Who Gets Screwed in a Divorce? I Do!

when you enter the unholy state of divorce, be prepared to give everything to your ex-wife

If you are an American male, and if you get married, the chances are approximately one out of two that you will eventually get divorced. If you sue for custody of your children, the odds are very much against your winning. In some states, only two percent of the men in divorce actions ever gain custody of their children. The national average is something like four men out of every 100 getting custody, and at least two of those four are simply handed the children at their wives' request.

You can also count on paying your ex-wife's court costs and at least some of her attorney's fees--almost 98 percent of the men in divorce settlements do. There will be other payments as well. Property will have to be divided and, in some cases, alimony will be awarded. Debts accumulated during marriage will have to be sorted out, and it is probable that you will have to absorb most of them.

After your divorce, if your ex-wife plays games with your visitation rights and does not permit the children to see you, there is only one chance in a million that she will be jailed for such behavior. Should you, in retaliation, withhold alimony or child support from her, the chances are much better that you will be jailed. You might also lose your visitation rights.

You probably will not be very healthy or stable after your divorce. You will be about three times more prone to suicide than your ex-wife.

After divorce, men are much more vulnerable to mental illness and self-destructive physical diseases such as cirrhosis of the liver. Dr. Stephen Johnson of the University of Oregon is doing research in the area of divorce and mental health. "There's no doubt about it," he says. "Men take divorce much harder than women. Divorced men seem to have higher rates of mental illness and suicide than do divorced women."

Having lost your home and your children and your financial equity, for a time you may have a self-image that looks like contortions in a fun-house mirror. But to top it all off, you will be less apt than your ex-wife to seek any kind of professional counseling.

"It's obvious to me that women come to get help much more often than men," Dr. Johnson says. "I'd guess nine women for every man; something like that. Men just can't admit they need help." Johnson's book First Person Singular is designed to lead both men and women toward "living the good life alone."

"I wouldn't want to be a man today," says Joanne Saunders, one of the best divorce lawyers in Chicago. She is divorced herself. She looks like Joan Rivers and she has the same quick wit. She has handled hundreds of divorce cases for men, and she doesn't like what she sees.

"God help the poor bastards," she says, shaking her head. "There's women's lib for women, but what have men got? Gay rights?" She laughs. "I work two areas of the law: divorce and labor negotiations. And I'll tell you this. I'd rather argue with an angry labor leader than with an angry wife." She fans herself and fakes an attack of the vapors. "And I'll tell you this. It's a lot of crap that women are automatically better parents than men. Especially those women who have to keep their kids in order to prove something or to punish the guy. Today they do it under the label liberated woman. Unh-unh. Not in my book. They get custody and then they turn around and work like hell on their careers, leaving the kids to watch TV. That's not being liberated. That's getting it both ways."

Her final thought is loaded with possibilities. "We should handle divorce the same way we handle labor negotiations. That's all it is, anyway: a negotiation. There's no blame and there's no guilt, and you've got two people who have blown it and they may have kids. OK. Just settle up. Sit across the table and hire some mediators and bargain. 'You get this/I get that.' Move the whole thing out of this morality-religious-legal thing and into a negotiating session." She stops and thinks. "But as for being a man today?" She laughs again. "Honey, you can have it."

"One of the biggest struggles I had," says a recently divorced man, "was to recognize that I had a problem. That may sound stupid, but it's the truth. My marriage was in terrible shape. I was cheating on my wife and she was cheating on me. It was a bitter household. But neither one of us had the energy or the guts to change anything. So, as I look back on it, I think the crucial question for most men is this: When are you going to admit that your marriage is not going well? When are you going to get your head out of the sand and your ass out of the air? I mean, I was an ostrich for ten years. I can't believe it now, but it's the truth."

Men are reluctant to admit to failure. They often pretend that all is well in the palace when, in fact, the walls are crumbling about them. So the obvious first step in any solution to the problem is the admission that there is a problem.

