"A Miserly Husband Has No Right
to make his wife a victim of his own sordidness." Words from George Bishop, Every Woman Her Own Lawyer: A Private Guide in All Matters of Law, of Essential Interest to Women, and by the Aid of Which Every Female May, in Whatever Situation, Understand Her Legal Course and Redress, and Be Her Own Legal Adviser (1858). More (emphasis in original):
What a Wife may do with a Miserly or Penurious Husband.—When a husband, by reason of penuriousness, meanly refuses to supply his wife with necessaries suitable to her rank and condition, the wife may obtain them of any tradesman or tradesmen, and the husband must pay the bills of the same.
On the other hand (emphasis also in original), A Wife can not maliciously run her husband into debt.
I knew a female lawyer who was doing some pro bono work in the 1980s defending a widow who was sued by a hospital for paying her husband's medical bills -- and the defense was, you guessed it, under the Doctrine of Necessities a wife isn't obligated to pay her husband's bills, she's only obligated to do the housework. It worked: the hospital realized it could win but only after paying tens of thousands in legal bills to appeal the case all the way up to the Supreme Court of North Carolina or higher, so it dropped the case. She pointed out that a lawyer is obligated to raise any possible defense, regardless of what the lawyer may personally think of it. The North Carolina Supreme Court overturned the sex-specific nature of the tort a few years later. But several North Carolina common law features -- the abandonment tort and the seduction tort, as well as the criminal-law defense of spousal compulsion, for example -- remain gender-specific and good law to this day.
My former spouse's credit card bills were at least three times that and I did not relish paying them off in the wake of her bankruptcy. If you marry a spendthrift, you're screwed. At least there's a cap on child support payments.
The moral basis for alimony is that the earner signed a contract to support the homemaker and that breaking up the marriage does not remove that obligation.
Fair enough, I suppose, although many contracts that substantial are unenforcable against individuals without precautions to make sure that the obligated party knew what he was getting into. Remember how many papers you had to sign for your mortgage before the bank had reason to believe they would be able to forclose if you didn't pay?
However...
On this theory the homemaker also undertook obligations when they married, and those obligations seem to disappear immediately. This is manifestly unfair and has a disparate impact on men and women as well.
You might argue that it would be impractical in the extreme to require the homemaker to come back every day to cook and clean for the earner. This is fair enough ... but cleaning services and cooking services and private concierge services are available in most parts of the country. Feminist organizations are fond of quoting large figures for the value a homemaker brings into the home, and I'm willing to take them at their word. Everyone who is obligated to pay alimony should be entitled to deduct the amount required to make up those services that the homemaker chooses to no longer provide in kind before the amount is calculated.
-dk
You might argue that it would be impractical in the extreme to require the homemaker to come back every day to cook and clean for the earner. This is fair enough ... but cleaning services and cooking services and private concierge services are available in most parts of the country. Feminist organizations are fond of quoting large figures for the value a homemaker brings into the home, and I'm willing to take them at their word. Everyone who is obligated to pay alimony should be entitled to deduct the amount required to make up those services that the homemaker chooses to no longer provide in kind before the amount is calculated.
Excellent point, Mr. King.
What if alimony is viewed as repayment of the opportunity costs incurred by the non-earning spouse?
P.S. Is that your real name or your porn name?
From Cameron:
This can be interpreted in two ways:
1: The homemaker could have earned money during the marriage, but didn't.
This is amply compensated. In most states, the homemaker will get at least half of the marital assets even though the earner will have put forth substantially more than half of the effort required to earn those assets. The share that they did not earn but that they get anyway is compensation for the lost income during the marriage.
2: The homemaker let hir career atrophy during the marriage, so they can't earn as much after the marriage.
In my state of California, there are fourteen factors to consider in setting alimony. Only one of those factors involves lost opportunities, and that has to be read creatively to even get that. Alimony is based on earning power, whether there was a pre-existing career or not.
Cameron's view does not correspond to reality for several reasons:
1: Alimony is assessed based on the earning power the earner has, not on the earning power the homemaker could have had. No attempt is made to determine the latter. This is a hugely important point in testing this view. A person who marries a doctor and drops out of the labor force gets substantially more alimony than one who marries a factory worker, despite having suffered no greater a career damage.
2: For this view to be fair, there would have to be some showing of culpability -- not for ending the marriage but for stunding the homemaker's career. Cameron, do you claim that happens?
3: The earner's homemaking skills have also been allowed to atrophy. Why shouldn't the earner get compensation for that?
-dk
It's no worse than being on a slave galley. If you're chained to somebody next to you for years, in most cases you'll get along with them. If not, it's going to get unpleasant. In neither situation will the slave galley be an abode of bliss, but it might at least be tolerable.
1) It takes several years of cohabitation to really get to know someone, maybe less if the two of you are older. Six months or a year and a half just isn't enough.
2) The older you are, the more likely the marriage is to be successful. I got married at 21. Intelligence can't make up for the fact that people aren't finished growing emotionally until they're 30 at least.
As far as alimony, though my parents are spewing such weird things as I should get the house but my ex should make the payments, I'm of the mind that a high earner should help out the other for a little while if the other cannot support themselves. By 'support' I'm not talking about maintaining their previous married standard of living, I'm talking about affording a one-room apartment, car/insurance, gas, phone line, food, utilities, and health insurance, but nothing beyond that.
I'm currently in that situation. I have a business I'm running, but it doesn't make enough to support me by itself. I also have a part-time job that may or may not give me enough hours any given month to cover things on the above-mentioned list that the business can't. I do have career plans, but those may take several years to have any effect. In the meantime I'm keeping my eye out for jobs that pay more than my current one, but until then... I'll be living on the charity of a friend who has two rooms in his house to spare.