Last year, Andrea, 37, and her husband decided to end their marriage. It wasn’t easy. They’d been together for 17 years and had two small children. But over time, a collection of grievances and resentments had piled up under their marriage like tinder. Add to that the pressure of living in New York City: “Two working parents, no family nearby,” Andrea points out. “Things were bound to blow up.”
For at least a year, the couple tried to reconcile their differences. They read books and articles, and logged countless hours on the tear-sodden couches of various therapists. But nothing worked, and finally, they were tired.
As agonizing as making the decision was, it was also a relief to agree on something; when I spoke to Andrea a few months later, she and her soon-to-be ex had reached a level of equanimity. “He’s a good person; I’m a good person,” she said. “I just think we’ve changed.”
Once they’d made the decision—or, rather, “called it,” as Andrea said, “like on a medical drama when someone’s dead”—things moved quickly. Determined to keep the situation amicable for their kids, they made an appointment at a friendly-seeming mediation office, one with child psychologists on staff who specialize in helping families navigate the complex emotional territory of divorce.
While it can’t be said that Andrea and her husband felt good walking into their Upper West Side facility, at least they felt in control. That is, until the mediators asked them to sit down and draw up a budget. “We were like, ‘Okay, fifty-fifty,” Andrea recalled. “And then it became clear, right away, there’s going to be a huge deficit on his side every month.”
This wasn’t a total surprise: Nine years ago, Andrea’s husband—let’s call him Phil—decided to leave his job and go back to school for his PhD in literature, with his wife’s full emotional and financial support. “I didn’t care about who earned more,” said Andrea, who earns a good living as an executive at a tech company. “I wanted him to be happy.”
Since then, Phil had gotten a job as a part-time teaching assistant. But looking at the cold, hard numbers, it was clear this wouldn’t be enough for them to follow through with the vague plan they’d come up with: Andrea and the kids would stay in their rent-controlled apartment, and Phil would get a place nearby. In their neighborhood, Phil couldn’t afford a backyard yurt. She wasn’t even sure how he’d be able to move out. “And we need separate spaces so we can maintain goodwill,” she thought, starting to panic. “We can’t be around each other’s dirty socks and dishes in the sink.”
Thankfully, her husband, who had apparently been making the same calculations, spoke up.
“I’ll have to get a job,” he said.
Andrea was relieved. “He was being very stoic,” she recalled approvingly. But to her surprise, the mediators seemed to discourage him. While it was true that Phil was the lesser earner, they said, he had still made contributions to the marriage, and as such was afforded certain benefits under New York state law: For instance, in a custody arrangement such as the one he and Andrea had planned—in which the couple would truly share custody of their two children—the moneyed spouse, in this case, Andrea, would be held responsible for paying a larger portion of the children’s expenses. And as the “nonmoneyed spouse,” Phil was entitled to spousal support, to be determined based on Andrea’s income.
Spousal support? Like, alimony? Every nerve in Andrea’s body suddenly felt like it was on fire. Who did they think her husband was, Zsa Zsa Gabor? She tried to catch Phil’s eye, but he was listening intently. When she ventured to say that if she was working full time, she thought it was only fair that Phil work full time, she felt as if everyone—including Phil—was looking at her as though she was in some way trying to take advantage of her ex.
Was she? Later that night, as Phil contentedly snored in the bed they still shared, Andrea tossed and turned. As a child of the 1980s, she considered herself “all for equality and feminism,” blind to the traditional gender roles her parents had grown up with. That was how she had gotten into this situation in the first place, she thought indignantly.
Phil was a great dad, but it wasn’t like he had sacrificed his career to take care of the children and domestic work. “He’s been working part time so he can do other things for his career,” she said. Meanwhile, they—she—paid for a part-time cleaning lady and full-time child care. “So that he could pursue his hopes and dreams,” she said.
While Andrea felt empathetic toward her ex—she still, despite everything, wanted him to be happy—there were practical concerns. For starters, she couldn’t afford to support two households in New York City.
