Alimony Goes Both Ways

She didn’t go into marriage contemplating divorce. She and her husband were young, well-educated and in love. He was a successful salesman; she’d just signed on with an accounting firm. So it didn’t bother her that six years later, her career was flourishing, while her husband had begun bouncing from job to job. Nor did she balk at supporting him later, when he quit his job to battle his addiction to alcohol.

But when he stopped even looking for work, exhausted her insurance plan’s coverage for substance abuse treatment, and began dipping into their savings account to finance his drug and alcohol binges, she began to consider getting out. Twelve years of marriage was adding up to a loss.

“I could see our lives going straight downhill,” e-mailed the woman, who asked that I call her Emily. “And I remembered my mother saying, when she divorced my [alcoholic] dad, ‘What do I need him for? I can do bad on my own.’ And I realized that [my husband] wasn’t doing anything for me but dragging me down.”

So she consulted a lawyer about divorce and found that if she left her husband, she might well “do bad” on her own--financially, at least--because a judge would likely order her to spend a substantial portion of her salary supporting her ex for years to come. “He can’t work because he drinks too much, and that’s considered a disability,” Emily wrote. “And that makes him my responsibility.”

Now she’s weighing the high cost of alimony against the growing resentment she feels and facing questions unhappy partners have asked themselves for years: How bad do I want to get out of this marriage? And can I really afford to leave?

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Statistics are hard to come by, but alimony for men is no longer a mere blip on the radar screen, the quirky province of wealthy, aging movie stars who wed, then divorce, charming young men. Divorce lawyers say the number of women paying spousal support is rising, and the stigma of asking for alimony seems to be fading among men.

Certainly, it is atypical, still. Husbands tend to earn more than their wives, in part because women are more likely to stay at home to care for children at some point during a marriage. But parity among husband and wife is no longer rare. In fact, more than 10 million married women earn more than their husbands these days, and the number grows each year.

A check of Internet sites devoted to divorce includes dozens of postings from women who’ve been asked, or ordered by the court, to pay alimony--like this woman, who signed herself “Please Help !!”: “We don’t have children. He has no health problems preventing him from going to a job . . . He does not lack job skills. We have been married for 4 years and 9 months, and I recently filed for divorce. I make $6,000 a month, and he only makes $2,200. Now he is suing me for spousal support, asking for $1,000 a month. Can he legally do that?”

The answer is yes, he can; and he may well get what he seeks. The law on alimony is intended to be gender-blind and nonjudgmental, to allow for both spouses to retain their standard of living after divorce. Under California’s no-fault divorce laws, judges are instructed to consider several factors, including each party’s employment history, age and health, and ability to earn enough to sustain “the standard of living established during the marriage.” It’s designed as a bridge to independence, a cushion that enables an ex-spouse to get his or her footing financially.

That means that if the wife carried most of the economic burden during a marriage, she may have to continue to foot the bills when the marriage ends, at least in the short-term. Call it the downside of gender equality.

“For better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health . . .” We still recite those vows when we wed, but we no longer feel bound by them in our marriages. If she turns into a nag, he can’t hold a job, she sinks into depression, he becomes an alcoholic ... Well, that’s not the person we thought we had married. And like a business deal gone sour, we opt out. And alimony may be the price we pay to sever the tie.

But alimony is really about more than money; it’s become a lighting rod for our conflicted feelings about the sanctity of marriage, the fallout from divorce, and our failings as husbands, wives and lovers.

“Alimony used to be tied to ‘fault’ in a marriage, and the more ‘at fault’ you could find your spouse, the more alimony you could get,” says sociologist Constance Ahrons, author of the book “The Good Divorce” and a researcher with the Council on Contemporary Families in New York City.

“Now legal fault may not be necessary to get a divorce, but spouses still need to find ‘fault’ for why a marriage broke down. And alimony is one way that fault is played out.”

An aggrieved spouse may feel a sense of entitlement; may consider alimony redress for pain and humiliation, abuse or abandonment. And a spouse who wants to leave can see alimony as a ticket to freedom.

But you can’t right the wrongs of marriage at the time of divorce, and alimony can never be a salve for emotional pain. In fact, continual wrangling over money is what keeps some couples emotionally bound to one another long after their marriages end.

It may seem unromantic, but Ahrons says the only way for us to unburden alimony of its emotional baggage is to treat a marriage relationship like a business partnership. When the terms change--she quits work to stay home with the kids, he develops a drinking problem--the partners should “negotiate a settlement,” figure out what will happen financially for each if their marriage fails.

Because marriage is more than a romantic notion. It’s a bargain struck by two people in love, with the power to enrich and empower and encumber us; to dictate the shape of the rest of our lives. And we need to approach it eyes open wide--committed to keeping the marriage alive, but prepared for a life on the other side.

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Sandy Banks’ column runs on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].