Is it really that bad? That men, upon discovering their wife with another man, will naturally assume that they will never see their kids again?
Pretty much. It's not bad enough to kill yourself and others over, but the situation for fathers in North American family court is pretty bleak.
No-fault divorce in both Canada and the US means that divorce can be made by one party for any or no reason, which means that more likely then not, the wife would've unilaterally divorced him. (2/3 divorces are initiated by women, it may be more as I've seen even higher numbers cited). If we had at-fault divorce laws then the guy could've pressed the divorce and likely would've gotten the children, but we don't.
Here's American stats:
In fact, 70 percent of all child custody cases are awarded to the mother. Child custody cases are awarded to the father less than 10 percent of the time while joint custody of the children is awarded to both the father and mother roughly 20 percent of the time. In one of the most lopsided years in United States history regarding custody decisions, 40 percent of the decisions handed down that year resulted in absolutely no custody rights, access rights, or visitation rights for the father.
http://www.lawfirms.com/resources/family/child-custody/child-custody-fathers.htm
Here's some Canadian stats:
In the majority of cases (79.3 percent), the mother had sole custody; the father had sole custody in 8.7 percent of cases. Shared custody (a child spends at least 40 percent of the time with each parent) and split custody (one or more children have primary residence with the mother and one or more children have primary residence with the father) were relatively infrequent at 6.2 percent and 5 percent, respectively.
http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/pi/sup-pen/pub/2003_4/sum-som.html
On top of
that:
About 80% of custodial mothers receive support (while less than a third of them work full-time).
38% of fathers are denied visitation rights. 60% of support not paid is due to inability to pay.
Half of women see no value in a father's continued contact with his children.
40% of women said they interfered with their father's visitation rights.To put it simply if you're the father and you go to family court prepare to get reamed. There's a significant chance you'll never see your kids again (at least not until their grown). The likelihood is that you'll barely get to see your kids at all and then only after getting through the bitch's manipulations to keep you from your children. And, as likely as not, she'll be poisoning the children against you.
Oh, and when the bitch prevents you from visiting your kids, the courts will do jackshit to help you.
Meanwhile, you'll be working very hard to support the whore who likely won't be working and there's a decent chance you'll end up broke.
This doesn't even mention the profound psychological damage that will occur to the children. Something which will eat you alive, but which you'll be helpless to stop.
Divorced men are also about
4 times as likely to commit suicide as divorced women and
twice as likely to suffer depression and 6 times more likely to suffer depression than those who remained married.
Divorce is a very horrible prospect for males; the courts are against you, the public is against you, and your wife teaches your children to hate you.
For a more personal description:
Universal Divorce
A Male's Perspective On A Bad Idea
If you were to believe those brawny viragos at NOW, you might think that universal divorce was a force for liberation of women, and just a splendid thing for kids. You know the line: marriage is the vilest form of chattel slavery, men molest their kids when they're not beating them like drums, and such like. (Actually, I can't think of a better authority on children than 12,000 squalling lesbians who don't have any. Can you?)
Well, let me offer a revisionist view of divorce, from a male point of view:
After a few years under one roof, Willy Bill and Cupcake no longer get along well. Part of it is Willy Bill's fault, and he knows it. Part of it is Cupcake's fault, but she doesn't know it. She expected marriage to fulfill her fantasies and make her happy. It didn't, because married people are just married people, and life ain't all ham hocks and home fries. This too is Willy Bill's fault. Life, that is.
Since Cupcake wasn't happy being single, and wasn't happy being married, she now figures she'll be happy divorced. She's going to have a dynamite social life, not like living with what's-his-name. She'll have a fascinating job and a swell place. Joe Perfect will appear on a white horse and life will be roses again. She forgets that it never was, and anyway there just isn't that much Prozac. The divorce occurs.
Which devastates the kids. She says it's better for them to have one parent than to have parents who don't get along. This is the Enabling Fantasy of divorce. Ten years later the kids will still be trying to get mommy and daddy back together.
Next, Cupcake learns that the business world is not importunate in its desire for women of thirty-six with no resume. Day care is expensive. As kids get older, their toys cost more. What's-his-name may have been inadequate as a fantasy mechanic, but he did have a sizable paycheck.
