7 ms·

I am not married, and I am in my twenties, and I don't get why people are signing a contract with high termination fees just so they can compromise on everythin

by fosk 9y ago

I am not married, and I am in my twenties, and I don't get why people are signing a contract with high termination fees just so they can compromise on everything for the next 4 decades. Somebody please enlighten me, why are we still stuck with this 2000yrs old tribal behavior instead of moving on with a more modern approach? Edit: controversial arguments come with downvotes, but I'd really like to know your opinion on this.

jonahx 9y ago
Not sure why you're getting downvoted -- it's a perfectly reasonable question. The two biggest reasons are: people like security and intimacy; and they want to raise a family with someone. You can argue that you don't need marriage for those things, and technically you don't, but whatever alternative you land on (especially for raising a family) will likely be effectively identical to marriage in practice. You can opt out of family and long-term relationships altogether, but you'll be missing out on a central part of the human experience. If the "early termination fees" are your biggest concern, find someone with similar views and get a prenup. Or just stay together without officially getting married. You'll lose tax benefits, but if it's important to you go for it. If that didn't answer the question you intended to ask, you'll need to clarify what you meant by a more modern approach. What are you imagining that looks like?
- fosk 9y ago
  I tried to answer to your question here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15179002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15179002
smelterdemon 9y ago
If you're looking for a purely financial reason, tax benefits and better insurance rates.
twothamendment 9y ago
I'm happy to be stuck with my wife for the next 4 decades and have more than one to look back at. When you find the right person, it isn't much of a compromise. I'm curious - what is the more "modern approach"? No commitment, no family?
- Balgair 9y ago
  Correct. Yes, I compromise with her, but it is because I love her and she is usually right and she comes at the problems loving me. We all have blind spots, and she knows mine pretty well by now. Together, we are much much stronger than apart. I can't live without her at this point, I would be 'myself', with the same body and memories, but I would not be me. It's like The Doctor when he re-gens. He has all the same memories, but he is totally different. Without my wife, I would be 'dead' in that way too. I wouldn't want to be with anyone else at this point, she and I have created a world and life together and I love her more everyday.
  - fosk 9y ago
    Correct me if I am wrong, you could still love her, and do all the things you do, and keep supporting each other just with the power of your love without grabbing a pen and signing a piece of paper. I am not arguing against long-term relationship or against honest and true love, I am arguing against the actual marriage practice.
    - spookthesunset 9y ago
      You are gonna get something that looks awfully close to a marriage over long enough of a term. Why not just go for marriage?
    - Balgair 9y ago
      If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, you may need some stale bread to feed it, not a sirloin. What's the big deal with signing a piece of paper and having a really awesome party with all your family and friends? I don't get the adversity to the marriage 'practice' (not a bad word choice either, as you do have to practice it everyday).
    - amag 9y ago
      It sounds like you agree with the concept but disagree with its name.. All relationships have their ups-and-downs, and there may come a time when the only thing holding it together is a promise that was made in front of other people. You may think that's a bad reason to stay together, but the fact is that that (bad) time will most likely pass and if you're still together you may very well find your way back to each other. I know my own marriage has sometimes hung by not much more than that and then we've found our way back. Of course if a promise you make means very little to you, then so will marriage.
pentae 9y ago
I believe it's because as you get older, the 'single life' becomes less interesting, less rewarding and culturally less acceptable.
- rl3 9y ago
  Largely because of biological aging, especially on that last point. Relationships will be interesting once aging is no longer a concern. I suspect it will be common for most marriages to have a natural duration that's planned for up front.
  - majormajor 9y ago
    > Relationships will be interesting once aging is no longer a concern. I suspect it will be common for most marriages to have a natural duration that's planned for up front. I disagree. If people live longer with less physical aging then I'm even less interested in repeating tedious 20s-style hookups and first-dates/first-year-of-dating experiences in the future.
