When I did online dating I came across many divorced men (usually with kids) and by far the majority told me they lost interest in her looks, like quite a few told me she got fat. I’m not fat but this horrified me. It’s one thing to be divorced because the spouse cheated or abused, another because of looks. The fact is looks will fade and wealth could fade. Those to Mr ate superficial reasons.I just found a very interesting tidbit from this Atlantic article:
theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-divorce-proof-marriage/381401/
“Men are 50 percent more likely to end up divorced when they said their partner’s looks were important in their decision to get married, and women are 60 percent more likely to end up divorced when they cared about their partner’s wealth, compared to people who said they cared about neither.”
Ay yay yay!
So if one parent is a heroin addict and the other is a cheater, the heroin addict should get the kids?I agree. If one person is the guilty one they should be supporting. I think it’s immoral when someone cheats then they get support. They should pay for the children and lose custody. The wronged spouse shouldn’t be penalized at all.
That’s not the majority of parents.So if one parent is a heroin addict and the other is a cheater, the heroin addict should get the kids?
I think “the best interests of the child” is a better test for custody.That’s not the majority of parents.
I think that is true. A man can be a good father except that on one occasion on a trip overseas he was unfaithful, but if the wife is mentally ill, an alcoholic with a violent temper, and addicted to heroin, and has beaten her children mercilessly, then what?Not being an adulterer does not automatically mean that a person is the better parent. There are lots of ways to be a bad spouse and a bad parent.
Note that I said,* “Sometimes, a marriage breaks up by the fault of one, by the refusal of one, or by the infidelity of one, not because both failed to keep their vows.”* I did not by any means say what fraction of the time this is the case.So if one parent is a heroin addict and the other is a cheater, the heroin addict should get the kids?
I do not have enough experience with family courts to know if the courts care whether or not a child is going to be placed with an unfaithful parent and the lover that broke up the marriage. If the courts treat that as a “stable, two-adult household”–that is, as some sort of an advantage for the child–while penalizing the parent who is single because he or she will not take a lover because he or she is still putatively in a valid marriage, that would be a miscarriage of justice.I think “the best interests of the child” is a better test for custody.
While heroin addicts are fortunately uncommon, there are lots of alcoholics, workaholics, prescription drug addicts, pot smokers, verbally and/or emotionally and/or physically abusive people, seriously mentally ill people, etc.
Not being an adulterer does not automatically mean that a person is the better parent. There are lots of ways to be a bad spouse and a bad parent.
I do not have enough experience with family courts to know if the courts care whether or not a child is going to be placed with an unfaithful parent and the lover that broke up the marriage. If the courts treat that as a “stable, two-adult household”–that is, as some sort of an advantage for the child–while penalizing the parent who is single because he or she will not take a lover because he or she is still putatively in a valid marriage, that would be a miscarriage of justice.
Yes, being an adulterer is automatically a strike against you as a parent. Sorry, but cheating on your child’s other parent is a gross betrayal of your child’s trust, not just the trust of your spouse. Are there other ways to be a bad parent? Sure, there are. There are worse ways to betray a child’s trust and your duty as a parent than by committing adultery. That is certainly one of them, though, and it is not a minor one.
Honestly, do you really think that if your mom were cheating on your dad or vice versa that it has nothing to do with you? Of course it does! A child who is angry at a parent who commits adultery has every right to be angry, every right to be hurt, and every right to believe the parent is less to be trusted to keep a promise.
There is more than one way to betray trust, but adultery is a real betrayal of trust. It is a lot worse than “it wasn’t great,” just as selfishly cheating the family out of the financial support that they deserved was a lot worse than kind of selfish. Yes, it makes a big difference in either case whether the betrayal of trust was an isolated incident, a habit, or a flagrant and open insult to the wronged spouse. (In the case you cite, the financial betrayal was a flagrant, open, and habitual insult to the family. What the extent of the infidelity was, I can’t know.)In one case I know where mom was messing around, dad had long ago stopped supporting the family financially, even though he was living under the same roof and making a nice salary. He’d buy motorcycles or collectibles and leave the family with $20 for groceries while still living with them.
