7 ms·

They really buried the lede. There are two things happening here that can arguably be traced to one cause: Educated millennials apparently see marriage as some

by sulam 8y ago

They really buried the lede. There are two things happening here that can arguably be traced to one cause: Educated millennials apparently see marriage as something you do _after_ you've finished establishing yourself. It is a goal, not a given. Uneducated millennials apparently have the _same_ point of view, but they aren't established and therefore they aren't getting married. Given that marriage often means you end up with the lower of the two credit scores, you're on the hook for debts, you're going to be paying jointly filed taxes regardless of future marital status, etc -- it absolutely makes sense not to get married until you're financially established. Now that the mystique of marriage is broken (thanks to those baby boomers get divorced in record numbers), it's no longer a rite of passage into adulthood.

gumby 8y ago
> Given that marriage often means you end up with the lower of the two credit scores Does anyone actually think this way?? Honestly I can’t imagibe ever thinking financially when I proposed.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  Yes, they do. proposal =/= legally married; I know several people who held off a little while... either until they were out of school, or made a major purchase (such as a house, that sort of thing).
- magic_beans 8y ago
  Of course people think this way. It's foolish not to, especially when couples can commit to each other in so many ways other than legal marriage. I'm shocked there's someone on hacker news who doesn't.
  - Freak_NL 8y ago
    Thinking in terms of credit scores seems to be a US thing though. Sure, when you consider marriage you will be aware of each other's financial situation (including debts), and ideally you'll be living together and sharing finances for a couple of years already (ten years in my case), but credit scores seem pretty localized.
  - ryanobjc 8y ago
    A meta comment, this kind of thread is why I don't respect hackernews commenters anymore. It frequently goes like so: - Comment: Something - Reply: But my experience says otherwise, why are you so wrong? There is a persistent lack of ability to see other people's point of view. Surely it is not everyone here, but it's enough such that things get really boring here.
    - sdinsn 8y ago
      Why are you talking a comment thread so seriously? It sounds like that's your problem.
    - gumby 8y ago
      Wasn't the post more "am I wrong?" rather than "poster is wrong"? And the responses were useful.
    - jboles 8y ago
      In many cases I think it goes beyond a lack of ability, to wilful obtuseness.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      That's part of what I like about Hacker News. They may not be able to see each other's POV, but I can. I come out with a richer appreciation for the diversity of experience out there from reading it, even if all the participants do is argue.
      - magduf 8y ago
        I like his comment. I think what he's saying is not that he doesn't appreciate diversity, his complaint is the way in which people discuss these issues: instead of being respectful and level-headed, they act like extremists. I think this is common to people in this profession. There's some other forums where I see a similar dynamic, and then there's other forums where it's completely different. Let's just say that the forums where people are nicer and more respectful have few, if any, engineers. Remember, there was a study a while back that showed that engineers have a greater propensity to become terrorists. People who gravitate toward engineering have much more black-and-white thinking, and with that comes a greater tendency towards extremism.
- sulam 8y ago
  I was raised in a very poor environment, and I still have connections to and experiences from that sort of life. Credit affects a ton of your life in ways that people who aren't poor can't appreciate. If you want cable, they are going to run a credit check on you and if the results aren't great, you need to pony up a large deposit. If you want to open a bank account, your options are greatly diminished if you have bad credit. You are automatically disadvantaged if you're trying to rent a desirable apartment. It's probably obvious, but you also don't have credit cards without pre-paying, and that complicates life in a number of ways (and most people with bad credit also don't have the resources to pre-pay a credit card). Not so surprisingly, this all factors into whether or not to get married to someone!
- harryh 8y ago
  Essentially everyone thought this way up until maybe 100 years ago. Marriage was just as much an economic union as for love and companionship. In many ways it still is whether people acknowledge it or not.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- xfitm3 8y ago
  The credit score remark is a reference to losing half your assets and/or taking on your partners debt if things go wrong.
  - watwut 8y ago
    That assumes you are marrying someone with zero resources.
    - sulam 8y ago
      Most people in the US have less than $10000 in savings.
  - krageon 8y ago
    Do most people really not marry with prenup?
    - loco5niner 8y ago
      I didn't. We are committed til death do us part. Not just saying that.
    - sulam 8y ago
      California has a difficult relationship with prenups. My wife and I essentially have to keep our pre-wedding finances completely separate or they become marital assets and subject to a 50/50 split. Any debts we incur past the date of our marriage are marital debts I believe, and prenups aren’t enforceable.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  In my social circle, it's not all that uncommon for it to be a purely financial decision. One pair of friends, I didn't find out they got legally married until much later, when it came up incidentally in a conversation about filing taxes. And I was no more offended about it than I'd be about them not keeping me up to date on whether they itemize or take the standard deduction, or deciding not to invite me along for a mortgage refinance. I don't know if it's boomers treating divorce as a recreational sport, or if it's the whole 90's/00's DOMA subplot in the story of marriage in the US, or something else entirely, or all of the above. But, at some point, the idea that "love == government licensure" just stopped seeming reasonable.
