13 ms·

How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

50 points by nature24 9y ago

fictionfuture 9y ago
Seems that the liability for men to get married is much higher now in the event of a divorce. Also women are less dependant on men and more able to control when and if they have children. Everything else is irrelevant imo.
mlrtime 9y ago
Many men are understanding that marriage is a no win situation. You find yourself working your entire life to support your wife and family only to have a high percentage of ending in divorce. Your assets will be taken from you and you will be lucky if you get 50% custody. If you do not wand children there is no point in getting married.
- moomin 9y ago
  You might want to investigate the "high percentage" figure. It's one of those talking points that isn't really grounded in any solid numbers.
  - TACIXAT 9y ago
    If anyone else doesn't want to investigate, this article puts it at 25%. [1] Some may consider that a high percentage. If this is a major concern though, my advice is to marry someone who you trust to not be horrible in the case of a divorce. It won't always work out that way, but at least you can have some confidence that they won't try to ruin your life just for fun. 1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/heart-the-matter/201704/do-half-all-marriages-really-end-in-divorce https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/heart-the-matter/201704...
    - hnaccy 9y ago
      >my advice is to marry someone who you trust to not be horrible in the case of a divorce If people could accurately judge character they wouldn't be getting divorced. Nobody enters a relationship thinking their partner will cheat yet it happens all the time.
  - xenihn 9y ago
    Personally, any figure over 10% is high to me.
    - bryanlarsen 9y ago
      If you're both between 30 & 34, both on your first marriage, and both have college degrees, the rate is below 10%. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201606/these-are-the-best-and-worst-ages-get-married https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201...
  - 19guid 9y ago
    Per CDC (2014), the marriage rate in the United States is 6.9/1000 people while the divorce rate is 3.2/1000 people. [1] I'd say that's very high. 1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm
    - tomp 9y ago
      That's about 50%, which is the commonly quoted figure. However, IIRC that figure is skewed significantly by second (and further) marriages (i.e. by people who "like" getting divorced). The figures for first marriage are somewhat lower.
      - dajohnson89 9y ago
        Does that really mitigate the point of divorce rate being high?
      - moomin 9y ago
        The interesting thing is that you can't actually divide one number by the other, because you don't know when the marriages began. What you actually need is the data "how many marriages in 1980/1981 &c end in divorce"? The information that a bunch of retired baby boomers are divorcing has little to no relevance to 30-somethings getting married right now. In particular, since fewer people are getting married than used to (the whole point of the article), this is overstating the divorce rate.
    - hellogoodbyeeee 9y ago
      Your statistic is skewed by people that get married young and have low education. College graduates have a divorce rate closer to 25% https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divorce-patterns-by-gender-race-and-educational-attainment.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor...
  - justaman 9y ago
    Its 40-50% marriages. However people who get remarried or married a second time are significantly more likely to get a divorce. Pretty damn high. Flip a coin. Whats really interesting is the number of sexual partners and how that relates to divorce rates. http://www.apa.org/topics/divorce/ http://www.apa.org/topics/divorce/
    - anbende 9y ago
      Yes, but for educated people who have a reasonable income, it drops to 15-25% depending on your source. There's also a growing body of research on practices and habits of healthy satisfying marriages. Raw average divorce rates don't really capture what's possible with forethought and discipline.
  - tosstossy 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_in_the_United_States#Rates_of_divorce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_in_the_United_States#R... The rates are high, and it's worth considering how many marriages should be divorced but instead forcibly stay unhappy for things like traditional or religious reasons.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  What a depressingly cynical outlook. >find yourself working your entire life to support your wife You do know that lots of women have careers now right? You can arguably do quite well as a team pooling financial resources and saving for retirement. It also makes you more resilient to changes in employment. >If you do not wand children there is no point in getting married. What if you just want to engage in a mutually meaningful tradition?
  - adekok 9y ago
    See Florida for "lifetime alimony" Why would someone work if they can divorce, keep the kids, and get paid forever? Other states aren't quite as bad, but they're still bad: http://tomjameslaw.com/blog/what-judges-really-think-about-fathers-responses-to-court-commissioned-judicial-bias-surveys/ http://tomjameslaw.com/blog/what-judges-really-think-about-f... A study conducted in 2004 found that although the tender years doctrine had been abolished some time ago, a majority of Indiana family court judges still supported it and decided cases coming before them consistently with it.2 A survey of judges in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee found a clear preference among judges for maternal custody in general. Even in jurisdictions which have 50/50 custody as the default, judges still overwhelmingly favor one side over the other. i.e. judicial prejudice is well known, wide-spread, in defiance of the law, and ongoing. See Florida again. Action groups have successfully fought against equal custody by default, because saying "we're for equality" means "fight against equality", apparently.
    - Mz 9y ago
      Why would someone work if they can divorce, keep the kids, and get paid forever? Because unless your ex is very wealthy AND your alimony increases over time to keep up with inflation, alimony tends to not adequately support a middle class lifestyle by itself. Because women tend to outlive men and tend to marry men who are older than them (average: about four years). When the ex dies, you will be penniless if you didn't also work. Because as the kids grow up, if you don't have goals, interests and earned income of your own, your life can wind up very empty. I'm a divorced single mom (with adult special needs kids who still live with me) who gets alimony. These are some of my reasons for working to build an income of my own.
- greekyogurt21 9y ago
  This post reeks of red pill nonsense.
- thriftwy 9y ago
  > Your assets will be taken from you and you will be lucky if you get 50% custody This is an interesting situation from the point of how economy, politics and people work: If you protect X, you will get less X. If you protect women in marriage by giving them more assets and custody on divorce, you make it harder for women to find a spouse. Those who already had one, benefit. If you protect home renters by putting conditions on potential landlords, you will get better conditions for existing renters but worse conditions for new renters. You thought you can make world better by placing conditions on other people, but it bites the actual demographics you were thought to protect.
  - adekok 9y ago
    If you protect mothers by giving them welfare, you get more single mothers. If you give courts / child protection services a cut of the child support money, you get more divorces where the fathers are cut out of the children's lives. If you punish men in divorces, financially ruin them ("imputed income"), and don't let them see their kids, you get a massive increase in male suicide after a divorce.