If that first step is taken, there is an ideal scenario. It is not impossible that both husband and wife will be free from self-righteousness and vengeance. The divorce can occur without the usual rancor. Male and female can split the spoils of marriage and agree to terms and go their separate ways. Perfecto! No big legal fees. No recriminations. Two adults in a relatively sane world who understand that people change and honeymoons end and legalized affairs run their course. What could be better, given the circumstances?

If you are young and unburdened by property and children, your chances for a peaceful divorce are better than for those people who have invested more time and energy and resources in their marriage and who, therefore, feel more threatened by its collapse.

Let's do some assuming. Let's say that at this point you are filled with confusion and guilt but that you don't quite know what to do about it. Your marriage is not going well. You are trapped in a dishonest relationship, but you are afraid to admit it. Your wife claims you are a monster who is unfit to live with. If you have children, they are being told by her that you have never appreciated them and that you are not to be trusted. You come home one day and find a canceled check in the mail indicating that your wife has retained a lawyer. The bank balance shows that she has withdrawn all the funds from your joint account. You know that you are spending as much time away from home as you can and that you are drinking too much. Your professional life is suffering from your split energies. Your sense of identity is not what it used to be. After all, you were raised to be perfect. You are supposed to be a provider for women and children, a guardian and advisor and protector, a wolf at the mouth of his cave. But here you are, mucking around in self-pity and chaos, frightened, uncertain of where to turn or what to do. You ask yourself: If John Wayne could take Iwo Jima singlehandedly, why do you have trouble climbing your own steps?

What do you do? Where do you go?

After talking with hundreds of people in the field--lawyers, judges, social workers, psychiatrists, teachers, psychologists, clergy, doctors, writers, divorced people themselves and their children--I've found that there are some specific pieces of advice for men that seem to apply almost universally.

One refrain sounds consistently through all advice: Talk to somebody. Don't bottle up your problems and play the big brave warrior. Talk to a person, any person, preferably someone who has heard it all before and recognizes the dreary sameness in your melodrama. You are not alone. Many of us have been there. Try to remember that.

Dr. Harry Whiteley is a psychiatrist in private practice in Chicago. His office is a comfortable place that looks more like a private den. A paperback copy of Sexual Suicide is on his desk. Dr. Whiteley is a lean man with reddish hair and a trim beard. When he speaks, there is an air of kindness about him.

"Men have terrible troubles in divorce," he says. "A while ago, I was in a friendly neighborhood poker game. You know, we'd meet once a week and play for small stakes and just enjoy one another. One by one, there was this steady erosion of people as the guys got divorced. They didn't call or come by. They dropped out. Period. They became invisible. It seemed to me they gave up the support of the community. I was amazed."

(continued on page 230) Divorce (continued from page 216)

After an hour's discussion, Whiteley concludes: "Men are an unexplored area, really. They don't identify their emotions very well. They usually know when they're angry, but they hardly ever can admit to grief. It's hard for them to regress. Hard for them to trust another man in this emotional side of things. I know that I have to fight a certain kind of dread that I feel when I see a male patient who is so locked in that he can't hug or cry or express anything but anger. It can take years of work before some men are willing to be self-expressive at all."

Judge Charles Fleck is a Republican slated by the late Mayor Daley to run for the Cook County Court. He is young and humorous and refreshing and he looks something like the comedian Charlie Callas.

Fleck hears hundreds of divorce cases a year. He thinks many men are paralyzed by fear of failure and that often their best case is never made.

"It's ego," Fleck says. "Men think they are supposed to be the stronger sex. They can't face defeat by their wives, so when it gets to the 'final war,' they'd rather give in and sign a weak divorce agreement than fight a battle they might lose. I see a lot of men who aren't psychologically prepared to fight for the custody of their children. But in today's society, the mother is not automatically the better parent. The father usually loves his children as much as anyone else, and there are many times when he might make the better parent."

