From divorce court to popular culture, alimony

is a dirty word. Unpopular and rarely ordered, the awards are frequently

inconsistent and unpredictable. The institution itself is often viewed as an

historical relic that harkens back to a gendered past in which women lacked the

economic independence to free themselves from economic support by their spouses.

In short, critics of alimony claim it has no place in contemporary visions of

marriage as a partnership of equals. But as Cynthia Lee Starnes argues in The

Marriage Buyout, alimony is often the only practical tool for ensuring that divorce does not treat

today’s primary caregivers as if they were suckers. Her solution is to

radically reconceptualize alimony as a marriage buyout.

Starnes’s buyouts draw on a partnership model of marriage that reinforces

communal norms of marriage, providing a gender-neutral alternative to alimony

that assumes equality in spousal contribution, responsibility, and right. Her

quantification formulae support new default rules that make buyouts more

certain and predictable than their current alimony counterparts. Looking beyond

alimony, Starnes outlines a new vision of marriages with children, describing a

co-parenting partnership between committed couples, and the conceptual basis

for income sharing between divorced parents of minor children. Ultimately,

under a partnership model, the focus of alimony is on gain rather than loss and

equality rather than power: a spouse with disparately low earnings isn’t a

sucker or a victim dependent on a fixed alimony payment, but rather an equal

stakeholder in marriage who is entitled at divorce to share any gains the

marriage produced.