So, I’m driving to work - la la la - and guess what comes on the morning radio show?
A case about men who have two different families - and they manage it by having separate identities.
So Mr. Joe Shmoe has a wifey here with a house and a car and kids, etc.
Then Mr. Joe Shmoe also happens to me Mr. Dipstick who has another wifey somewhere else with kids and car, etc.
A private investigation service was talking about the issue, saying that they have come across A LOT of these cases. The guy gave the stat that about 1/20 guys they investigate actually are doing this - how that translates to the national statistic, no one knows.
Most of the time, the speaker said, the wives have no clue about the other family.
So I came home and did some more investigation - on Google of course!
Found the following article, but I can’t find any other information about non-Mormon occurrences. The speaker was saying this is NOT limited to Mormons, and most of the cases he sees are just regular Americans.
**A form of polygamy that some polygamous families use to skirt the law is where the husband marries the first wife, she takes his last name, he divorces her and then marries the next wife who takes his name. [For polyandry relationships, it is the wife that marries and divorces the husbands one after another.] This repeated until he has married and divorced all his wives, except possibly the last one. This way the wives feel justified in calling themselves Mrs. [husband’s last name] and, while legally they’re divorced from the husband, they act still married to him and expect those around them to acknowledge and respect this. The one that stays married to the husband is usually the housewife (the one that doesn’t have a job, tends after the children still at home, cooks the family meals, cleans the house, and other normal housewife duties) of the polygamous family so she and her children can receive the husband’s health insurance coverage. The other wives getting their health insurance coverage from their employers. If all wives work and have health insurance from their employers, all wives may divorce the husband to be equal to each other. However, if all wives work and one of them loses their health insurance, they’ll legally marry the husband again to get covered by his health insurance. And if the husband loses his health insurance, he’ll marry the wife with the best coverage. It is also not uncommon for the husband to be a househusband and thus not work. However, unlike the before-mentioned housewife scenario, the househusband usually doesn’t do duties normally performed by a housewife but instead allocates his time to spend more time with each of his wives. In a “normal” househusband situation, the working wives may work different shifts and/or days to have the husband to themselves during their non-working hours when the other wives are working.
Until 2001, since only one wife is married to the husband at the any time, no law was being broken and so this type of polygamous family unit could be overt about their relationship. In 2001, Tom Green was convicted of polygamy in Utah for having 5 serially monogomous marriages, while living with previous wives. His cohabitation was considered evidence of a common-law marriage to the wives he had divorced while still living with them. Tom Green also married one of his wives when she was 13, when the minimum age for marriage for women was 14.**