AIBU to want half of the pension after divorce?

But it doesn’t matter if she brought nothing to the marriage at all, if she didn’t attend a single school play and didn’t clean or cook or sort out Christmas presents. She could have spent her days on a chaise longue eating grapes. It doesn’t matter.

I have adults now.

I don’t cohabit, nor would I ever want to.

I think people here are being really mean. The children being the age they are mean OP is 60s and so is husband. Quite a lot of this age group working in director roles expected wives not only to stay at home, but also to undertake various roles, and it wasn't to "potter" or to lunch.
A lot of women ended up giving up work or staying at home because of the complete lack of input from the man; they would have been effectively a working single parent and this was NOT what their husbands "required". It wasn't the easy option most people are imaging.

We are going round and round in circles. The OP's children were grown when she was in her late 30s! It's just not true to say that she could not have had a career. I'm not sure what you mean by affecting the children. Are you implying that all DC need a SAHP, otherwise they can't thrive?

Yes, I've seen a lot of this. Sometimes there just isn't room for two careers in a marriage. You don't even find this out until you're married with children, then it's too late. If you haven't lived in this dynamic, you don't know how restricting it is.

Hi OP, as you can see from the sheer number of replies - your question has touched a very raw nerve! I don't think it's really about you personally, so please don't take it too much to heart. Here's what I think is actually going on:

1. comparison hurts more than unfairness does. A lot of the harshest posters are women who worked full time AND did the lion's share of childcare and home admin on top ("the second shift"). When they see you potentially ending up in a similar or better financial position for a different path, it doesn't feel fair - even if nobody's actually done anything wrong. Psychologists call this relative deprivation - we don't measure our situation in a vacuum, we measure it against the person standing next to us, and that comparison stings far more than an abstract unfairness would.
2. “She must not deserve it” protects their own world view. Loads of us want to believe that hard work = reward, full stop (just-world belief). If a SAHM comes out financially secure "for doing nothing" (in their eyes), it threatens that belief - because if it's not true for you, some posters have to face the thought that their years of grinding away at both a job and the household maybe didn't buy them any extra security either. It's much easier on the ego to decide you don't deserve it than to sit with that.
3. Sour grapes basically.. A few posters have said outright they weren't able to stay home even if they'd wanted to - money, a husband who wouldn't have gone for it, whatever. When you can't have something, it's a very human trick of the mind to decide it wasn't worth having anyway, or that the person who did have it is somehow morally lesser for it (cognitive dissonance reduction, if you want the technical term). It's not really about you - it's about a choice they didn't get to make.
4. Women being harder on other women than a stranger would be.. This gets called horizontal hostility in feminist psychology - when a group has to fight for scraps of social approval, they sometimes end up policing each other more fiercely than any outside critic would, rather than banding together. Working mums get told they're neglecting their kids, SAHMs get told they're parasites - nobody wins, and women end up turning on each other instead of on the actual system that never valued care work properly in the first place.
5. Unpaid work is invisible because we’ve never built it into how we measure “contribution”.. Yhere is no payslip, no job title, no annual appraisal for raising two children and running a household for 40 years - so when people ask "well what did she actually DO", it's because our entire economic language (GDP, CVs, pension statements) was never built to capture it. That's not a reflection of its real value, it's a design flaw in how we count things. It's exactly why UK divorce law treats homemaking as an equal contribution to a marriage regardless of what the comments section thinks - the law is one of the only places that explicitly corrects for this blind spot.
6. And there is a class angle too…Full-time SAHM right through into your 60s is genuinely more common in professional/higher-income households (which is your world - private school, one big income) than it is for most UK women, who've worked through motherhood out of necessity since the 70s/80s at least. Some of the "this wasn't normal" pushback is really a class gap talking past itself, not an attack on you specifically.

None of this means you were greedy for asking the question - the opposite, really. The posters most furious about your unpaid contribution being "worth" 50% are often, without meaning to, proving exactly why the law protects it. Please do go and get proper legal advice, and try to let the pile-on roll off you a bit. Good luck OP 💐

Her kids are 40… she could have returned to work 30 years ago 25 years ago but chose not to. Better yet she still could have returned to the working world at 40 20 years ago when her kids were 20 but instead she’s now sat at 60 deciding where the money she didn’t earn therefore has no rights to morally is going. She could have built a wonderful career for herself over the last 20/30 years but chose not to.

