Category: Divorce, child support, custody, family law

What if a man could look at all of the tasks required by the roles of husband and father and, like Bartleby, the Scrivener, simply say “I prefer not to”? That’s the story in Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden. Her husband “James” is pseudonym for Henry Patterson Davis (nytimes 1999 wedding announcement) who was completely unashamed of abandoning the wife and kids to the point that he gave the author explicit permission to publish her tale in the New York Times and as a book, knowing that anyone with access to Google could trivially discover his real name and that they Daily Mail would run headlines like this:

For most of the no-fault divorce era in the U.S. (1970s onward), men have been kept in their place by a family court system that will ruin them emotionally (give the kids to the mom) and financially if they attempt to throw over the traces. Our laws are nominally gender-neutral, however, and women who have a higher income than their husbands have been vulnerable in recent decades to losing divorce lawsuits and writing monthly checks to enable their former spouse to enjoy sex with younger women (see “More and More Women Are Paying Alimony to Failure-to-Launch Ex-Husbands. And They’re Really, Really Not Happy About It.” (Washingtonian 2021)). Bell Burden’s book is about a wife who is moderately rich via inheritance/trusts but who quit her career and thus earns much less than her husband. His financial exposure in a divorce was limited by a prenuptial agreement keeping most of their finances separate (this can be the default in Germany by checking a box on the marriage license application). The family court system in Northeastern states is premised on the assumption that fathers don’t care about their children, are incapable of caring for children, and that their only valid role is financial support of the mother of the children (who can decide to spend some of the money that she receives on the kids, if she so chooses). Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage answers the question, “What happens if a white man with money acts in accordance with court system expectations?”

While married, “James” stays in harness, laboring like a Latinx landscaper:

In 2008, Susan bought us an eight-acre plot of land adjacent to our house. We wanted to secure our privacy and have space for the kids to build houses as adults. The new plot was all forest—oak trees, pine trees, brush. James was entranced with it. He created winding paths, pruned trees with a long pole saw, and sprayed every weekend for poison ivy, wearing a Roundup backpack with a nozzle. He said it would take him many years to make the paths perfect for the girls’ weddings. He imagined walking them through the woods to a small beach on the lake, steps from the osprey pole. He named the beach for Finn, and carved Evie’s initials in a fallen tree trunk beside the boardwalk. He found boulders in the woods and named them for each kid, the biggest for Carrie. He taught them how to find their rocks using his carefully tended paths.

He kept investing in our Vineyard imprint, year after year. In 2018, he designed a large addition to the garage to house his extensive collection of motorcycles and forestry equipment. He included a garden on top of the addition for me, raised beds we filled with herbs and tomatoes and flowers. In 2019, he planted blueberry and raspberry bushes on the edge of the property, plants that take several years to bear fruit.

As of 2019, in other words, he was investing time in a house that belonged to the wife (purchased with her family trust funds) whom he was soon to sue. The Covidcrats felt free to reevaluate all assumptions that Americans had about life, e.g., whether children had the right to attend school and adults had the right to congregate in churches or at work. Perhaps this gave “James” a mental nudge to question long-held assumptions. Regarding continued sex with a 50-year-old mom and continued hands-on responsibility for housing, feeding, and talking to adolescent children, “James” never said that there was anything wrong with married life, but only “I prefer not to continue with this life.” After the wife learns about her 35-year-old competitor:

He said, “I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t.” He said, “I feel like a switch has flipped. I’m done.” He said, “You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”

The author, her friends, and various mental health professionals were all shocked by this Bartleby-like behavior.

My stepmother, Susan, called me several times a day. We were very close, bonded from the moment she entered my life in 1972. She wept with me, both of us quiet as we cried. She was the only person who tried to reach James. She emailed him in the second week, writing that in her forty-five years of practice as a family therapist, she had never seen someone leave a marriage so cruelly. She begged him to speak to me, to do therapy with me, to try to end the marriage kindly, honorably.

[an elite neighbor on the Vineyard] leaned forward and raised both his hands, his palms facing me. He said, “I want you to understand that what James is doing is wrong. The way he left you without explanation is wrong. Walking out on his family during a global pandemic is wrong. The way he is treating you now is wrong. If he tells you it isn’t, if anyone tells you it isn’t, don’t believe them.”

