In a column for Slate, Tim Hartford explains why divorce is good for women using nice, neat, bloodless rational choice theory. I like rational choice theory. It can be a useful way of analyzing why individuals behave in certain ways. It assumes that people rationally look at option A and option B, weigh the alternatives, and then choose the option that benefits them the most.
In this column, Hartford explains how the greater ease of a “no fault” divorce has lead to happier women.
…once divorce started to become conceivable, women knew they could no longer think of themselves as one part of an economic unit. Rationality, you will recall, is about thinking ahead and responding to incentives. Realizing that the economic unit might break up, at which point a woman who simply specialized in having children was in serious trouble, it became rational for a woman to maintain career options as divorce insurance. In the division-of-labor world of the 1950s, unhappily married women would rationally stick it out: they had few alternatives. But as more older women were finding jobs, managing their housework more quickly with the aid of washing machines and electric irons, women started to realize that there was an alternative to an unhappy marriage. Divorce was still financially tough but it was no longer economic suicide. And then the contraceptive pill came along, making women—as we have seen—more highly educated, career-minded and employer-friendly…
That started a second reinforcing loop—some people regard it as a vicious circle. Because divorce was conceivable, women preserved career options. But because women had career options, divorce became conceivable. It became less and less likely that a woman would become trapped in a miserable marriage out of pure economic necessity…
The serious entry of married women into the workforce has meant that they spend a little less time baking cookies, and perhaps also that their husbands spend a little more time with the children. It has empowered them to leave marriages that are not working, making them happier and safer from abuse. It has truly been a revolution, and the price of that revolution is more divorce and less marriage. That price is very real—but it is almost certainly a price worth paying.
Really interesting and I agree with much of what Hartford said. But I can’t resist poking holes in his argument. Hartford makes the same mistake that all rational choice economists make. They assume that people’s preferences are all the same.
So, the looming spectre of poverty from divorce has pushed women to enter the workforce in droves. They need the insurance of a paycheck. That sounds about right. However, is full time employment good for all women? Hartford assumes that full time employment makes people happy. Writing legal briefs is better than baking cookies.
Full time employment is great for people who do cool jobs, like writers, pundits, and economic professors. Full time employment sucks for the person doing data entry in a direct mail company or the person who fills up coffee cups at a diner or the person renting cars at an airport. How many daycare workers would rather be watching their own children, instead of spending most of their paycheck to have other people watch their children? My father-in-law is marking off the number of weeks until retirement on his desk blotter.
And even some people with enough education and privilege to have access to cool jobs, still would prefer to be home watching their kids. They would rather change diapers, than prepare legal briefs. All those women are forced into the workforce, because they need that insurance, but they aren’t really happy about it. Being a stay at home mom is now a high risk sport.
Then there is the whole problem with the double shift. Many working women return from a full day at work to put in another shift at home. They are still making dinner, minding the kids, doing the laundry. Divisions of labor from the 60s still apply in many households, even though women are now doing the bread winning, too.
The availability of divorce has been great for some women – those who have access to great jobs, those that need the threat of a divorce to keep their men in line, those who are in genuinely abusive situations. But it hasn’t been great for the women who have been pushing unwillingly into the workforce and now face a double shift at home.
Apt. 11d 
I don’t know that I agree with the primary supposition here, which is that women enter the work force as a guarantee against divorce. My experience tells me that these days women work to cover the house payment.
Two Income Trap, if memory serves, argued that the American family is engaged in a kind of housing arms race, that has driven up the cost of housing as more and more families borrow against two incomes. These women are not protected from poverty in case of divorce; if they don’t have *two* incomes they still end up bankrupt, regardless of whether they’ve worked or not.
A more reasonable comparison, IMHO, if you want to talk about the impact of divorce on women is to investigate women who continue to live in a way parallel to pre-divorce periods: spouses whose income was never high enough to support them. In this category you could place stay-home parents, as well as the many writers/musicians/professional volunteers who are active outside the home but depend upon income from another. Are those people better or worse off with divorce? That should be the question.
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Tyler Cowen links to Stephanie Coontz’s take. Money graf:
“The late 20th-century revolution in the role and function of marriage has been as far-reaching — and as wrenching — as the replacement of local craft production and exchange by wage labor and industrialization. Like the Industrial Revolution, the family diversity revolution has undercut old ways of organizing work, leisure, caregiving, and redistribution to dependents. It has liberated some people from restrictive, socially-imposed statuses, but stripped others of customary support systems and rules for behavior, without putting clearly defined new ones in place. There have been winners and losers in the marriage revolution, just as there were in the Industrial Revolution. But we will not meet the challenges of this transformation by trying to turn back the clock.”
Which is, I think, what you’re saying.
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Full time employment sucks for the person doing data entry in a direct mail company or the person who fills up coffee cups at a diner or the person renting cars at an airport.
There you’re making the same mistake: you’re assuming everybody agrees with you about *your* statements. As a secretary, I can tell you that plenty of us peons enjoy getting out of the house, having a joke with the co-workers, and being useful as well as making money. Going home after a good day’s work, I feel good about what I’ve done, and because there’s a distinct change of atmosphere and responsibility, I value my evenings and weekends.
Even some of us moms don’t want to be home with our kids–it would have broken my spirit entirely to stay home with mine, I enjoy my work much more than I enjoy daily housework and constant childcare.
