I think this is a big thing, and one that in the end will ruin us as a society if we let it. There's something innately wrong about this constant rat-race I see in some friends where they effectively say "oh, there's something wrong with this partner that in my previous X relationships I didn't see before. let's go find another one". Modern communication methods (social media and dating apps in particular) have created a situation where you can constantly compare your partner to the rest of the world, while at the same time (theoretically, for most people I'd argue partner choice hasn't increased at all, or even decreased) widening the dating pool. The idea of commitment becomes... Alien, because it's so easy to just go and trade her in for a newer/better model, not realizing that we're all flawed in our own particular way and that part of a relationship is sticking with eachother and growing because of that.
Eventually, you start looking for the absolute best in every way, which is probably never going to exist
For me the significant markers of committed relationships were first moving in together, then perhaps buying a home together (in those places where that was still affordable), and then for those that wanted them and by far the most important having children together.
Many of my friends and family have gotten married along the way too but it never felt like a big deal because by the point they got married they'd already been together for several years. It was a nice opportunity for a celebration! But having children together seems the far greater commitment. Marriages may end but even if you split up you'll still be parents together.
I grew up in a far less religious society than the US so maybe this just reflects a different cultural background. The US has always been more religious than Europe while also having far higher rates of teen births and children living in single parent households. But US rates of religious identification and teen births have both been falling rapidly over the past couple of decades.
This. And ultimately having kids with this person is another ego-exposing (and hopefully ego busting - but that's not guaranteed) exercise that contemporary societies gave up trying with varying excuses ranging "economical" to "climate saving" reasons.
Being married has been awesome. Best decision I ever made.
Some days are hard, sure, but that's part of living with someone who is not you. We come out as better people in the end.
I know someone who was with their partner for years, and has been engaged for years more. I've come to the understanding they'll likely never actually marry. They appear to just want some negotiated commitment. Actual marriage appears to carry strings they're reluctant to accept. (Funds appear to be kept separate as well.)
A negotiated commitment takes a specific form (the terms of the negotiation) but a marriage defines a commitment to be committed. I've heard some folks of my generation say things like "we got divorced because we fell out of love", which sharply contrasts with my view of marriage and falls more in line with a standard committed relationship.
To me, a marriage is a commitment to consistently try to fall back in love and work through things, even at those points you might otherwise quit.
Granted, I'm a religious guy and my view on marriage is flavored from that perspective, but making the marriage official was certainly key to the commitment for me personally.
Interestingly, this is why I broke up with a fairly long term partner. I just wanted to do what I want when I wanted to do it. We didn't have any kids, so that was easy. But I lost a bunch of money from our shared house/possessions, I just let them have almost everything because I didn't care too much.
Maybe I did it in the wrong order, and if I spent decades doing what I wanted first, things would have been different. But right now, the ability to do what I want when I want is awesome and I couldn't be happier.
Probably, yes.
It's not this crowd you should be defending against - it's the profiteers. Extraction of profits has been elevated above everything else and I feel the social contract between industry and individuals has been violated. Salaries are depressed and everything is so expensive, people need to have worked-out a decent-paying career before they consider getting married and/or kids, so people are getting married later in life, or not getting married at all because the dating pool gets shallower with age.
The societal effects of over-extracting profits are ging to be catastrophic, but short-termism is now built-in.
In your model the causation is that profiteers caused the breakdown of marriage but we shouldn't confuse correlation with causation.
It's also plausible that the decline of marriage caused the preponderance of profiteers.
Indeed given the modern day 'profit above all else mentality' that seems to pervade many businesses thoughts these days, and the length of history of marriage, I'd say the latter is more likely.
As for dual income. I'm sorry I simply don't believe it. In my conservative Catholic circle in a high cost of living area, I'm seeing many families with almost a dozen kids where only dad is working (my wife and I included). Dad is not even a software engineer making high six figures. In many families the father's are totally normal incomes and we have a fair share of people making below average. Two incomes is a choice. There is no difference in average income between the two groups yet one has different values. One difference is the mother's are very productive amongst themselves getting things done economically.
