AIBU to want half of the pension after divorce?

OP has said:

'I suspect he has had many other women over the years as well. We haven’t had an intimate relationship in a very long time. He’s careful and clever though and I could never prove it. Would it make a difference though?'

She didn't do anything to confirm her suspicions.

I really hope so, but I'm not always sure.

There are some women on MN who will have you do a full days work, save for your maternity, fund maternity leave, chain yourself to the kitchen sink when not at work, pay half the bills, fund your own massive pension, be able to afford your own home, and all kinds of hard labour.
Staying at home is absolutely not acceptable (even with the most robust financial provisions and protections).

And when your partner leaves, you shouldn't expect cooperative parenting and absolutely no / the very minimum of child support (to be stopped or reduced as soon as someone else needs him to feed/house their children).

Yep people here suggesting he was being screwed over seem to think this was a model forced on him. Instead of a set-up they both preferred.

They’re not ridiculous just because the feminists of mumsnet want society to reflect their preferred family structure.

Lots of families find it far easier to have a traditional split where one focuses on paid labour and the other unpaid labour. Why should marriage laws be restructured because you think mothers (and sometimes fathers) should be forced out of the home? If they are merely two independent people what point marriage?

I agree. I was born in 73 and mum couldnt go back to work until we were at school as there was no childcare locally. There were a very small number of child minders but that was it. Either it was family or if you had money, a nanny or mothers help.

I do think a lot of it depends on where you lived too. I know around here being a SAHM/housewife was not at all unusual in 1980's. There very much was the same attitude that the OP's husband had, having a wife who stayed at home after the kids started school shows how successful they are as a couple and was a status symbol. There is a woman my mother knows from church who takes great pride in making sure everyone knows that she didnt have to work. She is about the same age as my mother, so mid 70's.

Yep. There is a revealed preference here from DH. This is how he's chosen to conduct his life.

Quite. If he didn't like the setup he could have divorced op years agoand kept the last 20 years of his pension.

It's easy to get that impression from this site but you never know the gender or circumstances of the people posting. Many people will have agendas and will be making things up.

State-funded nursery schools and universal pre-school education were rare during the 60s and 70s.

Why should she have been working outside the home if both parties prefer the set-up they had? You know there are lots of men who prefer having their spouse on hand to manage all domestic affairs instead of having two stressed parents fitting all home admin around two full time jobs.

She did indeed, but that's a different point. I mentioned upthread, the women I know in their (later) 60s now who stopped work in the 80s often for quite a few years when their DC were at home did all eventually end up going back, but that's because they were poorer. So once the kids were old enough that there was no real practical downside, they didn't want to forego the income.

Whereas it sounds like in this family, by the time they'd got to that stage, the low wages OP would've brought in wasn't enough of a draw to bother. This is where she's also quite different to a woman who already had a well established career by the time she had kids.

You'd be entitled to half equity in house and half joint pension funds, half of any savings or investments. The joint pension would be split in half and transferred to a pension account for you. You wouldn't get half the pension value in cash. If your home is paid for so no mortgage you'd be able to sell it and both get much smaller places. You might need to go back to work to get a mortgage. A judge will think you have 7 years of working time left before a pension is taken. If you are divorced there is nothing to make your stbexh give you more than half of the equity because you don't work.

Childcare costs are just for the first 4/5 years. And you see them plenty. It’s just an excuse to stay at home and not work.

TAKE HALF THE PENSION!

Always always always for a fair pension split. My brother foolishly did not do that on his divorce (despite me saying that he should view that as his pension too as he reduced his own for tax structuring).

He regrets it now. Of course your husband will think it unfair. A lot of men choose to ignore women’s unpaid labour in divorce despite loving it during marriage.

Edit: I misread. Yes what he suggests is fair re: combining the pensions and splitting the total in half. Don’t see why that’s an issue.

The thing is the OP was only 40 when her youngest was 18.
She had many years to go into work.

It's quite easy to fill your days if you don't work, but considering women of her age may live to 90, it's a lot of days to fill even doing voluntary work and childcare for grandchildren.

I think she was filling her days/ biding her time with the intention she and her H would do 'things' when he retired but clearly he doesn't see that -or want to do what she wants to do.

I particularly enjoyed the post from a woman indignant at the possibility of ever taking a share in her partner's pension in a divorce, who wasn't even married anyway.

Ha dont be so sure!

No one will tear down a woman faster than another woman.

Well you do you dear! I’m sure your self sacrifice will be appreciated!

I am pretty sure that a lot of the more aggressive and diminishing posts do not come from the female kind...

I don't think we're comparing like with like.

Rates of mothers working were lower in the 80s than now, and there wasn't the same subsidy. They were also steadily increasing, and women with money and/or help from loved ones did manage to work even with babies. But because OP had her kids young and without a career, her earning potential would've been lower and there's no guarantee they could even have afforded childcare in the early days.

So if OP is compared to other married 20 year olds who gave birth then, I doubt she's even remotely unusual in not having worked for a while whilst having children in the home (it gets more unusual later on). But of course loads of women, especially those with careers they didn't want to leave, did go back to work with small DC and used either formal or informal childcare.

Because that’s how it works. If you rtft you’ll understand. Hopefully 🙄

BTW I think this thread has become hugely sidetracked.
It's not about the choices OP made and if they are acceptable to others.

It's about what happens now for her next 30 years.

She possibly took a few years out until they went to nursery.

My friends' mums who would be 100 now returned to teaching once their children were 3 and able to go to a state nursery.

I have a pension from working and only stopped aged 40 but I deeply resent anyone saying I did “fuck all” after that. Everything we did was organised by me.
But many women do work and organise everything.

I can't imagine stopping work at 40.My career had only been going to 18 years after uni with 4 years out as a SAHM. I had a H who travelled overseas a lot but I still worked part time till my late 60s, out of choice.

So who looked after your mother's friends children? Did they have family help? Teaching was probably one of the few jobs you could do with young children in the 70s and even then it was mostly only once children started school. My mother trained as a teacher so she could go back to work but zero opportunity with any other job without family to do childcare.