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Unfortunately, if Mr. Hartford’s premise were accurate, the fact that the number of women filing for personal bankruptcy since 1980 has increased 700% and some 41% of those women filing list divorce as a major contributing factor to their loss of income is counterintuitive.
According to a 2003 study entitled “The Ability of Women to Repay Debt After Divorce” by Jonathan Fisher of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Angela Lyons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “…divorced women have the highest default rate” at 27.5 percent compared to 20.4 percent of divorced men and 14 percent of married households. And “Divorced women are more likely than divorced men or married households to be AFDC recipients and more likely to be dependent on these payments for financial security.”
Further “Increases in the number of weeks unemployed and being in poor health may have also contributed to the increase in the default rate for divorced women. However, the combined effect of being unemployed and being in poor health has a larger impact on divorced women suggesting that they are more likely than other households to be financially affected by unanticipated shocks.”
Not that I would ever suggest that ANY woman should stay in a dysfunctional marriage, but clearly, on the whole, divorce isn’t good for anybody regardless of sex, especially those with less access to education and financial resources.
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“I don’t know that I agree with the primary supposition here, which is that women enter the work force as a guarantee against divorce. My experience tells me that these days women work to cover the house payment.
“Two Income Trap, if memory serves, argued that the American family is engaged in a kind of housing arms race, that has driven up the cost of housing as more and more families borrow against two incomes. These women are not protected from poverty in case of divorce; if they don’t have *two* incomes they still end up bankrupt, regardless of whether they’ve worked or not.”
I was going to bring that up, so thanks, Jen, for saving me a few minutes! I’d add that the same applies to the explosion in college costs–it’s possible that they are increasing so rapidly in part because of the two-income arms race, plus student loans. I also remember reading somewhere the point that single mothers are actually much worse off these days, even if they have a good job. Speaking very broadly, back in the good old days a husband contributed mainly his paycheck to the family, and a traditional family would have one breadwinner. So, theoretically, if Ms. Singlemom had school age kids, and she could get a job that paid the same as Mr. Breadwinner’s, she’d be in basically the same position as a two-parent family with one income. Hence the very short-lived vogue for single-parenting among the middle class–it didn’t look like the absence of a husband would make a big difference to quality of life. However, nowadays, Mrs. Breadwinner has a job, and Mr. Breadwinner helps out quite a lot more at home than he used to. So Ms. Singlemom is doubly disadvantaged–she has potentially half the household income of the dual-income couple, and she doesn’t have a new, improved contemporary husband who cooks, cleans, picks up after himself, and takes the kids to the park. (When my husband is out of town and I’m home alone with the kids for a couple days, it usually takes me until at least 1 AM to finish basic housework–dishes, trash, etc. And I’ve got twice-monthly cleaning help and am not very fussy about the house.)
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I certainly wouldn’t start anything i want to say with “I like rational choice theory” (since I hate it, on the whole, and consider it an exercise in modeling human behavior much worse than I don’t, know, modeling physics by assuming that the neutron has no mass. People are not rational (neither, incidentally are pigeons or monkeys, in my opinion)).
But, I think it’s pretty much pointless to argue about a world in divorce was unavailable, because it’s essentially a freedom issue. Can one be forced to remain in a partnership with another individual? Pretty much not. You can make people pay damages, but you can’t make them _do_ things. Like other modern trends, which may have negative consequences (outsourcing), divorce is essentially unstoppable in the new world.
I think the availability of divorce as an option has changed a lot of things about society and look forward to seeing how it plays out in the generations that grew up with it (as opposed to the ones for whom it was a new adventure). I think a lot of people are hoping that the rates of divorce will decline. But, I fear that believing that depends on ignoring demographic trends.
bj
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Laura has a point when she mentions that some women have not been very excited about the new dispensation, which means that they get to work jobs they don’t like and lose marriages and financial security that they would have kept under the old system.
In my family, I can think of one WWII generation couple with a good-sized number of children. He was allegedly abusive (and from what little I knew of him, certainly not a nice guy–stingy, taciturn, and selfish). She tried to leave at least once with the kids, but her parents turned her away. Had she divorced, she might have been a happier woman, but she would certainly have been much poorer, and it is doubtful that so many of her children would have managed to go to college.
On a happier note, my dad’s mom is almost exactly the sort of woman Laura is thinking of. She did some college, worked before she had kids (she did a stint at Boeing during WWII inspecting bomber radios) and worked a bit after she married a returning GI. They lived in a tiny house, had three kids, and built a bigger house mostly by themselves. When the kids got bigger, she immersed herself in Garden Club and Republican politics. When it was time to pay for college, she went to work for the local grocery store. Grandpa insisted that she work there years longer than she wanted to, and she was very happy to quit around the time her grandchildren started appearing. As an energetic (indeed, rather too energetic, thanks in part to innumerable cups of black coffee), independent woman for whom her home was her castle, she really hated being under someone’s thumb all day at work. In contrast, my grandpa loved the camaraderie at his cedar mill job and revered his bosses–he worked there years after retirement age. Aside from those two jobs, their third job was and is their farm, which for many years had 60 cows plus baby calves, and now has about 20, which is what they can manage now that grandpa is in his late 80s and grandma has lost most of her sight. Earlier in her retirement, she spent a lot of time with her 9 grandchildren, which was very helpful to her children and their spouses, especially the dual career families. My maternal and domestic conscience tends to speak with my grandmother’s voice.