Jemmeh 9y ago
Just legally speaking there's benefits: taxes, you can be on your spouse's health insurance, can visit them in the hospital, investments/inheritance, social security benefits, etc. I could definitely make an argument that a lot of those benefits could be done away with though. For example different methods of taxing people, healthcare not being tied to people's jobs/universal healthcare, etc.
- fosk 9y ago
  This is correct. Why can't we, as a society, move away from marriage as it is today but still implement rights between two individuals who love each other in a different, more modern, way?
  - grzm 9y ago
    Define your goal. In this case what exactly is meant by "different, more modern way"? How is the better than the current situation? How is it worse? How do we get there from here? Also note that marriage today isn't the same globally, nor is it the same as it was 2000 years ago. It does and is changing.
    - fosk 9y ago
      My goal is having two individuals loving each other, protected during their relationships with some rights (ie, if she/he is injured at the hospital I am recognized the right to go see her/him), that are able to move away freely from each other without feeling stuck in a contract. Some of this couples will last forever, some will realize they are not meant for each other and they can walk away without ruining their or their partner's life. Maybe some of them will ultimately be more happy with their lives and meet other people who they really love. The current legal form of marriage formalizes love in a contract that doesn't take into account the fact that love can disappears one day for no reason, but assumes marriage is here to stay. Or to be more accurate, it does take that into account with a very expensive trigger called "divorce". Therefore the divorce is putting a price to my lack of love, and makes the decision to quit harder. By doing so the decision of staying together, which should be governed by love, is determined by cost, effectively negating the whole purpose of a marriage. Unless it's purpose keeping two individuals together no matter what, even if there's no love. Maybe it made sense in the medieval era, not in our century.
solotronics 9y ago
there are health benefits to having a dedicated partner as well, life expectancy improves
isoprophlex 9y ago
Because once your brain matures and you have faced your own mortality, some people realize its not a matter of compromising or sheepishly following tribal behaviour. It actually makes sense to some. For me, it's a way to facilitate spending the limited amount of time I get on this planet: by being with my family. Marriage is a nice, acceptable institution to facilitate family life. Upsides are the ring, the party, taxes, no legal bs when having kids and the ease of buying a house. I've yet to find a downside... Prerequisites are the conviction that your SO is the one you want to be with for a long time, without exception.
- Jagerbizzle 9y ago
  In many cases, you pay a tax penalty for getting married. My girlfriend and I, who own a home together, would pay roughly $7000 a year more in taxes were we to get married. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty
gyardley 9y ago
You know how sometimes when you're looking at an old codebase, where all the developers who've written it have moved on to other jobs, you see a little bit of code that doesn't seem to make sense? And then you remove that code, and then and only then do you find out exactly why it was there in the first place - usually in a rather painful way? Well, things like marriage are the societal equivalent of that bit of old code. We're 'stuck' with it because (for the vast majority of people, anyway) it serves a useful purpose, one that only becomes apparent when you go without it. That's not to say we can't and shouldn't change the institution - it not like it hasn't been evolving over the centuries - but it'd be wiser to make changes cautiously, experimentally, and locally rather than just 'moving on' as a society.
Glyptodon 9y ago
There are many many efficiencies that come with having partners of various kinds. Partners are like a RAID array for your everyday life problems: get sick? They help cover the bases while a rebuild happens. Need someone to be home over a couple days because of a plumber or something? Now you each only need to miss half as much work. Need to pick something up from the store on your way home? Maybe they need something too and the number of shopping detours taken is reduced by half. Likewise, partners enable a bit of task specialization. Maybe one of you really knows real estate and the other is great at finding bargains, or managing retirement assets, or any other number of such things: you both get the result of the better partner's ability in each domain. Marriage is a form of attempting to guarantee that one always has a beneficial partner. Though hopefully they're also a best friend who you enjoy being around and doing stuff with and not just a highly capable android sitting around to help make your life more efficient. I'm not entirely sure what makes it something to be "stuck in" or all about (negative) compromises.
