<p>purple flurp-- come on already! The girl has been cheated on and humiliated and now you want to call her a prostitute? Give me a break. Why are you protecting his money? Why is his money worth more than her dignity, her self-respect, the broken promises and the fact that she now has children to raise? You’re just wrong on this one, and I usually find you so sensible. The wife is not a prostitute. IF he breaks the promise? She gets a new contract. ALL he has to offer is money. She’s already given him everything else. </p>
<p>That’s like saying a patient with a broken heart (metaphor) ought not to be able to sue the doctor for pain and suffering. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>The idea that if someone marries a person with already great wealth they are “after their money” is interesting. So, being financially successful precludes having someone have genuine feelings for that person? I don’t buy that.</p>
<p>If Elin works through this, more power to her. If the marriage doesn’t survive and she has $75 million, more power to her. Seems to me just as valid an argument can be made that Tiger is taking advantage of an opportunity to minimize the fallout of his conduct by using money.</p>
<p>^ Agreed. 100 million a year…now THAT is SEXY. I went to a party a few years back and there was a certain famous gentleman there who was worth about 250 million. I will admit it did make him VERY attractive. I do not think it is any more shallow than being attracted to physical beauty. Whether it is wise to marry an individual solely for either reason is another question.</p>
<p>I am not sure I see it completely this way. Yes, I imagine the spouses get used to a certain way of life and they don’t want to end that. But to marry a prominent, wealthy man and then having children with him early makes it difficult if the marriage ends (not impossible, I know there are those who have been able to do it) when she did not finish her education, and not sure about her legal status in the US if they divorced. Then there is the issue of the kids going back and forth between dad’s mansion and mom’s shanty (exaggerating here), the possibility that Dad could remarry and have new children and “forget” about the existing ones…It’s hard to know what is going through her head other than shock right now, but I think I would be conducting myself in the same manner. Renegotiating a prenup, but protecting my children - she seems to be home alone with them a lot - would be the most important thing to me.</p>
<p>If I were married to a man of that type of wealth and found out that he had been conducting serial (and concurrent?) affairs for several years, the last thing I’d think about in the first couple of days after the incident is money. Elin is sitting in a good place. Her very wealthy husband has cheated on her, embarrassed her, lied to her, and in doing so, changed the status of the pre-nup. That is a given, and money can be dealt with down the line a bit, after the acute emotional turmoil died down. </p>
<p>If I were going to be cheated on by a whore-dog husband, I would love for him to be as rich as Tiger Woods. Many women who undergo this humiliation are married to very ordinary, everyday poor cheaters. They are no less hurt or humiliated than Elin Woods, but they have much less recourse. </p>
<p>Money does not equal love, and a marriage based on graded payments for staying a certain number of years is not a “contract” of love or anything resembling it. It is a contract of money and opportunity. As I said, I think they both knew what they were getting into. If either of them were marrying for true love, a pre-nup would not have been necessary (or tolerated). When you are as wealthy as Tiger Woods, money does change the “love” contract, and to pretend like this relationship is just any other young people falling in love and getting married is very naive (and imho wrong).</p>
<p>A bikini model who works as an au pair meets and marries one of the richest athletes alive. My bad to think it could be anything but true love. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>My heart goes out to the many women who undergo this and end up raising children alone, often with deadbeat dads who don’t make child support payments. Their children are the unprotected ones. Woods’s children will always be cared for, at leat financially.</p>
<p>Elin has been given great financial incentive to “work things out,” be the dutiful wife for two more years, and get her 55 million. Then the marriage can fail, and she’ll be much better set. That’s love?</p>
<p>I find it interesting that Elin is considered opportunistic, a gold-digger, prostitute, etc. etc. because she’s negotiating a new pre-nup. People haven’t questioned Tiger’s intentions in requiring Elin to sign a pre-nup before they got married. I imagine many folks think he was just protecting himself. I’d say Elin is protecting herself and her children at this point as well. More power to her. Maybe with counseling they can work things out, but if that doesn’t work, I think Elin is doing what many women in her position would do.</p>
<p>I’ve always wondered how a couple who bickered over a prenup could have a happy marriage. A friend of mine is a successful businesswoman, and she and her husband, who she considers her servant, bickered endlessly about the prenup. I still have no idea why those two got married. Wouldn’t you always have that prenup "negotiation’ in the back of your mind, starting off the marriage on a negative foot? I think I would. </p>
<p>I question any marriage based on a financial contract. But that’s just me.</p>
<p>BTW, I do not consider a second marriage wherein the parties have grown children or previous children to be in the same category. I do think that provisions have to be made to protect prior children. This couple had no prior children…their only children are the ones they share.</p>
<p>I agree with you 100%. That’s why I said I would prefer more parity in a relationship. I do not want any marriage relationship of mine to be based on a financial contract. Some don’t seem to mind, though.</p>
<p>In the case of Tiger and Elin, though, with a contract like the one he had drawn up, there was incentive for Elin to stay in the marriage for at least ten years for a bigger payoff should the marriage fail. I would think that would given Tiger the feeling that he was somewhat safe in “straying”…he knew his wife was bound by the pre-nup and that she would have financial incentive to stay. Now, he is increasing that incentive. Again, I ask, This is love?</p>
<p>purpleflurp - the pre nup is not to reward her, but to protect him. However, the money going up can protect her. The amount doesn’t go up as an incentive for her to stick around in a loveless marriage. The amount goes up because every year she is with him, she gets further away from being able to support herself and the amount she would be entitled to in a divorce goes up. Without the pre-nup she might have claim to half of whatever he brought in while they were together. I don’t know which state’s law would govern in this case since they own homes in several locations, but in a community property state, she could be entitled to $50m a year without the pre-nup. She doesn’t get more money with a pre-nup - she gets less.</p>
<p>Are you saying that the pre-nup served as a disincentive for Tiger to honor his marital commitment? In other words, he felt freer to go ahead and cheat on his wife because of it?</p>
<p>The typical middle-class marriage has a pretty high infidelity/break-up rate, and this can only be higher with the Tigers of the world because there are that many more people willing to go after him. So when Elin went into this marriage, she knew full well that there was a pretty good probability something like this would happen, and she probably felt that with the fame and fortune she was marrying into, it was worth the premium. </p>
<p>Now both have lawyers who are doing what is advantageous to their party - in her case making sure the fine she levies has a lot more zeroes than the one given by the FL police, and in his case not being left by a bitter woman who can further damage the image that he has messed up. So he remains a family main for a hundred mil, and she eats her pride and hangs on for a king’s ransom.</p>
<p>It is also just as likely that she went into the marriage believing that they would be different - that their love would defy the odds and that he really was the seemingly perfect, loyal, honorable guy that everyone thought he was. He may have even been that guy then. He may have been that guy until his father - his conscious - died. She may have had no inkling that he had a wandering eye and could have believed every lie he ever told. That happens - I know.</p>
<p>Wow, I didn’t know losing your dad was an excuse for misbehavior. My dad died a decade ago and I did nothing of the sort - I guess I blew my chance.</p>
<p>I think you know that I didn’t mean it was an excuse. I’m not so sure that Tiger’s relationship with his Dad wasn’t a bit pathological. Did he have many choices about anything while his Dad was alive? Maybe not. Armchair psychiatrist alert but enmeshment is very unhealthy and when you lose the person who was steering the ship, you just go off course. That is why we post on and on about letting kids go, not being helicopter parents, letting them find their wings - all those cliche things that hopefully lead to healthy relationships.</p>