And there was another uncomfortable thought roiling in the back of her mind: a sense that “if the roles were reversed” and she were in Phil’s shoes, if she were the lower-earning spouse, she might feel differently about the situation. “I feel so conflicted,” she told me. “On the one hand, I want to be like, ‘Sorry, it’s not my job anymore to support your lifestyle.’ On the other hand, if a man was speaking of his wife that way, we’d be like, ‘What an asshole.’”
Andrea wasn’t alone—not in being in this situation, or in feeling conflicted about it. In 2013, the number of households with kids under 18 featuring female primary breadwinners was 40 percent, according a study from Pew Research, up from 33 percent in 2005. And while as of 2010 only 3 percent of men received spousal support from their wives, that number might soon jump. “It’s a huge issue,” says Elise Pettus, the founder of a New York–based support group for divorcing women called UNtied. “And there’s a big backlash against it,” she says, in part because many of the women divorcing now—who, like Andrea, come from Generation X or older—find themselves caught between the views they grew up with and those of their parents, who came of age in the 1950s. “We all think we’re feminists,” Pettus says. “But our society hasn’t fully caught up.”
The word alimony has itself become something of a shorthand for the war between the sexes, thanks to the Hollywood stereotype of a scheming vixen with dollar signs on her eyeballs, hell-bent on taking her ex for all he’s worth.
The first version of this schemer was likely introduced in the 1949 movie Alimony, but the term is ancient and has simpler roots. Derived from the Latin word for sustenance, the concept can be traced back to the Babylonian king Hammurabi—he of the “eye for an eye” system of justice—who declared that if a man wished to separate from a woman who has borne him children, he must give her a percentage of his wealth (and if they did not have children, he must return her dowry). At the time, women had few economic possibilities outside marriage. (“If a woman opens a tavern, she should be burned to death” was another of Hammurabi’s rules.) And the goal, in addition to discouraging divorce, was to preserve the social order: If every man threw his wife out on the street when he was tired of her, the streets would be filled with starving women, which wouldn’t be good for anybody.
Several hundred years later, the ecclesiastical courts in England adopted a similar rule, although since divorce was anathema to the church, alimony was only granted in exceptional circumstances, to those whose husbands were judged truly despicable (in the Middle Ages, this bar was high). Eventually the rule made its way to America, where its essence remained the same—the man paid the woman—right up until the 1970s, when William Orr, a fortune seeker in San Francisco, fell $5,000 behind on payments to the ex-wife he’d left back in Alabama. Instead of paying up, he decided to take his chances suing the state: The law, he protested, was unfairly based on “archaic notions” of gender roles, an argument that had resonance in the post–civil rights era. Although lawyers for Orr’s ex, Lillian, countered that alimony was a kind of acknowledgment of, and reparation for, the long history of discrimination against women—the maltreatment and burning and whatnot—the Supreme Court, which eventually took on the case, decided the husband had a point. “The old notion that generally it is the man’s primary responsibility to provide a home and its essentials can no longer justify a statute that discriminates on the basis of gender,” Justice Brennan wrote in the court’s landmark 1979 decision, Orr v. Orr, which ruled that alimony be awarded based on financial need rather than gender and required that states rewrite their laws using sex-neutral terms.
The victory was bittersweet for William Orr, who by then was president of his brother’s technology company; he was ordered to pay his ex in full, with interest. Nor was this particular breakthrough in equal rights celebrated by feminists, especially given that the same year, Congress had failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.
“For 200 years, women have been coming before judges and saying, ‘I’m entitled,’” famed divorce lawyer Raoul Felder said on a TV panel after the proceedings. “And then the United States Supreme Court said, ‘Hey, men are just as good as women.’”
“Men are not just as good as women,” his foil on the panel, divorce lawyer and women’s-rights advocate Cecile Weich, fired back. “Women, in most instances, are better. That’s not the point. In the United States, we have a Constitution that doesn’t recognize women as equal under the law.”
Nor were women recognized as equal in the workplace. The year the court passed Orr v. Orr was the same one in which the Bureau of Labor Statistics first measured the wage gap and found that women’s paychecks averaged 62 percent of men’s. Divorce only made these numbers worse, according to sociologist Lenore J. Weitzman, who reported in 1985’s The Divorce Revolution that men’s standard of living increased by 42 percent in the year after a divorce, while women’s and children’s dropped 73 percent. “I handle many women in the courts who are unable to get a job, because they have to take care of those young children,” Weich said on the panel. “And I have heard middle-aged male sexist judges say to those women, ‘Well, this is liberation. Go out and get a job.’”