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“It has truly been a revolution, and the price of that revolution is more divorce and less marriage. That price is very real—but it is almost certainly a price worth paying.”
I don’t like the judgmental term “price,” so I’ll use “consequence.” Another consequence is delayed marriage. Before people get married, they live together for a while, see if they have this marriage thing (meaning a committed relationship as opposed to a sacrament) all worked out first. So divorce may not increase because people are working out compatibility issues before marriage.
This is all totally foreign to me, though. I work because I am an adult, not because I am a woman preserving career options.
Re filling coffee cups in a diner: my mom actually went to work in a diner when my youngest sister started school. She did it not to pay for college (Ha! My parents had no college savings plan, which makes it a good thing I got massive amounts of aid/scholarships) but because she wanted a little extra spending money. And she liked the work and still has good friends from her time there.
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My mom (though much less energetic than her mother-in-law), has three children and was home basically all of my childhood, aside from the occasional substitute teaching gig (mainly at a reservation school). When my younger brother was in kindergarten and I was deep into high school, my dad starting making noises about her getting a job. She had cancer treatment for the next year or so, but eventually my parents took out a small loan, we built a store (meaning that we as a family did most of the construction ourselves–we painted the exterior until 11 by the light of headlights) and opened a tourist trap. It was a slow start (many hours, the only sale would be a 5 cent twist of licorice), but eventually it was a going concern, with my mom the face of the business (chief aesthetic officer, buyer, and salesperson), and my dad a behind the scenes guy (placing orders, doing paperwork, dealing with the bills, and folding many a t-shirt), plus a few summer employees (which in the early years meant me and my sister running the cash register as long as there were cars on the road to the National Park). I honestly can’t imagine my mom working for a boss–it’s just not in the blood.
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One other interesting way this is playing out, at least in my circle, is that age at marriage appears to be declining in professional classes. At my office, the 20-something women are often married at 25. It’s striking to sit in meetings and see how consistent this generational trend is.
The Gen Yers don’t seem to feel the need to wait, and I actually consider this progress. There seems to be less, erm, ambivalence on the part of the young women. These ladies honestly don’t expect to do all the housework. And I am extremely jealous to hear that they’re right: their husbands were often raised to clean up after themselves. I meanwhile only avoid cleaning up after my 43-year-old husband by hiring a cleaning lady. No wonder they can’t relate to my flashes of anger at the “iron my shirt” incident.
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There’s a lot to chew on in this post.
First of all, no-fault divorce HAS reduced the number of female suicides as well as men murdered by their wives. The reduction in the number of trapped, desperate women who see no way out of their marriages but murder is a good thing.
I remember Laura posting a review of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio and I commented on how no-fault divorce was a godsend to the likes of Evelyn Ryan. I’ve listened to stories my grandmothers and aunt told, and read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and can tell you that in the “good old days” there were many husbands who were out-and-out shiftless. Not just mean, not just difficult to get along with, SHIFTLESS. A woman who was unlucky enough to be hitched to a shiftless man had an albatross around her neck for life. And these guys knew it. Divorce might seem like one of those “First Wives Club” type things but another scenario, let’s call it Katie Nolan Gets Fed Up, is more common.
“Ah,” you say, “but what about those ‘First Wives Club’ divorces?” Well, back in those good old days before no-fault divorce, a man who tired of his wife just took a mistress. Or two. And spent all his money on her. The grandes horizontales and other courtesans of the nineteenth century were dripping with diamonds bought and paid for by other women’s husbands.
I would venture to add that the pheomenon of the man walking out on his family “to find himself” or whatever, so common in the Boomer era, is less common now. Why? Because there is no longer a surplus of women as there was in the ’70’s. The sex ratio is now male-biased, at least for everyone except African-Americans, for people under forty. And even then – men are living longer, there are fewer widows, therefore it is no longer assured that a middle-aged divorced man can have his pick of hot women with great jobs willing to take on him, his first-wife drama, and bratty, resentful stepkids.
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But there are getting to be a lot more college-educated women than men, so that particular pool is skewed.
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Jen, good comment about The Two Income Trap pushing women into the workforce, rather than insurance against divorce.
Many commenters- Women who make substantially less than their husbands (raising my hand here) are still at a major disadvantage. I also thought about this objection, but forgot to add it to my post.
bj, rational choice is a fun exercise. It can’t be used to explain everything, but it is a good for explaining behavior of one individual, rather than groups of people. I think it failed here, because it made the assumption that all individuals have the same interests.
Kai and Wendy, I’m sure that many secretaries and waitresses love their jobs. Many lawyers probably hate their jobs. I’m just saying that individuals have different interests, that’s all.
jen, good to hear about evolution in the traditional division of household labor.
jim, oooh, I dislike Stephanie Coonz. Yes, there have been winner and losers in the marriage revolution, but that’s no reason to discount the losers. Their interests shouldn’t be forgotten. I think that they should have options in the modern age, without returning back to the age of Leave it to Beaver.
good discussion, folks.
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“Many lawyers probably hate their jobs.”
You can go beyond “probably” to “Many lawyers hate their jobs.” At some point, I started noticing that there are a lot of people (both men and women) who used to practice law but don’t anymore.
