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I don't think you do. If both people have the same level of income, there's no alimony. Alimony is meant to allow someone who has been a house spouse for years (decades) to think about divorce, so they are not trapped by finances.
How easy do you think it is to get a job after working part time (or not working) for 20 years? Older with no recent experience is not going to get you any jobs.
Wich is precisely the point of this sham of a law. I think Republicans know that they are decades away from revoking no-fault divorce, but they can erode a woman's ability to leave an unhappy marriage. This, abortion bans, school choice, it's all about turning the clock back before women's lib, ERA, etc.
That's all fine, and like I said, that's where alimony does make sense. But I've heard of cases where two spouses both have careers, albeit one makes substantially more than another, and alimony is awarded to the lower earner for lifestyle offset or something like that, basically that one spouse is accustomed to a certain lifestyle and therefore the higher earning spouse offsets the discrepancy. That's where I think it's ridiculous.
My brother tells that story. His wife had a career also and could make much more money if she switched job locations. But he now has to pay her because she won't move.
The truth is she did have a career and it was sidelined by their children, while his was not, and he continued up the ladder. She could move(like they did for his career once already, as a family) but doing so takes the children more than 100 miles away and she could lose custody and/or child support for breaking the parenting agreement.
Generally my brothers an ok guy, but his vision and view on this is objectively wrong, and viewed through a lense the divorce created in him.
Guess which version everyone in his small town knows, and what gets repeated...
Except even in dual income households a lot of times, the lower earner in the relationship has made career sacrifices to enable the higher earner, be it
taking a roles with lower responsibility to have increased flexibility
accepting jobs in new locations with limited growth opportunity when the higher earner moves for a promotion
foregoing growth opportunities / education earlier in life to support raising a family
Relationships are a partnership, working together for a collective goal. When one partner "makes substantially more than the other" that probably wasn't achieved alone
You mean how some people put their careers on hold to raise their kid(s) until they're old enough to go to school because the cost of child care is too expensive and thus their earnings and retirement suffered for over half a decade at least and then they get divorced and the stay at home dad is awarded some alimony because yeah, his earnings went way down after he re-entered the work force and thus was awarded alimony for making sure his wife and kids were taken care of and she was supported as she continued to work and move up?
But yeah, it's totally unfair that the wife was made to pay alimony even though they both had careers at the time of the divorce but she made much more money.
Alimony shouldn't exist.
But we should also have social safety nets in place such that alimony isn't necessary.
The idea of alimony, though, has morphed over the years from allowing someone to, as you say, consider divorce without being trapped by finances, to replacing a stay-at-home spouse's potential income had they not been the stay-at-home spouse. That change makes me pretty uncomfortable, especially the government stepping in requiring an ex spouse to pay what the other person might have made.
In Germany there is this net. But you still have to pay alimony.