Most people see being in a position of vulnerability with respect to another human being whom they trust as a wonderful thing, which gives them a great deal of every day happiness. You see this vulnerability as merely negative, a threat to your individualistic pursuit of wealth ("assets and income"). You have a right to live however you want, of course, but maybe consider the possibility that others are getting something valuable out of this that you've missed?
life is risk. marriage is a great way to de-risk many aspects of your life. 2x income for only 1.3x increased expenses. Easier debt/mortgage access. Support (financial/emotional) in case of illness or income loss.
>other person, who probably doesn't like me very much anyways
Marrying the right person is the key (hanging out with your best friend forever is cool), and that for sure is risky/not easy.
This feels like a straw man, or straw woman, as the case may be. Why would you even consider marrying someone who probably doesn't like you very much? And why would they consider marrying you?
(He says, fresh off watching the finale of Succession.)
Marriage is not for everyone because it requires dying to one's own self a bit. So it is not really a path to self actualisation. But is definitely a way of putting oneself in a position where one is no longer focused on one own's progress psychologically, emotionally, financially etc and others and their interests become more important.
So if you are looking at marriage as a way of improving oneself, you may be in for a reality shock. That may happen but it happens at some cost and isn't the point of getting married.
Does it sound masochistic? well, on the surface it does. But it is part of being a mature person for a large part of humanity and is often a hard path but there are others who have chosen celibacy - which may infact be even harder.
Having said that, having someone by your side who you genuinely care for and who cares for you and who you can grow old with is quite a treat.
(If you never could make a relationship work because you're lousy at relationships, that is more your failure. But if you're in the first paragraph, you're probably feeling that you're in the second, and you may not be.)
Some people don't value that and so, a life married would be a burden.
This seems like a bit of a false promise... Once you commingle finances, own a house together, have children, and so on, there's no "easy escape hatch." Plus thinking of having an "easy escape hatch" probably does not do wonders for the relationship.
A large percentage of divorces are due to financial disagreements... joint accounts have proven to be a failed model at scale. If you want to share money, have separate accounts and transfer money between them as needed/on a schedule. No room for impropriety/mistrust. Everybody has autonomy.
If we choose to be realistic, rather than idealistic, we would recognize that a large percentages of marriages fail, and people should not structure their lives in such a way that the end of a relationship is catastrophic (beyond the obvious emotional burden).
Because it's simple and easy? I trust my partner; she trusts me; we discuss expenses beyond some fuzzy threshold that we both seem to understand intuitively.
The alternative seems to require spreadsheets. Who pays for the kid's daycare? Who pays what percentage of the mortgage, and what ownership stake does that represent? What if someone's income goes dramatically up, or dramatically down?
It sounds exhausting.
What does this even mean, how do you "at scale" something between two people?
My wife and I have a joint account, all money goes in, things for the family come out of it, we get allowances out for our personal things. If one of us spends the money on our personal things without consulting the other, then that person values X over the family, QED.
I think you might be implying that "family values have failed at scale" but that's a different, cultural thing, that is probably tied to a lot of different factors especially media. It's not that family values themselves are bad.
Stay at home moms which take care of multiple children full time typically do not earn an income
That's putting it delicately.
Quite a number of judges have straight out ruled that prenuptial agreements are not binding making this a free for all. The resulting judicial caused disaster often is what's catastrophic as opportunism shines through.
Been married 25 years with a joint account and no prenup; wouldn’t want it any other way. Life is too short to worry about things like this and personally I would find it a sign of mistrust so it wouldn’t work in the first place.
If you have children I'm not sure how you can avoid this. You have to share the care of the kids. One of you is going to take a hit in your earnings. Be that in extra sick days or for her the maternity leave. I don't think you can account for the work sharing evenly, so I don't think it's fair to try and account for the financial sharing.
Because you have to in order to cohabitate? Just because two people do not use a joint account does not mean they both are not incurring shared expenses, i.e. commingling finances.
Rent/mortgage/property tax/home insurance/food/energy/kids/etc.
This ruins the child
I actually totally disagree with this. The difference between “I’m in this relationship because I love this person but also I have to be for my visa/finances/friendships” and “I’m in this relationship because I love this person and I can leave tomorrow if I want to” for me has been night and day.
