I Married For Love, But Now I Owe My Ex-Husband $150K
New Africa | Shutterstock I married for love. Also, I was 28, and I had been with my partner for nearly five years, and it was the next step. Also, marriage came with lots of financial and legal benefits. Or so I was told. These oft-touted financial and legal benefits do exist. But many of them only exist in very specific contexts, contexts that may or may not apply to you. Many stop existing entirely if you get divorced; in fact, they morph from benefits to penalties.
I married for love and somehow ended up owing my ex-husband $150K
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It doesn't matter how many years you put in. It doesn't matter how many marriage counselors you sought out. It doesn't matter how hard you tried to make it work. In fact, the more time you sink into your marriage and the more assets you accrue, the more complicated and expensive divorce is likely to get.
Still, we peddle marriage as a benevolent institution. One that is designed to protect, not entrap, us. As a female reader recently asserted: "The institution of marriage, even monogamy, was invented to protect women… Before contraception, you needed some guarantee that the father of the baby [would] stay around and take care of the baby and you."
Let's get one thing straight off the bat: The purpose of marriage has never, ever been to protect women.
For the vast majority of its history, the institution has served primarily as an economic contract under which women were considered their husbands' property, sometimes listed alongside livestock.
Turns out, when a woman is treated as property and society limits her employment opportunities, it really sucks if her husband decides to leave. As such, a few safety measures were put in place, a way for the men in charge to throw a bone to single mothers in the name of their "protection." No matter that destitute single mothers were products of the social and economic systems they had designed.
Though I grew up believing marriage was about eternal love, it was often hard to spot it in most of the marriages around me, unless the fairy tales were mistaken and eternal love actually looked like exasperated resignation. But no matter. Even on the rare occasions when this flimsy premise was called into question, marriage was definitely marketed as the financially smart way to go. You would save on taxes, be able to add one another to your health insurance plans, and be protected in the absolute worst-case scenarios, which were, in no particular order, death and divorce.
Today, these so-called protections still extend to full-time homemakers who don't engage in paid labor. So, if you're a woman who plans to devote most of your life to unpaid caregiving labor, and if you have found a partner who is actually able to financially support an entire family, and if this partner isn't physically or emotionally abusive, it's probably a good idea to marry this person.
While marriage wasn't invented to protect you, it remains the financially prudent option. Your financial stability will by no means be guaranteed should you get divorced, but the patriarchy will throw you a bone or two.
That said, if you already support yourself and you plan to continue pursuing paid labor throughout most of your adult life, marriage becomes a much larger financial risk.
It is risky for all genders in this scenario, but particularly for hetero mothers, who are far more likely to serve as the primary unpaid caregivers, both during the marriage and in the event of divorce.
Contrary to popular rhetoric, women in the United States fare worse financially in divorce, despite higher financial burdens as caregivers.
These days, the divorce rate is estimated to be around 40 percent, a number that marriage advocates applaud because it's 10% lower than it was in years past. Meanwhile, "gray divorce", divorces over the age of 50, has more than doubled in the last few decades, and should this trend continue, it seems likely that the overall divorce rate will also trend upward.
This is all to say that the odds of divorce are still pretty high. And what's not factored into the divorce rate are all the abusive marriages people stay in out of fear, not to mention all those other resigned married couples who stay together primarily because divorce seems so onerous.
If I were considering any other significant financial investment that carried a 40+ percent risk of putting me in a significantly worse financial position, I would absolutely seek an alternative investment opportunity. But no one ever told me this when I got married. I knew divorce was expensive, but I assumed it was mostly due to the cost of hiring a lawyer. I knew a lot of men complained about how much divorce cost them, but my understanding was that divorce tended to be a pretty good deal for moms, who usually seemed to get the house and reaped the benefits of alimony and child support.
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Divorce can punish women who support themselves
Not that I was thinking much about any of this when I actually got married. I was still all hung up on eternal love. Imagine my utter shock, then, when I looked at the Excel sheet my lawyer sent over and saw that I would owe my soon-to-be-ex-husband $80,000 to $150,000, not including the $10,000+ in legal fees.
If you, like me, are amongst the nearly half of hetero wives who make about the same amount or more than their husbands, marriage simply doesn't math. And if you are among the many other hetero wives who make less than their husbands but not so much less that it's considered a "significant" income disparity, marriage is also unlikely to math.
Unpaid labor still doesn't count the way it should
In all the above scenarios, including mine, women do about 2.5 hours of daily unpaid labor to their husbands’ 1 hour, but nowhere is this labor factored into divorce.
Family law only takes unpaid domestic labor into account if the unpaid caregiver earns either no income or significantly less income.
That is to say, if both parents have roughly equivalent paid jobs, the laws governing asset division assume that both spouses equitably partook in the unpaid domestic and caregiving work, even though this flies in the face of every study or survey ever conducted about the division of labor in heterosexual marriages.
Furthermore, women don't typically just "get the house." If you do keep the marital home, you will likely have to pay out half the equity and take on the full mortgage. If both spouses' names are on the deed, you also have to refinance said home, which has considerable financial implications if interest rates are high.
Despite all the ado men make over alimony, only 10% of divorces in the United States actually involve spousal support, a growing percentage of which entail the woman paying her ex-husband, even if she still serves as the primary caregiver. If one parent receives sole custody or assumes the bulk of parenting responsibilities, child support may be awarded. But only 46% of parents with child support agreements receive all that is owed to them, and 30% of parents owed child support receive nothing at all.