Fleck is aware of the antiquated divorce system and all its defects. "Marriage may not even fulfill the needs of society today," he says. "But we're still applying old standards to modern problems. We have a new divorce act here in Illinois that has language in it as to grounds that is 106 years old, taken right out of the act of 1872. The law talks about one spouse doing harm to the other 'by poison or other means.' That's a quote. Traditional practice simply hasn't caught up with the times. The whole system needs to be re-examined." He leans back and stares at the gum-ball machine in the corner. Over his head, there is a sign that reads, Three may keep A Secret if two are Dead. Fleck is sitting at his desk, judicial robes on, waiting for the next session. "I don't know," he says again. "I guess I'd have to admit, when it comes right down to it, that the male may be equal under the dry rubric of the law, but he probably isn't always equal in the way the divorce law is administered. Men who complain about unfair treatment frequently have legitimate complaints.

Fleck's conclusions are echoed by many other people in the system itself: lawyers, psychiatrists, social workers, judges. The male does not fare well in the process they administer.

But as much as it might be needed, there is no national men's-rights group at present. There is no coordinated divorce-reform organization, no male equivalent to the National Organization for Women. Nothing on that order.

What we do have is a growing number of independent divorce-advisory groups designed specifically to meet men's problems. And any man about to go through a divorce should consider joining one.

State by state, city by city, on an inconsistent and unorganized basis, men's-rights groups are being born. Each group seems to operate more or less on its own. Standards and goals vary, but if you shop around a little and compare their stated purposes, you should be able to find something of utility.

Contact several of the groups and ask about their fees, their methods of operation, the size of their membership, etc. (One list of men's divorce-reform groups is printed in What Every Man Should Know About Divorce, by Robert Cassidy.) Do this as soon as you think your marriage is heading for divorce. Don't wait until you are in court, because by that time, you might already have made several major tactical errors, and you may be locked into a course of action that you could not have foreseen.

Almost any one of those groups can give you some kind of help. Many of them offer men's rap groups, divorce clinics, newsletters, court observers. They will help you choose a lawyer from their knowledge of the attorneys in town who take some interest in men's rights. How did you plan to pick a lawyer, anyway? "He's a nice guy and I had lunch with him once"? Or "I went to college with him"? Or, perish the thought, "I'll just use my wife's attorney and save on fees"? More than a few men have paid dearly when they've chosen an attorney by word of mouth.

So it is a good thing to be able to use men's-rights organizations for advice and recommendations. They have not been around in any force for more than a few years. They do not meet with the approval of some of the established order within the divorce system; but they have increased the options for men by helping them, at the least, compare notes about the unfair treatment so many of them receive.

From a brochure of the America's Society of Divorced Men (Elgin, Illinois):

Our main concerns are for our children, justice and our freedom. . . .

We believe that contemporary marriage and divorce practices do not permit men to marry with any reasonable degree of safety. In practical fact, we are in custody of our wives, or ex-wives, and in practical fact, we are only tenant fathers, almost wholly subject to the whims of women, the legal profession and the courts.

We have an Equal Right to the custody of our children, if we enforce it. We do not have to pay alimony to undeserving spouses if we assert our rights! We do not have to be jailed for divorce debts, or pay opposing lawyers before the fault is proven, or stand for being removed from our children and our homes upon unproven, often perjured complaints.

That is helpful language to the man who is going through a divorce. He needs to know that he has some rights. He needs help in remembering the basics. Perhaps if he is reminded of those things and if he is given some help and advice along the way, he will be less likely to become one of the statistics mentioned at the beginning of this article.

Advice such as this: "If a divorce is pending, a man should not move out of his house." So says Richard Templeton, president of A.S.D.M. "The question of whether or not and when you move out of your house is extremely important in a tactical sense," he adds. "A lot of men don't know that. A lot of lawyers don't tell their clients much about that. OK. That is where an organization such as ours comes in. If a man about to go through a divorce contacts us, we can help with his self-defense. We tell him, 'First and foremost, don't move out of the house. No matter how hard your wife makes it on you, you stay. It's your home as much as it is hers. Those are your children as much as they are hers. In most states, you can't be thrown out of your own home without a court order. In Illinois, for example, even if they get the court order, there has to be a hearing within ten days of the action. You have (continued on page 234) Divorce (continued from page 230) constitutional rights. Don't forget that. You leave the house and you leave the children--unless you decide to take them with you, which is recommended in a lot of cases. But let's say you just leave. The divorce is going to take time. All that time, your children will be living with their mother. You sue for custody. The judge sees that you've been out of the house for six months. The courts don't like to move children around. So goodbye, custody."'

