Which upsets those poor, ever-oppressed women who can’t do whatever they want, whenever they want, and still walk off with the house, the kids and financial support:
I don’t think any of us are going to lose much sleep over Heather Mills and her millions. But we should be concerned, and here’s why: the more divorces there are involving huge sums, the more afraid men become to marry. And while that may not affect the man much, it’s very bad news indeed for the woman. I know of someone, I’ll call her Anna, who for the past ten years has lived with her partner, who I’ll call Harry. They have two young children.
For years, Anna said to Harry she thought that they should get married, for the sake of the children if nothing else. Harry refused. Anna had a job when they first got together but gave up work when she had her first child. This suited her; she wanted to be at home. It suited Harry; he liked her to do the cleaning, the washing, the ironing and the shopping – indeed, he thought it was her place. He gave her £80 a week housekeeping money. She was never allowed more. If she wanted to buy something for the children, or a birthday present for a friend, or new clothes for herself, she had to scrimp and scrape each week in order to save sufficient money to do so. You might ask why Anna accepted this situation. The answer is because she is a gentle, fragile soul with no stomach for a fight. She pretended to herself for a long time that everything was all right, and then she went to see her GP, who gave her antidepressants.
Whether because the antidepressants have given her new energy, or whether because every dog has its day, Anna has now decided she has had enough. She wants to leave Harry. When she told him, his response was that it was his house, his money and his children. She could leave by all means. But she would be homeless. She would be penniless. And if he had his way, she would be childless, too: he would fight her for custody, using her depression as his weapon. It was her choice, he said.
It sounds like Harry knows what he’s doing. This writer’s advice is typically stupid – don’t have children if he won’t marry you, never stop working – as always, feminists mistake the symptoms of the problem for the disease itself and suggest behavior that will only exacerbate the situation. I mean, all Anna has to do is simply remain with the family she chose to create; if she wants to leave for whatever reason, then she should leave with nothing. Isn’t she a strong, independent woman now, thanks to the drugs?
The thought for today: how much worse would Harry’s situation would have been if he had married Anna?
There are women worth marrying; I know because I was fortunate enough to find one. But they are rather more scarce than one might wish to believe and in the feminist, post-Christian legal environment of today, it behooves a man to be very, very careful before handing over the keys to his potential financial destruction to a woman.
A friend of mine is an extremely wealthy guy in his late thirties, has three children by three different women and laughs out loud at the very idea of getting married. He is, I suspect, a likely model for the successful “post-patriarchal” man.