- KekDemaga 9y ago
  For me it always seemed like a business deal. You decide to become partners with someone and invest in each others success. My wife for example bought me books on programming early in our relationship, now that I have applied those skills and got a job in the field the extra money I bring home benefits us both. She is rightfully entitled to some of that ROI should I leave her because she did a lot of the initial investment, a legal marriage only formalizes that agreement and encourages it.
brightball 9y ago
Well... > A contract with high termination fees Not sure people who are getting married generally see it that way. There are certainly the segment of people out there who view marriage as the thing you do after dating, but there are others who legitimately see it as wanting to spend your life with someone and maybe have kids of your own. When you make that kind of a commitment and mean it, it's not a contract with termination fees. It's a promise. From that point forward you are doing what's best for your family and not just you...not because you have to compromise on everything but because you love your family and you want what's best for them. It's not so much a matter of being agreeable as a matter of putting your family before yourself.
samlevine 9y ago
It's the best way to raise socially and economically successful children in the modern era. It has a good side effect of giving otherwise ineligible bachelors the ability to form families and thus do something other than die in wars and commit crime, but I don't think this drives individuals to marriage.
humanrebar 9y ago
> ...I don't get why people are signing a contract with high termination fees just so they can compromise on everything for the next 4 decades There are lots of replies about how the spouses benefit from marriage, so I'll add a new reason: children, especially "oops" babies. About half of all pregnancies are unplanned, regardless of marital status. It's honorable to explicitly define the relationship so the current and future beings affected by a sexual relationship are well cared for. Because of economies of scale, the most efficient way to care for a family is under one roof. There are direct reasons why the poverty level of kids is directly related to the marital status of their biological parents. The legal contract and the social contract (wedding vows in front of all your favorite people) are ways to ensure the definition of the relationship is enforced by all prudent means. Of course, you could have sex hundreds and thousands of times during your fertile years hoping that a baby doesn't happen. And you could just get married once a birth is imminent. But over the millennia, most cultures have found that an already established marriage is the best place for a pregnancy. Anyway, I want nothing but the best for all the single-parent and divorced families out there, but it's not empirically controversial to claim that kids born to stably married couples have the best outcomes.
- cerberusss 9y ago
  To me as a N/W-European, it feel strange to hear you link marriage and obligations to children. Under Dutch law, your obligations to children do not change with marital status.
- XorNot 9y ago
  Including marriage in this explanation implies the wrong causative effect though. "Stably married" just means a stable relationship. Whether you have a ceremony or not is not a causative predictor of a stable relationship.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    That sounds like an empirical claim. Do you have any evidence to back that up? The evidence in the other direction showing marital status is linked with child poverty is pretty clear. Census data shows that poverty rates are five times higher for children of single mothers (1). Maybe the mechanism isn't clear or something, but the data is stark enough to deserve an explanation about why marital status isn't important to kids. (1) http://educationnext.org/files/ednext_XV_2_mclanahan_fig04.jpg http://educationnext.org/files/ednext_XV_2_mclanahan_fig04.j...
ttcbj 9y ago