Templeton has other suggestions. "On the tactical side, again. Get to the joint account and close it. Cancel all the credit cards. Change the beneficiaries on insurance policies and your will. Make your children the sole beneficiaries so your ex-wife doesn't profit from your death. Fight alimony."

As Templeton sees it, there are four rules for emotional self-protection as a male starts divorce proceedings. "One, contact an organization such as ours; we've been through it before and we know what you are going through. Two, stay out of bars. Three, self-pity is out; try to get rid of it. Four, remember at all times, as hard as it may be, that you have constitutional rights."

It seems safe to say that if you choose a men's-rights group that suits you, your chances of maintaining your self-respect are improved. Whether the organization is called Fathers for Equal Rights or Men's Divorce Reform or Divorced Men's Association, it can give you some insight into the divorce process as it affects men. You will probably feel less alone. You will be able to talk with other men who have gone through what you think is your unique experience. You can profit from their mistakes and listen to their advice.

Having said all of that in support of men's-rights groups, there is one small warning.

Leon Tebo, past president of Divorced Fathers, has some cogent reflections on the problems that some groups can cause if you do not choose wisely:

"Some of the people heading these programs stay too long in the job. They can get bitter and lose perspective. Divorce is an emotionally packed issue and some of the men who work with it day after day can turn every bit as fanatical as the most radical women's-rights groups."

Tebo himself resigned as an officer of Divorced Fathers for that very reason. "I had my own life to lead," he says. However, he sent out a questionnaire to some of the 80 extant men's-rights groups before he left, trying to see if there were any interest in national coordination. "I got very few replies," he reports. "There is a need for a unified men's-rights movement. But I guess it's not going to happen for a long time. The divorce-reform groups come and go. It's hard to keep track of all of them. But it's possible that even the far-out ones may be of some help to a guy getting a divorce."

The message is simple. Join a men's-rights/divorce-reform organization. Before you move out of the house. Before you hire a lawyer. Before you agree to talk with your wife's lawyer. Join a group of men who have been there and who know something about it. You are entering a system of law and precedence that is a nightmare for most men. While you may still think of yourself as the toughest guy on the block, try to remember that this is not your neighborhood. You haven't even been down this block. You may have a gauntlet to run. Why not take advantage of the few opportunities you have and subscribe to some of the only aid offered?

One of the biggest problems a man faces when he considers divorce is the choice of an attorney. It is not a casual matter. If things are going to be contested, and if a fight looms, the choice of a lawyer can make you or break you. But it is almost impossible for the lay person to judge an attorney's ability and interests. Firmness of grip, clearness of eye, style of dress, professions of sympathy, size of office--none of these makes the perfect barrister for you.

With good reason, many lawyers are cynical about men's rights in divorce, particularly when it comes to questions about child custody. But if you are going to try to win custody of your kids, does it make sense to deal with a defeatist in the matter? Some lawyers will pretend your case is simple and will suggest that the cost will be minimal; but when you get your bill, you will find complications you never imagined.

(It is impossible to estimate in any accurate way what the average divorce costs in terms of attorney's fees. There are "do it yourself" kits that advertise complete services for under $100; there are attorneys who publicly claim they can handle cases for about $150; but the time and charges vary greatly from case to case and from region to region and a divorce usually costs much more. Your best bet is to request an estimate of fees for your particular case and, if possible, to get an agreement that billing will not exceed a certain figure. Finally, should you feel you have been grossly overcharged, do not forget that most bar associations have grievance procedures by which you can contest unreasonable fees.)

Unless you have extraordinary contacts inside the legal profession, you should consider using one of the divorce-reform organizations for attorney references. They probably know the lawyers who have a genuine interest in men's rights. And in using them, you are at least doing better than choosing at random.

"Wait a minute," you might argue. "Why do I need any help now that there's 'no fault' in a lot of states? No fault sounds really simple. Nobody has to blame anybody for anything."