  - everdrive 8y ago
    What sort of social circle is this?
- rayiner 8y ago
  I sure did! Marriage is, primarily, a financial and risk sharing arrangement. That’s the point of it.
- astura 8y ago
  Good God, you're kidding right? Making sure you are financially compatible with your spouse is just as important as making sure you are emotionally compatible. Financial issues are the #1 cause of stress in marriages. Civil marriage is very similar to a business partnership.
extragood 8y ago
Unintended pregnancy in US teens has consistently dropped by quite a bit [1], and I have to imagine that has reduced the number of "shotgun weddings" at a young age. That said, the number of unintended pregnancies by people at and below the poverty line has actually risen somehow. [1] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-united-states https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...
- dcole2929 8y ago
  The somehow is the access to contraceptives being severely curtailed. Outside of condoms pretty much every form of contraceptive is much more expensive and harder to get than it once was. Free/Cheap birth control was an excellent way to prevent pregnancies but various entities have conspired to take that away, with the ridiculous idea that people will just stop having sex. Condoms can be expensive if you are living below the poverty line but people aren't going to stop having sex. Thus you have these obvious consequences.
- tropdrop 8y ago
  > somehow Note that access to reproductive care continues to be impeded on in places like Utah and Texas - see the recent filibuster in Texas by Wendy Davis, for instance, or Utah's "abstinence-only" school curriculum. It is not usually middle class families hurt by policies like these (e.g. Utah's laws assume the parents will deal with sex ed, and by and large, middle class families do just that). Instead, abortion/birth control restrictions and/or poor sex ed hurt lower educated, lower income families. Single moms (whose husbands are in prison) have no time to ensure each of their kids gets proper attention, have no control over the next pregnancy because lack of education/PTO to drive to the next state for abortion, new child is born, cycle continues and unintended pregnancy rate for people below poverty line increases.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- trentlott 8y ago
  The concerted effort to shut down Planned Parenthood, probably. When you remove and important and often sole provider of family planning, the planning part goes astray. My biggest question is who profits from eliminating places like that? I don't buy that it's just about abortion and religion (and therefore politics, in the US.)
jriot 8y ago
My wife and I got married young, 21 and 20. Neither of us had any financial issues because we were too young to have any financial issues. Twelve years later and we are still married. By sharing our 20s together it allowed us to see each other grow personally, professionally and together in many ways. Neither of us views marriage in terms of financial purposes. There are economic benefits we see. For example I work from home and she is a stay at home mom. 90% of our meals of made from scratch by her e.g., we render leaf fat to use in pie dough and get peaches from farmers market to use in the pies. I am certain people view this as a 1950s arrangement but we are healthy to the point we can't remember the last time we've been to the doctor. Added bonus our kids will be out of the house when we are in our early 40s!
- taurath 8y ago
  > Neither of us had any financial issues because we were too young to have any financial issues Can I guess that your lifestyle doesn't vary hugely from that of your parents? I see most millennial having to contend with a relative shack vs their parents relative mansions and stability and stuff - the general feeling that you are "very" behind your parents.
  - jriot 8y ago
    We both were air traffic controllers in the Air Force and met at our first base. My dad was enlisted military and her mom immigrated here, working as a nurse in the prison system. I now work from home as a data scientist for a cyber-security company.
- LilBytes 8y ago
  Congratulations on finding yourselves so young and more importantly, being in a position where you were both able to grow with one and other. :) I'm rather envious. But like the OP above you mentioned, I wasn't in a position where I could or should be committing to life with some one. I guess that's where today's culture is a lot more forgiving and not forcing our generation to adhere to traditional social roles. I can't imagine anyone who'd have married to the younger version of myself would have made it far, and inevitably found myself on the wrong side of the documented statistics. So, yay... I guess.
apatters 8y ago
I'd really like to see some discussion of the numbers because on the surface a declining divorce rate sounds positive, but depending on other trends it might not be. If these are all true: 1- Unmarried couples with children are more likely to separate than married couples (this is probably true) 2- Couples with less means have become less likely to marry (this is confirmed) 3- Couples with less means are having children at around the same rate that they used to (not sure on this one) Then it suggests that fewer low income children may grow up in stable two-parent households, which is not progress at all, it means a stable family life is becoming a privilege reserved only for the upper class. Which would make a certain amount of sense in the context of long-term inflation and stagnant wages, there's a clear trend in the US of middle class privileges slipping away from a growing segment of the population. We should have seen this coming -- financial hardship has been the #1 cause of divorce for a long time.