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      > give courts / child protection services a cut of the child support money This one I don't understand how anybody could ever think a good idea. > If you punish men in divorces,...a massive increase in male suicide That's external locus ("avoid"). What should be a real concern for ladies that it would greatly dry up their pool of potential mates.
    - tetromino_ 9y ago
      > If you protect mothers by giving them welfare, you get more single mothers. Sure. But is it really worse for society to have single mothers on welfare than to have mothers trapped in toxic marriages for financial reasons?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- RijilV 9y ago
  Strongly disagree on "do not want children there is no point in getting married." There's an emotional reason to get married, formalizing a life long commitment. That's a big one for a lot of folks (citation: my marriage). But lets say you're not a feelings type of person, and those arguments fall on deaf ears. If you live in a community property state marriage makes inheriting assets ridiculously easy and avoids all sorts of taxes. (otherwise you're down the road of setting up trusts which will incur lawyer and trust management fees). Taxes are another one - if there's an income disparity. Filing jointly with a single income does wonders for what you don't have to pay. Your spouse can also not be compelled to testify against you, which depending on how paranoid you want to be might make you sleep better at night. To say there's no point is missing the point though - as much as marriage is enshrined in legal rights which are unavailable to those who do not marry, the institution of marriage is centuries old and exists in many religions. There's an emotional reason to do so, and that's point enough.
  - dpark 9y ago
    > Filing jointly with a single income does wonders for what you don't have to pay. Filing singly with a single income does even more assuming you have no dependents. Marrying someone with no income definitely doesn't result in a net increase in free cash flow. Taxes don't offset the cost of supporting an adult. To be clear, I'm not opposed to marriage nor to the concept of a stay-at-home spouse (of either gender), but it's not a net gain financially if the spouse doesn't work. It's not a guaranteed net gain even in the case where both work.
    - RijilV 9y ago
      This is a good misconception and undervaluing of what work means. Just because someone lacks a paycheck does not mean they do not work. Since my spouse retired we eat out half as much, we are both in better shape, we grow a non-negligible amount of our own food, have organic eggs from our own chickens, etc etc. our weekends are no longer packed with house work, small and medium sized home improvement projects happen at cost without paying someone else. We have a fanancial planner and have gone through multi excersizes tracking our spending. The end result is the work my spouse does saves around $50k a year in expenditure alone, not to mention the physical and mental health improvements. I think we often forget what work means.
- vlunkr 9y ago
  A high percent end in divorce, sure, but it's not like you're playing a slot machine. If you and your partner are committed you can more than likely beat the odds. This is incredibly cynical. I'm pretty happy to work to support people that I love. It might be easier in some ways to be single, but it's not a "no win situation."
  - javajocky 9y ago
    But that's not true -- it's actually fairly low. (see posts above).
    - cachemiss 9y ago
      Correct, there's relatively easy ways to de-risk things. My wife and I dated for 3.5 years and lived together for 2 before we got married. We are in a high income bracket, and both of us thought quite a bit about the person we wanted to married, and made sure we had good conflict resolution skills, respect for each other. We agreed on kids, religion , money and sex (make sure you agree on these or you are going to have a bad time). Chances of our marriage ending are very low according to the statistics. People always view marriage as this binary thing where you are either being completely and utterly scientific about things, or you are just being naive and jumping in. I love/d my wife deeply when we got married, but I was also aware of her flaws and my own. If you don't have any empathy or like living your life for yourself, don't get married (and probably don't date), it won't end well for you.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Its a bad contract, but it gets infinitely better and a lot less consequential if you are rich before marriage and spent five minutes on financial planning. Your assets will only be taken from you if they were earned during the marriage. So for anybody that wanted to work on something, like a house, any time between now and the next 30 years, then yeah marriage with the non-negligible probability of divorce will destroy the equity you dumped into it, no matter what proportion you and your spouse contributed. If you already had properties, even income producing ones, they can go in a trust before hand, and you don't even have to worry about the stigma of a "pre-nup", and nothing of consequence will be split from you in a divorce. Then you have the flexibility to actually enjoy the marriage, make any number of conditions to actually use the money or support a family or make grand children set, and if it falls apart, the financial things you worked for are still in place and hopefully A LOT more valuable. A trust can also help keep alimony and child support payments restricted to amounts that even the bread winner would find reasonable. This article talks about how marriage is declining amongst the poor, and staying steady amongst the privileged. It makes a few assumptions about why such as "women don't want men that can't provide", while my analysis has been devoid of gender. All around, it looks like education around how bad the default contract is has taken hold, even amongst the poor and uneducated, who previously had been greatly skewing the marriage and divorce rates.
- nkrisc 9y ago
  It depends on how you approach marriage, I suppose. I see people getting married after dating someone for only a year or maybe two. That's completely insane to me. My wife and I lived together for about seven years before deciding to finally get married. Our strategy was simple: don't marry someone you're going to divorce. We felt that by living together for so long and knowing each other so well, we were more sure we were making the right decision.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  High percentage? If you are both between 30 & 34, and it's the first marriage for both, the divorce rate is 10%. Between 25 & 29 it's 14%. If you both have college degrees, it drops even further. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201606/these-are-the-best-and-worst-ages-get-married https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201...
- g00gler 9y ago
  Not necessarily true. I think that's an outdated, albeit mainstream, approach to marriage. It should be more like forming an LLC wherein you make a partnership agreement. Called a prenuptial agreement in the US, I assume it's more popular amongst the wealthy. I'd want a solid contract wherein there would be no alimony, separate finances, and rational child support meaning no, you don't get X percentage of my income, you get 50% of the actual cost of raising the children. Should be much easier this way. Say the wife contributes 35% of the mortgage payment on a monthly basis, 35% of the home is hers in a divorce. If she stays home to watch the kids, you "pay" her a portion of your salary to account for this. Maybe we can crowd source some niche accounting software to make this trivial.
  - hnaccy 9y ago
    I believe judges can throw prenups out.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure not getting married is pretty popular with professional women too. Turns out they also have a career they care about. Who would've thought of women as humans, right?
  - atomical 9y ago
    Popular as a minority position?
    - dguaraglia 9y ago
