Marriage baggage lost in transport

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/12/2009 (5785 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sometimes I think that the only thing that keeps me and my wife of the moment together is our mutual poverty. I work for the Free Press, which usually pays me in bus tickets, and she is unable to work if you don’t count keeping house and looking after kids as work. Bus tickets only go so far, and then there is the problem of the dozens of children that she has — well it seems like dozens, anyway. Once you get past three, there is no keeping track, they’re just all over the place.

I am quite fond of her. She is less fond of me, which is hardly surprising, given that I am notoriously hard to get along with. If I could afford to pay her alimony, she might well jump at the chance, although, after 29 years of marriage, I am starting to think that she is just a bear for punishment.

But I can’t afford to pay her alimony — you can’t put bus tickets in the gas tank of an SUV, which is what she drives — and I need them to get work to earn more bus tickets.

In any case, the whole idea of alimony seems odd in the 21st century. Child support makes sense — you made them, you feed them is a pretty well incontrovertible argument — but the idea that a man should pay support to a woman just because he was dumb enough to marry her or she was dumb enough to marry me doesn’t make much sense in a world where women’s rights, freedoms and independence are such big issues.

The question pops up because of a court ruling that awarded a 61-year-old Toronto woman an alimony payment of $110,000 a month, the largest such award that any former wife has ever won in Canada. That’s a lot of bus tickets, although I suspect she may be driving a car in the future.

Carol Ann Elgner had been married to Claude Elgner for 33 years and that, coupled with the fact his annual income is somewhere between $3 million and $4 million, accounts for the extravagance of the alimony.

Her lawyer argues that this is only fair, that it represents a redefinition of the concept of alimony that is long overdue — alimony in the past “was always thought of as something that keeps the heat and lights on, and the gas in your car,” said lawyer Julia Hannaford triumphantly.

Alimony was previously punitive to wives, she says, although that will be news to former husbands who have been making punishing payments for years to ex-wives who have gone on to lucrative careers, but the judge in the case seemed to think it made eminently good sense.

Mr. Elgner’s income allowed his wife to stay home and care for their three children — all adults now. Not every married couple has that luxury, but a $4 million a year paycheque does allow for a certain latitude.

Since the couple split, Mrs. Elgner has been able to reduce her expenses to $88,780.33 a month, a much tighter budget than when she was paying $115,439 a month only recently. The judge in the case thought that the wife should not have to compromise her life-style because of the divorce — “Both parties should live out their retirement years in a style that can easily be afforded,” she said.

And that makes a certain sense. These people lived 33 years with him making a living and her making a home. When I was a kid, that was the norm of family life — although $4 million in annual income was hardly ever on the books — but people didn’t divorce so easily, either.

I didn’t know any kids from split families when I was growing up. Today, close to 50 per cent of first marriages end in divorce. I don’t know whether that is good or bad, whether men and woman are less miserable now than they were in the day of indissoluble marriages.

What I do know is that arguments for easier divorce laws — that they can free women from unbearable relationships, and men from intolerable ones — are probably true. But somewhere along the way, the baggage from those marriages got lost in transport.

We are told by the courts unrelentingly of women’s rights and men’s responsibilities as ex-husbands are beggared by judges for the benefit of their former wives. But what about women’s responsibilities? Why was Mrs. Elgnar not making $4 million a year herself? Between her and her husband they could have afforded publicly funded day care for the kids, or even a first class nanny.

She can now retire in comfort — I could squeeze by on $88,790.33 a month if I had to — but he will have to keep working to pay her that amount forever. There is a lack of equilibrium here, a lack of fairness that women are too willing to accept as long as they can put the payments in their purses. Here’s to being too poor to pay, except in bus tickets.

tom.oleson@freepress.mb.ca