by sulam 8y ago

gumby 8y ago

> Given that marriage often means you end up with the lower of the two credit scores Does anyone actually think this way?? Honestly I can’t imagibe ever thinking financially when I proposed.

zdragnar 8y ago
Yes, they do. proposal =/= legally married; I know several people who held off a little while... either until they were out of school, or made a major purchase (such as a house, that sort of thing).
magic_beans 8y ago
Of course people think this way. It's foolish not to, especially when couples can commit to each other in so many ways other than legal marriage. I'm shocked there's someone on hacker news who doesn't.
- Freak_NL 8y ago
  Thinking in terms of credit scores seems to be a US thing though. Sure, when you consider marriage you will be aware of each other's financial situation (including debts), and ideally you'll be living together and sharing finances for a couple of years already (ten years in my case), but credit scores seem pretty localized.
- ryanobjc 8y ago
  A meta comment, this kind of thread is why I don't respect hackernews commenters anymore. It frequently goes like so: - Comment: Something - Reply: But my experience says otherwise, why are you so wrong? There is a persistent lack of ability to see other people's point of view. Surely it is not everyone here, but it's enough such that things get really boring here.
  - sdinsn 8y ago
    Why are you talking a comment thread so seriously? It sounds like that's your problem.
  - gumby 8y ago
    Wasn't the post more "am I wrong?" rather than "poster is wrong"? And the responses were useful.
  - jboles 8y ago
    In many cases I think it goes beyond a lack of ability, to wilful obtuseness.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    That's part of what I like about Hacker News. They may not be able to see each other's POV, but I can. I come out with a richer appreciation for the diversity of experience out there from reading it, even if all the participants do is argue.
    - magduf 8y ago
      I like his comment. I think what he's saying is not that he doesn't appreciate diversity, his complaint is the way in which people discuss these issues: instead of being respectful and level-headed, they act like extremists. I think this is common to people in this profession. There's some other forums where I see a similar dynamic, and then there's other forums where it's completely different. Let's just say that the forums where people are nicer and more respectful have few, if any, engineers. Remember, there was a study a while back that showed that engineers have a greater propensity to become terrorists. People who gravitate toward engineering have much more black-and-white thinking, and with that comes a greater tendency towards extremism.
sulam 8y ago
I was raised in a very poor environment, and I still have connections to and experiences from that sort of life. Credit affects a ton of your life in ways that people who aren't poor can't appreciate. If you want cable, they are going to run a credit check on you and if the results aren't great, you need to pony up a large deposit. If you want to open a bank account, your options are greatly diminished if you have bad credit. You are automatically disadvantaged if you're trying to rent a desirable apartment. It's probably obvious, but you also don't have credit cards without pre-paying, and that complicates life in a number of ways (and most people with bad credit also don't have the resources to pre-pay a credit card). Not so surprisingly, this all factors into whether or not to get married to someone!
harryh 8y ago
Essentially everyone thought this way up until maybe 100 years ago. Marriage was just as much an economic union as for love and companionship. In many ways it still is whether people acknowledge it or not.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
xfitm3 8y ago
The credit score remark is a reference to losing half your assets and/or taking on your partners debt if things go wrong.
- watwut 8y ago
  That assumes you are marrying someone with zero resources.
  - sulam 8y ago
    Most people in the US have less than $10000 in savings.
- krageon 8y ago
  Do most people really not marry with prenup?
  - loco5niner 8y ago
    I didn't. We are committed til death do us part. Not just saying that.
  - sulam 8y ago
    California has a difficult relationship with prenups. My wife and I essentially have to keep our pre-wedding finances completely separate or they become marital assets and subject to a 50/50 split. Any debts we incur past the date of our marriage are marital debts I believe, and prenups aren’t enforceable.
bunderbunder 8y ago
In my social circle, it's not all that uncommon for it to be a purely financial decision. One pair of friends, I didn't find out they got legally married until much later, when it came up incidentally in a conversation about filing taxes. And I was no more offended about it than I'd be about them not keeping me up to date on whether they itemize or take the standard deduction, or deciding not to invite me along for a mortgage refinance. I don't know if it's boomers treating divorce as a recreational sport, or if it's the whole 90's/00's DOMA subplot in the story of marriage in the US, or something else entirely, or all of the above. But, at some point, the idea that "love == government licensure" just stopped seeming reasonable.
- everdrive 8y ago
  What sort of social circle is this?
rayiner 8y ago
I sure did! Marriage is, primarily, a financial and risk sharing arrangement. That’s the point of it.
astura 8y ago
Good God, you're kidding right? Making sure you are financially compatible with your spouse is just as important as making sure you are emotionally compatible. Financial issues are the #1 cause of stress in marriages. Civil marriage is very similar to a business partnership.

