[garenp]

If there are no children involved, none of the current onerous obligations and financial ruin should apply. The government should not be able to intervene and ruin one persons life by making one party an economic slave to the other.

The gov't should not be able to be so asinine as to say something like "ability to pay does not affect obligation to pay" -- in other words when a (typically father) gets laid off or makes much less money, they will not lower his support payments to be in line with his new pay. This is how we get working, homeless men living in vans -- some of whom later kill themselves.