[a psychiatrist] was blunt and, like the husband from overseas, she offered clear opinions. It was wrong to leave a marriage with no warning and no explanation. It was highly unusual not to want custody of kids who were as young as twelve. It wasn’t normal to search the basement for a prenup after telling children about a divorce.

A year later, the husband/plaintiff doesn’t have a more detailed explanation than “I prefer not to”:

I wrote, “You never told me what I did wrong in our marriage, why you stopped loving me. It is such an awful thing, after twenty-one years, not to know.” I had hoped something had changed, that he would give me the answer, the lost frames of the movie, something to help me understand what had happened. He wrote back, “I wish I could answer your question, something broke in me, it was me and not you, you did nothing wrong.”

Any life lessons from this book? The Martha’s Vineyard tennis club is jammed with women who have fancy degrees, but choose to not work. I.e., instead of marrying 30-year-olds with professional degrees, the men could have married 20-year-old yoga instructors and ended up with the same household income and many more kids.

The women were universally well-educated, but most, like me, had left the workforce. This felt good; in New York, I felt conflicted, and embarrassed, about having paused my legal career. I didn’t feel this way on the Vineyard, surrounded by smart women who had made the same choice.

One important lesson from the book is that people shouldn’t take money out of trusts to spend on real estate. A big point of leverage that “James” had over Belle was that she’d actually paid for their apartment in Manhattan and their house on the Vineyard with her trust funds. The prenup, however, technically gave the plaintiff the right to take half of the value out of both properties. Ultimately, there was a settlement, but perhaps the wife would have done better if her trust had owned both properties rather than her holding them in her own name or them being jointly titled. If you want to protect your kids from future family court predators, therefore, set up their trust so that the trust can buy and own property and the kids have the right to use it.

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It’s National Special Education Day. Let’s look at the latest from the towering intellects of the Ivy League: “Winning the Bread and Baking it Too: Gendered Frictions in the Allocation of Home Production” (NBER with authors from Princeton, Penn, and a university in Chile).

From the abstract:

We document that female breadwinners do more home production than their male partners, driven by “housework” like cooking and cleaning. By comparing to same sex couples, we highlight that specialization within heterosexual households does not appear to be “gender neutral” even after accounting for average earnings differences.

Final sentence:

the next frontier of gender equality may be encouraging men to “lean in” at home, including teaching home production skills and changing norms about task provision from a young age. This will allow men to maintain competitiveness on the marriage market even in an environment where their labor market advantage fades

The PhDs who wrote this are saying that a man who is interested in doing a ton of housework will be pursued for marriage by women with great jobs, but it seems that they never met an actual woman with a great job who said “I want to find a good homemaker to be my stay-at-home husband”.

The absurdity of this idea becomes readily apparent when one considers the interaction between the authors’ ideas and the typical state’s family law and family court. The stay-at-home husband who gets tired of the hardworking middle-aged wife can sue her and collect alimony and child support in order to fund his new relationship with a young woman (or young women). She was the breadwinner and he is entitled to maintain his lifestyle after he discards her in favor of someone younger. From Massachusetts Prenuptial Agreements:

One case that we looked at involved a successful financial services industry fund manager. Due to the Wall Street-style checks rolling into the household, her husband decided to relax at home, watch the nannies raise the children, surf the Web, pursue hobbies, etc. As the wife was getting ready to retire the stay-at-home husband asked “Do I need this woman to earn more money?” The answer was no due to the fact that she was about to stop working. He then asked “Do I need her around to provide a stable environment for our children?” The answer was no because the kids were nearly launched. Did he need her to produce more children? It would have been biologically impossible due to her age. After a bit of litigation it turned out that, under the Massachusetts no-fault system, “I want to have sex with 22-year-olds off Craigslist” is as good a reason for a divorce as any. The husband got paid tens of millions of dollars down at the local family courthouse. Although he only netted half of the money that his wife had earned, his practical spending power had increased due to the fact that the wife, like a lot of self-made people, was a saver while he was a spender.

