New divorce app to help couples split assets in New York without lawyers

I mean possibly, possibly not. For instance, my wife makes bundles more than me and is the bread-winner yet she works a licensed career, with her license restricted to a limited geographic area with not so many jobs. For her to start a new life would be much harder than me even though she is the bread winner. Also worth noting 'home-maker' is an extremely common niche in life so it's unreasonable to believe someone occupying that niche can't find another marriage with another divorced bread-winner seeking to return to the interlocking bread-winner home-maker scenario.

As a second, point, I totally object to the idea someone has an obligation to provide someone a 'new' life just because that person lost opportunities by voluntarily entering a relationship. For instance, people often give up career opportunities to take care of an ailing family member and no judge is going to order the ailing family member pay alimony pay them back to start a new career. In particular, if the vows include 'until death do us part' then that is a pretty explicit agreement not to provide provisions for post-divorce alimony arrangement. Even worse, no one should be in the position to pay for somebody else to get a new life if a partner say cheated on you and then divorced you to chase another partner.

And a third note, you've totally looked at it from a one-way lense here. The home-maker bread-winner interlocking really is a team equal effort. When the bread-winner loses the home-maker, they may have a lot to 're-learn' -- how to efficiently manage shopping, cooking, cleaning, balancing the budget (possibly). That takes a lot of time and their health may suffer because they no longer know how to say cook nutritiously anymore, so if the bread-winner needs to pay the home-maker to re-tool for a career then the home-maker should be ordered to help the bread-winner re-learn how to cook and other essential tasks (no joke, efficiently performing all the home-maker tasks can take a long time to master!). It really is a bilateral severance, if we want to create a severance fairly.

>If they're continuing to perform home making duties, they don't have the time to build that new life

If they're continuing to perform labor to pay alimony, they don't have the time to build that new life.

>And you're essentially keeping them trapped in the relationship even after a divorce.

But that's what alimony is! I'd support some provision that alimony could be cancelled if they don't want to perform the maid service, so they could avoid being trapped into receiving an alimony payment.

>You're of course welcome to negotiate anything with a potential spouse before marriage and encode it in a prenup.

The counterpoint is here any severance should be arranged in the pre-nup. In the old days in some cultures this was a dowry, which relied on up-front mutual agreement rather than unilateral violence of the state by judge after the fact. The default should be asset transfers and splitting happens during and at the termination of marriage and not after.

This just isn't always possible. Sometimes, folks change and want different things in life. For example: If my spouse suddenly decided he wanted children, that would end the relationship for me. I could not expect them to go without something they are finding critical to their happiness, but I'm not willing to bear children for someone else's feelings either.

And honestly, this is what being respectful in a relationship actually is.

But all that said, would one of us qualify for alimony or need some help getting on our feet? Yeah. One of us stays home, after all, and would need the assistance (though I'm not convinced it should be alimony, per se - not at our income level).

There is significant evidence that divorce frequently has long-term (indeed, life-long) negative impacts on children. A recent meta-analysis [0] concluded that:

> A significant association between parental divorce and every aspect of mental health was found with the following pooled ORs (95% CIs): Depression 1.29 (1.23–1.35), anxiety 1.12 (1.04–1.12), suicide attempt 1.35 (1.26–1.44), suicidal ideation 1.48 (1.43–1.54), distress 1.48 (1.37–1.6), alcohol 1.43 (1.34–1.53), smoking 1.64 (1.57–1.72) and drugs 1.45 (1.44–1.46) could be estimated... The results of the meta-analysis show a consistent direction of influence regarding the long-term effect of parental divorce on their children. Individuals affected by parental divorce have a higher risk of developing a variety of mental health conditions...

Another study on this topic (of which there are numerous) [1] says:

> Controlling for age, race/ethnicity, gender, and childhood socioeconomic position, respondents who recalled a parental divorce during childhood had increased risk of mortality compared to those with no separation. The association was stronger for premature mortality and deaths due to cardiovascular disease. Divorce in childhood was also associated with lowered adult education, fewer social network ties, more depression, and worse health practices... Parental divorce in childhood is associated with lowered well-being in adulthood and long-term survival...

Given the well-established reality of the potential life-long negative impacts of divorce on children–which, as a child of divorce myself, I see as not just something established by research, but also supported by my own life experiences–why doesn't the state have a legitimate interest in discouraging couples with children from pursuing divorce for insufficiently weighty reasons?

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00223...

[1] https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00038-012-0373-x