Of course there are always two sides to every story but ... poor bastard. Maybe he is a wife beating son of a bitch, and I know there are children involved, but since I'm a man I'm thinking he is a poor bastard.California used to be the center of the "woman takes your stuff" universe. But I have heard many stories like this one in Spain. I think Spain now tops California. In Spain it seems if there are children involved, the house and the kids go to the woman no matter what - and the man pays.
There must be some middle ground where both sides are able to have a life.
5 comments:
Does Spain do "Pre-nups"?
Hello, I'm from Madrid and I think that this blog is very interesting, I have only read some entries but I'll read more tomorrow.
Don't know Midnight. Why not? Unless some hidden law somewhere prohibits it.
Welcome Rorshach.
There's still the mentality here that men don't know how to take care of children, and therefore the children must be with their mothers; they NEED their mothers. Which is a bunch of crap if you ask me. The kids need an attentive parent. Period.
This is one of those little dirty secrets that doesn't get discussed much in expat blogs/forums, etc.
The child custody/divorce laws in many foreign countries can seem quite old-fashioned, biased toward the mother or just plain inflexible and out of touch with modern realities.
A lot of people love the idea of falling in love/building a life with a foreigner but the reality is that things can become a nightmare if the relationship falls apart and kids are involved.
Two stories I've heard about: One is of a British lady who had a baby, born in the U.K., with her Spanish boyfriend. They never married and broke up. According to the woman, her ex-boyfriend essentially said he didn't want to be a dad and that the mother and daughter would be better off without him living in the U.K. According to the ex, yeah, he admits that he wasn't interested in being a dad before but now he says he wants his child to live in Spain. Flash forward several months and now the guy has accused the woman of "abducting" his daughter from Spain and the mother has been ordered to return to Spain for a court hearing.
http://bit.ly/2NqCX3
Second story I heard about was on somebody's blog and it was about an American woman in Sweden who was forced to stay there because there is automatic joint custody in a divorce (unless one of the parents is truly unfit) or something like that. My recollection of this woman's story was that if she moved back to the U.S. the Swedish courts would automatically nullify her custodial rights so she was forced to stay in Sweden.
No big deal, right? Well, she was financially dependent on her husband while they were married and since she didn't speak Swedish and didn't have any sort of high in-demand job skills, she was unable to get a good paying job. That's why she wanted to move back to the U.S. so she could rebuild her life/career on her home turf. Now she's stuck in Sweden until her kid reaches adulthood.
In a lot of these divorces cases the men get royally screwed but sometimes it's the women who get jerked around. A lot of unfairness and pain being inflicted on both sides. That said, it seems that in some cases the courts don't appear to be operating in the 21st-century. A lot of old gender politics/stereotypes are still in play.
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