The Biological Stepmothers guide to custody.
The best way to get custody was 20 years ago, the second best time is today.
I can’t stand the Men’s Rights Advocates. (MRA) They are whiny, think of themselves as male feminists, have women running their ‘movement’ if that’s even accurate, and I’ve yet to see a win in the last 50 years from them. If I had to sum the idea up, it’s men agreeing with the equality line and deciding to be feminism, but for men. This doesn’t work, since feminism isn’t a movement or an ideology, but a tactic. The tactic is to weaponize the male protective instinct for more. More what? Just more. More freedom, less responsibility, more authority, more money and jobs and just … more.
The reason I bring them up is that one of their main grievances has been the unfairness of the family court system. They aren’t wrong. It doesn’t treat men as second class citizens so much as treats the things men value as less valuable in the courts decisions, which is such a feminine way to do things. For example, your average man thinks his job is to provide and protect. He gets a great job and buys a firearm and works his ass off to be good at both. But during a divorce proceeding, the wife can accuse hubby of being unstable and that he has firearms in the house, leading to an overly sensitive state to deal with the both, just in case, for the sake of the children.
And it doesn’t help that on the rare case where they have a crazy man with a gun, they plaster it everywhere. It’s a threat point. It’s the cause of the Emasculation Paradox.
I hate talking about statistics, in this case it’s illustrative of what’s happening. A majority of divorces are because the wife isn’t haaappy. There’s no abuse, there’s no cheating, there’s not much of anything worse than general money problems, but that’s more endemic than anything. Almost always, the reason is that wifey isn’t haaapy. (the extra aah is on purpose) So the rare exceptional case, with a man being arrested, or losing his shirt in the divorce, or being shot by cops or weekday dad (long story) are trotted around to keep the cattle in line.
The MRA decide to bitch and moan and build awareness, which is code for building a personal brand without committing to doing anything substantive. The red pill guys, of which many of us are lawyers, many more are divorced, and quite a few have gotten reasonable or beneficial results in the family courts, looked into the law, the process, and the decisions we can make to navigate the hellhole. And it turns out the law is impartial, even though it’s not fair. What does this mean?
You want to work and have a stay at home wife. The courts decides that means you came to this business arrangement with her and that you’ve decided to take her on as a financial dependent. There’s no reason to change things after separation: the kids are happy, the wife is happy, you both agreed to it. So outside of the economic reality, where most men have working wives, a stay at home wife is a poor choice for men. Why tell the courts you want to pay, regardless of whether you fuck your wife or not?
So the courts are actually fair, it’s just that the metrics the court uses favor traditional female role and harm traditional male roles. So how do you navigate it? Stop trying to play the part of the patriarchy and learn the rules you are given and play to win. It sounds like pithy nothings, so keep reading.
Pause
The Biological Stepmom
This was originally written by a lawyer, Red Curious. I’ve added, edited and streamlined the concept, since I don’t want people thinking I’m speaking as an accredited lawyer here.
As a divorce attorney I have the privilege of seeing
Why most marriages fall apart;
How different family and parenting structures function in the context of the new relationships of my clients and opposing parties.
I can’t imagine a single male divorce attorney who would deny it. Female attorneys have stronger hamsters, so I rarely trust them. As for family structures that work, I’ve developed the theory I call “biological step-mother.” It is based on this one infallible law of divorce and custody cases:
Men don’t get custody after marriage because they don’t live like they have sole, exclusive custody during the marriage. Shared parenting is a conversation for another day. Men must develop subliminal custody of their children in their wives’ minds, and more importantly, the courts.
Legal Context
Although laws are changing, custody matters always involve judicial discretion. This will never change. That judicial discretion will always tilt slightly toward mothers, regardless of what the statute says.
Judges inherently respect history, even when it has been overruled. History dictates that mothers are default custodial parents. Many judges have been in the profession since before the law change and can’t get the old ways out of their heads.
The law still assumes default custody to a mother simply because the baby came out of her belly, whereas men can’t know for sure who the father is until that DNA test comes back.
Author note: I don’t know if the online DNA tests are able to be legally binding, but we can in fact ensure custody now, sorry France
Divorce law is slightly different from custody law in that it presumes shared parenting, but the legal bias from juvenile law is still subconsciously present because most divorce judges are also the juvenile judges.
Abortion law implies that children are the property of the mother. It’s her body, so she can decide whether the child lives or dies. When the child is born, there is a slight change, but the legal context of “she decides what happens to her baby” subliminally carries over to DR/JV law.
Most DR/JV judges are women. As to the few male ones, they are virtually always closet betas who put women on a pedestal. They act alpha because it’s their courtroom and they have positional authority, but they have no internally radiating authority. They still crack jokes from the bench: “You’re here because you didn’t do the dishes like she told you, right?”
Can dads win custody? Absolutely, I do it all the time. But women don’t believe this until it actually happens. This is key. Women make decisions based on their perceptions, not actuality.
Here are the two parenting structures that often result in stressed marriages, and one I think guys can learn from.
Traditional Biological Mother
The biological mother has a unique and unashamed relationship with her children. She carries them in her womb, nurses them when they’re young, and often takes primary responsibility for their basic growth and development. For all practical purposes, they are her kids. This is especially true for stay at home moms.
You, as the father, are involved to the degree that she finds your involvement advantageous to the development of the children. If you start doing things she doesn’t like, she throws a hissy fit or just leaves. More significantly, she will undermine your relationship with the children in any number of ways. Parental alienation is real, and it squats to pee.
Traditional Stepmother
Step-mothers respect the fact that her husband is the ultimate authority figure over the child. If the relationship went sour, she accepts the fact that she will have no custodial rights in the child. As a result, she does not take personal responsibility for the growth and development of the child, giving it to her husband. By placing him in charge, she sees herself as a helper who comes alongside him to assist in raising the child.
Unfortunately, step-mothers often maintain a subconscious emotional detachment. This is because of the custody issue. They don’t want to form a close bond with someone when there is a possibility that they may never see that person again. I’ve heard it said many times: a woman’s greatest fear is abandonment. In this case, instead of a romantic abandonment, it’s a parent-child relationship that’s lost. For women, this is too close a bond to risk, so step-mothers remain subliminally detached and allow their husbands to be the final authority and emotional rock for the children.
Not to take more potshots on the MRA’s, but a lot of them have sob stories about dating the single mom, splitting up, then being abandoned by the kids they loved, and the mom they put up with to keep playing dad. They can be such a useless, whiny people.
Biological Stepmother
This is a relatively rare phenomenon, occurring when divorced or nearly divorced couples decide to reunite; particularly when the father has demonstrated that he is likely to get custody of the children or shared parenting and that she would not be the default custodian.