I find the paper interesting mostly because it shows the academic contempt for practical knowledge. They assume that American men without PhDs are behaving irrationally and need to learn from their intellectual superiors. Unemployed and low-income men who become champions at housework are going to snag hot wives who earn $500,000 per year because it will never occur to the $500,000/year women that they could be exposed to a family court lawsuit as soon as their hotness fades. That real-world American men aren’t pursuing the suggested strategy for “maintain[ing] competitiveness on the marriage market” doesn’t cause the academics a moment of self-doubt. They couldn’t even do a Google search, which would have yielded, for example, this Washingtonian article:

“What’s noteworthy to me is the fury of the women,” says Heather Hostetter, a prominent divorce lawyer in Bethesda who handles cases in Maryland and DC. “I just don’t experience that as much with men who are confronted with the fact that they have to pay alimony. And part of the fury relates to this idea of ‘What exactly am I paying for?’”

“It may be a shock to some women [because] they are not interested in supporting, nine times out of ten, what they call the ‘loser’—and that’s why they’re getting out of the marriage, because he’s a ‘loser,’ or he’s strayed, or whatever it might be,” says Cheryl New, a family lawyer who has been practicing in Maryland and Virginia for three-plus decades. “I think it is really hard emotionally for women to wrap their arms around this phenomenon.” Especially considering that in Maryland, Virginia, and DC, it doesn’t even matter how long (or short) your marriage was—you can still be made to pay.

One ex I spoke to told me that when she and her husband split four years ago, “he cleared the house out when he left. He took the TV, the china, my flatware. All of the things you would anticipate a man would say, ‘I don’t want this, you can have it.’ ” She pays child support and covers major bills for the kids—tuition, camp, insurance. “It’s a harsh reality,” as she put it. “I often look in the mirror and wonder whether this whole feminism thing backfired on me.”

These are the same folks who think that they can offer us practical advice on how to structure the welfare state (giving SNAP/EBT to 17 million in 2000 will never create 42 million SNAP-dependent Americans in 2025 (remember that there are additional federal food welfare programs so the number of Americans who receive taxpayer funded food is considerably larger than 42 million)), how we should change our lifestyle so as to reduce CO2 emissions enough to save our beloved Earth, how we can give every American unlimited medical procedures at a modest cost, and how we can have open borders without exacerbating what the same academics have identified as an affordable housing crisis, a working class wage crisis, a health care system capacity crisis, etc.

In case you’re wondering if it is only these three authors who have a blind spot regarding the family court exposure and the lack of any real-world women trying to find low-income stay-at-home husbands, here are all of the experts who assisted them:

We are grateful for useful comments from seminar and conference audiences at Brown, Harvard Business School, University of Michigan, Cornell University, Chicago Harris School, New York University, University of Pittsburgh, Drexel University, Arizona State University Applied Microeconomics, Barnard Economics of Gender Symposium, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics gender session, May Ridge Forum on gender economics, Society of Family and Gender Economics, New Advances in Family Economics Ravello, and Zurich Workshop in Economics and Psychology.

See also this hater who claims that men actually do more work once ensnared into a partnership with a female:

"Contrary to widespread belief, when you consider both paid and unpaid labor, fathers and mothers do similar amounts of work. In fact, on average, fathers do slightly more."

[Link below.] pic.twitter.com/B01B2uNeXp

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) November 28, 2025

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A hedge fund manager pointed out “Human Reproduction as Prisoner’s Dilemma; The decline of marriage in the West.” (Aporia, January 21, 2025):

[the effort required to raise a child to adulthood] makes human reproduction analogous to a prisoner’s dilemma. Both father and mother can choose to fully commit or pursue other options [“cooperate” or “defect”]. In this context, marriage provides a framework for encouraging, legitimizing, and stabilizing commitment. … A [men defect/women defect] society looks like the most primitive parts of sub-Saharan Africa or the Amazon rainforest. Women sleep around, while adult men prey on women and children and regularly kill each other for access to women. As men can have multiple wives and wives are not loyal, there is no respite from intrasexual competition; you can always be replaced. Without paternal certainty, men have no investment in the future and spend their time fighting, dancing or resting rather than working. Economically, these societies are desperately poor and largely incapable of collective action. In war, they shatter like glass when faced with an enemy that expect chastity and fidelity from women.