Obviously, it wasn’t great that the mom was messing around, but I think that a parent that cares about feeding children is a better parent than one that doesn’t.
So, again, I would look to “the best interests of the child” rather than assuming that an adulterous spouse was automatically the worse parent. There’s really no floor as to how bad a bad parent can be.
But, if women were to collude to demand more sure some men would marry, but I’m wondering if more men would simply drop out of the market. There’s plenty of other distractions and activities available.
There is more than one way to betray trust, but adultery is a real betrayal of trust. It is a lot worse than “it wasn’t great,” just as selfishly cheating the family out of the financial support that they deserved was a lot worse than kind of selfish. Yes, it makes a big difference in either case whether the betrayal of trust was an isolated incident, a habit, or a flagrant and open insult to the wronged spouse. (In the case you cite, the financial betrayal was a flagrant, open, and habitual insult to the family. What the extent of the infidelity was, I can’t know.)
**I don’t know either. The thing I knew about (long story) could have been a one off and may not have involved actual physical intimacy. But whatever actually happened, it was at the minimum very shady and inappropriate. Hence, I used the term messing around because I don’t really know how far things went.
Things fizzled between her and her gentleman friend because, funnily enough, he turned out to have certain unpleasant common features with her husband. So it wasn’t an ongoing thing.
**
That is not to say I’d want to be the poor judge who has to decide how to grant or divide custody in a situation like that.
**I would have no doubts at all–the parent that actually provides for the basic physical needs of the children is the parent that should have primary custody, sinner or not, if the other parent is incapable or unwilling to do that stuff.
A guy that doesn’t even think about what his kids are going to eat or where it’s going to come from is not going to do a better job with more abstract needs like their emotional or spiritual health.
From James 2:
“What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”
Likewise 1 Timothy 5:8:
" If any one does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever."
**
As I said, I think a judge would expect the husband in the case you describe to be neglectful and self-centered with his money at the expense of the bodily needs of the children. As you describe it, it is reasonable that the best guess is that if the court isn’t there giving the money to the parent who actually spends on the children, no money will get spent on the children. The mother’s self-centeredness and infidelity with regards to her lover sounds as if it is not nearly so habitual and that she balanced that infidelity with at least some fidelity and responsibility in some way.I don’t know either. The thing I knew about (long story) could have been a one off and may not have involved actual physical intimacy. But whatever actually happened, it was at the minimum very shady and inappropriate. Hence, I used the term messing around because I don’t really know how far things went.
Things fizzled between her and her gentleman friend because, funnily enough, he turned out to have certain unpleasant common features with her husband. So it wasn’t an ongoing thing.
I would have no doubts at all–the parent that actually provides for the basic physical needs of the children is the parent that should have primary custody, sinner or not, if the other parent is incapable or unwilling to do that stuff.
A guy that doesn’t even think about what his kids are going to eat or where it’s going to come from is not going to do a better job with more abstract needs like their emotional or spiritual health.
From James 2:
“What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”
Likewise 1 Timothy 5:8:
" If any one does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever."
I don’t know that I’ve ever been around a couple that divorced for no reason at all. It’s like planes don’t crash for no reason at all. There do seem to be some cases, though, where the desire to leave causes the infidelity, rather than the infidelity causes the divorce. Here’s a brief list of the ones that come quickest to mind with my best guess as to what happened:No, I mean the fellow who goes off to work and then has his wife who does not work for a salary file divorce papers on him without him doing anything she could have used to show fault in the days of no fault divorce. Infidelity should not be the only or even the all-important factor, but it is an important factor and it ought to be treated as one.
**Was the old fault-divorce list extensive enough?
Those days are so long gone that I have no idea what the old list used to be, beyond infidelity.**
She’s unhappy, she wants out or he’s unhappy and he wants out, and either one can unilaterally file papers. You can’t even get out of a business contract that easily! You certainly can’t get out and just say, “Congratulations, I get half the money and I own the relationships we forged as a business, too, because I worked directly with the customers and you worked in the back.”
