[roflc0ptic]

I don't have any strong opinions about the fairness or unfairness of divorce laws around parenting, not in the US and certainly not in Italy.

However, I was recently a very close witness to some divorce proceedings involving my girlfriend and the end of her polyamorous marriage, and boy, oh boy. The husband made the decision to make the divorce as painful as possible (falsifying evidence, perjuring himself) to try to get her to give up and let him keep all of the money (he keeps the $400k house, she keeps the $5k SUV), and ultimately, it largely worked. Would you pay $50k to avoid having a miserable year? I would've kept fighting on principle, but she's wiser than I am.

Whether or not any of this was fair, eh. The mistake she made was to enter into a binding legal contract with someone that didn't have a clearly defined, equitable exit path. She misjudged her husband, but no one's immune to that. Honest people will want to write everything down and be bound to their word.

Don't make agreements based on mutual trust and assumed cooperation into perpetuity. It's only once people's incentives shift away from cooperation that you get to see their true character, for better and worse.

[arkitaip]

The problem is that marriage is one of those very few relationships that's design to be all-in or not exist at all. Even signing something like a prenup is seen as incredibly suspicious. All your financial decisions have to be based on the fact that you and your partner are going to stay together til death do you part.

[dathinab]

Hm, in my environment prenup is the standard if one or both of the person's involved are wealthy, people kinda accepted that marriage tries to be forever but often isn't.

(Germany, Berlin, neither poor nor rich through sometimes slightly wealth family social circle)

[vkou]

Everyone who gets married signs a pre-nup.

The difference is that a few people people pay to have a custom one drafted for them, and everyone else just accepts whatever default one their jurisdiction provides.

[rbanffy]

> polyamorous marriage

I use to say those are O(n!) when they work, O(n!!) when they fall apart.

[fastball]

I think part of the problem is that many people aren't making agreements based on trust and are actually signing pre-nups, but those never seem as binding when it comes to actual court proceedings.