Divorce is scary, but maybe not panic-inducing

Still, don't get married unless you're 100,000% hell-bent on having children

The Internet Manosphere has a lot of strong feelings about marriage. Which is kind of silly because marriage is harmless.

It’s the divorce where they get you.

In fact, the entire point of marriage is the divorce.

The marriage license and all of your state’s laws have pretty much zero rules about the marriage itself. No rules about children, sex, income, housework, or anything else. There is literally no rule about the obligations you and your spouse have to each other other than the things you agree upon internally with each other - and there is no penalty if you break your internal agreement with your spouse.

Frankly, it would be really weird if your state had laws on the books about sexual frequency and chores.

So your marriage license is not a marriage license. It’s a divorce license. Your state has all kinds of laws in place about how to break the marriage license, not how to maintain it. Mostly, what happens during a divorce and how the assets and children are to be divided. Your marital agreement is you and your spouse agreeing that when you get divorced, you two will abide by your state’s laws and the decisions of your state’s courts regarding asset and custody division.

So the manosphere’s fear of marriage is really a fear of divorce. Because divorce is one huge pile of loss.

Actually, divorce is three huge piles of loss:

1. Your loved ones

2. Your current wealth

3. Your future wealth

Re #1: Losing your loved ones

If you have children, you are going to enter into some kind of shared custody agreement with your former spouse. Even in the best possible circumstance - your spouse is undeniably unfit with a massive paper trail to prove it and gets absolutely zero custody or visitation - you’re still stuck single-parenting the kids and making arrangements to schedule your work and life around the children because you don’t have a fit spouse to help you. Even that pie-in-the-sky best-possible case is still a bit worse off than you were when you were married and sharing the load, in most cases.

But far more likely, you’re going to share custody and only see your kids as a part-time Dad. That sucks a lot. Courts are starting to come around and 50-50 custody splits are starting to become more common. But the default in most places is still Mom gets primary custody and Dad gets every other weekend and one weeknight a week.

But whatever the split is, even if it’s a “fair” split, not having your children around a lot of the time sucks. Plus, all of the time you are together with them is now tainted by the single-parent part-time-Dad dynamic. That sucks even more. It changes the entire nature of your relationship with your children, and the entire course of your life and theirs.

And that’s just the kids. You also lose the wife you presumably loved once, who presumably loved you in return. You go from having a companion who loves you and shares a home with you, to not.

Your friends and family members pick sides — usually hers. Or they distance themselves from both of you because the whole situation is awkward and uncomfortable for them. So you lose most of them, too. If you have kids, that affects the kids too, because a lot of your mutual friends had kids who were friends with your kids until their parents stopped wanting to be around you.

Re: #2: Losing your current wealth

The manosphere panics a lot about getting “divorce raped” when a wife gets to divorce her husband and walk away with half of his assets. But honestly, this isn’t nearly as big of an issue as #3 (future wealth) for most guys.

If you are rich, then yes, you are vulnerable. If you have a big successful company and hundreds of millions in assets, you definitely don’t want a woman to marry you, divorce you a few years later, and walk away with hundreds of millions of your dollars.

But if you’re that rich, you have your company properly set up by a team of attorneys to be inaccessible to any of the owner’s wives in the case of divorce, your assets set up in a way to make them not able to be seized, a prenup that will actually hold up in court in most cases (because you clearly had a documented pile of assets that predated your marriage that you did not ever co-mingle with marital assets), and so on.

So a divorce will hurt a rich guy, but not as badly as you’d think if he was the least bit competent about his assets.

Most guys are not rich. They’re poor. They work paycheck-to-paycheck and have five-digits of credit card debt. If you’re a working class dude, your wife walking with half of the $1262 you still have in your savings account right now because you haven’t made the minimum payment on your credit card or paid your cell phone bill for the month yet isn’t that huge of an issue.

It’s the middle class, and especially upper middle class, guys who are vulnerable. If you’re a degreed professional with a six-figure job, a sizeable 401k you’ve been putting money into since your 20s, a 5-bedroom home in suburbia, and you just finally got most of your investment and savings accounts up to 7-digits so you’re barely a millionaire, that’s great! You’re not mega-rich by modern standards, but you’re pretty comfortable.

And you are ripe for divorce-rape.

Because that guy is going to lose his house, half of his 7-digit savings and investment accounts, and half of the retirement accounts he’s been contributing to his entire life. His assets are not set up in a way to prevent that and have likely been comingled with marital assets, and most of them likely don’t predate his marriage.

So really, losing your wealth via divorce is mostly a problem for the middle and upper middle class. If you’re rich or you’re working class, this is much less of an issue. Not always, but usually.

Re #3: Losing your future wealth

Losing their future wealth is the biggest pain point for most men when it comes to divorce. Child support and alimony/spousal support are taken from every future paycheck, preventing a divorced man from ever saving up and getting back to where he was financially.

It’s worth noting that if you have children, it doesn’t matter that much if you’re married. A woman can take you to court for child support regardless. It’s a little easier on her if you’re married because this will be something handled during the divorce as a regular part of the process, while obtaining a separate child support order without a divorce requires her to go out of her way to do so. That said, child issues are also sometimes a little easier on the man if married because custody gets decided on as a regular part of the divorce, while attempting to get any kind of custody of your children through a separate proceeding brought against a woman you’ve never been married to is a lot less likely to go your way.

It’s also worth noting that alimony and spousal support (similar but slightly different things depending on your state) are typically rare and/or temporary and usually only come into play in cases of extreme income disparity, such as rich husband + unemployed wife who quit her job to have rich husband’s babies and remained out of the workforce for years and is now mostly-unemployable. It’s much rarer for some barely-solvent working class dude to end up paying alimony to his working class ex-wife.

So regarding your loved ones (#1), being married may actually be a little easier on the man. Because he’s going to lose at least some custody regardless, but has a better chance of retaining some through a divorce than he does in some separate proceeding.

Regarding your current wealth (#2), being married is a huge vulnerability if you’re well-off but not rich enough to have set up your assets to be safe, or if you become well-off during your marriage. But if you’re rich with pre-existing wealth that is maintained competently, of if you’re working class, loss of your current wealth via divorce isn’t as huge of a risk.

Regrading your future wealth (#3), you’re vulnerable to child support regardless of your marital status. Alimony/spousal support is more rare and mostly comes into play for rich and well-off guys with low-earning spouses.

Putting all of that into a five-sentence summary gives us a fairly reasonable, non-emotional view of marriage and divorce. It’s a big risk and best avoided unless you are 100,000% dead-set on having children (in which case there’s an argument that marriage may actually be a better option than having children out of marriage). But it’s not as panic-inducing as the internet may lead us to believe.

Many internet men dream of one day having some kind of non-married-wife arrangement with a woman, because they’re just so gosh-darn alpha and manly that a woman will agree to some kind of weird non-standard non-marriage just to be in his life on account of how alpha and manly he is.

That doesn’t actually happen, because no normal woman agrees to crazy crap like that. Maybe one or two guys managed to pull it off. I dunno. But it’s not a thing most normal guys should be counting on. Plus, in many jurisdictions, doing that is going to end up being counted as a common-law marriage, and if you ever have any kids, you’re still on the hook for child support regardless of whether there’s a legal marriage.

So divorce is scary and risky, but maybe not panic-inducing. If you absolutely must have children for your life to feel complete (which is completely normal for a human being), maybe do what the rich people do, even if you’re not rich.