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“Many commenters- Women who make substantially less than their husbands (raising my hand here) are still at a major disadvantage. I also thought about this objection, but forgot to add it to my post.”
I don’t know how we missed that one, which is really crucial in demonstrating that female employment is more about stabilizing the family economy than insuring against divorce. If employment were 100% divorce insurance, working women would be simply maximizing income, which they obviously aren’t doing.
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A parenting e-mail list I’m on is filled with former lawyers, one who eventually became a doula. We got together with my husband’s old HS friends over Xmas, and one of them is a former lawyer now working at (some job I can’t remember because it’s one of those jobs like Chandler’s on Friends) at a big name computer firm on Long Island.
But then there’s one of my oldest friends who is still (at 42) a lawyer and enjoying it. And a friend about the same age went to law school after years in university development/fundraising and finally got his first real job this month.
I think becoming a lawyer was a status thing. People did it to make money, not because they wanted to be lawyers, or even because they were good at it.
Is it class privilege or something else (naivete’?) that I never ever thought of career planning in terms of making money? I just wanted to find what I enjoyed doing and was good at. I always figured I’d change my lifestyle to accommodate my salary, not the other way around.
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One oddity in the Catholic blogosphere is that (at least in the past) there were a heck of a lot of commenters who were lawyers. I expect the reason is that the sort of person who rejoices in mastering the details of Canon Law or the Catechism or Byzantine history as a leisure activity takes to US law like a duck to water.
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One more thing–I think law school is really a default option for a lot of college kids today. If they can’t figure out what to do with themselves, they go to law school. My husband teaches philosophy, and at his old institution in DC, lots of philosophy majors were headed to law school. I’ve heard the same thing about English, too.
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I suppose I find it hard to worry too much about women who are upset at the great tragedy of having to work uncool jobs to help support their family’s middle-class lifestyle when they’ve most likely been asking the same of their spouse.
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I just read Harford’s entire piece in Slate, and I found myself in substantial agreement with his analysis of the household economics that have led to much higher divorce rates: basically, the dissolution of gender roles within marriage occasioned by technological advances in the home. (I do take umbrage at his clueless and condescending gloss on homemaking and childrearing as “baking cookies” and “ironing shirts.”) I think he gets that current of social history just about right. (Does anybody else get that mixed feeling of triumph/dismay when they read a prominent figure arguing for a conclusion that you reached independently beforehand? Triumph, because you feel vindicated, but dismay, because now your brilliant insight isn’t yours alone.)
But I disagree with his conclusion that higher divorce rates make women happier and more secure. I think he gets this wrong because he disregards a concomitant pair of self-reinforcing trends over the same time period, and it has everything to do with what he conspicuously ignores in the piece: the effect of divorce on children. During the same period that divorce has been rising, birth rates have been falling and parents have been investing relatively more in each child. This has led to a different but equally fierce arms-race in the expense of raising children: homes in the right school district, extracurriculars, college. So while divorced and single mothers now have greater access to jobs, they are facing hugely inflated fixed costs for reproducing their middle-class status in their children.
Given the mixed-bag effects of divorce on women, and the not-so-mixed effects on children, I think it would be beneficial overall to reduce divorce rates further. (Not to zero, but lower than they are.) This doesn’t necessarily have to happen by legal means; it’s possible that cultural influences could lower divorce while leaving the legal channels open for those who really need it. Specifically I’m thinking of religion. If, as is often argued, the religious will inherit the earth via higher birth rates (and I dunno if this is solid, but IF it is), perhaps social taboos will swing back against divorce while leaving the legal channels untouched. Who knows.
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Oh, also, Harford doesn’t address the class gap in divorce: lower-income women divorce at much higher rates than high-income women. At first blush this seems counterintuitive—and it does, in fact, undercut Harford’s premise about incentives—because it would seem that higher-income women would enjoy more economic freedom to leave stale marriages. My theory is that because of assortive mating, higher-income women marry higher-income men, and thus the opportunity cost for divorce is much higher for relatively wealthy women than for poor women. Divorcing a master-of-the-universe type will cost a lot more in terms of lifestyle than divorcing a shiftless loser.
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i think when we talk about “the old system” what we are talking about is “the old economy”, and by that i mean the unprecedented wealth this country experienced during the decades following WWII.
women didn’t enter the workforce recently – they re-entered it.
“the two-income trap” is more the historical norm than the luxury of having the majority of families employ a full-time stay at home caregiver.
and yes, those of us who earn significantly less than our husbands are at a disadvantage. and unless i enroll in medical school tomorrow, that isn’t going to change. 😦
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Cates, I would tend to disagree that higher-income women avoid divorce because they have so much more to lose. I would argue instead that the reason they are higher income to begin with is that they waited longer to marry. And it’s clearly the case that waiting a few years to marry makes you less likely to divorce. (I believe it’s 26 for age at marriage that’s the “magic” point at which your chances of divorce go way down?)
Here’s where I pause to consider with a blush just exactly who I’d be divorced from if I’d gotten married at 21!!! (But he was very cute, I swear, and he could really hold his liquor.)
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“”the two-income trap” is more the historical norm than the luxury of having the majority of families employ a full-time stay at home caregiver.”