Neither my partner nor I is reliant on our relationship for good quality of life. There’s nothing stopping one of us from leaving, and I feel that this actually raises the stakes in a healthy way. It doesn’t mean that when challenges come up we bail on the other, if anything it makes them less stressful because we know the other clearly has a vested interest in sorting the problem since they could just bail. Of course children would change this dynamic.
Think of it this way: would you be more comfortable in a good job but one which you could be laid off and lose your visa sponsorship and have to upend your life suddenly or scramble for any job, or one in a country where you have the right to live and could find a similar job if you get laid off but take the time to find the right role? If compensation and conditions are similar, I imagine most would prefer the latter.
"I'd much rather have absolutely no legal rights if this shit goes tits up, I'd hate to have any sort of legal framework around dividing our assets!"
As for the easy escape hatch...a marriage is as simple to dissolve as the parties make it. An acrimonious common-law relationship (if your jurisdiction has such things) is easily as complicated to end as a traditional marriage.
Well if the only (or main) reason to stay together is because someone is married and that makes things complicated then the relationship is already in trouble.
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/television/2011/03/11/...
E: Consider https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/01/15/for-most-...
Marriage is a complex and binding contract that for two high earners is a tax disadvantage. The most prominent benefits I’ve learned are some situations around visitation rights, and avoiding being compelled to testify against your spouse. It comes from a very dubious history of the husband essentially owning the wife. The “commitment” of the legal marriage obviously doesn’t prevent people from falling out of love or breaking up, not that it should – if one partner stops loving another they will still leave the relationship one way or another. So, why marry — besides “tradition” and “society wants you to for whatever reason”?
Depending on your location you might already be married in a common law marriage.
Generally, where common law or informal marriage is recognized at all, it requires both shared intent to marry and publicly presenting as married. I know I’ve seen fiction where it requires little more than cohabitation, but that’s not a real thing.
In the cases of "never married", their happiness level approached that of married people in the last 10-15 years. Whereas divorced people were absolutely miserable, especially in the first few years following the separation.
This suggests that it's the divorcees who bring down the average happiness level of the "single" group, not that "marriage" brings up the happiness levels.
Presumably Married people at that stage are there because they work together not because there's just someone else there.
It could also be that people who are generally happier tend to be those to get/stay married.
I also wonder if there is some sunk cost psychology involved when surveying those later in life.
As for benefits that don't matter so much I count things like societal approval, "doing what my parents always wanted", etc. Which matter for some, but certainly not for all.
But the wet roads didn't cause the rain.
How many people are going to choose to have a mid/late-life crisis because a survey made them wonder if they were truly happy with their huge, life-changing and nearly irreversible decision to be married?
I also appreciate how I have a partner against this world, legally and emotionally.
For example, if you die, in marriage the house easily passes to your partner. Otherwise, it may go to next-of-kin.
Also divorce offers a structured way to manage ownership after a break-up.
I am not particularly fond of our marriage system, but LGBTQ fought for marriage rights for a reason.
We both have wills, which deals with with the probate issue of our ownership shares. You should have a will, even if you’re married! Probate can be expensive for your successors and family, and the process without a will is much more involved with the state. I also recommend establishing a revocable trust for these reasons.
I think the idea of a legal structured process for other belongings in event of a break-up sounds appealing in some regards, but reviews from friends who have been through the process rate it at “0 out of 10 this SUCKS” and “now I owe alimony for the rest of my life-ish because my ex decided to quit their job and become a grad student before we split”. In any event if we break up acrimoniously, we can still hire lawyers…
"But here, in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn't easy. You may ask 'Why do we stay up there if it's so dangerous?' Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: tradition!"
Seems like something folks would care about? It's adjacent to the "When I die, who gets my stuff?" part of the marriage contract which I remain convinced is the real reason governments need to be involved with marriage contracts. I also know a lot of folks who would rather their S.O. make medical decisions for them if they're debilitated than, say a sibling (especially if they're estranged).
But yeah, this doesn't explicitly prevent you from assigning power of attorney to an unmarried partner, of course.
You can file separately.
"Two high earners" is not a meaningful description. Two people each earning $500K is far different than one earning $300K and one earning $700K.
What if three people cohabitate for an extended period? Are they all married to each other?
