By Kimberly Harrington
Alimony never crossed my mind while I was married. It didn’t cross my mind when my then-husband and I separated. It didn’t even cross my mind when I was writing a whole-ass book about all of those things, including our impending divorce. I thought alimony was men’s business. And since I knew I wasn’t going to be getting any, why worry about it?
Oh, I should’ve worried.
I’m far from the only woman who is uneducated about alimony (or spousal support or maintenance, these are all the same things). On top of that, divorce law and how alimony is awarded varies wildly from state to state, meaning whatever experiences you might’ve heard or read about may not apply to you given where you live. Some states have permanent (lifetime) alimony, whereas most states determine the length of alimony based on the length of the marriage. Many states allow alimony payments to cease upon the remarriage of a former spouse and other states allow payments to cease just upon the cohabitation of a former spouse with their new partner.
When I had my first consultation with a local lawyer, she ran the whole alimony picture down for me, given the rough outline I had provided, including how long we had been married and my income versus his. You will not be surprised to hear that I did not like what I heard! I thought my head was going to blow apart into a thousand deadly shards while snakes, tarantulas, fire, hornets, and witches poured forth from my empty skull to completely darken the skies.
Not to be dramatic.
I couldn’t believe, after all the money I had earned and paid out over more than 25 years together, after everything I had done to not just hold everything together in general but had also subsidized during our marriage and separation, that I was also going to have to pay him cold hard cash. For years.
Unfortunately, my lack of knowledge isn’t all that unique. Alimony was legally gendered for so long and continues to exist in the cultural imagination as something that only men do.
In its most basic form, alimony is calculated based on the length of the marriage and the disparity of income between the two partners. Transparently, my divorce didn’t go through the court system other than our agreement (negotiated collaboratively and using attorneys) being approved by a judge. But let’s dig into a brief history of alimony in general. Some of us keep feeling surprised (🙋🏻♀️) by the unfairness of institutions and laws as if they’ve always been with us since time immemorial. Lest we forget, these are institutions and laws created by men, to — wait for it — benefit men.
The origins of alimony date back to 1800s England and were rooted in the profound inequality within marriage. When a woman entered a marriage at that time, her legal identity was merged with her husband’s. Any property she owned was now his, and she also transferred her ability to keep any earnings, enter into contracts, or own property to him. It became his obligation to “protect” and financially support his wife. But note: “Alimony, then and now, wasn’t really about the woman’s well-being so much as protecting the state from the undue ‘burden’ of taking care of her when her husband didn’t want to provide for her anymore.”
The premise of the American system of alimony, built upon that English system and brought over by settlers, was to support divorced women who now had no other means of supporting themselves. But in 1852, states began enacting the Married Women’s Property Acts, which at least allowed divorced women to gain back control of property they had entered their marriages with (thanks?).
Alimony was a male-coded feature of American divorce until a 1979 Supreme Court ruling (Orr v. Orr) rendered the payment of alimony gender neutral. Keep in mind this law changed because a man didn’t feel like paying alimony and of course he won.
Gender-based arguments aside, what stands out to me is that we keep accepting the premise of the question (which partner should pay alimony?) instead of interrogating the core concept of alimony itself. In her introduction to “Spousal Support Disorder: An Overview of Problems in Current Alimony Law” in the Florida State University Law Review, Jennifer L. McCoy put it this way:
“Marriage has never been a relationship based solely on love and companionship — it has always primarily been an economic institution. In this institution, husbands and wives contribute to the
marital union by earning wages, sharing resources, and making joint decisions regarding careers, purchases, and investments. Thus, some consider marriage an ‘economic partnership.’ Although the
term ‘partnership’ suggests gender equality between husbands and wives, the term is misleading because partners to a marriage are typically not economically equal. A happy marriage may mask this
inequality, but it becomes openly evident upon divorce.”
I know I will get strong pushback from some women on this. I understand why. We know that women are the ones who tend to give up the most when it comes to marriage and family. Men benefit early on from women’s labor in marriage and raising children, while women tend to benefit later as their husband’s income and professional standing (theoretically) grow. And women are the ones who are culturally and socially rewarded for putting themselves dead last, which is the acceptable way to be seen as a “good” wife and a “good” mother. That is, the proper place for ambition is within the home and in service to your family. It’s also a very neat way to put yourself at extreme financial risk.
These are the women who feel most trapped and have the least economic mobility. These are the women who cannot just leave, even when their lives and the lives of their children are at risk. These are the women who are looking at the overall picture, the wellbeing of their children, the basic ability to string together an income, and wonder how they’ll survive, never mind thrive.
Our discomfort with looking past the supposed romance of marriage — not wanting to “break the spell” — to examine all of its economic underpinnings and levers of power is what keeps so many women stuck in place.
It would certainly be easy to dismiss women paying alimony as either a non-issue or one of privilege in the “it must be nice” vein. But my situation is not niche. Although alimony is declining — around 10% of divorces in 2010 resulted in alimony being awarded compared to 25% decades ago [1] — 3% of those alimony recipients were men.
The percentage of women who are lead or co-breadwinners is higher than you might think, too. In 2019 two-thirds of mothers were either breadwinners or co-breadwinners for their families. More than 4 in 10 (41.2 percent) were sole or primary breadwinners, either single working mothers or married mothers bringing in at least half of their families’ earnings.
The power dynamics tied to income and whose job is seen as “important” are undeniable. The main reason I had power in my marriage is because of my income. We moved for my job, never the other way around. We need to hear more of these stories.
