Yesterday NPR had a long discussion about alimony -- the arguments for and against various kinds of alimony and the changing circumstances around it as women become more equal players in the workforce. It wasn't a bad discussion, but it seemed like nobody brought up one rather important point.
Note: I'll be using male pronouns to refer to the higher-earning partner in a marriage and female pronouns for the lower-earning one, just to make things read more smoothly. I realize that sometimes those gnder roles are reversed, but it's just easier to shorthand it that way.
The argument in favor of alimony is that often one partner in a marriage (usually the woman) opts not to have a career or to make her career secondary, as part of the division of labor within the marriage. This results in a diminution of earning power even long after the marriage ends, such that simply dividing the marital assets at the time of the divorce is not enough to put the former partners on even economic footing. The premises of that argument are hard to deny. If a woman gives up her career for a couple decades to be a full-time mother and housekeeper, and then gets divorced, it's certainly reasonable to expect her earning power will be a lot less than her ex-husband's for the balance of their lives. Even some sort of "transitional alimony" --support from the husband for a few years while she retrains for the job market-- is not likely to put her in the same economic position as him, since she can never recover the lost work experience she would have gained (and that he did gain) during the time when she was home with the kids.
The issue none of the NPR guests mentioned, though, is that the division of labor within a marriage has more than just an economic impact on the long-term position of the partners. Chances are, the husband, in that hypothetical, paid a price of his own for their agreed division of labor during those two decades. Studies suggest that part of the reason men have traditionally had shorter lifespans than women is the stress of their work lives (the gap between male and female longevity has shrunk as women have moved into the workforce and started to have higher incidence rates of stress-related disease). So the husband may have given up a few years of his life as part of his bargain with his wife, in their choice of roles. A court can't exactly order her to give those years back to him.
There are other trade-offs, too. A stay-at-home parent typically will develop closer relationships with the children (and other family members) than the parent they see much less often due to his work schedule. Those bonds of affection are likely to be affected for life. I'm sure a study of divorced couples would show that their adult children spend a lot more time with (and provide more support later in life to) the parent who worked less through their childhood. It's only natural. That's part of the trade-off in the division of labor -- while one parent is away developing business relationships that will enhance earning power for the family, the other parent is spending more time at home developing family relationships that will enrich life in immeasurable ways even long after the marriage has ended. Just as a stay-at-home parent is wagering that her diminished earning power won't matter, because the marriage will stay together and she can live off her husband's earnings, the spouse who dedicates himself more to a career is wagering that his more tenuous family relationships won't matter, because the marriage will stay together and he can enoy those relationships when the kids and grandkids come to see the other spouse. A court can step in and order the one spouse to share his enhanced earning power with his ex-wife, but it can't really come up with a way to make the other spouse share her enhanced family relationships with her ex-husband.
Even that's not the end of the trade-offs a working spouse makes when he agrees to focus heavily on his career. Stay-at-home parents and part-time workers have more opportunity to develop community ties, deep friendships, hobbies, and other life-enhancements of that kind. For the person whose role in the marriage is to maximize the family's income, chances are there won't be a lot of free time for acting in community theater, leading a cub scout troop, becoming a great cook, volunteering at a homeless shelter, learning to play a new instrument, organizing church activities, taking part in the PTA, etc. Given the statistics that suggest people live longer, healthier, and happier lives when they are involved in their communities and have a large group of close friends, this is yet another thing that will pay dividends for the non-primary-earner in a relationship, even long after the marriage breaks up. And it's another thing a court can't really do anything to share equitably between the divorcing partners.
So, alimony ends up being a way that one partner can be given half the benefit the other partner built up through his agreed role in the marriage, while he can't really be given any of the benefit she built up through her agreed role in the marriage. Is that fair? Is it right that when the marriage breaks up the long-term non-economic sacrifices made by the careerist for the family unit aren't taken into consideration by a divorce court, while the long-term economic sacrifices made by the non-careerist for the family unit are?
Just to illustrate, fast-forward our hypothetical couple to their golden years. Without alimony, the wife may well be living off of nothing but Social Security, thanks to her lower earning power, which kept her from being able to save for retirement in the years after divorce. But she may be doing so with plenty of help and emotional support from her kids, her church, her community, and her close-knit group of friends, in good health, thanks to the non-economic benefits she reaped from those twenty years when she wasn't expected to put career advancement first. And the husband may well be living a pretty luxurious retirement, thanks to all the earning power he accumulated during those years... but he may also be sicker and lonelier, because of his diminished opportunities to develop those kinds of connections his ex-wife benefits from, back when his agreed role was to bring home the bacon. Even in that alimony-free hypothetical, you could argue that the ex-wife is better off -- or you could argue that the ex-husband is, depending on how you view the relative importance of money versus health, personal growth, and relationships. The alimony-free situation preserves the bargain they made when they agreed to that division of labor in the marriage, with the natural advantages of each role flowing to the person who agreed to fill it. So, is it right to step in with alimony and deprive the ex-husband of the one significant relative advantage he got from his side of the bargain, while leaving the wife with the entirety of her relative advantage?
