Reply to "Real-life" examples of alimony paid/received?

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Reply to ""Real-life" examples of alimony paid/received?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Alimony is ridiculous. Get a job. The gravy train ends once you decided to end the marriage.[/quote]

Alimony is recognition for the 'work' of domestic life.  While there are varying levels of the productiveness of that work, it is still work.  Consider the case of the navy wife and their children.  She is incapable of maintaining a career because her husband is shipped from port to port every few years.  The career aspirations of a naval officer rests very much on the ability of the spouse to maintain the domestic sphere and promote his social life. Or a journalist posted for a foreign country with spouse and kids in tow. That journalist's family life would be non-existant if not for the spouse.  There are many high achieving professionals who wouldn't have a domestic life if not for the spouse at home.
Modern courts do recognize the education attainments of the non-working spouse and increasingly factor that into the duration of alimony.  So if the non-working spouse is college educated and still young, alimony would only be a few years as the expectation is that she can return to work with some training.  But if the non-working spouse is in her late 50s and had outdated skills but raised a passel of his children, maintained home, took charge of the domestic responsibilities for several decades so he had the freedom to travel and make partner, the it can be reasonably argued that she will have a hard time finding outside work and frankly her efforts on the domestic front is 'work' that helped propel him professionally.  She is entitled to a share of his success because she helped get him there.  That's the gray world of alimony.[/quote]

No, this is wrong.  Alimony has nothing to do with the "work" of domestic life.  The receiving spouse doesn't have to have contributed to domestic life at all; there is no standard to meet for domestic work or childcare or helping advance the spouse' career.  Spouses who never enter the kitchen or touch the mop are as entitled to alimony as hard-working housewives and mothers.

Alimony is recognition of the fact that two spouses form a unit, and share a lifestyle, and when that unit breaks down, the lower-earning spouse is entitled to a soft transition out of her better-resourced life with a former spouse.

I personally find the talk of "contributing to career advancement" to be utter bollocks.  There are tons of successful single navy officers and journalists out there. Most successful men would have been successful, married or single. They became successful because that was their priority. [/quote]

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