Most courts do a very good job of splitting up the assets fairly between the woman and her lawyer. Was there any other party who is supposed to get any of the assets?
And then there are the liabilities. Guess which party gets those.
I take back what I wrote earlier because I don’t have any good data on this.
What I do know is that Marriage in the 2020s has evolved a lot over the past 60 years in the USA and possibly other countries. No matter what anyone thinks of the institution of Marriage its a legal construct with benefits, responsibilities, and liabilities for those who enter it where their individual life/responsibilities become partially the property of their partner and also for those involved in the system. Same goes for the processes involved with having children where Age 18 (and in some jurisdictions this gets extended out much longer partially or widely) is a boundary where the lives of the parents are managed heavily by the system until they get past that milestone.
In order to have honest dialogue on this topic I think a few considerations are in order.
(1) Honestly address the benefits of marriage for men and women.
(2) Honestly address the liabilities of marriage for men and women.
(3) Look at the data carefully, in particular on what happens in case of divorce with who gets assets, liabilities, spousal support, parent time, how much of the income, responsibility for attorneys fees, and more.
(4) International considerations - we live in the Internet era and jet plane flights are a lot less costly than they were in the past. No longer do men and women have a limited dating pool. Its literally hundreds of millions of men/women in the market and the laws of supply/demand are at work.
(5) Post-Divorce Effective Tax Rates - do the math on why so many become “deadbeat”.
The bottom line is that Marriage is a contractual relationship which requires a huge amount of TRUST for people to enter if they are well-informed.
Yeah, had an ex that tried to come after me years later when unpaid taxes were due.
Successfully pointed out to the IRS that she had retained all tax records, and that the divorce settlement clearly spelled that I was not responsible for anything like what she was trying pull.
After stealing thousands from me with here sneaky bank transactions that I had no idea about, then to come trying to pry a few more thousand left me with a permanent bias against her culture.