Gold digger or Coal digger?
Interesting article in the Standard yesterday: http://bit.ly/198vPsc about ‘ladies who lunch’ relying on their husbands for meal tickets. I take issue with Sarah Duckworth from Munday’s Solicitors who says that women are cynical and deliberately don’t go to work in order that their husbands pay maintenance to them. Firstly, both men and women that I see are deeply anxious about money on divorce, the cost of lawyers and how much money they will have to live on once everything is divided. I have yet to find a ‘cynical’ person who deliberately sets out to fleece their partner, wealthy or otherwise. On the contrary, I find men worried they will have to work forever to continue to fund what was the ‘married lifestyle’ and at the same time try to fund themselves. I find women, who may have been financially dependent for 30 years, suddenly without enough money to put petrol in the car because funds have stopped. Ms Duckworth suggests that these women should get work. Well, those are easy words. Often these women gave up careers on the insistence of husbands wanting them to be at home and enjoyed their wives financial dependency. They find themselves 20 or 30 years later having no place in the job market with an ex-husband who feels that he wants to turn off the tap having encouraged the lack of qualification in the first place. There are also many women who are career women who are the main breadwinners, who equally have to pay maintenance to their ex-husband. The same insult isn’t levelled at them. Sara Rowden relies on big money cases where the pay-out is many millions to substantiate her argument. Often in these cases, there is a 3 year marriage, with an age discrepancy, where we could rightly surmise that there may have been gold digging. Most of us, in the real world have real worries about money, irrespective of gender and these worries are universal.