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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

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
  [deleted]
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

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.