When I was in my twenties, I didn't think marriage sounded that great either. I am 42 now and love being married. Here are a few thoughts: * I really understood the desire to marry when I found someone who was right for me. My wife and I are highly compatible. It is great having a teammate in life. I had many relationships which were good, but didn't rise to this standard. All the time, I think about how much I respect and value her. * I value stability for my children. I love my children more than I could ever have anticipated, and the home we create for them matters a lot to me. Also, there is no one else who understands your parenting project the way your spouse does. * My wife and I laugh a lot together, usually just before we fall asleep or just after we wake up. The intimacy and comfort is fun. * For me, I didn't like the idea of marriage until I was ready for it. What I mean is that when I was young I wanted to work all the time, and I felt poor and was constantly worried about money. By the time I met my wife, I had had enough career success, and had enough savings, that I was ready to be really generous without feeling stressed about it. I mean generous in the broadest sense: with my time, with my emotional security, with my financial resources. Marriage seemed more threatening or risky before I got to that point. * The 'contract' is negotiable - we have a prenup. That said, I don't ever expect it to have any meaning for us, but don't get hung up on that. I could name a lot more reasons, but those are the main ones that come to mind. My advice is: Keep trying to meet a lot of people. Eventually, you will meet one who after a year or two makes you say "If I could lock this situation in, I would be ecstatic," and she will feel the same way. Then, marry her! The day I got married, I couldn't believe my luck. Many years later, I feel far more lucky than I did the first day. Also, I love this essay on marriage: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/slates_10th_anniversary/2006/06/watching_the_couples_go_by.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/slates_10th_...
logfromblammo 9y ago
As someone who has been married for 14 years, I heartily encourage you to attempt a more modern approach with whomever you may be able to convince to try it with you. I was a big fan of the subplot of The Office (US) where Dwight and Angela drew up, negotiated, and signed a procreation contract. The real problem is not defining your personal relationships as you see fit, but in getting the government to recognize that you should have the power to do so. Some politicians are very keen on defining marriage in a particular way, as though it would stop certain forms of relationship from existing, when in reality it just denies to some people the ancillary rights that others freely enjoy by default. As long as you don't mind the legal discrimination against you, there is no reason for you to get married in the traditional, legally recognized sense. But an awful lot of people like the benefits available only to married couples, which are largely unavailable to those in some other kind of family partnership. The advice I give to all young people is to never get married, ever. But at some point, many of them will discover seemingly sound reasons to discard my advice, and will do it anyway.
31h 9y ago
why are we still stuck with this 2000yrs old tribal behavior instead of moving on with a more modern approach? There was a time when our ancestors became monogamous, and before that they weren't. So how do you consider non-monogamy more "modern"?
majormajor 9y ago
What do you propose as your more modern approach? Probably two reasons for downvotes: This seems like stereotypical naivety-driven "everything is broken why doesn't everyone else see it" youth angst without any propositions for things to make people better off instead, and closely-related, it seems unaware of that marriage has been an evolving thing for a long time, not a purely untouched for hundreds of years legacy thing. Consider views in the US on arranged marriages today vs 100 years ago, typical ages at time of marriage, requirements/allowances for divorce, etc. I'd argue most of what you probably want already happens and has been happening for decades or centuries in the form of marriage being continually adopted to the times. In particular, I'm interested in your "more modern approach" to shared property - from big-ticket items to small-ticket-but-potential-high-attachment ones.
XorNot 9y ago
Marriage doesn't mean anything to me but it meant a lot to the woman I'm now married to, and legally it is no less complicated to exit a long term defacto relationship then a marriage (unless you spend way too much time trying to structure it so that it is). Which is kind of the answer here: if you spend a lot of time with someone, then the contracts you'll sign (house, bank, etc.) will have high termination fees anyway.
havetocharge 9y ago
Simply because you gain more than you put in, and that's true for both spouses. I am not going to get into specifics because those are very personal.
dnoeu872sn 9y ago
4 decades? Are you planning on murdering your potential spouse in your 60s (since you seem to be implying that divorce is too costly)? I'm in my 40s and hope to still be married in 40 years!
losteverything 9y ago
Im sorry for you. Stevie Wonder said the first thing he would do if he had sight would be touch the earth. You are a blind man asking us what is the earth. We cannot answer.
ericmcer 9y ago
I was in the same boat as you until I broke my tibia rock climbing and had to lay in bed for 6 weeks. Shit happens in life and as you get older having no support network becomes less appealing. In your early 20's it is easy to be an island.

