What sounds exhausting is having so many expenses.

Childcare: family/friends/old lady at church whose kids have moved out long ago.

Mortgage: your tenants. Ownership stake? 50/50 profit-sharing split on sale. Don't finance a depreciating asset that doesn't generate a lick of cashflow.

Oh man, you solved child care! How incredibly brilliant and clearly obtainable and available to anyone with kids! What genius, what grace! I bow before your compassionate and well reasoned suggestions!

Until your partner decides one day that they no longer are going to abide by that trust and find someone else, raid the joint account, the investments, and sell things right from under you which they are allowed to do with no repercussions due to the marriage according to the government and on top of it disappear with the children. Trust me from experience. You may think you know someone until they up and change on you overnight. Marriage is a sham in the U.S. which favors women in so many ways that men should seriously consider the true cost/benefit of even getting into that contract in the first place.

I am 50 and I have never met anyone who had this actually happen. I have seen messy divorces, but money was never stolen like that and the change was never overnight (everyone of their friends saw it coming, every time, usually since day one, but it’s pointless to warn people in love… and after that usually kids).

Then again, I don’t live in the US; people here (or maybe it’s just my circle) are less pre occupied with money and lawsuits. Even the most messy divorces I know of from my friends didn’t need lawyers.

Count your friends and loved ones lucky in that sense. It certainly happened to me and am still recovering from it 2 years later.

The mixing of finances can be traced back to coverture where the wife lost legal personhood upon marriage. In that case the wife was not able to own property in her own name.

This doctrine developed into the various marital property laws we have today. Of course the wife no longer loses legal personhood, but the married couple itself still retains a kind of legal personhood, a couple can own property jointly, and when the marriage is dissolved the marital property needs to be redistributed back to the “shareholders” by a court.

At the same time, another change was happening: the cultural acceptance of divorce. While not so long ago, divorce was unthinkable for most, in modern times it’s completely normal.

So the law of marital property has developed based upon a model of lifelong marriage, whereas culture has embraced divorce and remarriage.

There is another culture that has a cultural acceptance of divorce and that’s the Arabs. But because they developed their marital property law afterwards, with the prospect of divorce and remarriage built in, it turned out in a completely different way. Instead of viewing the married couple as a single legal person (i.e. marriage as a corporation), they viewed the couple as individuals with a contractural arrangement, forbidden to interfere with each other’s property.

This is a great overview of the out of sync cultural shifts in the Western World, particularly the U.S. I wasn't aware of cultural norms around marriage in the Middle East. I'll be sure to read more on it.

Sign a pre-nup

This is the best advice now considering how brutal divorce can be. If someone says they aren't about money then you can find the truth out very quickly by making that expectation clear.

absolutely, if you trust and love each other then this is just a formality for the reasons you stated, generally speaking. If not, it's an escape hatch from financial ruin.