      Not sure what you mean. Considering there's slightly more males than females in the US, staying single must necessarily be an even smaller "minority position" for males.
      - atomical 9y ago
        The number of women who don't want to get married and have children is tiny. How could it be popular? > Who would've thought of women as humans, right? Is that really necessary?
        dguaraglia 9y ago
        > The number of women who don't want to get married and have children is tiny. How could it be popular? You do realize the vast majority of marriages happen between men and women, and if only a "tiny minority" of women didn't want to get married, then by necessity only a "tiny minority" of men wouldn't be married? So either the article is overstating the phenomenon (by saying it's incredibly popular) or a similar amount of men and women must be choosing not to get married. > Is that really necessary? The OP was making the argument that "men choose not to get married because reasons." Seems like they never bothered to consider there's a significant amount of professional women that are not interested in getting married until later in life. There's been a lot of thinly veiled (and sometimes pretty blatant) misogyny around HN of late, that's why I made the joke about them probably having something do with it.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  Did you guys read the article? All the Hacker News comments seem to think the Marriage is going down because its not a good deal for high net worth me. This might be true, but was not the point of the story at all. Marriage is declining among the middle/lower classes. Its women who don't want to marry a man who doesn't have a job that are causing the rate to change. This does reinforce the cynical point, that in marriage men are only there to supply funds, but the rich men who are opting out are not doing it at a high enough rate to matter.
  - deleted 9y ago
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- rayiner 9y ago
  From 1960 to 2011, the percentage of married women who earn more than their husbands went up from 6% to 24%. Among the demographic of people choosing whether or not to get married it's much higher--women in their 20s out earn men their age. It would be paradoxical if marriage rates were declining because men don't want to commit to supporting a wife and family even as the amount of money women bring into the family unit is increasing. The correlation might even suggest the opposite: women do not see the need to get married because they no longer need men to support them. (Also, even including the older generations, very little alimony is paid. Americans pay about $10 billion in alimony, almost all by men. But there are about 25 million divorced men in the country, resulting about $33 per month in alimony on average.)
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  If you do not wan[t] children there is no point in getting married. I'd argue that a marriage and children shouldn't be lumped together be default. You can raise children perfectly well without being (legally or common law) married.
- dqpb 9y ago
  That depends on your definition of win. From an evolutionary point of view, winning is maximizing your number of offspring who also go on to reproduce. This point of view has interesting implications for gender specific mating strategies, since women can only conceive every 1-4 years and men can impregnate every 3 days.
moomin 9y ago
"As marriage has declined, though, childbearing has not, which means that more children are living in families without two parents and the resources they bring." Er, no, it doesn't mean that at all. I mean, I 100% support anyone doing the ridiculously hard job of raising a kid all by themselves, but just because Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson aren't married it doesn't mean they aren't committed to each other and their children. Anyway, maybe the truth is: people don't have to get married, and it's expensive to do so. I don't think there's any great mystery here.
- madengr 9y ago
  Get married is cheap. Getting a divorce is expensive.
- technofire 9y ago
  > just because Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson aren't married it doesn't mean they aren't committed to each other and their children. From the article: "The decline in marriage was not offset by more couples living together."
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > ...just because Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson aren't married it doesn't mean they aren't committed to each other and their children. Sure, but marriage is literally a commitment to each other, current offspring, and future offspring. Theoretically a couple could enter an "anuptual agreement", but that's a rare occurrence if it happens at all. A vaguely defined agreement can work fine, sure. But specifically defined and specifically enforced agreements have their merits.
jgh 9y ago
Let's see how many /r/redpill talking points we can collect in here over the next few hours.
- greekyogurt21 9y ago
  A fair amount
- jnordwick 9y ago
  Bonus points for /r/iamverysmart worthy comments
mfoy_ 9y ago
To quote Alec Baldwin's character, Ellerby, from The Departed: "Marriage is an important part of getting ahead; lets people know you're not a homo. Married guy seems more stable. People see the ring, they think 'at least somebody can stand the son of a bitch'. Ladies see the ring, they know immediately you must have some cash or your cock must work." A touch on the homophobic and misogynistic side, but it seems relevant.
- thriftwy 9y ago
  Once marrying becomes an unfortunate choice, it starts to signal the opposite. "This guy is so desperate he had to marry"
  - mfoy_ 9y ago
    That frame of mind implies that marriage is something women want and something men do not want. Why? It sounds like you're making some weird assumptions about sex-positivity, child-rearing, or finances.
    - msla 9y ago
      Or just making assumptions about how well single women get on in life, which is, in turn, an assumption about how well women do in the workforce. If a woman's best life strategy is to get married so she doesn't have to take in laundry or become a shopgirl or take some similar low-pay/low-status job, marriage becomes seen as something the man is roped into, because men can (presumably) do just fine for themselves on their own, and, perhaps, are better off financially without "The Little Woman" to support. Dual-income households destroy that pretty well, but notice how universal such thinking was in the pop culture of the 1940s and 1950s. It's one more example of how all social effects are interrelated: It's hard to be sex-positive if the common STDs are effectively incurable, or require chemotherapy (vide mercury treatment for syphilis) to even attempt to cure. It's impossible to have same-sex marriage if your legal system has coverture, which means a marriage is a union of the husband and wife into the legal personality of the husband. It's impossible to take a modern view of marriage as something which can be put off if fully one half of the population depends on it to have a good life.
kop316 9y ago
I wonder if this is also due to the high cost of the actual marriage ceremony. A (cheap) engagement ring can cost over $1000, and can easily jump to $5-10K. Then a traditional ceremony can easily be over $10K, with no upper bound on how expensive it is. This was the cause of me no longer being with an ex, they were already in debt $80k from school, but still wanted a ceremony that could have easily cost $40K. I had no debt, and was unwilling go into that sort of debt for a ceremony. I think a lot of people see that as well, and realize they simply cannot go into that sort of debt for a wedding ceremony. EDIT: My point was more if that is expected of someone from their family/significant other, that would certainly be major factor in not wanting to get married. Wedding ceremonies can certainly be done affordably, and I think it is smart to do that.
- jgh 9y ago
  Lots of people do it at City Hall and it usually costs about $50. Throw a nice dinner in for a few of your closest friends / family and you're talking about a decent wedding for a few hundred bucks. No need to go crazy.
