I think Vox just got beaten by a girl:
Here he is, not even their official dad, and he gets weepy when he doesn't talk to them. This is the stuff Hallmark TV specials are made of, yet you're turning your relationship into an episode of "Prison Break." You admit, "It's not that I can't trust him." No, it's that you're irrational and insecure, and making his life hell is probably your way of controlling how much of it he diverts to people who aren't you. Come on, after five years, you don't know what he's made of, or whether he still has the hots for the last lady in his life? If he is running away with her, he's an awfully slow runner. Like, at this rate, he might be able to beat Stephen Hawking across my living room rug.
Sometimes it takes a woman to really speak the hard truth to another woman who is behaving irrationally(in fairness, the same thing applies to men). From the way that the Advice Goddess posted the woman's email, it sounds more like she's dating a real family man who has a hard time letting go of being a father figure to the children of his previous lover. Considering the way that many men are, it would behoove this woman to sit back and try to encourage him to be more like a god father than a real father, while encouraging him to stay the way he is in case she wants to have children with him. Not that many men out there who are willing to sacrifice for children like that, you know.
On a related note, it is very sick how many states will not protect men who are victims of fraud from child support payments. I just don't see how you can argue that it is good for a child to make a man who isn't the biological father, and who was deceived by the mother, pay a small mortgage's worth of money to support that child. Such a thing is only more likely to alienate the man, making him regard the child more as a financial parasite, than as a child he can still be authority and father figure for. By not holding the mother and biological father accountable for the full cost of the child support, all that is being done is making a man who used to be a father, regard the child he once thought was his own, as a financial liability that may prevent him from having his own children.
I just don't see how you can argue that it is good for a child ...
It is an archaic argument that probably does not have a place in the modern world.
Society benefits when ANY man can be tagged with financial support of a child instead of all of us collectively getting the bill. The easiest man for the state to tag is the husband of the woman when the child was born. They have records for that. otherwise, they are depending on the willing cooperation of the woman to rat out her under-cover-lover.
As I have said before, I would like to see a law passed to require all children having DNA paternity established at birth. Men who know the unpleasant truth could then have the freedom to accept it with full disclosure.
I agree with you both. I personally would refuse to pay for a child that wasn't mine, regardless of the consequences.
What Amy does not get is that the girlfriend is not being insecure or clingy. She is protecting exclusive rights to the father for HER future children at the expense of previous children. This is a biological imperative. It is hard-wired and women will/can not discuss it. Good father to other children = bad father to yours. Financial and emotional support to previous children = less to go around for new family.
Her position is logical and moral but her inability to say it out loud makes her a manipulative bitch, expecting to marry the guy first and then change the rules.
Roci,
"Society" can pay for that child, then. No man should ever be forced to pay for a child he neither sired nor adopted.
I agree that she should talk to him after she gets married, but right now, she has no right to expect him to change the way he is.
I happen to agree with your position on this. I was merely explaining the current position of the family courts of all 50 states.
Better still, Let's find a way to sterilize all human beings. Only let them become fertile for short periods when the happy couple has chosen to conceive and demonstrates the stability and means to do so.
While this seems abominable now, I'll bet it is something we could get used to pretty quickly. After all, the founding fathers did not list procreation in the bill of rights. That omission is likely intentional. Further, most of the women in western civilization have already self-imposed this.
Society" can pay for that child, then. No man should ever be forced to pay for a child he neither sired nor adopted.
Do you see the irony of this position? It is immoral to force one man who is not related to support, but it is OK to force every man who is not related to do so.
This also raises the abortion conundrum. If a woman has the sole right to chose, then why is any man asked to support her choice?
Shouldn't responsibilities be tied to choices?
The man just wants sex, the woman choses to give birth and keep a child. Why is the man getting lifetime support obligations?
My logic on forcing "society to pay for it" is that society by and large tolerates the welfare state. By sheer fact of supporting the redistribution of wealth, a man loses a moral right to complain about the burden. If they get overburdened and essentially turned into the serfs that Hayek warned about, then so what? They deserve it.
The rest of us are already getting screwed by the welfare state, and this is the only thing that might help bring it down.
And I agree with you about it being her responsibility. I have griped about that much in the past.