All of which is to say, for a long time after that, if you heard about a woman paying her husband “to go away,” as Felder put it, it was probably someone rich and famous. Like Jane Fonda, who forked over $10 million to her second husband, or Roseanne Barr, who supported her first for nearly 16 years. Or Joan Collins, whose fourth husband, a Swedish rock star, asked for $80,000 a month after 13 months of marriage in 1987.
“Isn’t there a bit of a loss of dignity in this?” TV talk-show host Phil Donahue asked Collins’s ex, Peter Holm, glancing at the audience, who laughed uproariously, because even then the idea of a man being financially supported by a woman seemed ridiculous. After all, it had been the other way around for literally hundreds of years. (Holm ultimately received $80,000 total from Collins.)
Over time, there were more of these stories—J.Lo paying her backup dancer husband, Cris Judd, $14 million; Roseanne, again, this time having to give $50 million to Tom Arnold; Britney Spears paying Kevin Federline $1 million; Roseanne, again, paying her final husband and onetime bodyguard $40,000—and they started to seem less surprising. And not just because you could see them coming a mile away (ladies: Stay away from the help!). Women of the nonfamous variety were also gaining economic ground, and states like New York were doing away with the dreaded term alimony and replacing it with maintenance, which was seen as “something more rehabilitative, meant to get lesser-moneyed spouses into a position where they could be self-supporting after a divorce,” says Tom Kretchmar, a lawyer at Chemtob Moss & Forman in New York City. The refashioning of the idea of marriage as an economic partnership, as opposed to an institution defined by gender roles, might be part of the reason why by 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported that men were “shaking off the stigma of being supported by their ex-wives.”
Which, again, wasn’t exactly the kind of feminist milestone women felt like celebrating. James Sexton, a New York divorce attorney, estimates that for him, cases in which the wife is the main earner have gone up tenfold in the past decade—a period of recession that saw men’s earnings decline while women’s leapt higher. “I have a client right now,” he says. “She has $2 million in stock options from a company, and her husband is a total parasite. All he did was start unsuccessful businesses and be like, ‘Yeah, one will take off!’ And she’s deeply involved in the lives of her children,” Sexton goes on, “and I saw it dawn on her, like, ‘Wait a minute—I’m supposed to give him money? Because he tried to start, like, guacamole.com and it didn’t take off?’”
This reaction—disbelief, followed by rage—is not an uncommon one. While men’s-rights advocates like to point out that this is how men have been feeling all along—“This is what equality looks like!” says Alan Frisher, the head of the National Parents Organization of Florida—the reality is more complicated.
Like Sexton’s client, many of these higher-earning women feel as if they are contributing more than their fair share already, in the form of childbearing, housework, homework, and “emotional labor.” Carol Gilligan, a psychologist who specializes in women’s and ethical issues, says the anger women feel is fully understandable. “We know it’s hard for women to do what, for a lot of men, is easy to do, which is sit down and read a newspaper, and not see the dirty dishes or that someone needs a costume for school. All those nights with a sick child, or at a soccer game, that doesn’t count. But when they are earning money, it does count?”
This is something that Elise Pettus hears about at the workshops and dinners she hosts. “What I am hearing is ‘Yeah, he stays home, but I’m still doing the lion’s share of the housework,’” she says. “Or ‘I’m still paying for a nanny, because he’s working on his novel or his band.’”
This is also true of many of the female breadwinners Kretchmar sees as clients. “In many cases, you have women with these huge jobs with enormous commitments, women who earn more money and work longer hours than their husbands, but are nonetheless really, truly, and heroically still the primary caregiver to the children,” he says. “In those situations, a battle that frequently plays out is whether the father can succeed in getting fifty-fifty custody of the children, which, generally speaking, would qualify him to receive not only maintenance from his wife but child support as well.”