It's not because we are afraid of commitment, like this flimsy article suggests. We simply don't care about the symbolic ritual.
I just wanted to note that, depending on the state, the corollary can also apply; If you say you're not married, then you're not married. The more witnesses of both parties clearly stating this, the better.
I'm referring to states where common-law marriage potentially kicks in just by living together long enough.
In Dutch that is just "man" en "vrouw", i.e. man and woman. For spouse they use either "partner" or "echtgenoot", only the latter of which implies marriage.
That took an unexpected, refreshing, turn.
It seems to me that the legal system around marriage is outdated and flawed compared to societal norms today. Marriage licenses are cheap, easy, and quick to get. That's not necessarily a problem on it's own. Then you have a large number of marriages that end in divorce - a process that typically costs as much as each party buying a car, and takes months or years to complete. It's never truly over as I've heard stories of people seeking amended alimony years after the divorce. It seems many of the decisions maid by the courts in this realm are absurd (like the lady who was forced to pay for her husband's "lifestyle" or watching PPV porn; or not amending monetary obligations when income changes).
It truly baffles me how alimony is even legal today. Based on how alimony is treated, marriage is essentially indentured servitude. If any company offered terms that are typically found in marriage/divorce without any disclosure/consult, they'd be getting sued by AGs.
People talk about the student loan epidemic/issues, but I feel that this one is much larger and more costly.
The US has no guaranteed parental leave. If you have a kid and want one parent to spend any significant time with that kid, someone is sacrificing their career advancement. This usually hits women harder.
If you want to see the end of alimony, you’d need to make it easier to choose to have kids. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be a priority in the US.
This seems to be the case in every “developed” country
Society turns into a work machine that devalues having and raising kids
The US is particularly bad, but this is happening everywhere
Even if we accept what you're saying, that still doesn't address why this should be legal. You even say "want", so it is a choice. There's absolutely no reason that an able-bodied person of sound mind can't support themself. The state forcing another person to pay for that person's higher standard of living is absurd.
It's also essential in places where having a child severely decreases your chances of making a career for yourself. Think places where there's no guaranteed parental leave, or where there's only one parent who gets parental leave (making them much less desirable for employers).
There are plenty of cases where these restrictions aren't relevant (i.e. same sex partners (no gender discrimination) without children (no childcare obligations) both making careers), but those cases are a small minority of all the marriages that break up.
I agree that the way many alimony laws work is outdated, but they vary wildly and are there for good reason.
There are many cultures in the US. They way you describe it seems very old fashioned, which is not that common these days.
I'd rather see alimony removed. If you do that, people will choose arrangements that better suit them. If you leave this archaic system in place, it will promote less efficient decisions and continue to pose the other problems in the asymmetrical relationship you describe.
Isn't that the nature of the beast? When you get married everything is easy; you're happy and cooperating. When you're getting divorced you're upset and fighting.
If everything was ended amicably without lawyers you'd only be out a few hundred bucks.
But that's not even possible. Even the people I've known who split amicably still required lawyers. This goes back to the asymmetrical legal aspects of getting married vs dissolving one. You don't need to draw up a contract, disclose assets, or anything when getting married. You just adopt the standard contract as defined by the government. When divorcing, you are required to disclose assets, have property assessed, you need to split up the assets, and work out child care/cost details. You could likely work out a lot of this, but in general you still need a lawyer to make sure the agreement checks all the legal boxes. Then the state needs to approve it. Even if both parties agree, the state may not allow you to make certain agreements if they don't like it, or they think it's no longer fair (prenup). There are even law firms that offer amicable divorce services - they still cost thousands of dollars.
Even if you could file yourself, it costs about 10x the cost to get a marriage license.
Sometimes I wish there were pre-child counseling focused on helping parents strategize before they're pregnant -- or at least before children are born.
Regardless, folks need to do the math, especially if considering having many kids. And still consider their bodies aren't getting any younger or lives and longer.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/11/06/why-peo...
"Living Apart Together", or "LAT":
I’ve been with my wife for 13 years now, and married for 8. It’s been an awesome experience for us, but I know neither of us considered marrying any of our previous partners. If we hadn’t found each other, I’m not sure I’d be married at this point. Marriage in and of itself should probably not be a goal. It’s contingent on finding someone who you really want to be married to.
