CONS OF MARRIAGE
— "Conversation of clever men at clubs
— Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.
— to have the expense & anxiety of children
— perhaps quarelling
— Loss of time.
— cannot read in the Evenings
— fatness & idleness
— Anxiety & responsibility
— less money for books
— "Children — (if it Please God)
— Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one,
— object to be beloved & played with.
— better than a dog anyhow.
– Home, & someone to take care of house
— Charms of music & female chit-chat.
My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. […] Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps"
I'm always confused when I see people saying things like this, given what I've seen among my peers.
The benefit to marriage is having children. You've decided to have children, an irreversible decision that will bind you and your partner together forever, cost a six-figure sum, and have a huge impact on your lifestyle and finances. You may have to deal with substantial adversity - perhaps your child will be born with a severe disability - and you'll literally have to wipe someone else's ass. It may cost (you or) your partner her career, or even her life if things go wrong.
Given that, the decision to get married - which is very much reversible, and only costs a four- or low-five-figure sum - is trivial in comparison.
I thought there was no need for marriage, then I got married and it has totally been worth it, but not for any of the paper reasons above. Is it possible to have a relationship like mine without being married? I would say it would have to be, because how can a legal contract really improve your relationship that much? However, there’s something in the form of clarity, trust, and bonding that happens when you are married to your husband or wife that won’t be there before and doesn’t show up in pros and cons.
Not in PA. I've never seen a law that gives preferential treatment to married fathers vs unmarried fathers.
On the other hand, keeping hold of your assets and not assuming your partners debt puts you in a way better position to hire a lawyer and prove to the court that you have the means to provide for them.
> It can be useful for visas if you want to move abroad.
If you are in India and want to marry a US citizen for citizenship, that's a pretty big pro, however women rarely marry "down" like that so it won't apply to most men.
> There are some tax benefits.
Absolutely you can save a few percent on tax, in return for a fifty percent chance you lose half your assets.
If I had a son, hell no.
The oft-quoted 50% number is also questionable at best, see NYTimes [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-...
Also I’m not going to read a whole book to try to figure out what point you’re trying to make with your link.
Most men don’t fight for custody of their children in divorce. When they do they are almost always successful at getting at least joint custody. See e.g. WaPo [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/myths-about-custody-...
Maybe that used to be the case when divorce laws were written, but today I know very few marriages with the wife in a traditional role like that. The modern marriage has the home workload split equally and very often outsourced. Cleaning services, laundry services and food delivery are accessible and affordable while costing much less than the salary of a full time person doing those tasks and in no way worth paying for with half your assets.
So in divorce it comes down to earning potential vs spending habits. Earning potential for women is generally less than for men due to their preference for lower paying, humanist fields and their spending habits are generally higher.
That is why divorce proceedings are generally more profitable for women than the accrued assets of the single life.
> Most men don’t fight for custody of their children in divorce. When they do they are almost always successful at getting at least joint custody.
That is just not true. Couldn't read the paywalled Opinion article on WaPo but no judge will remove the mom from the kids life unless there are very good reasons (drugs etc) but they routinely consider monthly payments from men enough. Unproven allegations of abuse from the wife are often enough to remove the dad from the equation.
About 30% of married mothers don’t work outside the home, according to BLS statistics [1]. You may want to consider the possibility that the sample of people you know is very unrepresentative.
> The modern marriage has the home workload split equally and very often outsourced.
In “egalitarian” marriages where the husband and wife earn about the same amount of money, wives on average spend more than twice as much time on household chores and 40% more time on caregiving, according to Pew [2].
> Couldn't read the paywalled Opinion article on WaPo
It’s easy enough to get around the paywall to read the Opinion article from a law professor who specializes in child custody in divorce, but I guess you’d rather just continue to hold on your persecution complex.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1168961388/pew-earnings-gende...
So the great majority do. That actually confirms my world view. Of course my bubble is not representative, but it turns out that it formed the most probably correct opinion. Good enough for me.
> where the husband and wife earn about the same amount of money
So hard-working women (and they need to be hard-working in order to make as much as men who still have an advantage in the workplace) are also hard working at home. The article says that is only 29% of cases though.