As I understand it, the two-income trap is more than just dual employment–it refers to the middle-class housing-and-schools arms race where families bid up the price of housing in “good” school districts and neighborhoods, beggaring themselves in the process. I think that’s a relatively new development (perhaps partly due to desegregation?), just as the housing bubble was unprecedented as a nation-wide phenomenon.
I hesitate to describe the 50s as luxurious. Secure yes, luxurious, no. Couldn’t you equally well describe the difference between then and now by saying that in the 1950s, America was so poor that there weren’t enough jobs for women to be able to work? The Depression generation was thrilled with the comfort, cleanliness, and newness of their homes (the delightful shiny modernness of it all), but I think there’s a problem in taking that evaluation at face value. They were comparing their post-war lives to the two decades of material privation in their childhoods and early adulthoods–of course the 1950s in America looked like the Emerald City in comparison. But I’d recommend looking at artifacts of the 1950s with a more critical eye. How many of us would happily move into a mint-condition 55-year-old house, with all the original floorplan and fixtures, even if it was all shiny and in perfect working order if the condition was that it would have to stay that way, floorplan and all? (OK–the readers of Atomic Ranch magazine might, but even they like to tart their “Mid-Century Modern” houses up a bit.)
There’s a very insightful quote (I forget from who) that fits here: Conservatives want to go home to the 1950s; liberals want to work there.
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I was going to comment on the “divorce gap” between the college-educated and the rest of the population but Cates beat me to it. (For the scholarly paper on the subject google “Steven P. Martin” and “divorce.”) Amy P. pointed out that the educated tend to marry later, when they are (presumably) more mature and ready to settle down.
Also, turning the idea that women don’t want to divorce a high-earning man because they’ll lose their cushy life on its head – lack of money causes stress and tension that can have a corrosive effect on a marriage. It’s hard to have goodwill towards your partner if you are constantly fighting over money or stressed due to watch-dogging your budget and juggling bill payments year after year and STILL not making ends meet.
A couple more things: I would surmise that higher-income, more educated couples have greater access to counseling and the like if things go sour so they have a better chance of saving a troubled marriage. Also, they are more likely to be aware that divorce can be bad for children, and thus more motivated to work things out.
Finally: just a surmise, but are educated men more likely to embrace feminist principles (even if they don’t call themselves ‘feminists’) and want a companionate, egalitarian marriage? It seems likely. This more than anything might explain the lower divorce rate among the more-educated.
Ann Crittenden (author of “The Price of Motherhood”) thinks that a “share the pain” division of assets would lower the divorce rate. That is, whoever got custody of the kids would get the lion’s share of assets, enough to keep the kids in the style to which they are accustomed (good schools, college, etc.). A great idea on the surface, but I wonder would it make men very reluctant to marry at all? Or father children?
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I suppose lifestyle and personality factors like access to counseling, age at marriage and social capital might have some effect on the margins in keeping divorce lower among high income couples, but I’m enough of a rational choicer to think that it’s the basic economic incentives that do most of the work (ie, my theory about opportunity cost above).
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amy p, some dual employment may well be the result of a “housing and good schools arms race”, but amongst the working class in this country, that is not the case. working class families have both parents employed because they need to in order to make ends meet, have health insurance, &c.
and the 1950’s were technologically not as luxurious as life today, for sure. but economically, when working class families could afford a mortgage, had health insurance, and, with government aid, college education for their children – *on only one income* – that’s pretty darn luxurious. especially since so many working class families can’t achieve that standard of living even with two wage-earners in the family.
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Just about every church does some sort of marriage counseling, so marriage counseling is theoretically open to just about everybody (and our friends the Evangelicals are very big on marriage quality and getting men to take an active role in parenting). However, a lot of men just won’t go. Coincidentally, far more men than women say that their divorce surprised them. I’m guessing some of those who say the divorce came out of nowhere were the ones who wouldn’t go to counseling!
Ailurophile is right to bring up money, since it is supposed to be the main issue that breaks up marriages. The funny thing is that divorce tends to make people poorer (two households being more expensive than one), so a lot of couples would be materially much better off if they could manage to agree about money, rather than engaging in mutually assured destruction that only makes the lawyers rich. That sounds easy, but it isn’t–it means agreeing on a multitude of smaller issues. Should we have a baby? When? How many babies should we have? Should we pay for more infertility treatments? Should one of us stay home? For how long? Should we buy a house yet? How much house can we afford? Should we get a HELOC for remodeling? Should we pay off debt? How fast? How new should our cars be? How much should we eat out and spend on entertaining? What kind of schools should we send our kids to? Should we give to charity? How much? Which ones? Should we save for kids’ college? How much should we save for retirement? There’s a whole year of fights available in each of those questions if a couple doesn’t have very similar values. One spouse’s fecklessness can create a sort of parent/child relationship where there ought to be a spousal relationship, and there’s no faster way of losing your spouse’s respect, short of adultery or addiction (for details, see mydebtblog.com). The beauty of having a working budget is that it’s a sort of mission statement for a family–your values are there indisputably on the paper in black and white, since where your heart is, your treasure will be. I think this is all easier with bigger kids. I stopped cooking seriously in spring 2003, which was coincidentally when our oldest started crawling. Our youngest is almost three now and it’s quite a different world. I can leave the kids in a room briefly and no one squishes their baby brother irreparably or swallows a toy. Coincidentally, today I’m virtuously cooking beans in the Crock Pot for the second time this week, after leaving it on the shelf for nearly five years. Things change. I think that rather banal sentence is the best piece of advice I could offer a new mother who feels like using a frying pan on her husband (and who hasn’t?)–next week will be different, next month will be different, next year will be very different. I was reading somewhere that a survey was done and it found that after five years (or whatever), many people who said their marriages were unhappy had changed their minds–they weren’t in a bad marriage, they were just in a rough spot that they managed to get through.
