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This is part of a series on alimony. Related posts:
An End to Alimony Would be Good for Women
Stay-at-Home Mom Facing Divorce? Don't Expect Alimony
'I Turned Down Alimony' -- 3 Women's Stories
Of the 400,000 people in the United States receiving post-divorce spousal maintenance, just 3 percent were men, according to Census figures. Yet 40 percent of households are headed by female breadwinners -- suggesting that hundreds of thousands of men are eligible for alimony, yet don't receive it.
The reason? Die-hard gender roles, a bitter fight from breadwinning wives and macho pride, say family attorneys. And in some parts of the country, judges are flat-out sexist.
"Gender equality is a relatively new concept in the span of history, and old stereotypes die hard," says San Francisco Bay area divorce attorney Mark Ressa. "A successful man is considered a breadwinning man, and asking for alimony is considered emasculating."
Keith Craig agrees. His lawyer said should make a case for spousal support, as he had given up his public school teaching career to stay home with their two children while his then-wife earned more than $100,000. After his wife filed for divorce, Craig cobbled together adjunct professor jobs and freelance writing gigs, but sustained for four years on dinners of potato chips and canned soup and "an allowance from my parents." Asking for alimony was not an option.
"I'd love to have that money, but I'd never hit a girl and I'd never beg from a girl -- and I see palimony as begging ," says Craig, who at age 53 attributes his attitude, in part, to his generation. But not entirely. "If the roles were reversed and I were ordered to pay her alimony, I would just as soon jump off a cliff or dump $50,000 into legal proceedings to fight it," says Craig who today works in marketing at a technology firm.
This is a typical attitude held by men of all generations, say Ressa and Lee Rosen, a Raleigh, N.C. based divorce lawyer and author of Divorcing Smartly: The End of a Marriage Isn't the End of the World. Both lawyers report that very few men walk into their offices with the intent of asking for alimony, even when their situations are clearly eligible for spousal support. Meanwhile, female breadwinners never pay alimony without a contentious battle. "Every guy in that situation has to go through a fight, while (breadwinning) guys go into the divorce accepting they have to pay," says Rosen. Then, facing humiliation, stress and expense of that fight, they are further disincentivized from pursuing spousal support. "Men are essentially shamed into not receiving alimony," Ressa says.
Adds Rosen: "Her attitude is always, 'Dude, get a job.'"
Depending on in which part of the country you live, the judge may say the same thing.
In the San Francisco Bay area Ressa says that alimony is based on a fixed schedule determined by income and length of marriage, and that he does not see sexism on the bench. However, he recently represented a female vice president of a giant Bay area technology company divorcing an unemployed tire store worker who was seeking alimony. Despite the dramatic discrepancy in income, she fought and no support was awarded. Rosen, however, sees "a whole lot of bias against men in our judicial system" in North Carolina. In a recent case, the wife was an executive at a major national bank, while her husband stayed home with the kids, trying build a business "selling keychains online, but essentially not earning anything," Rosen says. The man was awarded 6 months of alimony. "If they had swapped gender roles, she would have been given years of alimony, no questions asked," Rosen says.
Men's reasons for for foregoing alimony are not all attributed to sexism, however. Keith Craig says one of his motivations for financial independence was just that -- a pursuit of a new life after his marriage. And like women I profiled in 'I Turned Down Alimony -- 3 Women's Stories, he hoped taking alimony out of the divorce would make it a smoother process and facilitate co-parenting -- which he says it has. Ressa says that the differing approaches to spousal support speak to another fundamental difference in the sexes. Men, he says, tend to be confident in their ability to be self-sufficient, regardless of how dire their immediate post-divorce situation may be. "In general, women tend to be much more cautious about finances, and are insistent on availing themselves of every asset they're entitled to," Ressa says. "Men are more the eternal optimists. They see a bright future, no matter how bleak their finances are now."