  - kop316 9y ago
    I completely agree. My point was more if that is expected of someone from their family/significant other, that would certainly be major factor in not wanting to get married.
    - jgh 9y ago
      Fair enough!
- CalRobert 9y ago
  Perhaps those are the weddings we focus on and we forget all the cheap ones? I've known quite a few people (myself included) who did it for a few hundred quid (turned out Tuesdays were cheaper so we did it then at town hall). Of course, it's cheaper if no family come. Remember, all those gifts they give you are a social debt for which they will want to collect.
kool1 9y ago
Why on earth would should I dedicate my life to some loser that wants to marry me? I probably make more than him anyway so unless he's 6'2'' athletic and makes enough for me to stop working there's no point.
njharman 9y ago
> “Women don’t want to take a risk on somebody who’s not going to be able to provide anything,” That's such a fucked up sexist thought. It says woman are in control of marriage, what men want is irrelevant. And that the role of men is provider. Men belong at work and women belong in the kitchen, is that it?
- aetherson 9y ago
  If both parties' consent is necessary to get married (which, you know, I hope it is), then either can veto it. If both parties need to provide in order to maintain a decent standard of living (which is the reality of America today), then either party can look at the other and say, "This person is not providing anything" and exercise their right to veto. If women are more stably employed than men, on average, which is again the reality of lower-income areas, then it is women who will be dominantly in the part of the person judging and vetoing, without any sexism (except, I suppose, possibly on the part of the employers who make lower-income men less stably employed, though I don't think that sexism is the causal factor there).
- tomp 9y ago
  > Men belong at work and women belong in the kitchen, is that it? No, it's just describing the reality that it matters to women how much a man earns. See the last graph in the second section of this article: https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-online-dating-a9e3990d6ae2 https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Yup. There are definite physical[1] and psychological[2] differences between the sexes that lead to different mating strategies[3]. We can bemoan the inequalities that exist with that structure, but it doesn't change the fact that men and women are different in many ways. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mating_strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mating_strategies
diiaann 9y ago
Most people I talk to assume that marriage is a boon for taxes. It is not. Our current tax policy can penalize both low-income and high-income earners. https://taxfoundation.org/understanding-marriage-penalty-and-marriage-bonus/ https://taxfoundation.org/understanding-marriage-penalty-and...
jasonmaydie 9y ago
I don't buy the authors assertions at all. Who thinks being married is a privilege in the United States? We went through the last 10-15years liberating ourselves from marriage and now somehow it's being viewed as a privilege? It's like saying male/female parenting is privilege. It's not.
richardbenson 9y ago
Can HN stay politically neutral, please? Otherwise in two weeks every post will be about Trump, or how only whites can be racist, etc. Kill the cancer before it spreads.
- jgh 9y ago
  HN is certainly not politically neutral and you can see that in action every time there's a post about sexual harassment or racism in the workplace.
debacle 9y ago
I find a lot of the conclusions drawn in the article unscientific, and they don't really jive with my experience. From what I've seen, totally anecdotally, being more successful and being married are symptoms of being a more stable individual. I don't know many people in good jobs or with careers that aren't in some sort of relationship, and many of those I know who can't maintain a relationship also can't maintain a job. The only exception to that rule that I've found is black women. I don't know many black women in stable, long term relationships, regardless of their career success. The reasons for that are more social than economic.
leggomylibro 9y ago
Wow, this hasn't been up very long and I think the discussion here could already use some more empathy. Looking at marriage as an institution is maybe not the best way to approach the issues that people are going to try and bring up in this sort of discussion. How about this recent piece from The Atlantic, "Love in the Time of Individualism"? https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/09/love-in-the-time-of-individualism/540474/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/09/love-in-t... It seems two-pronged, to me. And people are gonna feel aggrieved, probably rightly to some degree, no matter which side they wind up on. For women, men are frustratingly even LESS likely to commit and stick around for any length of time these days: “It’s not that love is dead, but the sexual incentives for men to sacrifice and commit have largely dissolved, spelling a more confusing and circuitous path to commitment and marriage than earlier eras.” And for men, the numbers are simply massively against you and you're facing a huge time investment simply to meet one single person who probably won't even like you that much - why would you bother?: "Popular dating apps put women in the position of gatekeeping, whether deliberately or not. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a smartphone will swipe right on basically everyone. This forces women to be choosier about who they say yes to. Even if they also swipe with abandon, they end up with more matches to sort through—yet more gatekeeping." So tl;dr, we're all (not) screwed. Of course, these sorts of pieces tend to focus on traditional heterosexual relationships, so this all might dissolve (maybe into similar or totally different issues) with LGBTQ relationships; I don't pretend to know.
stcredzero 9y ago
Well, for one thing, getting married was something for everyone, including the poor. In Meg Keane's A Practical Wedding, there's a discussion about what weddings were like in the beginning of the 20th century. It turns out that what we consider a "normal" wedding was once the wedding only rich people could afford. http://a.co/iC1AZMU http://a.co/iC1AZMU Back then, a wedding happened at church or city hall, and there was a simple stand-up reception at home. The Tappet Brothers warned to beware, "The Wedding Industrial Complex." A lot of the "traditions" around weddings are manufactured with the express purpose of getting more money out of you. This reminds me of a discussion I had with a VP at my company about what happened to going out to the ball game. It used to be something democratizing, something even the poor could afford. Now, everything is jacked up in price, starting with the ticket, and the amount one would spend to take a family out could count as a major purchase. The same thing happened to the movies. I think capitalism is the best system we've come up with so far, but someone needs to realize that everyone needs an outlet, or else people will reject the system.
bob_neumann 9y ago
How incredibly frustrating: The correlation between marriage and the general wellbeing of a middle class income is well-known. It leads folks like Ben Shapiro and Larry Elder to say, "if you want to be middle class, 1. don't have kids outside of marriage, and 2. keep some kind of full time job." Makes perfect sense to me. However, the leftist NYT, reading the same correlation, instead comes to the conclusion of, "Oh look, now those rotten rich people have even taken MARRIAGE away from the poor people!" If that ain't fake news, what is?
RickJWagner 9y ago
3 simple rules to join the middle class: Finish high school, Get a full-time job (any job), Wait until age 21 to get married and have children: Dramatic results.
- KittiHawk 9y ago
  It doesn't sound like that's been nearly sufficient for quite some years now.