Joe Perfect doesn't show up, which is hardly surprising. Cupcake isn't Suzy Prom Queen any longer. Most guys shy away from women who always have kids in tow. They have either had kids, and don't want more, or else never wanted them in the first place. As men get older, marriage becomes less important to them.
Cupcake finds that the men she might date, typically two to eight years older than she is, are a sorry lot. The good ones have been taken. The leftovers are either gay, or confirmed bachelors, or three-time losers looking for their fourth divorce, or such awful dweebs that nobody wanted them in the first place. Or they've been burned in one marriage and aren't about to make that mistake again.
In the divorce, either she got the friends or she didn't. When a couple split, the friends seem to think they can continue to be friends with only one of the former couple. If he got them, she's horribly lonely. If he didn't, she finds that married couples, which most of them were, don't want single people around. Four's company; three's a triangle. If she's attractive, it's worse.
Then come the long empty weekends when nobody calls. Depression arrives. She has a hard time growing a new social life because the kids are always there. Depression is two to four times more common in women than men, depending on whose figures you like, and she's got reasons to be depressed. No retirement, for example. She gets a prescription for lithium. Try finding a single woman past forty who isn't on Prozac, lithium, Depacote, Zoloft, or Welbutrin, all the M&Ms of the irremediably unhappy.
You can't divorce a car payment. Cupcake finds that she has to have a full-time job, and maybe some part-time jobs too. Days only have twenty-four hours. She doesn't have time to be a full-time mother and have an adult's social life. Often motherhood draws the short straw. She starts leaving young kids alone for long periods while she goes out. By no means all divorced mothers do this, but more do than the newspapers tell you. Latch-keyism becomes inevitable. The kids, unsupervised, feeling neglected, angry because Daddy left, begin to get into trouble.
Not infrequently mommy comes to resent her offspring. They're always there, always whining and fighting and wanting this and that. They make her life miserable, which doesn't happen with two parents, and there's no respite in sight. At best she becomes irritable and seems cold. At worst she slaps the hell out of them.
Then, dear God, puberty hits. Other things being equal, women are better parents than men for small children. A man would go crazy. For older kids, no. At adolescence they begin asserting themselves and testing Cupcake. A fifteen-year-old girl makes Attila the Hun look like a milk-fed pansy in lace shorts. With mammals like that, Cupcake will soon reflect, no wonder the dinosaurs died out. The kids walk over her, becoming contemptuous. She comes close to hating them for it.
A man would say, "No. You aren't going to run away with a feeble-minded dope-dealer who plays bass guitar. Because I say so. We've finished talking about it." It would stick. Women don't do this as well.
Relations with the ex run from none to good. Like as not, she hates him because the divorce didn't make her happy. Frequently she gets back at him through the kids. An angry man smacks someone. A woman's aggression is passive: She withholds sex or, after the divorce, the kids, while earnestly pretending she's doing something else. He gets no influence in raising the tads, doesn't get the report cards or school pictures, isn't consulted.
At best, he gets called only when the kids get into trouble and she can't handle it. Daddy becomes The Heavy. Five years later when they figure it out, they will be grateful. But that's five years off.
And there's nothing he can do about it: "joint custody" or not, if she doesn't comply, his choice is to put up with it, or sue mommy, which is not the high road to a kid's heart. He puts up with it.
Don't you love it? I mean, what a deal. The kids hate the divorce like poison, Willy Bill misses his kids horribly, and Cupcake gets to grow old by herself in a bleak apartment with a cat named Fluffy.
If that's not social advance, I don't know what is.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Divorce.shtml
And another article reiterating what I said with advice from a divorce lawyer:
Marriage, Bubonic Plague, And Infected Warts
If You Have A Choice, Go With The Warts
If I could offer a young man one piece of sage advice, it would be this:
Don't get married.
Don't do it. Come the divorce, as come it probably will, the courts will systematically shear you of your children, your house, and huge amounts of your income for twenty years. Don't do it. It isn't worth it. Nothing is.
My saying this usually brings, from women, cries that I'm an extremist or woman-hater. No. The problem is not women, but the courts. Men can behave every bit as reprehensibly as women, though they go about it differently. But the judicial system, which is politicized to the gills, utterly favors women over men in divorce cases, without remorse, decency, or concern for children.