What was the U.S. for its first 200 years? A “men cooperate/women cooperate” society in which there was monogamy and “Divorce is difficult: the marriage contract can be created by mutual consent, but cannot be unilaterally dissolved.”

What has the U.S. been since no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce become available circa 1970?

The shift from a cooperate/cooperate marriage system, where both men and women made sacrifices to gain the security required for childbearing, to a cooperate/defect one, where men are expected to uphold their end of the bargain in exchange for nothing, has failed. This is the legacy of second wave feminism. Men are dropping out of work or burning things down, and both marriage and children are increasingly relics of the past. We are thereby moving towards a defect/defect system of the kind I described at the start.

Why are there so many females trying to have babies with rich guys?

Polygamy is a natural attractor state for humans, since it satisfies the desires of powerful men to have multiple wives and the desires of women to have elite husbands. Monogamy requires both elite men and many women to sacrifice their desires. … Rather than invest in additional wives, men in monogamous societies invest in their original wife and children, with the result that almost everyone is better off.

Where’s the game theory promised by the article title?

But unilateral divorce doesn’t just destabilize marriage. It also changes the power dynamics within marriage from favoring the more committed partner to favouring the less committed partner. Hence, “under unilateral divorce, the distribution of resources within marriage favors the spouse who wished to divorce” (Reynoso 2024). In addition to destabilizing marriage, unilateral divorce incentivizes poor behavior within it, since the threat of ending the marriage on unfavorable terms for the undutiful partner no longer exists. This “weakens the bargaining power of dutiful partners who wish their marriage to continue or who wish to end their marriage because of serious mistreatment by the other partner” (Rowthorn 1999).

Unilateral divorce is sometimes portrayed as an advance in human freedom, but this is a mistake. By removing the ability to credibly commit to a long-term relationship, unilateral divorce prevents couples from reaching a mutually-beneficial bargain that greatly assists in the raising of children. Without forced marriage, which has never been part of the Western tradition, unilateral divorce actually removes an important choice.

The fact that individuals can now exit easily, and unilaterally, from a relationship makes it difficult for couples to make credible commitments to each other. They can promise anything they want, but most of these promises are no longer legally enforceable, and many are undermined by social policies which reward those who break their promises.

Because it no longer guarantees security (or anything else), marriage is much less useful and therefore less appealing.

What about marrying the government?

Rather than merely supporting their own wife and children, men are expected to support women to whom they have no relation, and from whom they can claim nothing in return. Not only is this much less motivating, but it also removes a major incentive for women to marry in the first place. The state can simply extract a potential husband’s wealth and transfer it to her, no marriage required.

How long will it take for family law to turn the U.S. into a richer version of the poorest African countries?

It takes generations to see these effects in full. Not only are we the product of millennia of selection for marriageability; social norms are sticky. At first, men see that their fathers worked hard to get married and that their older acquaintances are doing the same, and imitate them. Women aspire to marry as their mothers did. Even when the law has changed, the norms do not immediately disappear. But they get weaker every generation. People see that marriage no longer offers stability. They see their peers and parents ruined by divorce. They see that they can get the economic and sexual benefits of marriage without giving up options. And the old norms erode.

Why are prime-age men disappearing from the labor force (Obama White House)?

The post-60s settlement attempts to force men to transfer resources to women via the welfare state and child support. But as the Soviets discovered, it’s very difficult to get men to work to the best of their abilities through coercion alone. Without marriage, the state loses its taxpayers and society loses the men who make it work.

What about the baby bust that Elon Musk, whose first wife and mother of his children suggested divorce, decries?

By providing a solution to the prisoner’s dilemma of human reproduction, marriage greatly boosts fertility, even today. It’s not surprising that the shift from a cooperate/cooperate marriage system to a cooperate/defect one, and the attendant devastation of the institution itself, corresponds precisely to the end of the Baby Boom.

Happy Valentine’s Day, therefore, to those who celebrate, those who are married, and those who are married to the government!

(Bad news for those who are married: The article notes that, despite the ease of exiting unhappy marriages provided by no-fault divorce, marriages today are less happy than in the (good/bad) old days.)