When I’ve told other women that I’m paying alimony, it always garners a big reaction. Always. These are reactions of disbelief, rage, empathy, and frankly offense along the lines of how could that even be possible. I’ve had several women confide in me that they’ve chosen to stay married to their partner, even though they absolutely do not want to be, because the thought of having to pay them alimony fills them with such rage that they don’t think they could handle it. And I’ve had even more women relay to me stories of the women they know who have been ruined by paying alimony, all while dealing with their former partners shirking parenting duties and moving in with new girlfriends. These scenarios are much more common than you might think. These were the “good” marriages to “good” guys. These were the “but if it could happen to them, dot-dot-dot” type of marriages.
I believe the reason women react with such rage, or at the very least disbelief, to paying alimony is we know what alimony calculations will never take into account. Alimony will always be based on the numbers in a spreadsheet. What do you do when you’re told your labor within a family doesn’t really count? That that’s not real work? Even when nonprofits put dollar figures to make the unpaid labor of wives and mothers visible, no one takes it seriously.
On average, mothers reported being responsible for 72.57% of all cognitive labor compared to their partners’ 27.43%, and 63.64% of all physical domestic labor compared to their partners’ 36.36%.
The difference between working for a salary and running a family is like the difference between an accounting degree and a fine arts degree. One has standard correct answers, the other is all subjectivity. You know when you’re doing accounting right, it’s math. But mothering and relationship building, emotional work and family project management, the administration of the lives of people including you but in addition to you isn’t quantifiable, it’s qualitative and subjective. These are the fine arts of creating a home. They cannot be entered neatly into a financial assets spreadsheet and they cannot be divided. They do not grow in financial value and they cannot be bequeathed in a will.
To be clear, while childcare responsibilities are taken into account if a parent stays home full-time and does not work outside the home, to the best of my knowledge those same responsibilities are not taken into account when both parents work. Until alimony reflects the imbalance of those soft assets of care, it will never be fair.
Marriage might not be a business (isn’t it, though?), but it would be wise to start thinking of it as one. First marriages (40-50%) fail at roughly the same rate as restaurants at the five-year mark (49%), yet you don’t see people running out to open restaurants, fingers crossed and without a plan, without running the numbers, or without having an agreement in place. And depending on a spouse for financial security is like depending on your employer for health insurance. It’s just not a good system. Men have understood this for a long time, because unfairly or not, they’ve been prepped to be in a provider role. They’ve heard the alimony jokes. They assume men are the ones who get fucked over in divorce (the number of never-married men who have told me this on a first date cannot be overstated). But this is still relatively new territory for women, and it’s far beyond time that we catch up.
This doesn’t have to mean completely reformulating your life, just being smarter about it. Dori-Ellen Feltman, a family law attorney in Westport, Conn. puts it this way in an article in Ms.: “‘When things are good, it’s great — but you need to plan for what happens when it isn’t.’ Women can protect themselves by having a prenup agreement before marriage or a postnup negotiated afterwards when she decides to stay home, even requiring that she receive compensation for homemaker duties. These legal documents also specify the financial settlement in the event of a split.”
The legal landscape for divorce is not going to get better over the next four years, and with the conservative push to end no-fault divorce, it stands to get much, much worse.
If you’re considering ending your marriage, now is the time to start asking yourself tough financial questions, including the emotional ones around money. Here are some that I tormented myself with, when it was already too late:
If I had known I would need to pay alimony, would I have felt quite so generous in our marriage, especially as it was clearly faltering? Would I have stayed married, continuously accepting that my marriage was “good enough” had I known that once our marriage passed the 20-year mark that the length of time I would need to pay alimony would jump? Would I have continued to pay for the vast majority of our expenses even when we were separated and still living together, had I known alimony was on the horizon?
I also want to recognize that staying together for as long as we did, and keeping our family together under one roof even when we were separated, had its benefits. It was hard to recognize that through the rage-fog of the divorce process, but I know that now. The benefits certainly weren’t financial but, as they say, money isn’t everything. So it would be unfair and disingenuous to imply I would’ve done it all differently. I might not have. As they say, it’s complicated. Or in the wise words of The Facts of Life theme song: 🎶 You take the good, You take the bad, You take them both and there you have, The facts of life 🎶
But back to that historical foundational principle of alimony. If the initial purpose of alimony was to support a person who has no other means of support, then alimony actually applies to precious few adults, regardless of their gender. That’s the conversation that actually needs to be happening instead of who’s on the hook for what.
In the meantime, start talking to your divorced friends. Ask them what they wished they had known when they were married (or engaged or single). Ask them what they’ve done financially to feel more secure. Talk to a financial advisor and start thinking about the steps you can take to ensure your financial independence, even if you never plan on getting a divorce. Life, as they say, often has other plans.
What if your partner decides they do want a divorce? If they don’t want to work on your marriage? If they’re already in another relationship? What if they walk out the door tomorrow and leave you with the kids? What if they drop dead suddenly? These things happen. In fact, all of these things have happened in just my circle of friends and acquaintances, or to friends-of-friends, in just the past five years.
While this can all sound heavy, or even like it’s playing into old tropes around divorce (running off with a younger woman! ex-wives going broke!) it’s important to emphasize that the vast majority of divorces are initiated by women. And women are significantly happier after divorce than men. So there.
Kimberly Harrington is a creative director, the author of BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY, and her work has also appeared in McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Cut. She writes the bestselling Substack, HONEY STAY SUPER.