It’s enough to make a man suddenly believe deeply in equal rights. “You see it all the time,” Sexton says. “Like, 10 minutes before, they were Al Bundy, and now they’re Gloria Steinem.”
Of course, there might be more to it than that. “Men are fragile; we know this,” says Orna Guralnik, a New York–based couples therapist. “And they tend to experience divorce as a massive loss of control.” With the caveat that this is a generalization, she points out this also tends to hold up with gay couples who adhere to traditional gender roles. Male or masculine-identifying clients who feel like they are losing their masculine grip sometimes try desperately to hang on—and sparring over money can be a way of doing so. “It’s about retaining some sense of control,” Guralnik says. “Control of the other, and control of their own lives.”
On the other hand, women (or female-identifying people) tend to see divorce as freedom, Guralnik says. “For them, the idea of continued contact through payments feels like a noose; they’re allergic to it.”
However it ends up, this sort of battle tends to lead to lasting scars. This was the primary reason Ritch Workman, a former Florida congressman who worked with Alan Frisher on an alimony reform bill in that state, decided to forgo his own “manimony” (a term coined around the time of that 2008 Wall Street Journal article) during his own divorce. Sure, it was partly “a macho” thing, he concedes. But at the time, Workman was also out of a job, and “it would have been an easier transition for me to take money from” his ex-wife, Tiffanie, whom he’d trained in the mortgage business. But he’d seen how ugly things could get—like the guy he knew who had the checks he wrote to his wife printed with a photo of his face on them, so that she would see him whenever she cashed them—and he didn’t want that. Workman settled for her making him a pot of coffee at her house every time he went to pick up their kids, which he and his ex refer to as his “alimony.” “What was most important to me was that we had shared custody,” Workman says. “Those people who pay money and begrudge each other, they’re the ones picking up their kids at McDonald’s.”
Back in New York, Andrea was beginning to worry that she and Phil were headed for this Unhappy Place. Since their mediation session, Phil had become increasingly hostile. “He started blaming me,” she said. “You wanted this,” he hissed at one point, as though divorcing had been her idea. Their second mediation session was even worse: Phil, Andrea said, “kind of freaked out,” demanding that child-care expenses be split seventy-thirty.
What happened to his idea about get- ting a full-time job? Andrea ventured to ask afterward. “Well,” Phil snapped. “I don’t have to get one.”
By then, Andrea had been to Pettus’s support group a few times and had heard horror stories. “Just don’t wind up in court,” one high-achieving woman warned. She had, and had found herself “painted as the Wicked Witch of the East” by her husband’s lawyer—whom, to add insult to injury, she was paying for. She should have hired him for herself, she thought bitterly as the judge awarded her husband—whose looting of their joint accounts was the reason for the breakup of their marriage—a large cash settlement. So even though Andrea bristled at Phil’s comments—like when he suggested his career decision was similar to the one she’d made a few years back, when she left a high-paying job for a more interesting, equally compensated one at a smaller company—she held her temper in check. “I guess you’re right,” she said evenly. “I didn’t want to poke the beast,” she told me later. “If we went to court, he could rob me blind.”
As their third and final mediation drew near, Andrea was filled with dread. But then, miraculously, there was a thaw. Phil came back to their apartment looking more relaxed, and when he opened his mouth, he sounded once more like the person she’d married. “I don’t want to do this,” he said, regarding the arguing.
As it turned out, Phil had gotten a job. “He has a lot of pride, and he’s not a jerk,” Andrea said. “To his credit, he saw how off the rails it was getting.”
In the end, they skipped the last mediation session and filed with Wevorce, an online service that allows couples to work out their own arrangements. This time the negotiations went much more smoothly. Andrea let Phil have the rent-controlled apartment and bought a small place for herself down the street. They agreed to split child-care expenses sixty-forty, with Andrea taking on the larger amount, at least until Phil starts his job. After that, they’ll split it fifty-fifty. And that, finally, will be the end.
This article originally appears in the January 2018 issue of ELLE.
Jessica Pressler is a staff writer at New York magazine. She is the the former editor of the magazine’s news blog, Daily Intelligencer, and a regular contributor to GQ and Elle.