Male readers: What percentage of your time is spent doing tasks that you wouldn’t have to do but for the fact that you’re part of a family with children? My personal number is about 80 percent. This includes house-related tasks (if it were just me and Mindy the Crippler I could live comfortably in an apartment or condo). It includes all work for wages (I have enough money from previous work for everything that I might reasonably want to buy between now and age 100+; a big motivation for me to work is that I don’t want the kids to see me idle).

Since it is Valentine’s Day, let’s have some flowers… (front-yard orchids; tie them to a tree in the shade and walk away):

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“A Wife’s Revenge from Beyond the Grave” (The Free Press) is worth reading for the window that it provides into modern American marriage.

We consider ourselves smarter and more evolved than people in the past, but the story starts with a successful 33-year-old man deciding to reject 10,000+ years of human convention and marry a woman old enough to be a grandmother:

Catherine Youssef met Allan Kassenoff in New York City in 2005. He was an upstart, 33-year-old patent litigator; she was an associate at his law firm, four years his senior, and had already served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

She would start trying to have her first child, in other words, in her late 30s.

After they got married, Catherine wanted kids “ASAP,” Allan told me; she wanted to do IVF straight away, he said, before they’d even started trying naturally. He wanted to have kids, but he also wanted to at least try to get pregnant without medical intervention, given the expense of IVF—but Allan caved, he said, because Catherine, who was nearing 40, was so adamant. Allan says they underwent several rounds of IVF, estimating that in total the couple spent upward of $200,000 on fertility treatments.

Then, less than two years into their marriage, Catherine was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer and received treatment. According to her therapy records, which Catherine shared with her suicide note, she later told a therapist that Allan “showed that he was not good at handling stress” during this time.

While she recovered, the Kassenoffs decided to adopt. They contacted an adoption attorney, who matched them with a woman in Florida who was pregnant but unable to look after a baby; in July 2009, the Kassenoffs became parents to Ally, who was delivered to them straight from the hospital where she was born.

Soon thereafter, Allan says Catherine wanted to try IVF again—and threatened to do it “with or without me.”

He went along with it, but told me he was “nervous, because of how bad our relationship was.” He didn’t think bringing another child into the family was “the best thing in the world.”

This time, the IVF worked: less than a year after she adopted Ally, Catherine got pregnant. The Kassenoffs’ second daughter, Charley, was born in February 2011—and was quickly followed by a third, JoJo, in August 2013.

So… adoption throughout human history was mostly done in the context of strong family bonds, right? A man might adopt a nephew or niece or the children of a widow whom he married. Getting hold of a baby from a stranger 1,000 miles away is a new idea, I think. Obviously, IVF is also a relatively new idea.

I don’t want to spoil the article, but the mom in this story turns out to be unethical and takes tremendous risks. What job does she get?

But by March 2015 she was employed again, working for Governor Andrew Cuomo as a Special Counsel for Ethics, Risk, and Compliance.

The au pair turns out to have the clearest perspective on the situation:

Celine Dublanchet, who became the Kassenoffs’ au pair in October 2016, also made disturbing allegations about Catherine. According to court documents, Dublanchet said Catherine once locked Ally [the adopted child], then 7, in the basement by herself for two hours as a punishment, and on another occasion made Ally go outside alone after dark to “clean the garden” in the middle of winter.

Dublanchet claimed that Ally slept on a mattress on the floor in her room, while the other two children [the genetic offspring] slept in Catherine’s bed every night. Every morning, she told me, Ally had to make her mother’s bed.

“Ally was Cinderella,” Dublanchet later wrote to the court, “her two sisters Anastasia and Drizella, and Catherine the horrible stepmother.”

The wife seems to be aware of “The Domestic Violence Parallel Track” in family court:

After a trip to the hospital on May 11, 2019, Catherine texted a friend: “If I had a mark or a bruise or something, it would be easy.”

“You don’t need a bruise to divorce him,” the friend texted back.

“Just to get full custody,” Catherine replied.

On May 15, 2019—mere days after Catherine sent the text that began, “If I had a mark or a bruise”—Allan says his eldest daughter went to school and told her teachers that her dad had kicked her a couple of days earlier. The school immediately launched a Child Protective Services investigation.