Unfortunately, no fault is a term that is misunderstood by most people. While it can eliminate the need to get up on the stand and lie about supposed wrongdoing on the part of your spouse just to get a divorce, there are many problems it does not solve. The point is that the moment you begin to argue over anything--property, child custody, alimony, etc.--the case tends to revert to the question of fault. And the odds are that you will become involved in such arguments somewhere along the line.

Robert Blackwell, who has written a tough and handy book titled The Fighter's Guide to Divorce, says of no fault: "It is supposed to solve everything. It doesn't. It allows one to obtain a divorce, but then other items become the object of litigation."

So you had better be prepared to seek help and to defend yourself under rules and applications of law that have not exactly been kind to men over the years and that have driven many men to fundamental despair.

Merely listing the injustices and continuously chanting our complaints will not do much for any of us. Something else is needed. Divorce reform deserves our energies, but where do we go from there?

The ultimate question has nothing to do with laws or judges or cruel ex-wives. As comfortable as it might be to put the blame elsewhere, we men cannot dodge our responsibility. The overwhelming question is this: How can we find identity and pride and self-worth as men? We (continued on page 298) Divorce(continued from page 234) are not asking that question very much, at least not in public and usually not of one another. But why not? Women are asking, debating, communicating, searching for their right and proper role in this society. Why aren't men doing the same thing? Why are men dying so much younger than women? Is it just a genetic joke? Or does our thinking about ourselves in such destructive ways have something to do with our shortened life span? If the statistics cited at the beginning of this article are correct, and if many men are losing the struggle for survival after divorce, do we not need to find some inherent self-worth as men that helps us in our more desperate moments?

The suggestion is that men must begin making a case for themselves. Manhood is an honorable condition. Only when we know and understand this will we be able to take the pressures of something as intense as divorce in our society.

In his book The Male in Crisis, the Austrian writer Karl Bednarik suggests that "in modern industrial society, the majority of men suffer from a central disturbance in their masculine life." Noting that in the U.S.A., for example, something like 70 percent of all successful suicides are committed by men, Bednarik sees the threat to masculinity coming not from women but from "the male technological machine which permits a few 'Big Brothers' to make vital decisions for more and more people." He goes on:

This example of undermining the man's authority by the state is particularly revealing because it concerns one of the principal concerns of the male: that of fatherhood. . . . These responsibilities are of the utmost importance not only for the adolescent but for the male himself, because his role of paternal authority reinforces his ego even as it requires him to grow and mature. . . . The male is eclipsed by the institutions of the "father state." And in the course of becoming invisible to the public eye and to the children he is raising, be becomes equally invisible to himself.

That puts the male's divorce dilemma rather well, whether children are involved or not (though divorce involving children is almost always more painful). As the father state steps into your life and administers it, tells you whether or not you may stay in your home, how much you must pay someone for whom you probably have little respect, and even sets down the times when you may (text continued on page 302, following "A Divorce Manual for Men" on page 300) see your children, do not most men start to become invisible to themselves? What is your role, now that so many other elements and agencies are making the fundamental decisions for you? Just when does your job as male and husband and father begin? Most of us would admit that there is an emasculation going on here that centers on the tremendous powers of the bureaucracies that control us. Shane does not ride out of town until he keeps his appointment with his IRS auditor. Superman applies to the EPA to find out if he can still go faster than a speeding bullet, and once he gets approval, he needs clearance from the FAA.

Given all of that, can we men still define ourselves as men? And where can we turn to try to do that? Bookstores don't have men's-lib sections. Few men sit around trying to define manhood.

Manhood. Is it possible to define it today? Professor Paul O. Williams of Principia College believes that "taking up this question is especially important right now because, in redefining their role in society, women have begun to redefine, or misdefine, manhood." And he continues, "I'm not sure women can be utterly trusted in their redefining. They've never been men."

