As of March 1998, 235,000 families received alimony payments as income, with 56 percent of those receiving alimony having an annual income of $35,000 or greater.

(Source: U. S. Census Bureau, "09 Table of Contents"; published 17 December 1998; http://ferret.bls.census.gov/macro/031998/faminc/09000.htm; in the U. S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2000 [120th edition], Washington, DC, 2000, p. 380.)

"Whenever anybody asks me a question about divorce, I refuse to answer until I first have talked about two other subjects, namely, marriage and reconciliation....For God's purpose is marriage, not divorce, and his gospel is good news of reconciliation."

(Source: John Stott, Decisive Issues Facing Christians Today, in Richard A. Kauffman, "Reflections," Christianity Today, vol. 45, no. 14 [November 12, 2001], p. 94.)

Some myths die hard.  For at least two decades, the myth that divorce impoverishes women but enriches men has resisted every attempt to kill it with empirical evidence.   Social scientists are nothing if not persistent.   In a recent issue of the American Sociological Review, sociologists from Duke and Indiana Universities try yet again to discredit "the assertion that men gain from divorce," an assertion that is "still part of the conventional wisdom about marital dissolution." 

Using national data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the authors of the new study demonstrate that the men who come out of divorce as economic winners-and there are some men who do-are not typical or representative.  "Most men who separate," write the researchers, "do not experience gains in their living standards."  In fact, what the researchers find among men who divorce is "a majority of losers."  Among "the majority of partnered men [who]  . . . lose economic status when their unions dissolve," some experience relatively modest and manageable losses, but "a substantial minority of men see their standard of living slip in the aftermath of separation and divorce." 

Clearly, the authors of the new study conclude, it is time to discard "the presumption of symmetry [which] often leads to the inference that the economic losses experienced by women [in divorce] represent economic gains for men."  In most cases, divorce impoverishes both men and women-and enriches only the divorce lawyers.

(Source: Patricia A. McManus and Thomas A. DiPrete, "Losers and Winners: The Financial Consequences of Separation and Divorce for Men," American Sociological Review 66[2001]: 246-268.)