Or do we need new divorce laws

[Justforthisparticularrant]

So I’ve been married for 16 years. Good stable career, pension for 30 years. DH has been self employed. He’s started around five different ventures, always promising he’d need to put work in up front for no or little financial gain. He does so much then it’s onto the new project. He’s not lazy but ineffective in what he does. The promises of his various ventures making money never materialised. He won’t take advice or direction. He’s now doing ok but only in the last five months or so.

My stable income paid the mortgage for a decade and other big costs for our entire marriage. It allowed him the freedom to try out these projects, fail, yet still live a secure comfortable life and raise DC.

Meanwhile, I have battled for the full 16 years for him to take on the domestic load in an equitable way. He’s always done childcare equally and cooking/washing up and laundry has been fairly equal. But everything else has been 90%me for the bulk of our marriage. It’s only the last couple of years it’s been equitable but I’ve had to really campaign and educate him to get there.

But generally speaking, with a bit of nuance, I have been both main breadwinner and main housekeeper with him ‘helping’ around the house rather than taking any initiative and in reality he made it harder for most of those years - creating mess and chaos, ruining things by not looking after them, avoiding planning, sand bagging my attempts to do my best to sort things out and organise them.

It’s improved - but me fighting for fairness in domestic tasks has caused arguments and he’s not happy about it. He martyrs himself a lot - ‘all this work I do…’ etc. He was only working two/three days about four years ago so I pushed him to do more domestic stuff The first couple of weeks of him doing a properly equitable split had him moaning about how exhausted he was, yet six or so years previously when I said the same he minimised it and mocked me given I was only ‘working’ part time at the time. I was actually working 24/7 just lots of it the unseen work of home making etc.

He gets disproportionately angry, verbally abusive and he’s impossible to work with. I’m divorcing him. I’ve had enough and in the last couple of years his behaviour towards the DC has worsened.

I got legal advice and he’s entitled to half my pension. Literally - it will be valued and then half will come out of my pension and a new pension created for him with that in it. ALL of it. Even the 10 years worth from before we met. So despite him not contributing equitably to home making and family raising for the bulk of our time and not being the main breadwinner, he gets half of my entire pension.

I get that this is to protect (largely female) homemakers who work hard at home to support the main breadwinner. But now it’s often women who are the main breadwinners AND the main homemaker.

It just feels so unfair. I’m gutted and feel like this is just another way women get screwed over by the patriarchy.

Oh my god. I’m so sorry. That’s so awful for you.

I get that it seems unfair for you. But the law will not see the context and detail so it's a broad brush type approach that assumes, in the absence of clear agreed evidence, that the parties contributed equally in different ways.

Even if you could prove how little he contributed, the Court would also consider that he was dependent on you and this was a tacit agreement between you as it went on for 16 years. Look at all the mega rich divorces where the non working wife gets awarded millions but has likely never scrubbed a toilet or cooked a Sunday roast.

I do wonder if you might have some argument about the 10 years pension before marriage but, given the above points, you could spend a lot of money arguing about it and end up with very little extra (or none).

There is a bright side to this. By divorcing now, you are cutting yourself free for the future years. It will stick in the craw to hand over what feels like an unfair share of assets but then a line is drawn. For the rest of your working years your salary and pension will be yours. While he drifts on earning fuck all in his silly little hobby jobs. Better to draw the line after 16 years than 30 or 40!

At least you’ve seen the light! Good for you. My sister has been married for over 25 years to an absolute abusive monster. She has always been the bread winner, amazing career and has been paying for cleaners, nannys etc while he does fuck all and claims to be ‘fighting his addictions’. He doesn’t value her and isn’t bothered about their kids but it’s like she is brainwashed. Everyone else can see what he is but not her. She has a few high earning career driven friends in the same boat. Dump him, write off the money and move forward. Good luck.

I divorced him while one of my parents was still alive. I was sole beneficiary of my parents' estate and he thought he was going to get the lot and use it to pay off our joint mortgage so he could keep running "his business". I never signed up for that kind of life and I understand how fucking difficult it is to disentangle from one of these creeps. Lots of financial abuse in the marriage, it was toxic but there was emotional and physical abuse too.

These men who "work from home on own business", have countless "start up ventures that amount to nothing" are super dangerous.

The terms of my divorce make no financial provision for each other in terms of alimony or support.

Mine is an extreme case but when one of my parents was still alive and we let him stay in their house, we caught him taking a copy of their Will. 😬 I was ruthless after years of putting up with it. I don't regret it.