There are other fun surprises that many couples remain oblivious to until they get divorced. For instance, if you've been diligent with your retirement fund and your spouse hasn't (even though you repeatedly urged him to), guess what? Half of your fund will likely be theirs.
The marriage tax benefit often disappears when both spouses earn money
But, you may ask, what about the tax benefits of marriage? Won't I save so much in taxes that it cancels out the cost of divorce? In a word, no. Again, as it turns out, the oft-promoted tax benefits of marriage generally only apply if one spouse is making significantly more than the other.
So if you're a financially independent woman who makes a bit less than, about the same as, or more than your husband, you are likely to actually pay a marriage tax penalty.
Are you surprised? When I filed as head of household for 2025 and paid quite a bit less in taxes than the year before, I was certainly surprised. "Betrayed" might be the more accurate word.
While there were certainly factors more unique to my particular marriage, which included supporting my ex-husband through 11 years of school (also not factored into the divorce agreement) and refinancing his $35,000 undergraduate student loan in my name because I had better credit (do not EVER do this!), I can say beyond the shadow of a doubt that even barring these factors, marriage was the worst financial investment I have ever made.
My ex-husband, meanwhile, made out pretty well. He reaped the benefits of 20 years of my free labor, continues to benefit from it, and walked away with $85,000. In fact, marriage was such a great investment for him that in a few short weeks, a little over a year after our divorce, he's going to do it again!
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Divorce was expensive, but it was still worth it
To be abundantly clear, none of this is in any way intended to scare married women away from getting divorced.
Marriage was a terrible decision for me in more ways than one; divorce has unequivocally been the best decision I've ever made.
The financial burden of it is beyond infuriating, if and when I allow myself to get mad about it (which is less and less these days), and it's also been worth every penny.
This is intended to scare financially independent women who are considering getting married. Okay, "scare" is a strong word choice, but I hope to at least give you pause. Maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones who actually finds eternal love. Maybe you'll find a mix of love and resignation, and that will be enough. And if you do indeed stay together until death do you part, noteworthy financial and legal benefits will, in fact, apply, like exemptions from estate taxes when a spouse dies; Family and Medical Leave protections; and the right to visit a sick or injured spouse and/or have a say in life and death matters, among many others.
The question is, do these benefits outweigh the risks and potential costs? It depends on your life circumstances.
Perhaps, much like the elderly couple Paul and Julie in Shrinking, you'll find yourself in a situation down the road for which marriage maths. It's always on the table, and it's a far less risky option if you decide to do it later in life, when "until death do us part" isn't quite such a tall order.
But it's an enormous gamble for a financially and physically healthy woman to commit to this option in her 20s or 30s, especially when she has been subject to misleading propaganda and when the information she needs to make an informed decision is not readily available. To tether both your financial and emotional well-being to a single other human being before either of you really know yourselves is both very weird and not very smart.
There are other ways to build love, family, and support without marriage
Think about the fluidity of all the other relationships in your life. Our parents, our children, our best friends; they all drift in and out of our lives at various times. There are many people important to us with whom we've simply lost touch, and many others with whom we're in touch only sporadically.
Substack's Works in Progress newsletter discusses the fluidity of "marriage" (in quotes, because it means something very different in this context) in hunter-gatherer societies:
While Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas classifies most hunter-gatherers as polygynous, this classification is inaccurate. In practice, most men are unable to support more than one wife because they lack sufficient savings. Divorce and remarriage happen frequently because helpful extended families give women certainty that they won't be left raising children alone. The lack of inheritance prevents conflict from developing over having children with multiple partners, and the residential mobility means one can literally just walk away from relationships one no longer wants to be in. Consequently, women will frequently have children with two or even three men during their lifetime.
According to Substack author Elena Bridgers, "Most anthropologists refer to hunter-gatherer societies as ‘serially monogamous,’ meaning they form stable pair bonds, but these bonds are not always permanent." Weirdly, in this same story, Elena defends modern marriage, asserting that it is "worth it" for most people. These days our pair bonds still aren't necessarily permanent, but unlike our hunter-gatherer predecessors, we've made it incredibly onerous, and particularly onerous for women, to extricate ourselves.
If Elena were ever to get divorced, I'm quite certain she would change her tune. And again, the divorce rate doesn't even account for the number of people who would get divorced if it seemed less onerous. In fact, one study found that when laws make divorce easier, "Female suicides decrease by 8% to 16% and domestic violence decreases by around 30%."
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Are we still sure that marriage is worth it for most people?
Much like Elena, I'm eager to learn from the social structures that humans designed and maintained for the hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of the patriarchy. In one of my all-time most popular stories, "The Unsolicited Advice I Wish I’d Gotten Before Having Kids," I counsel younger women who want children to build their kinship circles beforehand and to consider co-parenthood outside cohabitation, especially outside marriage.
This isn't a call for us to reject romantic partnership; it's simply a call for us to be realistic about it. Most of us already pair bond with multiple partners over the course of our lives, and we are far better off building a financial future that isn't subject to the roller coaster of romantic love.
It isn't easy to do it differently, but guess what? Marriage isn't easy either. Neither is divorce.
And if at any point you need access to the financial and legal protections that are still only readily available in the context of marriage, they're always there. For better or for worse, it's not going away any time soon.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Mom, Interrupted.