It doesn’t make sense to me that she feels hard done by in the situation when she has chosen to be ignorant to the world and live off her husband.

I would understand her point if she was 20 years younger 30 years younger but she isn’t. She has literally sat and had everything handed to her while her kids have been adults for what 22 years?

come off it. I wouldn’t like to be the husband in this position. She hasn’t needed to be a stay at home mum in a long time so why should she get the advice she wants as though her kids are 15 and she is 35 😂

You previously said the 1970s not the 1980s

Her kids are 40… she could have returned to work 30 years ago 25 years ago but chose not to. Better yet she still could have returned to the working world at 40 20 years ago when her kids were 20 but instead she’s now sat at 60 deciding where the money she didn’t earn therefore has no rights to morally is going. She could have built a wonderful career for herself over the last 20/30 years but chose not to.

It doesn’t make sense to me that she feels hard done by in the situation when she has chosen to be ignorant to the world and live off her husband.

I would understand her point if she was 20 years younger 30 years younger but she isn’t. She has literally sat and had everything handed to her while her kids have been adults for what 22 years?

come off it. I wouldn’t like to be the husband in this position. She hasn’t needed to be a stay at home mum in a long time so why should she get the advice she wants as though her kids are 15 and she is 35 😂

I don't think she actually said that . I believe she said that she had been waiting for him to retire for years, not that he had agreed and kept changing his mind.

Her kids are 40… she could have returned to work 30 years ago 25 years ago but chose not to. Better yet she still could have returned to the working world at 40 20 years ago when her kids were 20 but instead she’s now sat at 60 deciding where the money she didn’t earn therefore has no rights to morally is going. She could have built a wonderful career for herself over the last 20/30 years but chose not to.

It doesn’t make sense to me that she feels hard done by in the situation when she has chosen to be ignorant to the world and live off her husband.

I would understand her point if she was 20 years younger 30 years younger but she isn’t. She has literally sat and had everything handed to her while her kids have been adults for what 22 years?

come off it. I wouldn’t like to be the husband in this position. She hasn’t needed to be a stay at home mum in a long time so why should she get the advice she wants as though her kids are 15 and she is 35 😂

Her kids are 40… she could have returned to work 30 years ago 25 years ago but chose not to. Better yet she still could have returned to the working world at 40 20 years ago when her kids were 20 but instead she’s now sat at 60 deciding where the money she didn’t earn therefore has no rights to morally is going. She could have built a wonderful career for herself over the last 20/30 years but chose not to.

It doesn’t make sense to me that she feels hard done by in the situation when she has chosen to be ignorant to the world and live off her husband.

I would understand her point if she was 20 years younger 30 years younger but she isn’t. She has literally sat and had everything handed to her while her kids have been adults for what 22 years?

come off it. I wouldn’t like to be the husband in this position. She hasn’t needed to be a stay at home mum in a long time so why should she get the advice she wants as though her kids are 15 and she is 35 😂

That's the thing though. Having a 'high flying career', particularly with a working partner, requires sacrifices and a lot of hard work. Many people are prepared to put in the hard work, the daily grind, make the sacrifices. The OP is not that sort of person. She led a passive life, had no ambition or particular interests. It's no good pretending that she wanted a high flying career but didn't because she was a martyr to her husband's career, when there is no evidence for this at all. The opposite, in fact.

Her kids are 40… she could have returned to work 30 years ago 25 years ago but chose not to. Better yet she still could have returned to the working world at 40 20 years ago when her kids were 20 but instead she’s now sat at 60 deciding where the money she didn’t earn therefore has no rights to morally is going. She could have built a wonderful career for herself over the last 20/30 years but chose not to.

It doesn’t make sense to me that she feels hard done by in the situation when she has chosen to be ignorant to the world and live off her husband.