50 points by nature24 9y ago

Seems that the liability for men to get married is much higher now in the event of a divorce. Also women are less dependant on men and more able to control when and if they have children. Everything else is irrelevant imo.

mlrtime 9y ago

Many men are understanding that marriage is a no win situation. You find yourself working your entire life to support your wife and family only to have a high percentage of ending in divorce. Your assets will be taken from you and you will be lucky if you get 50% custody. If you do not wand children there is no point in getting married.

moomin 9y ago
You might want to investigate the "high percentage" figure. It's one of those talking points that isn't really grounded in any solid numbers.
- TACIXAT 9y ago
  If anyone else doesn't want to investigate, this article puts it at 25%. [1] Some may consider that a high percentage. If this is a major concern though, my advice is to marry someone who you trust to not be horrible in the case of a divorce. It won't always work out that way, but at least you can have some confidence that they won't try to ruin your life just for fun. 1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/heart-the-matter/201704/do-half-all-marriages-really-end-in-divorce https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/heart-the-matter/201704...
  - hnaccy 9y ago
    >my advice is to marry someone who you trust to not be horrible in the case of a divorce If people could accurately judge character they wouldn't be getting divorced. Nobody enters a relationship thinking their partner will cheat yet it happens all the time.
- xenihn 9y ago
  Personally, any figure over 10% is high to me.
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago
    If you're both between 30 & 34, both on your first marriage, and both have college degrees, the rate is below 10%. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201606/these-are-the-best-and-worst-ages-get-married https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201...
- 19guid 9y ago
  Per CDC (2014), the marriage rate in the United States is 6.9/1000 people while the divorce rate is 3.2/1000 people. [1] I'd say that's very high. 1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm
  - tomp 9y ago
    That's about 50%, which is the commonly quoted figure. However, IIRC that figure is skewed significantly by second (and further) marriages (i.e. by people who "like" getting divorced). The figures for first marriage are somewhat lower.
    - dajohnson89 9y ago
      Does that really mitigate the point of divorce rate being high?
    - moomin 9y ago
      The interesting thing is that you can't actually divide one number by the other, because you don't know when the marriages began. What you actually need is the data "how many marriages in 1980/1981 &c end in divorce"? The information that a bunch of retired baby boomers are divorcing has little to no relevance to 30-somethings getting married right now. In particular, since fewer people are getting married than used to (the whole point of the article), this is overstating the divorce rate.
  - hellogoodbyeeee 9y ago
    Your statistic is skewed by people that get married young and have low education. College graduates have a divorce rate closer to 25% https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divorce-patterns-by-gender-race-and-educational-attainment.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor...
- justaman 9y ago
  Its 40-50% marriages. However people who get remarried or married a second time are significantly more likely to get a divorce. Pretty damn high. Flip a coin. Whats really interesting is the number of sexual partners and how that relates to divorce rates. http://www.apa.org/topics/divorce/ http://www.apa.org/topics/divorce/
  - anbende 9y ago
    Yes, but for educated people who have a reasonable income, it drops to 15-25% depending on your source. There's also a growing body of research on practices and habits of healthy satisfying marriages. Raw average divorce rates don't really capture what's possible with forethought and discipline.
- tosstossy 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_in_the_United_States#Rates_of_divorce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_in_the_United_States#R... The rates are high, and it's worth considering how many marriages should be divorced but instead forcibly stay unhappy for things like traditional or religious reasons.
ch4s3 9y ago
What a depressingly cynical outlook. >find yourself working your entire life to support your wife You do know that lots of women have careers now right? You can arguably do quite well as a team pooling financial resources and saving for retirement. It also makes you more resilient to changes in employment. >If you do not wand children there is no point in getting married. What if you just want to engage in a mutually meaningful tradition?
- adekok 9y ago
  See Florida for "lifetime alimony" Why would someone work if they can divorce, keep the kids, and get paid forever? Other states aren't quite as bad, but they're still bad: http://tomjameslaw.com/blog/what-judges-really-think-about-fathers-responses-to-court-commissioned-judicial-bias-surveys/ http://tomjameslaw.com/blog/what-judges-really-think-about-f... A study conducted in 2004 found that although the tender years doctrine had been abolished some time ago, a majority of Indiana family court judges still supported it and decided cases coming before them consistently with it.2 A survey of judges in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee found a clear preference among judges for maternal custody in general. Even in jurisdictions which have 50/50 custody as the default, judges still overwhelmingly favor one side over the other. i.e. judicial prejudice is well known, wide-spread, in defiance of the law, and ongoing. See Florida again. Action groups have successfully fought against equal custody by default, because saying "we're for equality" means "fight against equality", apparently.
  - Mz 9y ago
    Why would someone work if they can divorce, keep the kids, and get paid forever? Because unless your ex is very wealthy AND your alimony increases over time to keep up with inflation, alimony tends to not adequately support a middle class lifestyle by itself. Because women tend to outlive men and tend to marry men who are older than them (average: about four years). When the ex dies, you will be penniless if you didn't also work. Because as the kids grow up, if you don't have goals, interests and earned income of your own, your life can wind up very empty. I'm a divorced single mom (with adult special needs kids who still live with me) who gets alimony. These are some of my reasons for working to build an income of my own.
greekyogurt21 9y ago
This post reeks of red pill nonsense.
thriftwy 9y ago
> Your assets will be taken from you and you will be lucky if you get 50% custody This is an interesting situation from the point of how economy, politics and people work: If you protect X, you will get less X. If you protect women in marriage by giving them more assets and custody on divorce, you make it harder for women to find a spouse. Those who already had one, benefit. If you protect home renters by putting conditions on potential landlords, you will get better conditions for existing renters but worse conditions for new renters. You thought you can make world better by placing conditions on other people, but it bites the actual demographics you were thought to protect.
- adekok 9y ago
  If you protect mothers by giving them welfare, you get more single mothers. If you give courts / child protection services a cut of the child support money, you get more divorces where the fathers are cut out of the children's lives. If you punish men in divorces, financially ruin them ("imputed income"), and don't let them see their kids, you get a massive increase in male suicide after a divorce.
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    > give courts / child protection services a cut of the child support money This one I don't understand how anybody could ever think a good idea. > If you punish men in divorces,...a massive increase in male suicide That's external locus ("avoid"). What should be a real concern for ladies that it would greatly dry up their pool of potential mates.
  - tetromino_ 9y ago
    > If you protect mothers by giving them welfare, you get more single mothers. Sure. But is it really worse for society to have single mothers on welfare than to have mothers trapped in toxic marriages for financial reasons?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
RijilV 9y ago
Strongly disagree on "do not want children there is no point in getting married." There's an emotional reason to get married, formalizing a life long commitment. That's a big one for a lot of folks (citation: my marriage). But lets say you're not a feelings type of person, and those arguments fall on deaf ears. If you live in a community property state marriage makes inheriting assets ridiculously easy and avoids all sorts of taxes. (otherwise you're down the road of setting up trusts which will incur lawyer and trust management fees). Taxes are another one - if there's an income disparity. Filing jointly with a single income does wonders for what you don't have to pay. Your spouse can also not be compelled to testify against you, which depending on how paranoid you want to be might make you sleep better at night. To say there's no point is missing the point though - as much as marriage is enshrined in legal rights which are unavailable to those who do not marry, the institution of marriage is centuries old and exists in many religions. There's an emotional reason to do so, and that's point enough.
