It's been a tough road but I've been luckier than a lot of other men thanks to a good lawyer and standing up for what I want. I have remained in the home that I built before I ever met my cheating whore of a bad wife. I have fifty percent custody, with the majority of my child's daytime hours. I will pay no child support, and his mother will pay all health insurance and school expenses. For at least the next six months there are limitations on bringing the POS homewrecker who destroyed my child's family around him. Compared to what a lot of men go through, this is a win. But compared to the sort of deals women typically get, it's kind of fucked.

Sadly, my wife took advantage of me during our marriage's life and now legally she will be able to take advantage of me during our marriage's death. She made close to 3x my salary yet I paid all the direct expenses for the family other than food and car insurance. So her disparate income doesn't matter in the slightest. All that matters is who payed the most for our child. Despite our disparate incomes, I paid more for our child. So, the "formula" used by my midwestern state thinks that means of course I can continue paying for all those direct expenses by myself and also all the things she used to pay for, for some reason.

This "formula" is fucked. It's designed for women, who typically do most of the household shopping not just because it's "expected" but because they genuinely on average enjoy shopping more than men. (This is a statement about averages. I'm sure you know people who aren't average.) So it's not uncommon for women to take on that role economically and for men to take on the role of paying more of the bills. With less money tied up in bills, this makes more of married women's money technically "disposable" in our society in general than the money of married men.

So one person can make vastly more than another person, yet because they economically exploited them during the marriage, they can continue to contribute almost nothing to the economic welfare of their children when and if they ever decide to leave the lesser earning person. You can have one person who spends 3 grand a month on themselves while contributing 10k to the family expenses and another person who spends maybe 200 dollars a month on themselves while paying 25k a year in bills. The person with 3 grand a month disposable income doesn't have to help with food or clothes or any household expenses even if they did that before. Because it wasn't bills.

And for some reason the law doesn't care how much food costs or how much increased cost you have to face due to another person's shitty breaking of a poorly written unenforceable contract called marriage that was very explicitly broken.

The system won't be fixed until we bring back at-fault divorces. Custody should presumptively go to the parent who doesn't cheat. This should be a factor judges are allowed and encouraged to consider.

Until then, prenuptial agreements can provide a measure of safety in terms of finances, but when it comes to custody, they are commonly overthrown when contested. But in theory it could compel a set minimum alimony for a proven cheater.

Cheating destroys families in ways that amicable divorces do not. If you're going to take part in a basic foundational building block of society, you should take that seriously. You shouldn't harm your spouse or child with the extreme emotional abuse that is cheating on your family. It's so much less harmful to leave someone and tell them the hard truth than to string them along while you have your cake and eat it too. Cheaters should understand that when they take part in this kind of behavior they are doing something that by objectively harming their spouse irreparably they are also objectively harming their children and that it DOES REFLECT ON THEIR ABILITY TO PRIORITIZE THE WELL BEING OF THEIR CHILD. It just does. If you do something that harms your child, it should be able to be considered by a Judge.

I'm not doing this again, probably ever. Signing a contract like this is a goofy dumb thing to do. It REWARDS the other party for breaking the terms of the contract. The rationale was that marriage exists for the well being of children, but if over half fail..? A lot of the ones that still exist simply haven't failed yet. This is pretty much close to the end of this institution in our society, sadly. It isn't serving the purpose it was built for. If over half of marriages fail and then the contract often rewards the party that breaks it, this creates division and strife and disharmony that harms children. The children of divorce often turn out worse than the children of cooperating parents who never married, because those parents work together better than parents with a bitter past of one party deciding they simply changed their mind or thought they found someone better and then financially punishing the other party for it.

I'm in my early thirties, and if I have children, it will be out of wedlock, maybe with an alternative contract having to do only with child rearing. And TBH I probably just won't. I won't ever be able to give my son a full sibling now, he won't ever get that experience in life like I did. And if I can't do that for him, I'm not sure what would really be the point in putting him through the jealousy of watching me raise a theoretical half sibling with the love and care of both parents, or worse, putting him through the trauma of watching a younger brother or sister have their family self-destructed by yet another woman whose heart one day turns cold, and losing a second family.

I probably couldn't take it, either.