Divorce law in many states effectively contains both first-mover and anti-breadwinner biases, which discourage marriage partly because no-fault divorce is so easy and the spouse initiating the divorce can take the other spouse to the cleaners (contrary to gender stereotype, two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by wives, rather than husbands), like obtaining indefinite alimony based on a very short marriage.

This passage in your blog post is the whole reason for my pre-nup:

“it is also possible that an expectation of it as being easily dissolved and lacking in real security might discourage entry by other persons.”

No-fault divorce means less economic security for breadwinner spouses, especially husbands and fathers. In divorce cases, Virginia courts do things that are economically inefficient and unfair to breadwinner spouses, like awarding permanent alimony based on even very short marriages (Bristow v. Bristow (1980)), then constantly allowing the alimony levels to be reset based on upward changes on the paying spouses income (see Conway v. Conway (1990)), but not downward changes (see Antonelli v. Antonelli (1991)), and allowing child and spousal support levels to be set based not on what the paying spouse actually makes (which would be an easy mechanical calculation that would not enrich lawyers), but rather on higher, hypothetical (and sometimes arbitrary) estimates of what the paying spouse could make, or once made (“imputed income”), as in the cases of Cochran v. Cochran (1992), and Antonelli v. Antonelli (1991).

Virginia’s divorce laws are an impediment to small business creation by divorced people. As prominent divorce lawyer Richard Crouch noted in the Fall 1992 article in Family Law News, a publication of the Virginia Bar, Virginia courts employ a “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” approach to people who try to start small businesses (see Crouch, “Support Obligations in Mean Times: The Virginia Courts and the Recession,” Family Law News, Fall 1992, available http://www.abolish-alimony.org/reports/fight-back/contempt/Virgina-court-imputed-income-92.pdf )

If you leave a steady job to try to set up a small business, and it succeeds, you will have your alimony and child support payments increased over their prior levels (See Conway v. Conway (1990)).

But if the business fails (as most small businesses do), resulting in your income falling below its prior levels, the courts will force you to pay alimony and child support as if you were still making the higher income you made at your prior job. (See Antonelli v. Antonelli (1991)).

Virginia courts are also frankly gender-biased in child-custody and alimony decisions, sometimes awarding lifelong alimony to wives based on short marriages, but refusing to award alimony to husbands who were in longer term marriages and made just a fraction of what their wives’ made.

For example, the Virginia Court of Appeals denied alimony to a father even though his ex-wife made five times what he did, and he was the caregiver for the couple’s children, and instead ordered him to pay his ex-wife 40 percent of his meager disability pension, in Asgari v. Asgari [2000]. It is hard to imagine a similarly-situated ex-wife not receiving alimony for at least a few years. For example, in Calvin v. Calvin [1999], the appeals court awarded a wife alimony despite describing her as adulterous, “vindictive and cruel”). As Crouch notes, in Virginia family law, “sex is the difference that makes a difference.”