Should you doubt this, read, before you pop the most foolish of questions, From Courtship to Courthouse by the divorce lawyer Jed Abraham.*
Writes Abraham, "If you're like most men, you're married, or you hope to marry some day. You think you deserve to live happily ever after, but if things don't work out that way, you'll get a civilized divorce and move on. You'll stay pals with your ex, and you'll see your kids as often as you want.
"You have no idea what you're getting into."
And you don't. Not the faintest freaking clue.
A few facts from Abraham:
"The odds are 50% that your marriage will end in divorce. The odds are 70% that your divorce will be filed by your wife. The odds are 80% that your wife will get custody of your children-plus child support, alimony, and/or a hefty chunk of your property."
That is how it is.
Yes, I know: You don't think this applies to you. Cup Cake loves you. She would never behave in such a way. Think again. You have no conception of the hatred that divorce engenders. Men are callous; women are mean. When a family breaks up, when a life dreamed of disappears in flames and emotions go limbic, women are not the kinder sex, and certainly not the more rational. And Cup Cake will have the absolute upper hand, with the full power of the state to help her express her dissatisfaction with you.
Abraham: "If your wages are not withheld and you fail to pay your child support, the State will garnish your pay, slap liens on your property, intercept your tax refunds, report you to credit agencies, discontinue your driver's license, suspend your professional and business permits, hold you in contempt of court, put your face on a wanted poster, throw you in jail, and deny you food stamps. But if your ex doesn't spend that very same support on the children, the State will do. . . nothing."
It gets worse. There is, for example, "imputed income." This means that your child support will be based not on what your children need, not on what you earn, but on what the court decides you could earn.
Don't do it.
If you love Cup Cake, live with her. Be kind to her. Be loyal to her. She may be as nice as you think she is: Many women are. Buy her roses. Just don't marry her, or have children with her. If the laws were even-handed, marriage would be an admirable institution. The laws aren't equal.
But it's the kids she'll use, should things get nasty, to tear your guts out. If you're sure that Cup Cake won't do this, you're crazy. True, she may not. Not all women do, or not to the same degree. But you won't know until it's too late. And the courts will do anything she wants.
Abraham: "Your ex will warm to calling all the shots. She may cancel your visitation now and then. If she's truly mean-spirited, she'll go much further. Under the cover of her court-appointed role as sole custodian, she'll systematically sever your relationship with the children. She'll badmouth you to them. She'll schedule their extracurricular activities during your visitation time. For good measure, she may accuse you of domestic violence and child abuse."
Think "joint custody" is the answer? The courts won't enforce it. What are you going to do-sue Mommy? The kids will hate you for it. Do you believe in pre-nups? The courts ignore them. Read Abraham. It's all there.
Then, says Abraham, there's the killer: "More efficiently, your ex may simply move with the children to a distant community, with the law's acquiescence."
Kids are the crunch, guys. They hurt. And she will know it, and use it. The courts will help her. At bottom, the position of the courts is that the children are her property, like furniture. Judges don't care about you at all.
Ever drive away from what used to be your home, with your daughter of four streaking across the parking lot, yelling, "Daddy! Daddy! Please come back!"-and you can't?
Ever have your little girl of four say, "Daddy, can I get my birthday present early?"
"Why, Pumpkin?"
"Well. . . after the divorce we might move, and I won't see you again."
That's what you are in for, guys. Don't do it. You'll be suicidally depressed, miss your kids to the point of desperation, be almost frantic-and the courts will make sure you can do nothing about it. The ex will probably enjoy it.
That's the reality. Don't believe it? Talk to men who have been there.
Why do women do these things? Not because they're evil. Cup Cake is probably a perfectly decent woman in her dealing with the rest of the earth. She'll do it because she hates you, which is the normal outcome of a divorce. She'll do it because she can. She's furious because the marriage didn't work, which will be entirely your fault.
And the law gives her every incentive: She will get the house, the kids, the child support-and she knows she will. If women knew they had an even chance of not getting custody, of having to pay child support, the divorce rate would drop like a prom dress and joint custody would suddenly mean joint custody. Women love their children as much as men do.
But that's not how it is. The courts encourage divorce, and they rape men. Get used to it.
Abraham: "The odds are it doesn't pay for you to marry and have kids."
That's a fact, guys. Think about it.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Jed.shtml
The Anglosphere - English Liberty, English Tradition, English Law
Children are no better off with either parent in a divorce case. Chances are if you're having a divorce you're a shitty parent.
- By QatzelOk
- By litwin