isn't grandfathered through with the laws in place at the time it was consummated.

2) As of today, the outcome of divorce (how assets are distributed) is overwhelmingly in favor of the female, assuming a mixed-gender marriage. This is one of the reasons for the large gap in divorce initiations: women profit far more, and thus more often end the marriage.

There are a couple more conclusions you can draw about whether you should do more due diligence on the person you're about to marry.

1) If you're female, you can be far less concerned. If it turns out to be the wrong guy, just divorce him. If anything, you'll get assets and a livable wage for no effort for years.

2) If you're male, you should be far more concerned. You need to do 10-50x more work vetting your future partner than your parents and grandparents did.

3) The divorce laws in 5 years may be completely different than today. Be sure to plan for how the political climate will change in the future.

I have been married more than once, so as you can imagine, I've had to put a lot of thought into this matter. The marriage that ended is responsible for reducing my wages, which should lead me to living comfortably in San Francisco, to being required to live with roommates. There is a large amount of danger involved in marriage, so make sure you understand the dangers before pulling the trigger.

EDIT: The reduction in income also has prevented me from working at several really great startups and instead having to slave at more profitable companies like ad networks etc. These go against my moral compass, so for me, at least, divorce also led to me having to contribute to increasing evil in the world. This is a huge personal hit that is hard to understate.

(Contrast: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/mar/24/tini-ow... )

But it's important to remember that laws and legal precedent about support for former female partners came about because women often got screwed financially in divorce. Even if they could even get a divorce.

And sometimes women still get screwed financially, and in other ways, by divorce. Child support is sometimes inadequate, or effectively not collectable. And women traditionally contributed unpaid labor, in the form of housework and childcare. And often, they were (and even now, sometimes are) more-or-less unprepared for decent jobs.

Anyway, based on other comments, a key argument in favor of marriage, for long-term relationships, is clarification of intentions. That's especially crucial, obviously, if there will be children. Without a marriage, it's all subject to litigation. And if partners have resources that they want to protect, they can negotiate a prenup.

I also think that culture does play a fair role. I was initially hesitant to marry (as a millennial) because a lot of my friends were being denied the ability to marry who they chose, so I wanted to stand with them and reject the institution. That, thankfully, has been resolved - but I can totally understand people who have mixed feelings on marriage.

A LOT of problems are caused by a lack of at least one parent/parental role.

Even worse if children result in said broken marriage: he will pay for their upbringing and their mom lifestyle for at least 18 years. Actually, children will cost him even if they are born outside a marriage or relationship altogether, in a random encounter let’s say.

http://www.realworlddivorce.com/

As someone who's been through a divorce, I think this is the wrong perspective.

The law should always be considered a backstop for when other solutions fail, not a first solution to aim for.

For instance, if you have a disagreement with your neighbor about a fence or a tree or something, you should always go and talk to them first. If you're a business and have a disagreement about the contract with some other business, you should always go and try to sort it out without lawyers first.

Making it possible to sue your neighbor or your business partner when discussion fails to produce results doesn't mean that you're "trivializing neighborhood relations". Well-written and consistently-applied laws means, ideally, that when you have those conversations with your neighbor or your business partner, you never end up going to court, because everyone knows exactly what's going to happen.

The law in the UK is already written to try to encourage people to save their marriage: In the absence of adultery or physical abuse, you can generally only file for a divorce after you've been separated for 2 years; and this includes provisions for short stints of living together to give it a second chance. (E.g., if you separate for 6 months, come back together for 3 months, and then separate again, the "clock" doesn't start over, and you can file for divorce after another 15 months.)

By the time that people move out, the relationship is almost always in a really bad state; and by the time you've lived separately for 2 years, there's almost zero chance you're going to get back together. At that point what you have is no longer a marriage, and the divorce proceedings is only recognizing legally what has already happened relationally.

I mean, yes, we as a society should also be trying to prevent disaster-in-waiting marriages from happening; and should be investing time trying to strengthen marriages -- even marriages which are relatively stable.

Making divorce difficult won't save marriages, but it does add all kinds of perverse incentives. If you have to prove adultery or abuse to file, then suddenly you have to bring in private investigators to spy on people, and sling around reputation-destroying accusations in public, making the whole thing a lot more nasty.

For general context, I think it's the case that most relationships will have some disagreements and dissatisfactions from time to time, that are usually temporary and could be resolved in most cases assuming both partners are psychologically healthy and have reasonable conflict resolution skills.

I also think that both partners will from time to time notice what appears to be a more desirable partner than their current partner, sometimes that's an accurate impression and sometimes it is only a temporary impression. In the past, social and legal incentives discouraged married people from breaking up their families at low points in their marriage, and ideally they'd stay together long enough to find out how to work out their problems.