> you’d rather just continue to hold on your persecution complex
You gave me a paywalled article. I gave you a whole free book which you dismissed summarily. Who'd rather hold onto their preconceived ideas then?
I do thank you for the other links, I learned some facts I did not know.
Yeah, because giving someone in a casual online conversation a whole book without even telling them what point they’re supposed to take from it is fucking stupid.
> Unlike child support, which is common when divorcing couple has kids, alimony awards have always been very rare, going from about 25 percent of cases in the 1960s to about 10 percent today, said Judith McMullen, a professor of law at Marquette University. In one study of Wisconsin cases, she found it was only 8.6 percent.
My worry if divorced would be splitting up my retirement savings. Alimony would probably be comparatively cheap.
Still, most people who get divorced probably have nothing to divide and no income to divert to the poorer spouse.
If you look at mid-to-high-income homes, I bet alimony goes up.
Because they want to? I really don't get this attitude of rationalizing everything in terms of pros vs cons. It just teaches people to disregard how they feel
Also interesting that when you give examples of pros and cons, you only give examples of them for you as an individual. If you were to take them for society at large, marriage would be a net positive
Considering why you want the things you want is also worth doing in itself. You might realize that you want them for reasons that are no longer valid, or because someone else wants you to want them, or any number of bad reasons. You might realize that you don't really care about something you thought you wanted.
>If you were to take them for society at large, marriage would be a net positive
Marrying "for society" is probably the dumbest possible reason, even dumber than "because my parents want me to".
How is wanting to make someone else happy a bad reason?
Sure, not everyone has your best intentions in mind. People don't sit around wanting to make scammers happy, normally it's those that they care about
So you want to? Good! But maybe go into that a bit. Figure out the "why". This is going to be super important within a marriage when you and your spouse disagree on something. Because then "I want to" isn't going to cut it. You need to explain more and figure out what inferences led to that "wanting to".
I also want to do tons of drugs every night. The reason I don't? A pros vs cops debate happening automatically in my brain. Even if you don't rationalize it, it still happens. And since it's there you may as well use it, even if sometimes ignoring it in the end.
Typo, or deliberate? Either way, it's beautifully apt.
That's a weird way to feel. Think about why you feel that way.
Perhaps, like women who historically were shamed for going outside of a prescribed gender role, you too are falling victim to gender roles that no longer really exist.
It's sad that getting the government involved in marriage has led to all those adverse incentives, but it's perfectly possible to get married without being married on paper to reduce those risks (although beware of common-law marriage). Since if someone really wants to spend their life with you and is committed to that, what they care about is you making that commitment to them, not ensuring the state will take your stuff and give it to them if you separate.
People with skin in the game behave differently. It’s not an adverse incentive. It’s incentive alignment, it’s the core value proposition of marriage.
If you care enough about someone to tell them you’re committed but not enough to let society actually enforce that commitment then by all means don’t get married.
It's only really the breadwinner commitment that gets enforced, the supported spouse suffers little consequence if they fail to maintain their end of the commitment.
Yep! And I still get half if I run off with the pool boy, so that seems fair.
> It's only really the breadwinner commitment that gets enforced, the supported spouse suffers little consequence if they fail to maintain their end of the commitment.
The “supported” spouse in most cases (especially if there are children) is performing significant amounts of unpaid labor. The fruits of that labor are generally intangible and do not accumulate, so the spouse can’t take them with them in the case of separation. This does not make that labor any less important than the labor of the “breadwinner.” It would be profoundly unjust to allow the “breadwinner” to accumulate and retain all the fruits of their labor, leaving the “supported” spouse with nothing for all their labor.
What if they don't? That isn't actually part of the deal legally speaking, they can just refuse to lift a finger to no consequence.
It's a lot easier to get rid of a layabout when you aren't married. If you get married you probably increase the probability they get lazy beacuse now you've limited your options and they know it.
Many of us are living this hell. It's too expensive to leave the lazy partner, and they know it. So you earn all the money, do 80% of the housework, and raise the children nearly yourself. They watch TikTok and Instagram all day, and your lawyer gives you an estimated price tag of well over a million dollars to escape.
So you make the rational choice to remain in hell until you die, being her personal pack mule forever.