system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do some people have to pay their ex-spouses after a divorce because they're "accustomed to a certain lifestyle"?

I think the terms for what I'm referring to is 'alimony', but I'm not entirely sure.

I just don't really understand the argument that someone should be forced to pay their ex because they're accustomed to a certain lifestyle.  I mean... Doesn't that give me a disincentive to keep my wife's quality of life relatively low?  If I were rich, and I spent a ton of money buying my wife nice things and then we got a divorce, she could claim money from me because she got used to being treated that well.  However, even if I was rich, if I was very stingy with buying her things, then she wouldn't be "accustomed" to a nice lifestyle, and I wouldn't have to pay as much.

Am I misunderstanding this?  It just seems like such a moronic non-argument.  You don't give kids at school varying lengths of timeouts depending on how long their timeouts are at home, so why is this argument one that seems to hold up in our legal system?

What am I missing, here?
gpt
Now that most households have both parents working a job, it does not make quite as much sense as it used to, but consider this:  You get married at a fairly young, but still responsible enough age, say 25.  You have a college degree, but you and your spouse decide that they will work and you will stay at home and take care of the house, and children when they come around.  Let's say you are okay with that, as it is something that is very commonly done by people and you don't mind.  

10 years go by, you have a couple of kids, and you stay at home taking care of them.  But things aren't working out with your spouse.  You decide to get a divorce.  Your spouse has a job and can maintain a healthy lifestyle, and you will share the kids 50/50, but what about you?

You haven't had a job in 10 years, if you ever had one.  The job experience that you may have had means almost nothing.  Your college degree is equally worthless or even moreso.  That combined with your age and kids (employers can't ask you about that, but if they know somehow it won't help your case), makes you about the bottom of the barrel in terms of people they want to hire.  You will be lucky to get a job being paid a few dollars over minimum wage.

If you had had a job for all that time you might be a top quality hire, but you gave that up for your marriage, in a mutually agreed upon decision.  It didn't seem like a bad idea because marriage is supposed to be for life.  The situations could easily have been swapped around -- your spouse could have stayed at home and you could have gotten a job, and then they would be in this predicament.  And maybe it wasn't even your fault that the divorce happened -- maybe your spouse was abusive, or you just realized that you weren't in love with each other anymore.

It's probably not fair that you are now being made to live a much poorer life for a decision that could have easily gone the other way.  And it's hard for courts to determine what *could* have been if the marriage arrangement had been different, so they err on the side of making things equal just in case.   Sometimes people get help maintaining a lifestyle they deserve, sometimes people get a free ride to a lifestyle they never would have had if they hadn't gotten married in the first place.  All in all it is seen as fairer to take a certain part of someone's money (while allowing them to still live a nice lifestyle) to help another than to tell that person to go fuck themselves when it might not be their fault at all.