There are numerous cases where one party did nothing wrong. “Wanting to leave” does not justify the infidelity or make the other party at fault.I don’t know that I’ve ever been around a couple that divorced for no reason at all. It’s like planes don’t crash for no reason at all. There do seem to be some cases, though, where the desire to leave causes the infidelity, rather than the infidelity causes the divorce.
Mental instability is grounds for fault divorce. Alcoholism is also.
- A person can be impossible to live with (for instance in the case of severe mental illness) without being at fault.
Example?
- There can be real fault that is nearly impossible to prove.
Yes. So? People have attempted fraud since time immemorial. This still avoids one spouse leaving the other without just cause.
- It’s always possible to generate “fault” (for instance, by having an affair). In the good old days, you could do this as a conspiracy between husband and wife using a private detective. (See Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust, where the hero needs to generate proof of adultery in order to get a divorce in England of the 1920s or 1930s.)
Sure, but is “dissatisfaction” or “I found someone better I’m currently having an affair with” legitimate grounds for divorce?
- People don’t get divorced for no reason at all. I can’t think of a single case I know of where that happened. I’ve got one mystery item on my divorce list where I don’t know what happened, but I’m pretty sure that if I knew the couple better I’d know what happened. We have to associate with the possibly guiltier of the spouses, so we went to talk to our priest. He said, “Catholics don’t do shunning. If there was an affair going on between X and Y, we’ll know soon enough. Also, a couple with [large number] of kids doesn’t get divorced over nothing.” And that was very good advice.
Then why punish the children by only allowing them to see the breadwinner in the previous marriage 20 percent of the time?
- Children deserve the best relationship with both parents that is possible in their best interests. Anna Karenina should have been able to see her son–it was a cruelty in the Russian system that she was not allowed to see him. The fact that she was an adulteress didn’t mean that her son didn’t need her.
This is far from being universally true. Also, if this is the rule of thumb, access to the children should also be 50/50.
- There is basic economic justice involved. Whatever the circumstances of the marriage, spouses deserve 50% of the assets acquired during the marriage. In any other arrangement, under fault divorce, the more evil spouse could just blackmail their spouse into accepting fault, just to get out. So, 50% is not perfect, but there’s a rough fairness involved.
Children are not things (like houses or money). Custody arrangements should reflect their best interests, rather than fairness for the parents. If dad is going to stick them with their step-mom while he’s working his usual long hours, maybe they’d be best off with mom instead even if it’s not a 50/50 split? (All things being equal.)Example?
Lots of abuse is very difficult to prove.
Yes. So? People have attempted fraud since time immemorial. This still avoids one spouse leaving the other without just cause.
While perhaps trapping a lot of innocent spouses in bad marriages, as used to happen a lot.
**The current system has false positives, but the old system had a lot of false negatives.
There’s no perfect system.
Also, practically speaking, fault divorce is not coming back to the US. That horse has left the barn. Ditto automatic alimony, of course.**
Sure, but is “dissatisfaction” or “I found someone better I’m currently having an affair with” legitimate grounds for divorce?
**Well, having a spouse that is having an affair and has left one is certainly grounds for divorce. **
People tend to remarry very quickly after divorce, so it’s a very real possibility that the dissatisfaction comes from thinking they can do better than the current spouse.
**Some do, some don’t. **
Then why punish the children by only allowing them to see the breadwinner in the previous marriage 20 percent of the time?
**Did they only see the breadwinner 20% of the time during the marriage and did the breadwinner provide only 20% of hands-on parenting? Then 20% after the divorce is quite reasonable.
**
Also, if one spouse shows adultery, there’s a good chance they don’t have as strong moral compass as the other party, and this should strongly impact custody.
**It’s one parameter, certainly, but there are many others.
For instance, the non-cheating spouse may be mentally ill or have crawled into the bottle years ago or have prescription drug habit. **
This is far from being universally true. Also, if this is the rule of thumb, access to the children should also be 50/50.
Right. And most Catholics of that era believed that an annulment was only something that was used in extreme cases and not something that they could approach their parish priest about.Annulments don’t “result in marriage breakups.” The marriage is broken before the annulment process begins. A civil divorce is required before the annulment process can start.