Having kids is the same way. It shouldn’t be the default, it should be the thing you do when you truly feel it would add value and meaning to your life, and be worth the tradeoffs you’re making. I hope that society moves more in the direction that both marriage and having children is something that you can choose to do, or not, and there’s not an implicit judgement on you for failing to meet norms that honestly don’t work out for the majority of people.
I don't know where things stand now, but there was a similar pressure in Appalachia ~15 years ago. If you'd been out of high school more than a couple of years and hadn't gotten married or at minimum found someone you'd intended to marry, people would start asking if you were closeted or something, which seemed crazy to me — how on earth could I possibly find it a good idea to get married before I'd even had a chance to get some clue about how to function as an adult or figure out who I was?
A lot of people succumb to that pressure. I think out of everybody in my class and the classes both before and after me I'm the only one who wasn't at least engaged by age 22.
I perceive the big event as the opposite of something healthy. The need for a legal thing is resolved in Canada: if you live together for 1 year, that's basically equivalent to being married.
I have been living with my partner for 13 years (I'm 34), we both work from home so that's some 24 x 365 x 13 hours together. I occasionally ask her to marry me, for fun, and she says yes. At times she says maybe to joke. But really after living together for that long, does that even matter?
So there you go, another reason to never marry
We have two children.
I like marriage as a ceremonial recognition of a thing that's already happened better than the maligning a commitment version.
FYI she’s not joking, you should surprise her and do it.
We also didn't want to deal with the additional cost of being married but not being citizens yet of the country we would marry in (we are now citizens though).
Certainly, they were right.
Much of the value of marriage is to enhance the child's claim to both parents' wealth and income. If married, it's much harder for one partner to tap out of parenting, in financial terms
Child support can be determined independently from being married. Whether one is married or not has no bearing on one's financial obligations to children, to my knowledge.
I have trouble taking anything in this genre by an American seriously unless it clearly communicates the definitions it is using.
There are other reasons why Americans might become less likely to choose one legal form for their marriage, like an American friend of the right-libertarian persuasion who does not just object to marriage, he objects that the laws of his state declare that he and his long-term, live-in partner have various obligations to each other which they have not explicitly contracted. OTOH there is the daft way healthcare works in the USA which can create incentives to use a particular legal form.
Why get married? Typically there’s a wedding. That’s a ceremony involving you, your partner, both partners’ family and friends, and a religious and/or civic authority. You’re throwing a big party saying “we are committed to each other”.
When you’re very religious, this is required to become partnered and accepted as an adult in the community.
When you’re not religious, this is an incredibly expensive way of getting a bunch of other people involved in your relationship, which has a 50/50 chance of ending despite the life vows.
For some it might be beautiful. For others, there’s just no real point to it.
Personally, I’d be interested in a ceremony celebrating a commitment to cohabitation and partnership that sheds the baggage of a wedding and marriage. Something like a domestic partnership housewarming party.
This is the real logic that explains why we never got married. Why spend the money on it? People here say 'think about the people in your life' - but for me, that gets a shoulder shrug. I'd see my parents the same amount, I see other relatives an appropriate amount, I see my friends when I want; frankly I'd rather save the money and spare myself the hassle.
Now you could say "you could go to the courthouse" but, again, shoulder shrug. We could also not, which takes less effort.
So we never got married. Simple as that.
Especially if it didn't involve renting a venue, 25% mark ups, hurt feelings from non-invited folks, decades of expectation building, and an industrial complex focused on money extraction.
Generally, a collapse is considered a bad thing. Surely for those underneath or on top of the thing that is collapsing.
Sure, people can get married without choosing to have children. There's just way less on the line. Divorce is much easier. Just split the assets and move on. No need to worry about custody issues, where the child will live, all the relatives that have a relationship with the child, etc.
Also, if civil marriages didn't exist today and I tried to propose "hey, let's invent a system where you register who you're fucking with the government", you'd think i was insane. Rightly so.
I don't think so at all.
In general, society (ours, and afaict all others too) has a vested interest in the formation and preservation of family units. This seems pretty obvious to me, for various economic, cultural and moral reasons.
