You specifically call me out as full of BS, but that's ok, I got data on my side.
Perhaps you can try again without the personal attack?
Well, not quite. I said the picture you drew was full of bs. Small but significant distinction.
It is not possible to have data that unequivocally demonstrates that one sex or the other gets screwed more, more frequently in divorce. Getting screwed can only be expressed as an index of factors, thus it comes down to the issue of "lies, damn lies, and statistics."
Women file first? I'll buy that. That is a combination of women wanting divorce because of real or perceived advantages; women wanting divorce because they've been abandoned by their spouses; women wanting divorce because they need to have custody clarified for school, travel, medical care, insurance, etc., for the kids; women wanting divorce because the spouse has moved out and is having a merry old time randomly doing cute things like having the phone or the water shut off with no warning or discussion (ok, so that one is probably not particularly common, I just know someone who had to deal with that crap); women wanting divorce because the spouse has cleaned out the bank accounts and left her with the kids but not the money to feed them or to buy gas to get them to school; women wanting divorce because the spouse has committed multiple acts of fraud, forgery, theft, etc., against them (again, maybe not the most common, but personal experience with that joy); women wanting divorce because the spouse beats the *expletive deleted*it out of them on a regular basis; women wanting divorce because the spouse beats the *expletive deleted*it out of the kids on a regular basis; women wanting divorce because the spouse has decided that cooking meth in the house while the kids sleep is a great plan; women wanting divorce because CPS heard about the meth plan, or other reckless and/or criminal and/or abusive behavior and has informed the woman that the kids will go to foster care if she doesn't divorce the spouse. Oh yeah, or he could be sleeping with a couple of her co-workers. That can inspire divorce in the most stubbornly determined to stay married spouse.
Of course, women can pull all that crap and more. When it comes to the amount of misery a crappy spouse can inflict, the sky is a limit, regardless of sex. But filing for divorce does not indicate a massive trend of women cleaning out their spouses for all they've got, up to and including ice trays. It may indicate a lower tolerance for putting up with the bs, or it may indicate a tendency to be subject to more violent and potentially dangerous bs. But ok, so women file first. Of course, sometimes men announce they're done and she can feel free to serve him papers anytime. Nothing like your ex dumping you in the same breathe he assigns more work. This means nothing wrt who gets screwed more, more often.
But ok, so women tend to get the kids, and the house, and the child support, and the alimony.
Ok, see, I dunno about you, but I personally do not enjoy having sole custody over and responsibility for my kids. It is not awesome and wonderful being everybody's least favorite friend/co-worker/relative because you always need to leave early/take the day off because a kid is sick/have help picking up a kid from school because you have to get to work early because you couldn't stay late, etc. I did not enjoy last winter, when I left for the daycare at 6:45 am, picked them up from the daycare at 6 pm, and then had the joy of trying to obtain groceries with two worn-out, cranky, miserable, exhausted kids. Now I have help, but only because I'm significantly knuckling under to family wishes and living kind of the opposite of the lifestyle I'd like. It is not a great thing to try desperately to convince your 2 y.o. that watered-down yogurt is milk because you are too tired to drag everyone out--a half hour+ ordeal--to buy actual milk. It kind of sucks to not be able to get a haircuts for weeks or months because there is just no time when you don't have to take care of the kiddos.
I would really like to have a social life someplace other than the internet. But I can't leave the house. This is not awesome.
A whole lot of men don't have custody because they don't want custody. Yes, courts are biased towards giving custody to the person who has demonstrated more having created a home for the child in various ways. Yes, this usually means mom, and sometimes, that's a really, really bad call. But women having custody more often is not just because courts hate men. It also has something to do with men being far more likely than women to walk away from their kids, or to regard a night or two a week as sufficient time to be a parent. Much as I never, ever, ever wanted to have sole responsibility for a couple kids, and much as I'm a crappy mom because I work too many hours, they are more upset and unsettled when I'm not around than when Dad isn't. This is common. And in my case it sure as hell isn't because dad was slaving away to provide a nice life for us. In many cases it is. But there is no general rule about these things. In many cases the roles are completely reversed, and the courts are dumb and may not catch on to that. But those are a small minority of cases. Still sucks, but it's not nearly as one-sided as you make it out to be.
