The Un-DivorceFollow

Yeah, that's a myth for the most part. It only used to be almost an automatic award of children to the mother simply because a few decades ago, the mother stayed home while the father worked outside of the home. By default, the mother was the primary caregiver for the children.

The court tends to award physical custody to whoever is the primary caregiver for the children. If Ray and I split up, he would probably get physical custody because his work hours allows him to be home in the afternoons with the kids while I am still working. There are a lot of other factors the court takes into consideration, but who spends the most time with the kids is the biggest.

They aren't. I went to my dad after my parents' divorce.

I've never heard of a single divorced husband receiving alimony from his wife, and outside of the realm of celebrityism, I'm not sure it's ever happened.

I know of one couple where the ex-wife pays both alimony and child support. He was a stay-at-home dad. I guess technically he still is.

I can see money being the big issue here, as mentioned it can cost quite a bit to go through the courts, not to mention the time to split the assets if any.

My parents got an un-divorce I guess. Ok not really I came home one day to find my father crying on floor, clutching a dear-john letter from my mom. They never did any legal filing though, what my mother left with she kept. I stayed with my dad for many years, but with his heart condition causing me to be the primary care-taker of our house I left after a few years and moved to a small town with my mother so I could actually finish school.

Now my dad did date again, and his girlfriend at that time was very keen on him filing papers at some day, even though he stated he didn't want to get married again (which is good I suppose, they would have been married for a mere 5 years before he died).

Perhaps if there was something like this at that time they could have gone through with it.

Absurdly absolutist statements aside, there is an element of bias to child custody; it's the same set of biases that normally harm women and are, regardless of whichever specific sociological impact you're discussing, pretty offensive in their own right.



The only recent US stats I could find from a quick google search disagree strongly with this:



Source.

Mom:
Cheated on dad for two years
Would leave us home alone while he was working at night
Got surprise drug test in court she failed
Tried to commit suicide when the custody battle fell out of her favor

Dad:
80% earner, no infidelity, and the drug test was his lawyer's idea so he stopped smoking pot for a month so we wouldn't have to go live with a methfreak. My dad had custody of me from 12-18 and my sister from 11-15, although she got farmed off to mom when she turned out just like her.

From what I remember, even 12 years ago, the judge noted how hard it was to my father to take custody away from the mother, but he knew it was obviously the better option. He had to cut a good deal with her to get her to stop fighting, though: No child support (well, $1/year that she never paid), and she gets half of his 401k when he retires. They filed for bankruptcy soon before their divorce so there were really no assets to throw around but us (and his retirement), and my dad ended up getting the short end of the stick anyway.

My mother spent more time with us for sure, but being her being tweaked and making us hang out with her boyfriend and lie to my dad about it afterward wasn't really "quality". I hope it really wasn't that weighty of a decision for the judge, because if he would have given us to our mother by default I really would be a stripper with coke lines down my *** and married to Barkingturtle.

I'm not trying to argue because I assume most custody cases do split towards the mother although I suspect this is more due to apathy on the part of the father than bias against fathers who actually try. However, the joint custody number seems vague. For example, I have "primary physical custody" of my son in what is technically a joint custody arrangement (despite her having not seen him in going on over two years now). Plenty of joint custody arrangements still have a primary custodial parent, the main difference being that you need to contact the other parent for major events such as changing addresses or major elective surgery on the child or something.

What the hell does this even mean?

Didn't say it didn't happen. Just said I wasn't sure. Also, one can be ignorant and be an adult at the same time. You should know this.

Has it been that long? I guess I just don't think highly enough of our conversations to remember.

They're in the middle of an un-divorce.