That's not to say that anyone should be stuck in a marriage. Divorce should obviously be possible for lots of reasons, and possibly for no reason, but it shouldn't be *incentivized* in my opinion. If a couple merely wants an unstable, temporary relationship, that's perfectly fine. No one is demanding that they give up that lifestyle if they prefer it, but for those who prefer the idea of marriage as a way of encouraging each other to commit to the relationship in the long term, current laws have removed absolutely every disincentive to break up the family and actually made married relationships more unstable than unmarried ones by creating financial and other incentives for breaking up the married relationship.

1) Spousal support awards to a lesser earning partner encourage that partner to break up the family rather than put effort into resolving disagreements or dissatisfactions in the relationship.

2) No-fault divorce means that anyone can end a marriage at any time for any reason, which no longer seems like what "marriage" was in the past or the vows that are made. If it's just a temporary relationship that can be ended at any time, why call it "marriage" rather than "girlfriend/boyfriend/etc."? Importantly, if there is no fault, but both parties walk away with 50% of the assets (and in practice much more usually goes to one of the sides) then the lesser earning partner in particular, and/or the partner that started with less assets, is at least "not disincentivized" from breaking up the family.

3) Child support awards in excess of the amount needed to raise children encourages the lesser earning parent to break up the family rather than resolve disagreements cooperatively. Note that I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to stay in a truly bad relationship, but specifically the award amounts should not be in excess of the needed amount. To the extent they're in excess, it's effectively a financial reward for breaking up the family.

4) Child custody awards are something like 80-85% of the time to the mother, so if a mother disagrees with the father on how to raise the kids or is having some other reasonable disagreement with him, she can break up the family and know that it's highly likely she'll get the vast majority of time with the kids, and in almost no cases would she get less than 50/50. So rather than both partners needing to learn to cooperate, one has a nuclear option they can use at any time, which imbalances any negotiation around personal boundaries or child raising.

If the government wanted to encourage stable families they would do things like:

a) Let divorce remain an option, but the party breaking up the family should be disincentivized rather than incentivized.

b) Make pre-nuptial agreements ta default that people need to opt out of, so everyone negotiates the terms on the way in instead of expensively on the way out.

c) Promote education about healthy conflict resolution strategies for all couples considering marriage, and possibly in all levels of education throughout life, as it would be beneficial to society as a whole.

No-fault divorce is the inevitable result of the fact that women can now be reasonably expected to support themselves without a man.

What's difficult is splitting things up. Not just the things but also children and the place you live. You have to work out a solution with someone you'll probably have a mixed bag of feelings for and against.

You can argue that people would be better off in the split without having signed a contract with a set of rules to follow if they can't agree. But I'm not sure you'd be right.

Another thing is that I understand you're providing an argument, but I think the idea that love is the only thing keeping people together in a relationship is incorrect, it's much, much more complicated than that.

But isn't that still directly related to finances? The article kind of touches on the same point, where women are "giving up on men" who are not in a good financial position. Not having your finances sorted out with a former partner would also question one's financial position. If one wants to explore other partners after a relationship breakdown, there is social pressure to get one's finances in order.

> If you ever imagine re-marrying

But circling back, you pointed out that the most common reason people get married is for financial reasons. So it seems the reason for divorce, in order to prepare for another marriage, is still for financial reasons.

Which makes sense as the modern marriage contract doesn't cover anything other than financial attributes. Maybe there was an earlier age where there was more to it, but we don't uphold those values anymore.

You get divorced, you split your combined assets (excluding prenups), the child support vector will be based on the relative net income of each parent (and beyond certain basic level of income the vector just settles at 50/50). The stay-at-home parent will find work or failing that gets unemployment/welfare benefits. The standard of living is expected to drop for both spouses after a divorce because it's cheaper to live together in any case. Nevertheless, securing the children's upkeep comes first. If one parent can't or won't pay child support the state provides it for the other parent so that the kids can live on something, and later collects the payments from the first parent the same way it will collect other debts such as back taxes.

For the stay-at-home spouse it's still a choice with pre-known potential disadvantages, and thus smart couples can draw a contract at the decision time to even out the tally. They can split the income of the high-earning parent at point each month, or they can formulate a mechanism to give the stay-at-home spouse a higher proportion of the combined assets in case of a divorce, and have that indexed by the number of years that spouse remained home, or anything else that works out well. It's all doable so that upon a divorce both spouses get their fair share.

The worst thing is not to pre-plan anything, then get divorced at once and find yourself in a completely new situation with no preparations. But there's nothing that prevents either partner from being proactive regarding this. The law doesn't need to enforce any hand-holding here: it's not the fifties anymore. Most people, both men and women, have their own career and get married as adults and divorce as adults.