Ditto the house. Can you say "white elephant"? I know several woman who got stuck with the house. In MI, houses are worth next to nothing and are hard to sell. Even if the property settlement considers the sale of the house, she's still got to deal with it. I don't recall the deals of how the marital property value of a house is set in MI, recall there's some funky rule--in any case, being stuck with the financial burden of the house is often not ideal. But one spouse tends to move out first, and it's usually the man. Call me a crazy sexist if you must, but I'm gonna chalk that up to basic male tendencies. Going out prowling in a bar or apartment complex to fix a problem is the primitive hunter-gatherer dude trapped in suburbia. Hunkering down in the house with the kids to weather the storm in a more typically female act. Biology isn't destiny wrt behavior, most of the time, but it sure does have a humongous effect on statistics.
And for the woman who keeps the house long-term? Yeah, maybe some women are into that. I personally find that while I miss having a workbench, not to mention a washing machine, a two bedroom apartment even is more housework than I can handle on top of the 45-50 hour/week job, the endless dropping off and picking up of kids, and my special "I'm too *expletive deleted*ing exhausted to move" internet time. But unless there's serious money involved, which makes everything easier, it utterly sucks to intensify one's efforts to earn a living while moving from most (not always, but very often) of the housework to all of it, to prepare and serve every meal, to parent the kids. In between homework and working late days and and generalized exhaustion at the end of the day, I never seem to get more than five minutes or so actually just be with my kids, instead of herding them from one thing to another to another.
Child support? Yeah, goes with the kids. Sometimes it's too high. More often there just isn't any. I don't get any; I could get a very small amount, but it would be insignificant to me, and is vital for him, so I don't expect any at this point. Friend of mine doesn't get any. Some men do end up paying too much, and that sucks. But a whole lot more single parents need to receive a whole lot more child support before paying too much because a bigger problem than paying way, way, way too little or not at all.
Alimony? See above. In the rapidly dwindling minority of jurisdictions with way outdated statutes, yeah, alimony sucks. Most states have re-written those laws and tend to award alimony in relatively few cases, a reasonable amount, and for just about long enough to get some education and get started on a path. If you think that it is screwing men over to require that they pay for a little while to enable some education and employment prospects for a woman who has put her academic and career life on hold for the sake of washing your socks and bearing your children, well, then, you're wrong.
Yes, marital property is divided. In MI, I don't know well the laws of the few community property states. Yeah, the guy earned that money. What the heck was she doing the whole time she was scrubbing floors and bearing children and washing socks, if not earning that money? Pretty much when a partnership dissolves, partnership property is divvied up. Marriage is a partnership. Basically, if you want every buck you ever made and everything that it paid for to belong to you and you alone, then either marriage is not for you, or marry someone with equal or better earning power. But don't be too surprised when she's not too enthused about earning just as much money as you while she's bearing your children and washing your socks.
I don't buy into statistics, but most single, divorced women I know certainly to struggle to keep up a comfortable-ish standard of living. Allegedly women tend to end up impoverished after divorce at a far greater rate than men. Well, yeah. Personally, the limits placed on working by being a single parent combined with bearing all the ordinary kid costs, combined with pay through through nose for every minute and then some I have to be working or otherwise away tends to limit one's financial health. This applies to single dads as much as single moms, but there are fewer single dads, and not just because the courts hate guys.
I tend to think generalities in this case are more than a little ludicrous. There are so many variables and so many deviations from them, and so often, so much of what you consider men being screwed turns out to screw the woman just as much, but in a more labor-intensive way. Yeah, I got screwed in my marriage/break-up. So did Nick. So did Scout. Etc. It happens. We could've married smarter, but hindsight is 20/20, and you gotta live the life you got. Personally, I'm way, way nicer to my ex than he has earned, because I have a vested interest in not crushing my daughters' father like a bug. So I let him watch the girls at my place, and I help him with transportation from time to time, and I won't ask for child support until he has a job. Wouldn't make much different to me, don't see the point. And I hardly ever call him a jackass to his face
I know women and men who are similarly going above and beyond to be decent to a wreck of an ex for the sake of the kids, or just for the sake of not being a jerk. Thus, I dislike the bitterness of the generalities tossed out by both sides. They do nothing but foster resentment and perpetuate bitterness and increase attorneys' billings. And much as one can holler "well, I wasn't talking about YOU!!!!" sorry, no. You foster unwarranted, unnecessary bitterness against divorced women, and well, as a divorced women, I reserve the right to call bs.
Marital dissolution screws most people to some degree or another and it just cannot be quantified as men/women get screwed more/more often. When there's serious jackassery on the part of one spouse, it tends to screw the more innocent spouse more. Taking a life and splitting in half pretty much sucks for everybody who loses half their life, and especially for those of us you've already lost most of it to spousal malfeasance. Besides, I've lost my kids to daycare as surely as my ex has lost (well, given) them to me. Parenting is a team sport, doing it alone is bad for all involved, especially the kids.
And that's all I have to say about that.
