I'm not up on American law(or most others to be fair) so you may have to explain this to me. From what I know it's only something paid until you're legally seperated/the marraige is dissolved, and from what I read there they're divorced, so for what reasons is he paying it anyway? Or is it due to grounds of it being backdated?
That's not how it works here at all. Originally, as others have noted, alimony was paid in recognition of the fact that most married women were full time stay-at-home parents, or even full time "homemakers," back in the days when household chores really required a lot of time and effort. Point being that in those days it was difficult for a woman to enter the workforce and earn anything beyond a subsistence income.
The phrase, "in the manner to which she has become accustomed" was commonly used in divorce settlements. The reasoning was that although women did not have all of the rights that men took for granted, the institution of marriage at least gave them the right to economic prosperity and the comforts of the social class that they were able to marry into. When you married a woman, they couldn't really make you "love, honor and cherish her till death do you part." But by the goddess, they could at least make you give her a home commensurate with
your income and social class "till death do you part." Once she'd gotten a bit older and showed the wear and tear of raising your children, you could go off and find a younger one who might overlook your own pot belly and wrinkles in order to share your wealth, but what was your poor ex-wife going to do with those same wrinkles and the same effects of gravity, but no job, or perhaps just a clerical job?
Alimony was instituted to protect wives from being thrown out of the lifestyle they had largely built, even if they hadn't financed it. As the gender gap narrowed, it became unremarkable for men to be awarded alimony if the roles were reversed. If a female movie star married a man with a more ordinary job, for example, she would have to pay him alominy after divorcing him, in order to continue living "in the manner to which he had become accustomed."
These days, with women faring better in the job market and many wives and mothers holding good jobs, alimony is considerably rarer. Men are required to pay child support, but if the wife was self-supporting before and during the marriage, he will usually not be required to pay alimony. Extreme cases of corporate presidents, popular entertainers, etc., are obviously the exception.
Judges periodically review and revise alimony agreements. If this woman, who is now a man, is able to set himself up in a successful, prosperous life, his alimony will be canceled. Unless the former husband is a multi-millionaire, of course. One envisions this sort of predicament befalling, say, David Bowie.
