Category: Divorce, child support, custody, family law

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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Other than gender studies graduates who are about to have all of their student loans transferred onto the backs of the working class, divorced women are the most reliable Democrat voters in the U.S. What’s the latest harvest of material from Democrat-controlled media on the miracle of family court?

“My Husband Is Two Years Older Than My Son” (New York Times):

Our 19-year age gap feels treacherous and gossip inducing — and is also the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

This is his first marriage and my third. Minutes before our rainy courthouse wedding, my future mother-in-law said, “He’ll be your last love and you’ll be his only love.”

If you had asked me five years ago if I would ever date again, I would have said, “Not in a million years.” I was a middle-aged woman filing for divorce,…

The author is grateful that the mandarins permitted her to leave her house and work for wages:

I work as a freelance makeup artist in Portland, Ore., but business had been slow back then, so for extra income I took a cashier job at the local Fred Meyer grocery store, which is where I met Tylan.
He struck me as gorgeous with his long hair, piercing blue eyes and hippie wardrobe. He worked the cash registers too but was a “P.I.C.” (person in charge) who also had management responsibilities.
When the pandemic hit, my makeup work dried up completely, and I became reliant on my cashier job at Fred Meyer, which, as an essential business, stayed open even during the worst of Covid.

(Are we to infer from “management responsibilities” that she was having sex with the boss, as in this scholarly journal paper from the UK?)

… I was 46, one year younger than his own mother, and he was 27, two years older than my son.

He introduced me to emo-rock and I introduced him to obscure slow-core. We drank mead, tested out new recipes, and discussed music, career goals and sometimes, our love lives. Mine was nonexistent and I was content with that, and he was single, waiting for the right one. There were times I even tried to play matchmaker, but it never quite worked out.

There was a midnight skinny dip at the river, making out on a giant velour bean bag, and indoor camping with a tent made out of bedsheets. And then it happened one night, Tylan knelt on one knee and proposed. I was stunned and momentarily mute. It wasn’t until Tylan said, “Yes?” that I nodded my head and blubbered, “Yes!”

What else can divorce plaintiffs look forward to other new sex partners from a different generation? An enormous smile, at least according to “In Defense of Divorce” (Slate), author of This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life:

Lenz walked away from her marriage to rebuild her life in her 40s, and to find out what freedom feels like. Reading her story, we get to feel that freedom too. I talked with Lenz—divorced woman to divorced woman—about why divorce isn’t a tragedy.

People are really uncomfortable with a woman who is free and a woman who chooses herself. I think that adds into the dissonance—it makes people really uncomfortable when you say, “Hey, my marriage was not great and I’m leaving.” And you know this, too: The moment you get divorced, so many women go, “When did you know? When did you know? How should I know?”

I am anti the legal structure of marriage, because it is founded on women’s inequality. Look at the history of marriage. Look at these laws of coverture. Look at the laws in America where marital rape wasn’t even illegal until the past 20 years. And that’s because wives are property, and that’s the way that our legal system views women.

How tough is it to be a wife and mother with a full slate of modern appliances supplemented by Uber Eats food delivery and a weekly Latinx crew to do the real cleaning?

No, you feel miserable in your marriage because you never get a break because this whole system is packed on top of your shoulders and you can’t fricking breathe. And then the one time you get a moment to breathe, he’s like, “Hey, we haven’t had sex in two weeks.” … even the worst marriage still benefits a man in the end, because he is still getting free child care and his dinner made every night.

(Fair to guess that after the author sued her co-parent, both the retroactive and going-forward child care were not free?)

Contrary to nearly all survey data and journal articles, the book author says that the kids are way better off when mom and dad are having sex with a variety of new partners:

I think of it rather as a gain for [the kids, who were 4 and 6 when she sued their father], because they deserve relationships with the happiest version of both of their parents. … it’s really uncomfortable to be a sexual person to your kids, because if you tell, especially a tween daughter, that you’re dating, she wants to know, are you having sex? And then you have to talk about it.

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