- dpark 9y ago
  > Filing jointly with a single income does wonders for what you don't have to pay. Filing singly with a single income does even more assuming you have no dependents. Marrying someone with no income definitely doesn't result in a net increase in free cash flow. Taxes don't offset the cost of supporting an adult. To be clear, I'm not opposed to marriage nor to the concept of a stay-at-home spouse (of either gender), but it's not a net gain financially if the spouse doesn't work. It's not a guaranteed net gain even in the case where both work.
  - RijilV 9y ago
    This is a good misconception and undervaluing of what work means. Just because someone lacks a paycheck does not mean they do not work. Since my spouse retired we eat out half as much, we are both in better shape, we grow a non-negligible amount of our own food, have organic eggs from our own chickens, etc etc. our weekends are no longer packed with house work, small and medium sized home improvement projects happen at cost without paying someone else. We have a fanancial planner and have gone through multi excersizes tracking our spending. The end result is the work my spouse does saves around $50k a year in expenditure alone, not to mention the physical and mental health improvements. I think we often forget what work means.
vlunkr 9y ago
A high percent end in divorce, sure, but it's not like you're playing a slot machine. If you and your partner are committed you can more than likely beat the odds. This is incredibly cynical. I'm pretty happy to work to support people that I love. It might be easier in some ways to be single, but it's not a "no win situation."
- javajocky 9y ago
  But that's not true -- it's actually fairly low. (see posts above).
  - cachemiss 9y ago
    Correct, there's relatively easy ways to de-risk things. My wife and I dated for 3.5 years and lived together for 2 before we got married. We are in a high income bracket, and both of us thought quite a bit about the person we wanted to married, and made sure we had good conflict resolution skills, respect for each other. We agreed on kids, religion , money and sex (make sure you agree on these or you are going to have a bad time). Chances of our marriage ending are very low according to the statistics. People always view marriage as this binary thing where you are either being completely and utterly scientific about things, or you are just being naive and jumping in. I love/d my wife deeply when we got married, but I was also aware of her flaws and my own. If you don't have any empathy or like living your life for yourself, don't get married (and probably don't date), it won't end well for you.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
Its a bad contract, but it gets infinitely better and a lot less consequential if you are rich before marriage and spent five minutes on financial planning. Your assets will only be taken from you if they were earned during the marriage. So for anybody that wanted to work on something, like a house, any time between now and the next 30 years, then yeah marriage with the non-negligible probability of divorce will destroy the equity you dumped into it, no matter what proportion you and your spouse contributed. If you already had properties, even income producing ones, they can go in a trust before hand, and you don't even have to worry about the stigma of a "pre-nup", and nothing of consequence will be split from you in a divorce. Then you have the flexibility to actually enjoy the marriage, make any number of conditions to actually use the money or support a family or make grand children set, and if it falls apart, the financial things you worked for are still in place and hopefully A LOT more valuable. A trust can also help keep alimony and child support payments restricted to amounts that even the bread winner would find reasonable. This article talks about how marriage is declining amongst the poor, and staying steady amongst the privileged. It makes a few assumptions about why such as "women don't want men that can't provide", while my analysis has been devoid of gender. All around, it looks like education around how bad the default contract is has taken hold, even amongst the poor and uneducated, who previously had been greatly skewing the marriage and divorce rates.
nkrisc 9y ago
It depends on how you approach marriage, I suppose. I see people getting married after dating someone for only a year or maybe two. That's completely insane to me. My wife and I lived together for about seven years before deciding to finally get married. Our strategy was simple: don't marry someone you're going to divorce. We felt that by living together for so long and knowing each other so well, we were more sure we were making the right decision.
bryanlarsen 9y ago
High percentage? If you are both between 30 & 34, and it's the first marriage for both, the divorce rate is 10%. Between 25 & 29 it's 14%. If you both have college degrees, it drops even further. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201606/these-are-the-best-and-worst-ages-get-married https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201...
g00gler 9y ago
Not necessarily true. I think that's an outdated, albeit mainstream, approach to marriage. It should be more like forming an LLC wherein you make a partnership agreement. Called a prenuptial agreement in the US, I assume it's more popular amongst the wealthy. I'd want a solid contract wherein there would be no alimony, separate finances, and rational child support meaning no, you don't get X percentage of my income, you get 50% of the actual cost of raising the children. Should be much easier this way. Say the wife contributes 35% of the mortgage payment on a monthly basis, 35% of the home is hers in a divorce. If she stays home to watch the kids, you "pay" her a portion of your salary to account for this. Maybe we can crowd source some niche accounting software to make this trivial.
- hnaccy 9y ago
  I believe judges can throw prenups out.
dguaraglia 9y ago
I'm pretty sure not getting married is pretty popular with professional women too. Turns out they also have a career they care about. Who would've thought of women as humans, right?
- atomical 9y ago
  Popular as a minority position?
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    Not sure what you mean. Considering there's slightly more males than females in the US, staying single must necessarily be an even smaller "minority position" for males.
    - atomical 9y ago
      The number of women who don't want to get married and have children is tiny. How could it be popular? > Who would've thought of women as humans, right? Is that really necessary?
      - dguaraglia 9y ago
        > The number of women who don't want to get married and have children is tiny. How could it be popular? You do realize the vast majority of marriages happen between men and women, and if only a "tiny minority" of women didn't want to get married, then by necessity only a "tiny minority" of men wouldn't be married? So either the article is overstating the phenomenon (by saying it's incredibly popular) or a similar amount of men and women must be choosing not to get married. > Is that really necessary? The OP was making the argument that "men choose not to get married because reasons." Seems like they never bothered to consider there's a significant amount of professional women that are not interested in getting married until later in life. There's been a lot of thinly veiled (and sometimes pretty blatant) misogyny around HN of late, that's why I made the joke about them probably having something do with it.
ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
Did you guys read the article? All the Hacker News comments seem to think the Marriage is going down because its not a good deal for high net worth me. This might be true, but was not the point of the story at all. Marriage is declining among the middle/lower classes. Its women who don't want to marry a man who doesn't have a job that are causing the rate to change. This does reinforce the cynical point, that in marriage men are only there to supply funds, but the rich men who are opting out are not doing it at a high enough rate to matter.
- deleted 9y ago
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rayiner 9y ago
From 1960 to 2011, the percentage of married women who earn more than their husbands went up from 6% to 24%. Among the demographic of people choosing whether or not to get married it's much higher--women in their 20s out earn men their age. It would be paradoxical if marriage rates were declining because men don't want to commit to supporting a wife and family even as the amount of money women bring into the family unit is increasing. The correlation might even suggest the opposite: women do not see the need to get married because they no longer need men to support them. (Also, even including the older generations, very little alimony is paid. Americans pay about $10 billion in alimony, almost all by men. But there are about 25 million divorced men in the country, resulting about $33 per month in alimony on average.)
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
If you do not wan[t] children there is no point in getting married. I'd argue that a marriage and children shouldn't be lumped together be default. You can raise children perfectly well without being (legally or common law) married.
dqpb 9y ago
That depends on your definition of win. From an evolutionary point of view, winning is maximizing your number of offspring who also go on to reproduce. This point of view has interesting implications for gender specific mating strategies, since women can only conceive every 1-4 years and men can impregnate every 3 days.

