I think there’s a sense of “this would never happen to me.” I was educated in the same college as my husband, but the education you’re talking about (the hard knocks of life education!) is a different thing completely. When you enter into a partnership you are committed to maintaining forever, it does not occur to you that you might need to plan for a different path. My husband and I were 20 when we started dating; everything we built we built together. If someone had tried to make me understand when I was 32 and a new mother of two babies that giving up my career to care for them would make me financially vulnerable one day, I would not have believed them, I would have told them my husband and I would be together for life and so this wouldn’t pertain to me. Now I know that we can’t ever know how our lives will twist and turn, but I wouldn’t have believed it twenty years ago. I kick myself for not having seen it coming so I could have prepared for it, but also am not sorry for how fully I embraced my role in my family’s life…I don’t know what the answer is, except that when we get divorced we are seen as partners in every way, including financially.