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trishka,
But they had 1950s medical care, dental care, and pharmaceuticals. Also, if you look at my description of my grandparents’ life, they sent their three kids to college in the 60s with three incomes: his mill job, her grocery store job, and their 60-cow farm (which the kids helped a lot with). Granted, I agree that you probably couldn’t do the same thing as easily today (what with NAFTA, etc.), but it was not a single income, and I don’t think that the kids got really any financial aid.
As to the mortgage, I think a few years will take care of that. Around 2010, I think housing is going to be very affordable. (Maybe a lot of people will be out of work then, but houses are going to be a lot cheaper.) Even now, I listen to calls on the Dave Ramsey show where people have car payments that are literally higher than their mortgage payments–that’s what it’s still like in large areas of non-metropolitan America.
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Amy, I can relate to what you’re saying. And in a weird way it does somewhat get back to Laura’s original point … when you’re in a tough spot, broke, fighting over every dollar spent, it’s easy to say, “I’m in a bad marriage and need to get out.” Later you might find that you were really just broke and in a tough spot, and your marriage was not the issue. But when divorce is a real option and you’re not sure what to do to change things, I can see where you would opt for that. (And perhaps later regret it.)
On the other hand I’m not sure I ever would have consented to marry if I had known there was no back-away if it all went terribly south!!
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Speaking of 1950s medical care–when my dad and his brother and sister were kids, that meant their father (a middling former veterinary student and WWII medic) procuring vaccines and a large container of penicillin from their neighbor legendary Doc L—– and dosing the kids himself. Fortunately, they all survived.
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Laura’s going to have to start charging me rent again, but I’d like to mention that based on my skimming of my dad’s and my aunt’s new book on frontier women in our area of western Washington, there seem to have been a surprising number of frontier divorcees in the late 19th century/early 20th century.
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The Internet is a many-splendored thing. This is a post by a guy who revels in blogging about his cad adventures in seduction: http://roissy.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/dont-get-married/
expressing the view that he can get plenty of sex without marriage, divorce is expensive, qed guys, don’t get married (he doesn’t address the question of who is going to wipe his butt when he is 76 and incontinent and needs assisted living, if all the guys take his advice and there are no children).
It seems to me that for our friends who have divorced, it’s been hugely expensive and settlements have generally taken money from the higher-earning partner and moved it to the lower-earning, particularly when the lower-earning partner will be custodial for the children. But you know, it’s GOING to be expensive to move from supporting one dwelling to two, with the same money coming in, no way around it.
Here is a blog of photos of long-ago, focusing somewhat on child laborers at the turn of the last century: http://www.shorpy.com/ the past is a different country, that’s for sure. And people were a LOT poorer. One income could support a house, yes, and it was a house with one or one-and-a-half baths if you were lucky, and kids shared bedrooms. AmyP, it seems to me there was more consensus about what the roles of wife and husband were, and people could, in a way, marry with less care, because they could really expect that the role they were going into was defined, they didn’t have to negotiate everything de novo with the spouse. Now, yes, everything is on the table.
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“AmyP, it seems to me there was more consensus about what the roles of wife and husband were, and people could, in a way, marry with less care, because they could really expect that the role they were going into was defined, they didn’t have to negotiate everything de novo with the spouse. Now, yes, everything is on the table.”
I’ve agree that the lack of defined roles tends to increase conflict, at least initially, or during transitional periods (new baby, etc.). On the other hand, a more flexible family structure makes a family more effective, better able to arrange its resources to deal with challenges. However, I think that the contemporary may not be getting full value from the kids (at least I haven’t yet been able to fully exploit my 5-year-old!).
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Here’s another point against divorce, single parenting, and rigid sex role division within marriage: in all three cases, the family structure has much less flexibility and resilience than a two parent family. If you’ve got two kids, and one needs to spend a night at the hospital, it’s just a medium bump for a two parent family. One parent can go to the hospital and the other can stay home with the well child. But in a single parent family (or when one parent is away), this is a recipe for a genuine crisis, unless there’s a truly exceptional support network in place (and building that network takes a lot of time and energy, too). Likewise, one often hears of widows or widowers in a tailspin because their deceased spouse handled all the finances, and they had no idea what their household’s financial position was. I think the ideal to strive for is both specialization and flexibility. That’s contradictory, I suppose, but I think ideally both spouses should understand all of the basic processes that make the household work, even if the work itself isn’t shared 50/50. There were several years where I didn’t open a single bill, and I really should have been more involved, even if I wasn’t actually doing the payments.
(Laura’s really going to charge me rent now.)
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I know a few single parent families who have a hell of a better support network than I do. 😦 Of course, I chose to live in Massachusetts, 3+ hours away from my family (actually for 3 years I chose to live in Maine, 7 hours away). My single-parent friend J has her mother, brother and sister-in-law all within a few miles of her.