extragood 8y ago

Unintended pregnancy in US teens has consistently dropped by quite a bit [1], and I have to imagine that has reduced the number of "shotgun weddings" at a young age. That said, the number of unintended pregnancies by people at and below the poverty line has actually risen somehow. [1] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-united-states https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...

dcole2929 8y ago
The somehow is the access to contraceptives being severely curtailed. Outside of condoms pretty much every form of contraceptive is much more expensive and harder to get than it once was. Free/Cheap birth control was an excellent way to prevent pregnancies but various entities have conspired to take that away, with the ridiculous idea that people will just stop having sex. Condoms can be expensive if you are living below the poverty line but people aren't going to stop having sex. Thus you have these obvious consequences.
tropdrop 8y ago
> somehow Note that access to reproductive care continues to be impeded on in places like Utah and Texas - see the recent filibuster in Texas by Wendy Davis, for instance, or Utah's "abstinence-only" school curriculum. It is not usually middle class families hurt by policies like these (e.g. Utah's laws assume the parents will deal with sex ed, and by and large, middle class families do just that). Instead, abortion/birth control restrictions and/or poor sex ed hurt lower educated, lower income families. Single moms (whose husbands are in prison) have no time to ensure each of their kids gets proper attention, have no control over the next pregnancy because lack of education/PTO to drive to the next state for abortion, new child is born, cycle continues and unintended pregnancy rate for people below poverty line increases.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
trentlott 8y ago
The concerted effort to shut down Planned Parenthood, probably. When you remove and important and often sole provider of family planning, the planning part goes astray. My biggest question is who profits from eliminating places like that? I don't buy that it's just about abortion and religion (and therefore politics, in the US.)

jriot 8y ago

My wife and I got married young, 21 and 20. Neither of us had any financial issues because we were too young to have any financial issues. Twelve years later and we are still married. By sharing our 20s together it allowed us to see each other grow personally, professionally and together in many ways. Neither of us views marriage in terms of financial purposes. There are economic benefits we see. For example I work from home and she is a stay at home mom. 90% of our meals of made from scratch by her e.g., we render leaf fat to use in pie dough and get peaches from farmers market to use in the pies. I am certain people view this as a 1950s arrangement but we are healthy to the point we can't remember the last time we've been to the doctor. Added bonus our kids will be out of the house when we are in our early 40s!

taurath 8y ago
> Neither of us had any financial issues because we were too young to have any financial issues Can I guess that your lifestyle doesn't vary hugely from that of your parents? I see most millennial having to contend with a relative shack vs their parents relative mansions and stability and stuff - the general feeling that you are "very" behind your parents.
- jriot 8y ago
  We both were air traffic controllers in the Air Force and met at our first base. My dad was enlisted military and her mom immigrated here, working as a nurse in the prison system. I now work from home as a data scientist for a cyber-security company.
LilBytes 8y ago
Congratulations on finding yourselves so young and more importantly, being in a position where you were both able to grow with one and other. :) I'm rather envious. But like the OP above you mentioned, I wasn't in a position where I could or should be committing to life with some one. I guess that's where today's culture is a lot more forgiving and not forcing our generation to adhere to traditional social roles. I can't imagine anyone who'd have married to the younger version of myself would have made it far, and inevitably found myself on the wrong side of the documented statistics. So, yay... I guess.

apatters 8y ago

I'd really like to see some discussion of the numbers because on the surface a declining divorce rate sounds positive, but depending on other trends it might not be. If these are all true: 1- Unmarried couples with children are more likely to separate than married couples (this is probably true) 2- Couples with less means have become less likely to marry (this is confirmed) 3- Couples with less means are having children at around the same rate that they used to (not sure on this one) Then it suggests that fewer low income children may grow up in stable two-parent households, which is not progress at all, it means a stable family life is becoming a privilege reserved only for the upper class. Which would make a certain amount of sense in the context of long-term inflation and stagnant wages, there's a clear trend in the US of middle class privileges slipping away from a growing segment of the population. We should have seen this coming -- financial hardship has been the #1 cause of divorce for a long time.