by fosk 9y ago

jonahx 9y ago

Not sure why you're getting downvoted -- it's a perfectly reasonable question. The two biggest reasons are: people like security and intimacy; and they want to raise a family with someone. You can argue that you don't need marriage for those things, and technically you don't, but whatever alternative you land on (especially for raising a family) will likely be effectively identical to marriage in practice. You can opt out of family and long-term relationships altogether, but you'll be missing out on a central part of the human experience. If the "early termination fees" are your biggest concern, find someone with similar views and get a prenup. Or just stay together without officially getting married. You'll lose tax benefits, but if it's important to you go for it. If that didn't answer the question you intended to ask, you'll need to clarify what you meant by a more modern approach. What are you imagining that looks like?

fosk 9y ago
I tried to answer to your question here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15179002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15179002

smelterdemon 9y ago

If you're looking for a purely financial reason, tax benefits and better insurance rates.

twothamendment 9y ago

I'm happy to be stuck with my wife for the next 4 decades and have more than one to look back at. When you find the right person, it isn't much of a compromise. I'm curious - what is the more "modern approach"? No commitment, no family?

Balgair 9y ago
Correct. Yes, I compromise with her, but it is because I love her and she is usually right and she comes at the problems loving me. We all have blind spots, and she knows mine pretty well by now. Together, we are much much stronger than apart. I can't live without her at this point, I would be 'myself', with the same body and memories, but I would not be me. It's like The Doctor when he re-gens. He has all the same memories, but he is totally different. Without my wife, I would be 'dead' in that way too. I wouldn't want to be with anyone else at this point, she and I have created a world and life together and I love her more everyday.
- fosk 9y ago
  Correct me if I am wrong, you could still love her, and do all the things you do, and keep supporting each other just with the power of your love without grabbing a pen and signing a piece of paper. I am not arguing against long-term relationship or against honest and true love, I am arguing against the actual marriage practice.
  - spookthesunset 9y ago
    You are gonna get something that looks awfully close to a marriage over long enough of a term. Why not just go for marriage?
  - Balgair 9y ago
    If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, you may need some stale bread to feed it, not a sirloin. What's the big deal with signing a piece of paper and having a really awesome party with all your family and friends? I don't get the adversity to the marriage 'practice' (not a bad word choice either, as you do have to practice it everyday).
  - amag 9y ago
    It sounds like you agree with the concept but disagree with its name.. All relationships have their ups-and-downs, and there may come a time when the only thing holding it together is a promise that was made in front of other people. You may think that's a bad reason to stay together, but the fact is that that (bad) time will most likely pass and if you're still together you may very well find your way back to each other. I know my own marriage has sometimes hung by not much more than that and then we've found our way back. Of course if a promise you make means very little to you, then so will marriage.

pentae 9y ago

I believe it's because as you get older, the 'single life' becomes less interesting, less rewarding and culturally less acceptable.

rl3 9y ago
Largely because of biological aging, especially on that last point. Relationships will be interesting once aging is no longer a concern. I suspect it will be common for most marriages to have a natural duration that's planned for up front.
- majormajor 9y ago
  > Relationships will be interesting once aging is no longer a concern. I suspect it will be common for most marriages to have a natural duration that's planned for up front. I disagree. If people live longer with less physical aging then I'm even less interested in repeating tedious 20s-style hookups and first-dates/first-year-of-dating experiences in the future.

Jemmeh 9y ago

Just legally speaking there's benefits: taxes, you can be on your spouse's health insurance, can visit them in the hospital, investments/inheritance, social security benefits, etc. I could definitely make an argument that a lot of those benefits could be done away with though. For example different methods of taxing people, healthcare not being tied to people's jobs/universal healthcare, etc.

fosk 9y ago
This is correct. Why can't we, as a society, move away from marriage as it is today but still implement rights between two individuals who love each other in a different, more modern, way?
- grzm 9y ago
  Define your goal. In this case what exactly is meant by "different, more modern way"? How is the better than the current situation? How is it worse? How do we get there from here? Also note that marriage today isn't the same globally, nor is it the same as it was 2000 years ago. It does and is changing.
  - fosk 9y ago
    My goal is having two individuals loving each other, protected during their relationships with some rights (ie, if she/he is injured at the hospital I am recognized the right to go see her/him), that are able to move away freely from each other without feeling stuck in a contract. Some of this couples will last forever, some will realize they are not meant for each other and they can walk away without ruining their or their partner's life. Maybe some of them will ultimately be more happy with their lives and meet other people who they really love. The current legal form of marriage formalizes love in a contract that doesn't take into account the fact that love can disappears one day for no reason, but assumes marriage is here to stay. Or to be more accurate, it does take that into account with a very expensive trigger called "divorce". Therefore the divorce is putting a price to my lack of love, and makes the decision to quit harder. By doing so the decision of staying together, which should be governed by love, is determined by cost, effectively negating the whole purpose of a marriage. Unless it's purpose keeping two individuals together no matter what, even if there's no love. Maybe it made sense in the medieval era, not in our century.

solotronics 9y ago

there are health benefits to having a dedicated partner as well, life expectancy improves

isoprophlex 9y ago

Because once your brain matures and you have faced your own mortality, some people realize its not a matter of compromising or sheepishly following tribal behaviour. It actually makes sense to some. For me, it's a way to facilitate spending the limited amount of time I get on this planet: by being with my family. Marriage is a nice, acceptable institution to facilitate family life. Upsides are the ring, the party, taxes, no legal bs when having kids and the ease of buying a house. I've yet to find a downside... Prerequisites are the conviction that your SO is the one you want to be with for a long time, without exception.

Jagerbizzle 9y ago
In many cases, you pay a tax penalty for getting married. My girlfriend and I, who own a home together, would pay roughly $7000 a year more in taxes were we to get married. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty

gyardley 9y ago

You know how sometimes when you're looking at an old codebase, where all the developers who've written it have moved on to other jobs, you see a little bit of code that doesn't seem to make sense? And then you remove that code, and then and only then do you find out exactly why it was there in the first place - usually in a rather painful way? Well, things like marriage are the societal equivalent of that bit of old code. We're 'stuck' with it because (for the vast majority of people, anyway) it serves a useful purpose, one that only becomes apparent when you go without it. That's not to say we can't and shouldn't change the institution - it not like it hasn't been evolving over the centuries - but it'd be wiser to make changes cautiously, experimentally, and locally rather than just 'moving on' as a society.