When my water broke at just about the WORST time (11 pm) when I lived in Maine, we had pre-arranged that one of the young women who worked at her day care would stay overnight with her because my parents would never get there in time. We’d lived there for two years, and the day care was our only community. Ironic, huh.
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AmyP, it’s after events like that – kid to hospital, parent has to go to Japan for a week, parent gets really sick for a while – that the missus and I, one turns to the other and says, “Never divorce me!”
You certainly have a point on specialization, I ought to pay more attention to bill paying. Would she then do more on the lawn? Maybe….
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“I know a few single parent families who have a hell of a better support network than I do.”
Sure. On the other hand, an upper-middle class type career tends to require mobility, and having to stay in a single place suppresses earnings (and reduces financial security). Especially for the academic or nomadic corporate family, it’s nice to be able to bring your support network with you in the form of a spouse. (That isn’t always quite enough, though. When I was having my second baby, my husband, two-year-old and I all walked to the hospital, calling sitters most of the way. Then we got to the hospital, my toddler bounced on the birthing ball, my husband and daughter left to rendezvous with the sitter, and my husband returned barely in time for our second child to be born. Fortunately, we’d gotten a doula, so I wasn’t alone.)
“AmyP, it’s after events like that – kid to hospital, parent has to go to Japan for a week, parent gets really sick for a while – that the missus and I, one turns to the other and says, “Never divorce me!””
Well do I know that feeling. Kids seem to act up when they’ve got you outnumbered.
“You certainly have a point on specialization, I ought to pay more attention to bill paying. Would she then do more on the lawn? Maybe….”
If she (God forbid) died tomorrow, would you know where to look for important papers, and would you know which important papers to look for? One of the items on my to-do list is to have my husband give me a guided tour of the contents of our fire-proof safe. He still pays all the bills, but I’ve appointed myself in charge of long-term planning and keeping track of the monthly budget. ($228 dollars available for food and unexpected expenses from now until the end of January. Fortunately, February is short.) I was recently reading someone’s suggestion that the financially savvy spouse produce an up-to-date mini-summary of everything for the other spouse.
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There’s a chicken and egg thing about single parents and support, though. My guess is that single parents (and their extended family) make life changes in order to be nearer to one another.
What intrigues me is people who make successful support networks of non-family friends. In a pinch, since kids, our backup has always been family. We think of that as being accidental. We moved here for a job — before kids, it seemed coincidental that we had some family here. But, now, I can see how the presence of kids changes our plans about what else we might do.
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Monday Morning Links
Obama: None of our hands is clean. Sorry to disagree – mine are. Also, Obama goes after Bill. More from Wizbang. Apparently Osama is beginning to feel that hs is running against Bill, and I can understand why.The archeology of downtown NYC. Wooden wate…
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What a staggeringly superficial column, world-saver. The entire principle can be wrapped up with the artificial constructs of the nonsensical tension between baking and a career, of being “forced” into the workplace, by sheer, dimensionless economic opportunity, and by having another “shift” at home after 5?
Reality much?
Unbelievable. But it’s what we’ve become, haven’t we? Superficial, self-consumed, unprincipled, heartless, mechanical. Because it’s all about the cash.
The older I get the more I, a principled, rational, dedicated, faithful, spiritual, and even handsome single father and business owner come to realize I’ll be infinitely better off staying single than risking the sorts of plastic fantastics that populate the exploding pool of “eligible” single women.
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Come and get him, single ladies!
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Thanks, Amy. And to think guys thing women lack irony.
Speaking of singles, some common code words are: “I’m an attractive lady.” Means: I don’t trust you to have a valid opinion of my dysfunction. Or my looks.
“Life is incredible!” — I’m so insecure I could spit.
“Comfortable where I am in life.” — Don’t approach without seven figures.
And so on.
Come and get ’em ladies? Only if we’re foolish enough to get into those traps, which leads back to the original premise: Rating relationships solely by lifestyle obsessions. By Love, American Style.
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Begone, women trappers. Ten is all mine!
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For couples that can afford it there’s an argument that a parent staying home is divorce insurance. There’s a clearer division of labor, and somone to handle errands and unexpected illnesses, etc. Sure, there may be less money, but not always with the price of daycare and other working expenses. Quality of life matters — cooked dinners as a family, time on the weekends to do fun stuff as a family, enough sleep, no need to juggle two workers’ vacation time . . . . Wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect that less divorce would happen in these families?
Another point, possibly of limited relevance — any working mom stats are somewhat suspect imo, because any paid work during a year makes a woman count as employed. The number of women in the workforce is almost always overstated — a significant number of those women would be surprised to hear that they are in the workforce, since they work a few hours a week or had a job last December.
Also, my understanding is that there is not significantly less housework now than in the past. We have bigger houses, more stuff, higher standards, and less household help.
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Alison,
I believe SAHMs do divorce at a lower rate than WOTHs. However, you would expect that a SAHM who felt her marriage was going south would be likely to get a job.
“Another point, possibly of limited relevance — any working mom stats are somewhat suspect imo, because any paid work during a year makes a woman count as employed.”
Very good point–a technically working woman may not self-identify as a WOTH. Every so often, I hear a woman say something like, “I’m a stay-at-home-mom and I work part-time doing blah blah blah.” To a certain extent, being a SAHM is psychological. Also, women who do in-home childcare are hard to categorize, especially if it’s on a small scale.
