“The biggest financial risk for women today? Embarking on a relationship” (Guardian) looks at divorce under U.K. family law, which is similar to what prevails in the winner-take-all U.S. states, e.g., New York, California, and Massachusetts. As in the U.S., the majority of divorce lawsuits are filed by women and, as in the U.S., plaintiffs express dissatisfaction with (a) how they were unable to extract as much cash as they had hoped from defendants, and (b) how the profitability of the divorce was impaired by transaction costs such as legal fees.
A principal point in the article seems to be that women who marry should continue to work and generate income, but they don’t look at what happens if the husband responds to this increase in household income by quitting his job or scaling back his career. As in the example in Massachusetts Prenuptial Agreements, a woman who has a successful career can become the litigation target of a “dependent spouse” who traded her in on a 25-year-old from Craigslist. The U.K., like the U.S., has gender-neutral alimony laws.
The Guardian doesn’t have the bad taste to point out that the subject of the article would have been a lot better off financially if she’d had three out-of-wedlock children with three different high-income fathers than by being in a medium-term marriage with a medium-income partner (the unemployed guy (50+? The article doesn’t give his age) whom she was counting on to support her, post-marriage, had pension savings of only $282,500, likely comparable to the legal fees on both sides (we learn only about the woman’s bills, which were approximately $106,500 at current exchange rates)).