If we're going for personal experiences, I've known and been in multiple polycules and I can't say there's been any more drama than in mono land. Having multiple concurrent sex partners doesn't mean they're not relationships; I sleep with a lot of people ranging from my partner who I've lived with for 7 years to someone who is a hiking friend I met last spring, but they're still relationships. With full respect, your comment sounds like someone who has only external observation with the poly community/experience - i.e. the IT department phenomenon, you only get noticed the few times something is going wrong and are invisible when the ship is sailing smoothly the rest of the time.
But again this is all beside the point, being part of a "rounding error" is not comforting at all to me or providing equal human rights.
For all the usual reasons, they thought it was unacceptable to be single, both to society and to themselves. For the latter, it was the feeling, "I'm a loser whom nobody wants." In many societies, it IS almost unacceptable to be single. Thankfully that's less so in Western societies these days.
I'm not saying that's the only reason, but if we're looking at the big picture, that's a huge part of it.
Sometimes we say husband and wife just to simplify the conversation.
Also congrats on building a relationship that has lasted.
The other side is simply economic - getting married and raising a family is an expensive proposition that many people (at least in the United States) can no longer afford, and there's no real social safety net that ensures medical care and quality education for low-income families - so raising a family in poverty is not an attractive proposition. There's also good evidence that birth rates track economic recessions pretty closely:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/04/06/us-birt...
This economic factor seems universal, as the high cost of housing in China is associated with a decreased marriage rate (although unequal numbers of men and women related to the now-defunct One Child policy is another issue):
Consider me pleasantly surprised.
I'm an immigrant to Asia, so got my life in reasonable order a bit later than most (picking up and moving across the world will do that). Early marriage in a culture I didn't fit in to yet, would have been a terrible idea. I hear lots of disaster stories in this domain!
We decided to ignore local cultural norms and share a residence before marriage. This was in hindsight a wise decision that let us build a life together in confidence.
I had my immigration paperwork properly in order before we met, but had not yet made any real money. We were both pretty broke, at the time. We held separate finances at the start, but shared expenses, which improved our financial security quite a bit.
Honestly, we would have continued this way and ignored pressure to get married... except that it's somewhat difficult for me to gain citizenship. Without citizenship, no land/home ownership or access to many financial instruments -- so it's optimal that I hand over 100% of any income. Marriage provides me with at least a few rights in this context (at least de jure), so we went for it.
It was simply the least suboptimal choice. I feel if it wasn't for the weird legal context of being an immigrant to a country that receives few immigrants (Vietnam), we may not have bothered getting married, social pressures be damned.
The contract of marriage makes this easier than I imagine it would be without it.
If anyone is thinking about marriage, or troubled by this article, I strongly encourage he/she to really study what marriage meant for prior civilizations. Our society encourages people to accept modern marriage as an eternal, teleological, essential and inviolable constant of society. Imo today's US marriage is a poorly developed, haphazard, and soon-to-be obsolete layer cake of ideas which does a lot of harm.
Anything which isn't working for 50% of people, and which decimates family wealth when it fails, probably deserves critical thought.
The promised miracle spouse of modern marriage, who is your business partner, sexual fulfillment, therapist, childcare specialist, etc. etc. DOESN'T EXIST.
We didn’t do a big (or any) wedding, buy expensive rings, etc
But I guess we were already “committed” to each other in the intellectual / spiritual sense so marriage was just a formality. The whole “escape hatch” thing didn’t really apply, we just don’t give a shit about the institution of marriage and associated ceremony
This new “society provides most services” favours being single with one other person (and maybe one child).
Being married and having children is more suited for older days when society provided almost no security and protection from economic and natural realities.
Rest of the article suggests "financially independent" as working a job to support oneself. Though I wonder if a significant portion of their clientele are wealthy enough to not work or only work a small portion of the year. When I was single and made enough to live alone it actually increased my desire to seek a partner, not necessarily get an official marriage document.
Modern marriage makes you concentrate all that emotional energy on one person. It’s a lot.
It used to be that more social opportunities, status and privilege were afforded to married people.
The prevailing culture cares less about this signal. Or rather - there’s less of a prevailing culture than there used to be.