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Divorce is a gamble for any middle-class woman. I have an MS, a 3.9 GPA and grew up in a more or less privileged environment..and it all goes back to my divorce.
I divorced my husband, really had no choice as he was sleeping around and when I was at my part-time job, he brought our 2 and 6 year-old with to meet various women.
I left my marriage around the age of 40 and a week later my daughter was shot while at a gift shop–a fluke, a random act of violence.
A few years later my son was diagnosed with autism. I went through about 17 daycare providers and it had a profound impact on my career (writer/editor).
A few years after that, I was diagnosed with cancer. I think all the stress caused my health problems. I had to sell our home, declare bankruptcy and while physically recovered, all of my assets and spirit are gone.
My ex, who is a creative director in television—(he was a part-time musician and graphic artist when we married), has an income of 189K. While I dealt with the kids problems, worked full-time and sometimes more, gave up dating due to kid’s needs and lack of babysitting etc., he was searching for another wife and going to Europe, driving BMW’s, skiing in Tahoe. Apparently women thought he was a “catch.”
He recently married a much younger women who has never had kids (he never dated single moms as they never had enough free time)–and who is also now a creative services director and makes big bucks.
Given that divorces are “no fault” and women are equal, I wasn’t awarded any alimony, just full custody of the kids because my ex was never a great parent (he was building his career for “us”.)
I’m 55, have no money for retirement and yes–I’m bitter as a bag of lemons. Kids are unpredictable and so is health. Child support payments, even for men who make a good living–the top is about 30% of their after-tax income–less money than a full-time nanny makes. I would never have decided to have a 2 and 6 year-old as a single parent aged 40–with no real financial means. Yet the no-fault divorce laws imposed this on me.
I in no way feel thankful to my ex for giving me children–I could have planned for kids had I wanted to be a single parent and just gone to a sperm bank. Family law is ridiculously biased against the primary parent.
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Gloria
I appreciate your direct honesty “bitter as a bag of lemons,” as well as your telling your story. Quite a story and I feel it. I didn’t get cancer, actually caught it early enough and had a clean excision of the pre cancerous cells. My children are OK if you don’t count the eating disorder of my beautiful daughter and the fact that my son has avoided college and yet is so very intelligent, and would have if all of this hadn’t happened. He is still very angry. He so needs his father’s support and direction. He is grateful to me for all I did to keep a roof over our heads and to love him and help him as much as I could, and still do. He knows what happened and sees through his father.
I am 54 and have nothing financially. I helped him through law school with my inheritance and stayed home with the children and also took care of him and everything to do with the home, the kids’ schools, assisted in our business, etc. I brought in more money than he did from my family, he had quite a deal.
I asked for the separation due to his condescending, patronizing attitude to me and withholding of affection for years. I had earned a Master’s degree in the arts, right before our son was born, and I work now in that field, but it is a field where most retire at 50.
I was not good enough for him anymore, he was attracted to other attorneys, professional women and dated women in my field, which affected my career in this smallish city.
He remarried a woman 10 yrs younger and had a “new family.” Our children have received nothing from him. He sued for custody for over 4 yrs. it actually went on for longer than that until my son was 18 and he couldn’t use the law, as a lawyer, to batter us any longer. I did prevail, reversed custody, that he had won at first as he was on another case with the psych evaluator. It was a conflict of interest. That is not why I reversed custody. I had counsel and funding from my father, did everything in my son’s interest at every turn, and held a card that was quite loaded as per illegal acts he had committed. I merely referred indirectly to it with the GAL and it worked. Putting him in prison would not have helped our son. But it was tempting, to stop the legal abuse.
I am attractive, young for my age, do interesting work, and yet am still single. I have been labeled as bitter and I frankly find that rhetorically sexist. I like men and I am quite giving and kind, surprisingly so, considering. Had I known what I would pay, I would have fled with my son to another country. Now I will work very hard for the rest of my life to provide for myself and my children. I am from an upper class family and was taught to give of myself. That may work when you are married to an upper class man, not my case.
My advice is for women and some men in reverse roles, to get it in writing, when you agree to help them with their career, with the understanding that you are to have “your turn.” I didn’t get my turn and neither did our children.
I heard through the grapevine that he is sorry now, he is bored with his younger wife and realizes that I was “the love of his life.” He says he was abused as a child and that is why he did what he did. I say bullshit. Show me $150,000 in legal fees and a house worth close to a million, as well as most importantly, undo the damage to the children. Finally tell ME he is sorry. That will never happen. Too much pride.
For those who think women get it all as per custody issues, not always true, by a long shot when he is a “professional.”
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Thanks to anon and Gloria for sharing their stories. Maybe it’s my Catholic upbringing, but I like to think that the just get their rewards in the end and the unjust get what they deserve.
In the meantime, I’m glad that you shared your stories on this blog. Getting the word out is the only way for change to happen.
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I can’t believe the presumptiveness of the last “inheritance” poster. What gives you the right to anything more than a paycheck-to-paycheck envelope stuffer or handbill distributor existence? You have no right to housing. You have no right to food. Be grateful you are not living in a park shivering all night as you cry alone. Learn how to earn each breath of oxygen and stop whining about what someone didn’t give your uncalloused hands. I understand there are jobs open picking fruit or fresh veggies. Have you really earned more options based on your work alone and not that of your father or your husband?
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