Glyptodon 9y ago

There are many many efficiencies that come with having partners of various kinds. Partners are like a RAID array for your everyday life problems: get sick? They help cover the bases while a rebuild happens. Need someone to be home over a couple days because of a plumber or something? Now you each only need to miss half as much work. Need to pick something up from the store on your way home? Maybe they need something too and the number of shopping detours taken is reduced by half. Likewise, partners enable a bit of task specialization. Maybe one of you really knows real estate and the other is great at finding bargains, or managing retirement assets, or any other number of such things: you both get the result of the better partner's ability in each domain. Marriage is a form of attempting to guarantee that one always has a beneficial partner. Though hopefully they're also a best friend who you enjoy being around and doing stuff with and not just a highly capable android sitting around to help make your life more efficient. I'm not entirely sure what makes it something to be "stuck in" or all about (negative) compromises.

KekDemaga 9y ago
For me it always seemed like a business deal. You decide to become partners with someone and invest in each others success. My wife for example bought me books on programming early in our relationship, now that I have applied those skills and got a job in the field the extra money I bring home benefits us both. She is rightfully entitled to some of that ROI should I leave her because she did a lot of the initial investment, a legal marriage only formalizes that agreement and encourages it.

brightball 9y ago

Well... > A contract with high termination fees Not sure people who are getting married generally see it that way. There are certainly the segment of people out there who view marriage as the thing you do after dating, but there are others who legitimately see it as wanting to spend your life with someone and maybe have kids of your own. When you make that kind of a commitment and mean it, it's not a contract with termination fees. It's a promise. From that point forward you are doing what's best for your family and not just you...not because you have to compromise on everything but because you love your family and you want what's best for them. It's not so much a matter of being agreeable as a matter of putting your family before yourself.

samlevine 9y ago

It's the best way to raise socially and economically successful children in the modern era. It has a good side effect of giving otherwise ineligible bachelors the ability to form families and thus do something other than die in wars and commit crime, but I don't think this drives individuals to marriage.

humanrebar 9y ago

> ...I don't get why people are signing a contract with high termination fees just so they can compromise on everything for the next 4 decades There are lots of replies about how the spouses benefit from marriage, so I'll add a new reason: children, especially "oops" babies. About half of all pregnancies are unplanned, regardless of marital status. It's honorable to explicitly define the relationship so the current and future beings affected by a sexual relationship are well cared for. Because of economies of scale, the most efficient way to care for a family is under one roof. There are direct reasons why the poverty level of kids is directly related to the marital status of their biological parents. The legal contract and the social contract (wedding vows in front of all your favorite people) are ways to ensure the definition of the relationship is enforced by all prudent means. Of course, you could have sex hundreds and thousands of times during your fertile years hoping that a baby doesn't happen. And you could just get married once a birth is imminent. But over the millennia, most cultures have found that an already established marriage is the best place for a pregnancy. Anyway, I want nothing but the best for all the single-parent and divorced families out there, but it's not empirically controversial to claim that kids born to stably married couples have the best outcomes.

cerberusss 9y ago
To me as a N/W-European, it feel strange to hear you link marriage and obligations to children. Under Dutch law, your obligations to children do not change with marital status.
XorNot 9y ago
Including marriage in this explanation implies the wrong causative effect though. "Stably married" just means a stable relationship. Whether you have a ceremony or not is not a causative predictor of a stable relationship.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  That sounds like an empirical claim. Do you have any evidence to back that up? The evidence in the other direction showing marital status is linked with child poverty is pretty clear. Census data shows that poverty rates are five times higher for children of single mothers (1). Maybe the mechanism isn't clear or something, but the data is stark enough to deserve an explanation about why marital status isn't important to kids. (1) http://educationnext.org/files/ednext_XV_2_mclanahan_fig04.jpg http://educationnext.org/files/ednext_XV_2_mclanahan_fig04.j...