moomin 9y ago

"As marriage has declined, though, childbearing has not, which means that more children are living in families without two parents and the resources they bring." Er, no, it doesn't mean that at all. I mean, I 100% support anyone doing the ridiculously hard job of raising a kid all by themselves, but just because Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson aren't married it doesn't mean they aren't committed to each other and their children. Anyway, maybe the truth is: people don't have to get married, and it's expensive to do so. I don't think there's any great mystery here.

madengr 9y ago
Get married is cheap. Getting a divorce is expensive.
technofire 9y ago
> just because Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson aren't married it doesn't mean they aren't committed to each other and their children. From the article: "The decline in marriage was not offset by more couples living together."
humanrebar 9y ago
> ...just because Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson aren't married it doesn't mean they aren't committed to each other and their children. Sure, but marriage is literally a commitment to each other, current offspring, and future offspring. Theoretically a couple could enter an "anuptual agreement", but that's a rare occurrence if it happens at all. A vaguely defined agreement can work fine, sure. But specifically defined and specifically enforced agreements have their merits.

jgh 9y ago

Let's see how many /r/redpill talking points we can collect in here over the next few hours.

greekyogurt21 9y ago
A fair amount
jnordwick 9y ago
Bonus points for /r/iamverysmart worthy comments

mfoy_ 9y ago

To quote Alec Baldwin's character, Ellerby, from The Departed: "Marriage is an important part of getting ahead; lets people know you're not a homo. Married guy seems more stable. People see the ring, they think 'at least somebody can stand the son of a bitch'. Ladies see the ring, they know immediately you must have some cash or your cock must work." A touch on the homophobic and misogynistic side, but it seems relevant.

thriftwy 9y ago
Once marrying becomes an unfortunate choice, it starts to signal the opposite. "This guy is so desperate he had to marry"
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  That frame of mind implies that marriage is something women want and something men do not want. Why? It sounds like you're making some weird assumptions about sex-positivity, child-rearing, or finances.
  - msla 9y ago
    Or just making assumptions about how well single women get on in life, which is, in turn, an assumption about how well women do in the workforce. If a woman's best life strategy is to get married so she doesn't have to take in laundry or become a shopgirl or take some similar low-pay/low-status job, marriage becomes seen as something the man is roped into, because men can (presumably) do just fine for themselves on their own, and, perhaps, are better off financially without "The Little Woman" to support. Dual-income households destroy that pretty well, but notice how universal such thinking was in the pop culture of the 1940s and 1950s. It's one more example of how all social effects are interrelated: It's hard to be sex-positive if the common STDs are effectively incurable, or require chemotherapy (vide mercury treatment for syphilis) to even attempt to cure. It's impossible to have same-sex marriage if your legal system has coverture, which means a marriage is a union of the husband and wife into the legal personality of the husband. It's impossible to take a modern view of marriage as something which can be put off if fully one half of the population depends on it to have a good life.

kop316 9y ago

I wonder if this is also due to the high cost of the actual marriage ceremony. A (cheap) engagement ring can cost over $1000, and can easily jump to $5-10K. Then a traditional ceremony can easily be over $10K, with no upper bound on how expensive it is. This was the cause of me no longer being with an ex, they were already in debt $80k from school, but still wanted a ceremony that could have easily cost $40K. I had no debt, and was unwilling go into that sort of debt for a ceremony. I think a lot of people see that as well, and realize they simply cannot go into that sort of debt for a wedding ceremony. EDIT: My point was more if that is expected of someone from their family/significant other, that would certainly be major factor in not wanting to get married. Wedding ceremonies can certainly be done affordably, and I think it is smart to do that.