I understand how the years can pass by quickly and that women are fed the message that they need to try “hard enough” before divorce. People whose marriages are short are told that they don’t treat marriage seriously enough when the problem is that both people need to be trying hard.

It is unfair in your particular case but this also happens to men who weren’t abusive, worked hard for their money and then their wife claimed huge alimony despite not doing anything to deserve it. This has happened for decades.

It can’t be both ways, either alimony exists or it doesn’t. It needs to be applied equally. It’s not fair for anyone who this happens to but I don’t see how it’s “patriarchy” when it happens to men and women, and more so men.

I’m not sure how they will prove who deserves it and who doesn’t because it’s your word against his and vice versa.

The woman in this situation has, for some time at least, contributed at least half the actual work to the marriage.

The OP has been the breadwinner and the housekeeper/childcarer. I can see why she feels this is unfair.

It feels extremely unfair. The law can't cover every scenario unfortunately.

SussexPup · Today 10:49
I get it big time, absolutely my situation. Fortunately or unfortunately my husband died before we were divorced, but he had changed his will. And now his kids own half my house (which I paid every penny for) and to add salt to the wound I may have to pay stamp duty on the half when I buy it back. A lifetime of being financailly sensible gone. It's one hell of a rainy day. It is all legal, but it hurts. I am doing my best to work through the thoughts - half the house is less than I would have had to have given him if we had divorced, and I do have my life back.....but it is going to take time to work through the pain/anger and sadness, Hugs!

This really sucks, SussexPup. I'm a step child and my step mother is going to take my parents' former marital home all for herself and we'll never see a penny. Seems like there are just too many permutations for the law to deal with. My DF screwed my mum hard in divorce - mum couldn't fight, she just wanted to get away from DF and she had no legal help - she got about 10% of the value of the fully paid house from DF. 25 years younger SM has no kids, but won't leave us (DF's kids) anything at all. I drive past our old family home where I lived for 18 years. It's so weird that my stepmother is having the entire thing without ever having paid a penny for it.

Marriage is such a dodgy contract.

There is no other contract that I can think of where you put all your assets, everything you have, into a partnership with no small print, no T&C, no job description, no break clause, no performance targets…it’s committing £100s of £k all on trust, all for love.

And love comes with no T&C, guarantees etc.

I would not marry if my assets were significantly greater than my partners.

I would not give up my job / compromise my career for childbearing and child rearing unless I was married.

Part of surviving in the patriarchy (or any other context) is securing your financial stability.

Too many MN posts blithely preaching marriage without considering what ought to be the small print.

It was a 100% mortgage by the way, my parents paid the small deposit (around 10k) that I repaid to them. The house was obscene in price (we are talking over 600k 10 years ago). He massively over exposed us in terms of borrowing because he wanted that house. He kept a couple of highly paid jobs that could guarantee the mortgage but is such a disagreeable human that every employer paid him off after 18 months to get rid of him. So that's why he has to work for himself now. Life was misery.

We also married with no assets either. He is a con artist. Also abuses his own family for money and free childcare. Women are a cash cow to him.

I think the only unfairness is ALL of your pension going into the pot when there's ten years pre-marriage. I would double check that aspect of it.

It would feel fairer if the pension pot sharing was limited to contributions and growth for the period of the marriage, or even just for the period post-childbirth to 18.

I agree with PP that marriage needs to be a lot more specific as a contract.

What’s his latest business venture?

Can you threaten to take half of it if he’ll leave your pension alone?

I don't think it's necessarily unfair but I do think it should be talked about at late secondary school. Most people don't look into how divorce works until you are at the brink of it and then it's too late.

What I do think is unfair is CMS and how easy it is for self-employed to get around paying their fair share + that childcare costs isn't included when it's calculated. It's totally unfair that the parent who has the kids the most (or all the time) has to also pay more.

Some things have changed but there's still a gulf between where we are and equality, expectations on women and mothers are still often very different than those on men and fathers. We accept less from men, the standard of what is a good father is much lower than the standard society expects of a good mother. Women are socialised and raised differently in many families still. The whole thing is inherently unjust and unfair. The law however can only deal with so much nuance before things become unwieldy or prohibitively expensive, it needs to be a fairly blunt instrument and to try and achieve on balance the most good. It's set up to protect the more vulnerable, to protect where there's an imbalance of power and unequal baring of cost, in divorce the person that is economically vulnerable is more commonly the mother. Ultimately though the most vulnerable people are the children and they want to ensure where possible a decent standard of living in both households.