ttcbj 9y ago

When I was in my twenties, I didn't think marriage sounded that great either. I am 42 now and love being married. Here are a few thoughts: * I really understood the desire to marry when I found someone who was right for me. My wife and I are highly compatible. It is great having a teammate in life. I had many relationships which were good, but didn't rise to this standard. All the time, I think about how much I respect and value her. * I value stability for my children. I love my children more than I could ever have anticipated, and the home we create for them matters a lot to me. Also, there is no one else who understands your parenting project the way your spouse does. * My wife and I laugh a lot together, usually just before we fall asleep or just after we wake up. The intimacy and comfort is fun. * For me, I didn't like the idea of marriage until I was ready for it. What I mean is that when I was young I wanted to work all the time, and I felt poor and was constantly worried about money. By the time I met my wife, I had had enough career success, and had enough savings, that I was ready to be really generous without feeling stressed about it. I mean generous in the broadest sense: with my time, with my emotional security, with my financial resources. Marriage seemed more threatening or risky before I got to that point. * The 'contract' is negotiable - we have a prenup. That said, I don't ever expect it to have any meaning for us, but don't get hung up on that. I could name a lot more reasons, but those are the main ones that come to mind. My advice is: Keep trying to meet a lot of people. Eventually, you will meet one who after a year or two makes you say "If I could lock this situation in, I would be ecstatic," and she will feel the same way. Then, marry her! The day I got married, I couldn't believe my luck. Many years later, I feel far more lucky than I did the first day. Also, I love this essay on marriage: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/slates_10th_anniversary/2006/06/watching_the_couples_go_by.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/slates_10th_...

logfromblammo 9y ago

As someone who has been married for 14 years, I heartily encourage you to attempt a more modern approach with whomever you may be able to convince to try it with you. I was a big fan of the subplot of The Office (US) where Dwight and Angela drew up, negotiated, and signed a procreation contract. The real problem is not defining your personal relationships as you see fit, but in getting the government to recognize that you should have the power to do so. Some politicians are very keen on defining marriage in a particular way, as though it would stop certain forms of relationship from existing, when in reality it just denies to some people the ancillary rights that others freely enjoy by default. As long as you don't mind the legal discrimination against you, there is no reason for you to get married in the traditional, legally recognized sense. But an awful lot of people like the benefits available only to married couples, which are largely unavailable to those in some other kind of family partnership. The advice I give to all young people is to never get married, ever. But at some point, many of them will discover seemingly sound reasons to discard my advice, and will do it anyway.

31h 9y ago

why are we still stuck with this 2000yrs old tribal behavior instead of moving on with a more modern approach? There was a time when our ancestors became monogamous, and before that they weren't. So how do you consider non-monogamy more "modern"?

majormajor 9y ago

What do you propose as your more modern approach? Probably two reasons for downvotes: This seems like stereotypical naivety-driven "everything is broken why doesn't everyone else see it" youth angst without any propositions for things to make people better off instead, and closely-related, it seems unaware of that marriage has been an evolving thing for a long time, not a purely untouched for hundreds of years legacy thing. Consider views in the US on arranged marriages today vs 100 years ago, typical ages at time of marriage, requirements/allowances for divorce, etc. I'd argue most of what you probably want already happens and has been happening for decades or centuries in the form of marriage being continually adopted to the times. In particular, I'm interested in your "more modern approach" to shared property - from big-ticket items to small-ticket-but-potential-high-attachment ones.

XorNot 9y ago

Marriage doesn't mean anything to me but it meant a lot to the woman I'm now married to, and legally it is no less complicated to exit a long term defacto relationship then a marriage (unless you spend way too much time trying to structure it so that it is). Which is kind of the answer here: if you spend a lot of time with someone, then the contracts you'll sign (house, bank, etc.) will have high termination fees anyway.

havetocharge 9y ago

Simply because you gain more than you put in, and that's true for both spouses. I am not going to get into specifics because those are very personal.

dnoeu872sn 9y ago

4 decades? Are you planning on murdering your potential spouse in your 60s (since you seem to be implying that divorce is too costly)? I'm in my 40s and hope to still be married in 40 years!

losteverything 9y ago

Im sorry for you. Stevie Wonder said the first thing he would do if he had sight would be touch the earth. You are a blind man asking us what is the earth. We cannot answer.

ericmcer 9y ago

I was in the same boat as you until I broke my tibia rock climbing and had to lay in bed for 6 weeks. Shit happens in life and as you get older having no support network becomes less appealing. In your early 20's it is easy to be an island.