jgh 9y ago
Lots of people do it at City Hall and it usually costs about $50. Throw a nice dinner in for a few of your closest friends / family and you're talking about a decent wedding for a few hundred bucks. No need to go crazy.
- kop316 9y ago
  I completely agree. My point was more if that is expected of someone from their family/significant other, that would certainly be major factor in not wanting to get married.
  - jgh 9y ago
    Fair enough!
CalRobert 9y ago
Perhaps those are the weddings we focus on and we forget all the cheap ones? I've known quite a few people (myself included) who did it for a few hundred quid (turned out Tuesdays were cheaper so we did it then at town hall). Of course, it's cheaper if no family come. Remember, all those gifts they give you are a social debt for which they will want to collect.

kool1 9y ago

Why on earth would should I dedicate my life to some loser that wants to marry me? I probably make more than him anyway so unless he's 6'2'' athletic and makes enough for me to stop working there's no point.

njharman 9y ago

> “Women don’t want to take a risk on somebody who’s not going to be able to provide anything,” That's such a fucked up sexist thought. It says woman are in control of marriage, what men want is irrelevant. And that the role of men is provider. Men belong at work and women belong in the kitchen, is that it?

aetherson 9y ago
If both parties' consent is necessary to get married (which, you know, I hope it is), then either can veto it. If both parties need to provide in order to maintain a decent standard of living (which is the reality of America today), then either party can look at the other and say, "This person is not providing anything" and exercise their right to veto. If women are more stably employed than men, on average, which is again the reality of lower-income areas, then it is women who will be dominantly in the part of the person judging and vetoing, without any sexism (except, I suppose, possibly on the part of the employers who make lower-income men less stably employed, though I don't think that sexism is the causal factor there).
tomp 9y ago
> Men belong at work and women belong in the kitchen, is that it? No, it's just describing the reality that it matters to women how much a man earns. See the last graph in the second section of this article: https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-online-dating-a9e3990d6ae2 https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Yup. There are definite physical[1] and psychological[2] differences between the sexes that lead to different mating strategies[3]. We can bemoan the inequalities that exist with that structure, but it doesn't change the fact that men and women are different in many ways. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mating_strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mating_strategies

diiaann 9y ago

Most people I talk to assume that marriage is a boon for taxes. It is not. Our current tax policy can penalize both low-income and high-income earners. https://taxfoundation.org/understanding-marriage-penalty-and-marriage-bonus/ https://taxfoundation.org/understanding-marriage-penalty-and...

jasonmaydie 9y ago

I don't buy the authors assertions at all. Who thinks being married is a privilege in the United States? We went through the last 10-15years liberating ourselves from marriage and now somehow it's being viewed as a privilege? It's like saying male/female parenting is privilege. It's not.

richardbenson 9y ago

Can HN stay politically neutral, please? Otherwise in two weeks every post will be about Trump, or how only whites can be racist, etc. Kill the cancer before it spreads.

jgh 9y ago
HN is certainly not politically neutral and you can see that in action every time there's a post about sexual harassment or racism in the workplace.

debacle 9y ago

I find a lot of the conclusions drawn in the article unscientific, and they don't really jive with my experience. From what I've seen, totally anecdotally, being more successful and being married are symptoms of being a more stable individual. I don't know many people in good jobs or with careers that aren't in some sort of relationship, and many of those I know who can't maintain a relationship also can't maintain a job. The only exception to that rule that I've found is black women. I don't know many black women in stable, long term relationships, regardless of their career success. The reasons for that are more social than economic.

leggomylibro 9y ago

Wow, this hasn't been up very long and I think the discussion here could already use some more empathy. Looking at marriage as an institution is maybe not the best way to approach the issues that people are going to try and bring up in this sort of discussion. How about this recent piece from The Atlantic, "Love in the Time of Individualism"? https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/09/love-in-the-time-of-individualism/540474/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/09/love-in-t... It seems two-pronged, to me. And people are gonna feel aggrieved, probably rightly to some degree, no matter which side they wind up on. For women, men are frustratingly even LESS likely to commit and stick around for any length of time these days: “It’s not that love is dead, but the sexual incentives for men to sacrifice and commit have largely dissolved, spelling a more confusing and circuitous path to commitment and marriage than earlier eras.” And for men, the numbers are simply massively against you and you're facing a huge time investment simply to meet one single person who probably won't even like you that much - why would you bother?: "Popular dating apps put women in the position of gatekeeping, whether deliberately or not. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a smartphone will swipe right on basically everyone. This forces women to be choosier about who they say yes to. Even if they also swipe with abandon, they end up with more matches to sort through—yet more gatekeeping." So tl;dr, we're all (not) screwed. Of course, these sorts of pieces tend to focus on traditional heterosexual relationships, so this all might dissolve (maybe into similar or totally different issues) with LGBTQ relationships; I don't pretend to know.

stcredzero 9y ago

Well, for one thing, getting married was something for everyone, including the poor. In Meg Keane's A Practical Wedding, there's a discussion about what weddings were like in the beginning of the 20th century. It turns out that what we consider a "normal" wedding was once the wedding only rich people could afford. http://a.co/iC1AZMU http://a.co/iC1AZMU Back then, a wedding happened at church or city hall, and there was a simple stand-up reception at home. The Tappet Brothers warned to beware, "The Wedding Industrial Complex." A lot of the "traditions" around weddings are manufactured with the express purpose of getting more money out of you. This reminds me of a discussion I had with a VP at my company about what happened to going out to the ball game. It used to be something democratizing, something even the poor could afford. Now, everything is jacked up in price, starting with the ticket, and the amount one would spend to take a family out could count as a major purchase. The same thing happened to the movies. I think capitalism is the best system we've come up with so far, but someone needs to realize that everyone needs an outlet, or else people will reject the system.

bob_neumann 9y ago

How incredibly frustrating: The correlation between marriage and the general wellbeing of a middle class income is well-known. It leads folks like Ben Shapiro and Larry Elder to say, "if you want to be middle class, 1. don't have kids outside of marriage, and 2. keep some kind of full time job." Makes perfect sense to me. However, the leftist NYT, reading the same correlation, instead comes to the conclusion of, "Oh look, now those rotten rich people have even taken MARRIAGE away from the poor people!" If that ain't fake news, what is?

RickJWagner 9y ago

3 simple rules to join the middle class: Finish high school, Get a full-time job (any job), Wait until age 21 to get married and have children: Dramatic results.

KittiHawk 9y ago
It doesn't sound like that's been nearly sufficient for quite some years now.