The next morning, Saturday, May 18, Allan woke to an email from Catherine’s friend Wayne Baker, informing him that she had obtained an order of protection, barring Allan from contacting her or the kids. Allan says he believes the entire story about “the kick” was fabricated by Catherine, and she told Ally exactly what to say to school officials—all so that she could get custody of the kids.

When I asked Ally—now almost 15—about it, she supported Allan’s version of events, saying her dad had not kicked her; what she’d said to the school wasn’t true. “My mom told me to, like, always say bad stuff about my dad,” she told me.

The article provides a window into what it costs to settle the question of who gets the cash-yielding children in a U.S. family court (in a European country, the cost is often minimal because the law specifies a custody arrangement that is difficult to deviate from and child support profits are capped so there isn’t a huge financial incentive to get hold of the kids).

The judge also appointed psychologist Marc Abrams—who had worked in the Westchester County courts system for over two decades—to offer a neutral assessment of the parents and recommend a custody agreement. Though the report is confidential, Abrams revealed during a July 2020 temporary custody trial that he recommended Allan have sole custody of the kids—and that he believed Catherine had an “unspecified personality disorder.”

Catherine, along with two other women, filed complaints against Marc Abrams, the psychologist who recommended Allan have custody, alleging professional misconduct and inappropriate behavior toward women. Abrams denies these allegations, calling them and any others “defamatory.” After an investigation, the panel of court-approved mental health professionals removed him, meaning he could no longer provide court evaluations—a lucrative gig, with each case paying around $50,000.

That’s just for the psychologist. What about the divorce litigators? The article just says “after millions of dollars, and over 3,000 court filings, the divorce still hadn’t been finalized.” (The decision to get married also cost the man his $1 million/year job and career.)

For the full story, which has quite a few additional twists, read “A Wife’s Revenge from Beyond the Grave”.

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“Does Divorce Make You Hotter?” (Kat Rosenfield, The Free Press):

Five years ago, all my girlfriends suddenly decided to abandon their husbands en masse.

That is how it seemed at the time, at least. It all started when one woman blew up her marriage with one of those affairs so indiscreet that getting found out seemed like not just a risk but the entire point—then landed on her feet with generous alimony and a new boyfriend who was a 24-year-old fitness influencer. A few others, perhaps hoping to replicate her results, followed suit.

I lost touch with these women during the pandemic, so whether it all worked out for them, I couldn’t say; all I remember is that shortly after the last of the breakups, the new divorcées threw a Halloween party at which I was the only woman not wearing lingerie as a costume, and also the only one accompanied by a husband (what can I say? I’ve always liked him). I spent the evening feeling excruciatingly frumpy and middle-aged and also, absurdly, a little left out.

I’ve been thinking lately of that party, those women, the husbands they jettisoned like so much dead weight in a mimetic frenzy of best-life-living. Maybe the men were bad and deserved it, but it strikes me that nobody ever said so. My friends didn’t talk about being unhappily married; they just thought they’d be happier divorced, and no wonder. Even as divorce has retreated from the oft-cited peak rate of 50 percent, its place in the culture has all the urgency and incandescence of a current thing.

What does a successful alimony plaintiff call herself?

a New York Times feature about how Emily Ratajkowski has set off a booming new market for “divorce rings,” refashioned from the wearer’s old wedding band. One of them is engraved with the word badass, a detail I would have found absolutely impossible to believe had it not been accompanied by photographic evidence. … I try to imagine a world in which we’d tell a man that getting divorced made him badass, instead of a schmuck, a deadbeat, a loser who didn’t try hard enough. A world in which divorce rings for men are a thing, let alone one positively written about in The New York Times. It would never happen, of course. It’s only women who are seen as requiring this particular brand of cheerleading, who are relentlessly encouraged to reframe all their negative experiences as the best thing they ever did. … In this vision of feminism, marriage is a trap, divorce is a superpower, and women are not so much people as Strong Female Characters. …

It’s interesting, that last one: women are allegedly made more appealing by divorce, but nobody ever specifies to whom. The feminist cause? The next ex-husband?

The referenced NYT article:

Related:

• “MacKenzie Scott upended philanthropy as we know it. Melinda French Gates is catching on” (CNN), regarding how much better divorced women are at philanthropy than lesser humans

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