I would understand her point if she was 20 years younger 30 years younger but she isn’t. She has literally sat and had everything handed to her while her kids have been adults for what 22 years?

come off it. I wouldn’t like to be the husband in this position. She hasn’t needed to be a stay at home mum in a long time so why should she get the advice she wants as though her kids are 15 and she is 35 😂

This thread is glowing green from the envy.

This thread is glowing green from the envy.

It’s absolutely not envy. There is no part of me that would have wanted OPs life, particularly when her DCs were adults.
It’s the sense of entitlement of the Op that I think many posters are most astonished at!

Hi OP, as you can see from the sheer number of replies - your question has touched a very raw nerve! I don't think it's really about you personally, so please don't take it too much to heart. Here's what I think is actually going on:

1. comparison hurts more than unfairness does. A lot of the harshest posters are women who worked full time AND did the lion's share of childcare and home admin on top ("the second shift"). When they see you potentially ending up in a similar or better financial position for a different path, it doesn't feel fair - even if nobody's actually done anything wrong. Psychologists call this relative deprivation - we don't measure our situation in a vacuum, we measure it against the person standing next to us, and that comparison stings far more than an abstract unfairness would.
2. “She must not deserve it” protects their own world view. Loads of us want to believe that hard work = reward, full stop (just-world belief). If a SAHM comes out financially secure "for doing nothing" (in their eyes), it threatens that belief - because if it's not true for you, some posters have to face the thought that their years of grinding away at both a job and the household maybe didn't buy them any extra security either. It's much easier on the ego to decide you don't deserve it than to sit with that.
3. Sour grapes basically.. A few posters have said outright they weren't able to stay home even if they'd wanted to - money, a husband who wouldn't have gone for it, whatever. When you can't have something, it's a very human trick of the mind to decide it wasn't worth having anyway, or that the person who did have it is somehow morally lesser for it (cognitive dissonance reduction, if you want the technical term). It's not really about you - it's about a choice they didn't get to make.
4. Women being harder on other women than a stranger would be.. This gets called horizontal hostility in feminist psychology - when a group has to fight for scraps of social approval, they sometimes end up policing each other more fiercely than any outside critic would, rather than banding together. Working mums get told they're neglecting their kids, SAHMs get told they're parasites - nobody wins, and women end up turning on each other instead of on the actual system that never valued care work properly in the first place.
5. Unpaid work is invisible because we’ve never built it into how we measure “contribution”.. Yhere is no payslip, no job title, no annual appraisal for raising two children and running a household for 40 years - so when people ask "well what did she actually DO", it's because our entire economic language (GDP, CVs, pension statements) was never built to capture it. That's not a reflection of its real value, it's a design flaw in how we count things. It's exactly why UK divorce law treats homemaking as an equal contribution to a marriage regardless of what the comments section thinks - the law is one of the only places that explicitly corrects for this blind spot.
6. And there is a class angle too…Full-time SAHM right through into your 60s is genuinely more common in professional/higher-income households (which is your world - private school, one big income) than it is for most UK women, who've worked through motherhood out of necessity since the 70s/80s at least. Some of the "this wasn't normal" pushback is really a class gap talking past itself, not an attack on you specifically.

None of this means you were greedy for asking the question - the opposite, really. The posters most furious about your unpaid contribution being "worth" 50% are often, without meaning to, proving exactly why the law protects it. Please do go and get proper legal advice, and try to let the pile-on roll off you a bit. Good luck OP 💐

You clearly have no idea what it was like to find regular, affordable, childcare in the 80's and 90's that would facilitate a career, especially outside London. Nicola Horlick was held up as the "woman who had it all" in the 80's and 90's, except that she didnt and she could afford full time nannies for her kids. That wasnt the reality. There were far fewer nurseries and childminders then outside of the cities.

You sit there all smug that "I did it, so why couldnt @DivorcingDebbie25 ?!" without taking into account that you did it in a hugely different set of circumstances.

Your bitterness is showing that OP had an easy life and you didnt. Perhaps instead of insisted she could have worked, I could insist that if your career means so much, you shouldnt have had children so they didnt have to sacrifice their time with you because you chose your job over them....... its a thought.