Responsibility

Here's a thought. When a man gets divorced from a marriage where he worked and she stayed at home, he suddenly finds himself without someone to clean and take care of his house. After years of working in an office to support his family, his home-making skills have deteriorated. He devoted his life to providing money to his family and now the poor guy is stuck with a dirty home, a lack of good food, and no experience in home-making and cooking. I say that after divorce, the woman should be forced by the courts to continue to provide her services to her ex-husband one way or another, just like he is forced to continue to provide his financial services to her, at least until he finds a new woman or until his home-making skills have a chance to develop.

Obviously this has some obstacles and it sounds ridiculous at first. But the logic is sound once you wrap your mind around it and it raises some questions about the fairness of alimony nowadays. In theory, alimony is awarded when a spouse devoted her life to building a home and helping her partner further his career, thus harming her own prospects and career. But if marriage is a contract and his financial services are deemed obligations even after the marriage, what about her services and obligations to him? He now has to spend time taking care of his home, thus making his career suffer (using the same logic as was used for alimony), or he has to hire a maid, or the quality of his life now suffers after the divorce (another argument used for determining the amount of alimony) because his home and nutrition are falling behind. Not only that, but some feminists claim the wife provides critical moral support to enhance his earning capability. So are her services and obligations taken into account as well and the alimony adjusted accordingly when her obligations are cancelled due to the divorce?

Of course not. Once, it was the man's obligation to provide for the more financially helpless and unequal sex. It was a responsibility even after the marriage ended whereas a woman's services in a marriage did not figure in any selfish calculations. The logic behind alimony was originally very different. Alimony was about doing what is right for a dependent woman who provided him with a family, and it was about lifelong commitments and vows to support dependents, not about what he owes her for her work. But now that there are no-fault divorces and it's all about equality, rights, and who owes who what, shouldn't alimony be adjusted or eliminated accordingly?