From the original article on January 14, 2008. Author: Chateau Heartiste.
This article lays out pretty thoroughly just what a raw deal marriage is for men. Divorce is twice as likely to catch husbands by surprise as it is wives.
In a 2004 poll by the AARP, one in four men who were divorces in the previous year said they “never saw it coming.” (Only 14 percent of divorced women said they experienced the same unexpected broadside.)
In divorce, it’s men who suffer more financially:
The divorce system tends to award wives custody of the children, substantial child support, the marital home, half the couple’s assets, and, often, heavy alimony payments.
This may come as startling news to a public that has been led to believe that women are the ones who suffer financially postdivorce, not men. But the data show otherwise, according to an exhaustive study of the subject by Sanford L. Braver, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University and author of Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths.
[...] social scientists ignored men’s expenses — the tab for replacing everything from the bed to the TV to the house — as well as the routine costs of helping to raise the children, beyond child support. Even the tax code favors women: Not only is child support not tax deductible for fathers, but a custodial mother can take a $1,000 per child tax credit; the father cannot, even if he’s paying. As “head of the household,” the mother gets a lower tax rate and can claim the children as exemptions. If the ex-wife remarries, she is still entitled to child support, even if she marries a billionaire. Indeed, every year men are actually thrown in jail for failing to meet their child-support obligations. In the state of Michigan alone, nearly 3,000 men were locked up for that offense in 2005.
The stark realities of divorce paint a picture overwhelmingly tilted against a man’s interests. Here’s an example of just how bad it can get for a beta provider who thought if he was the good man the gods of fairness would reward him with steady sex, a faithful and loving wife, and a stable family:
They’d started going on expensive vacations in Europe and Hawaii, and he figured she’d be pleased at the prospect of taking more trips together, or at least at the prospect of seeing him around the house a little more, and not buried in his basement office. He had met her in graduate school over a quarter century ago, and they’d had their ups and downs, but he was still crazy about her. And he thought that, with a little more time together, she’d be crazy about him again too.
But no. She scarcely listened to any talk of retirement, or of vacations, or of anything he had to say. She had plans of her own.
“I want a divorce,” she said.
Paul was so stunned that he thought he must have misheard her. But her face told him otherwise. “She looked like the enemy,” he says. He started to think about everything he’d built: the thriving business, the wonderful family, the nice life in the suburbs. And he thought of her, and how much he still loved her. And then, right in front of her, he started to cry.
That night, he found a bottle of whiskey, and he didn’t stop drinking it until he nearly passed out.
Things turned sh—- very fast. His wife took out a temporary restraining order, accusing him of attempting to kidnap their youngest son. The claim was never proved in court. Then, with the aid of some high-priced lawyers, she extracted from him a whopping $50,000 a month — a full 75 percent of his monthly income. Barred from the house, he was not allowed regular access to the office he used to generate that income. (On the few times he was permitted inside, his wife did not let him use the bathroom. She insisted that he go outside in the woods.)
Paul is a very wealthy man, an “alpha” by most men’s definitions (though not by my definition) – he earns over $65,000 per month — yet his high financial status ultimately did not shield him from his wife’s dr. jekyll mrs. hyde act. In fact, it may have hastened her merciless decision. Paul is a classic beta provider, and after his wife had extracted the last penny of tribute from him to raise the kids to a self-sufficient age and live the life of a bon bon eating oprah watcher, she disposed of him with the cold-hearted cruelty of a despot dispatching his enemies by firing squad. His wife is likely a Hillary supporter.
Maxim #13: When the love is gone, women can be as cold as if they had never known you.
If that isn’t enough to convince you of the high risk gamble that is marriage, here’s another horror story:
Long before his wife came along, a frame-store owner named Jordan Appel, 55, had built a fine house for himself atop West Newton Hill in one of the fancier Boston suburbs. He loved bringing in a wife and then adding two children. “It felt so wonderful to say ‘my wife’ and ‘my children’ and feel part of a community.” He volunteered for the preschool’s yard sale; his wife took up with a lover. Sometimes she slept with him in Appel’s own house; in time, she decided to divorce Appel. As these things go, he was obliged to leave the house, and, as it happened, the community too. Money was so tight that he ended up sleeping in a storage room above his frame shop two towns away. His ex-wife works part-time on the strength of Appel’s child custody and alimony payments, and spends time with her boyfriend in Appel’s former house. She lives rather well, and he has to make $100,000 a year to support her and the children, which amounts to 70-hour workweeks. One day, he went back to his house and discovered many of his belongings out on the sidewalk with the trash. “My body feels like it’s dissolving in anger,” he says. “I’m in an absolute rage every single day.”
Now of course, many of you will say “but this guy Jordan is a total beta letting his wife take advantage of him like that!” and you’d be right. But regardless of his personal failings, his congenital betatude is no reason to accede to injustice codified by a discriminatory legal system. Either the laws change (and I personally favor elimination of no fault divorce as a start) or men should heed my advice and stay clear of the altar. Since I am not going to lift a finger to agitate for new laws that have a zero percent chance of happening in my lifetime, I follow the second option.
Maxim #8: Marriage is a social mechanism designed to exchange sex for indentured servitude.
So why are women now the eager instigators of divorce? What changed in the culture? Four things, primarily: the pill, easy divorce, women’s economic independence, and rigged laws that make divorce a good financial prospect for women. The four sirens of the sexual apocalypse together have created the perfect sociological storm where a woman has every incentive in the world to ditch a husband to follow the whims of her heart once his usefulness has been exhausted.
Listen to me — skip all that shit and learn to get the sex for free if you don’t already. All the positive loving benefits you can get out of marriage can also be had within an unmarried relationship.
Later in the article, the question is asked what can men do to avoid divorce?
One way, of course, is to avoid marriage.
The CH method. So elegant, so simple. So effective!
[...]husbands might be wise to pay attention to the essential ratio that — according to John Gottman, PhD, a world-renowned researcher of marriage stability — governs marital success or failure: five to one. That means husbands (and wives) should direct at least five positive remarks or actions to their spouses for every negative one. Any less and the marriage is in trouble.
Dr. John Gottman, five to one you are a dumbfuck. Glorifying their wives and putting them on pedestals is exactly what cost these hopeless betas their marriages. What they need to do is challenge their wives, not kiss their expanding asses with a stream of compliments. Cockiness, humor, turning the tables, not taking her shit, flirting with other women while wifey is watching... these are the improvements in character that will keep a wife’s love for her husband strong. As long as men are following the advice of these “social scientists” they will never unlock the mystery of what attracts women to men and they will suffer the consequences.
Here is an excellent quote from the article which vividly illustrates how badly the system is rigged in favor of women:
“A father could be sitting in his own home, not agreeing to a divorce, not unfaithful to his marriage vows, and not abusive, and the next thing he knows, the court has taken his house, his children, and a lot of his money, and then forced him to pay his wife’s legal fees and even her psychologist’s fees. And he can be threatened with jail time if he resists.”
To recap:
So.
Where’s the upside?
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