Williams is of the old-fashioned opinion that men and women differ. He thinks that, as a sex, men have special perceptions and talents. In a discussion titled "Don't Sell Manhood Short," he lists some of the qualities he thinks many men do possess. The list makes interesting reading for males caught in a sexualidentity crisis, and the qualities include sensitivity ("the enormous number of writers, thinkers, composers, artists, poets, social activists and the like among males"), generosity ("I have seen any number of men work hard over many years, with a free and generous spirit, for people who depended on them--often at difficult tasks, often at things they didn't want to do"), courage ("what Thoreau describes as 'three o'clock in the morning courage'--which includes the courage to endure, to carry the weight of whatever burden has to be carried"), intellect ("Manhood has the capacity to take an idea, examine it, follow it out into action and attend to its details, its development"), wit and humor ("I find a special purity and freedom from pretense in the laughter of a roomful of men. . . . It can't be imitated").

Aside from making clear that he is not limiting those qualities to the male sex, Williams makes doubly clear that he is not arguing for male domination of women. "Surely," he says, "it's not the place--or the inclination--of an individual who possesses the qualities I've described to keep woman back from what she sees as the pursuit of her destiny."

Certain feminists may scoff at Williams' list. Others may find it amusing to hear men praise themselves. But it seems clear that men need help today in perceiving themselves as men, and such help can come only from themselves. No National Bureau of Sexual Standards is going to do it for us. No Marshall Plan for a Beleaguered Sex is in effect. Men face an almost universal loss of identity in this technological society and it is through self-analysis that they can come to grips with the forces that would obliterate them as a sex with special gifts.

"There is only one thing I can say to you," wrote a Stoic philosopher named Epictetus, "that the man who does not know who he is, and what he was born for, and what sort of world this is that he exists in . . . and is unable to follow either reason or demonstration, or what is true and what is false, and cannot distinguish one from the other--such a man, to sum it all up, will go about deaf and blind, thinking that he is somebody when he really is nobody. . . . And do you think that this is something new? Has it not been true from the time when the human race began, that every mistake and every misfortune has been due to this kind of ignorance?"

The harsh experience of divorce tends to blind many men to their own virtues, to deafen their ears to even valid praise. If you add the pressures of modern living to the weight that bears on the male psyche at that moment, you come up with a reason for the high rate of self-destruction among males after divorce.

Still, not all is death and destruction for men in divorce. Men can turn the experience into something creative, something that leads to self-knowledge and to knowledge of others. A man can come away from divorce with a stronger sense of what it is to be a man, with an idea of his own limits, with an understanding that property does not define life, and--if he loses custody of his children--he can learn that the bonds between fathers and children cannot be dissolved by court decree. If the male does what he can to defend himself in a practical fashion, and if he stays in touch with other people and does not become a shamed hermit, his life can be richer than it could ever have been if he had stayed in the dying relationship.

Most importantly, men who have gone through divorce are often able to overcome what seem to be inevitable weaknesses of the male sex: the tendencies both to fear and to worship women. Men who have gone down to the wire in final arguments in divorce often are liberated from the fantastical Hollywood lens through which they have viewed womankind. They can see women as people. No more and no less.

To be able to deal objectively with a woman, to watch her talk, deal with others, deal with you, and to ask questions of her you might not have asked be fore divorce--How vengeful is she? How bright? If I married her and it did not go well, how cruel would she be? Does she manipulate me? Control me? Worship me falsely? Am I attracted to her for healthy reasons or are we both playing power games of one kind or another? Does she hide behind feminine poses or is she straight with me? Do we have similar interests? Am I becoming a dominant little Hitler with her cooperation or do we truly share in decision making?--all of these questions can be more readily available to the man who has been through divorce. He can choose to no longer romanticize or glamorize women. And in that choice he will find a new freedom. The world's population will double for him: He will be able to have women as friends, advisors, without always playing the sexual games that can lead to confusion and hypocrisy.

Divorce, in short, is only one of a million symbols for this difficult age in which we find ourselves. We men have a job to do redefining our roles and reaching out for health and identity. It remains to be seen how we will do it, but we are nothing if not resourceful and we will do it.

To those men reading this who are about to go through a divorce, or are in the midst of one, or are picking up the pieces after one, we say: Good luck, good brothers. You are not alone. You can survive. The choice is yours.

"As much as it's needed, there is no male equivalent to the National Organization for Women."

"Many lawyers are cynical about men's rights in divorce when it comes to child custody."