I think I might have got divorced wrong. We divorced due to irreconcilable differences. I worked part time around the 2 kids, I borrowed £12k off my parents and bought him out of the house. I know nothing about pensions but he was older than me and i know he had one 😱. He also had savings, should I have got some of that too? I feel so naive! We divorced 13 years ago.

Sorry, I have nothing to add to your OP but I genuinely didn't know this was a thing, i don't remember my solicitor ever mentioning it

I don't think the laws should be changed no, as you're right, they do offer important protections. However, laws can only go so far, and people still need to protect themselves within the context of their rights and obligations under the law. This means not allowing a situation like the one you've described to continue, and in the knowledge that every year you support your deadbeat, they gain more rights to what you've acquired, you get rid of them as soon as you've got the measure of them. I don't mean to sound unsympathetic. I feel for you. However laws to protect can be exploited and we all have a responsibility to look after ourselves.

How does this handle situations where the nature of the marriage is evolving?

When DH and I first married we didn't plan to have DCs. We both earned equally. At that time my inheritance prospects were significantly greater than DH's. We might well have opted for a what's mine is mine type of marriage.

As time went on we did have DCs. My career significantly outstripped DH's. DH became SAHP (a real one who took on the full domestic role). By this point a 'shared pot' marriage would have been more appropriate.

Our situation now is that DC are grown, DH works P/T and still performs the vast majority of the domestic role. His pension pot is tiny, the house and mortgage are in my name.

If I were cynical and our marriage was in trouble I might say I want the 'what's mine is mine' type of marriage.

I absolutely agree with you. But I think it goes further than this.. I think the whole situation of financial separation for marriage or otherwise needs tearing up and starting again.

I was the sole breadwinner in my marriage. Not because my ex husband stayed home to care for kids etc but because he wanted to run his "dream business" which of course failed. When we split after affair number god knows.. he got the equivalent of 10 grand for every year we were together. I paid ten grand for every year we were together. He had not paid a penny for 5 years on any bill, food, and had never paid a penny on the mortgage. He was also, extremely controlling.

I understand people say well you married them etc but when I married him he had a stable public service job and paid the bills. He became a freeloading cheater after the fact!

Compare that to my friend who was due to get married in may 2020 in new York. Couldn't marry for obvious reasons.. in September 2020 he left her for his secretary. They had been together 20 years. He was a multi millionaire. Because they weren't married (despite the fact they would have been but for covid) she had to pay him out £60,000 to get sole ownership of her house. He paid nothing.

I think both situations are equally unfair.

Of course its right where one party, male or female, takes on a role within the family that means they work less and thus have less pension or lower earner potential they should be protected. But i also feel that the current system is grossly unfair.

Firstly, the important thing is to stop it at 16 years, not let it become 17.

If he is lazy, a bit flaky and unrealistic - can you use it to your advantage? You clearly have approached divorce in your efficient way, as if you were him, that doesn't mean he will.

He is going to have different priorities and might agree to something like you having the kids more and you'll let him off maintenance if he leaves your pension alone. He sounds short termist, so work with that.

I always think this when people insist marriage is essential for women. It really does depend on circumstances and you need to consider it carefully if you are a high earner. I have two friend who have had to pay loads out to their ex husbands. Both split because husbands had affairs. Neither of the ex husbands can do any reliable child care because one moved miles away and the other travels abroad for work.

My mother’s friends who got into 2nd committed relationships, did not marry or move in the second time around because both parties wanted to keep the money and assets completely separate.

I've seen this pattern a few times, a man pursuing businesses whilst their financially secure partner foots the bills. They mostly aren't viable propositions and no bank would lend on them, hence them not succeeding.

Just a minor question - do you have to state in the divorce that you WANT a share of the pension? Because when I divorced my XH (who never paid the CMS, let alone anything else), pension was never mentioned. He's now 66, drawing a very good pension, and I got nothing in the divorce (house was rented). This was 20 odd years ago, mind.

Did you have a financial settlement? They should have stated all their assets and then an agreement is reached on the split. You aren't entitled to pension accrued after divorce though.

I think you’re angry at your own kindness and willingness to believe he would change. You’re angry at him for his behaviour. You’re angry because you’ve done the right thing of giving it a good go and you’ve lost out because of it. You’re angry at the situation.

(you’re not angry at divorce laws, they are largely a crude method to just allow everyone to move on)