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> Legal marriage is a lifetime obligation where the terms aren't decided until after you sign. That's part of the point - customary marriage vows are usually s

> Legal marriage is a lifetime obligation where the terms aren't decided until after you sign. That's part of the point - customary marriage vows are usually something like "to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, to love you and honour you until death do us part". There's a recognition there that life is uncertain and you can't predict exactly what the terms will be for the remainder of your life. But like most contracts, marriage is an exercise in giving up freedom to build trust - it's a way of aligning incentives so that two people can each know that the other has their back, even when they don't know exactly what that means. If you're not interested in making that contract or don't feel you could possibly be ready for it, then by all means, don't get married. It's not for everyone. But there's stuff you miss out on with that choice too.

nordsieck 7y ago
> it's a way of aligning incentives so that two people can each know that the other has their back But it doesn't align incentives. Instead, it creates unaligned incentives. In most relationships, one person is more of a spender and one person is more of a saver. Marriage is one big F-U to the saver. As far as I can tell, the real reasons to get married are the medical decision making and visitation rights. That's about it.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  > As far as I can tell, the real reasons to get married are the medical decision making and visitation rights. That's about it. Perhaps there is something more to an arrangement developed all over the world spanning a variety of cultures. Yes, one aspect of marriage is the business partnership. But there are other aspects to a marriage relationship that can’t be codified in law. Maybe it’s not as necessary with women now having just as much economic power as men.
  - nordsieck 7y ago
    > Perhaps there is something more to an arrangement developed all over the world spanning a variety of cultures. Yes, one aspect of marriage is the business partnership. But there are other aspects to a marriage relationship that can’t be codified in law. I have nothing against the cultural institution of marriage. It's probably a good idea for most people. However, most people are unwilling to participate in the cultural institution of marriage without also having a legal marriage. At this point in the US, the laws surrounding marriage and the cultural institution have almost nothing to do with each other. For example, almost all of the laws around the sexual aspects of marriage: for cause divorce, alienation of affections, etc. are gone in most places. So when people are evaluating marriage, the most important thing to evaluate is the law, because that's what affects people lives the most.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - kelnos 7y ago
      > However, most people are unwilling to participate in the cultural institution of marriage without also having a legal marriage. I don't think it's a lack of willingness, I think it's social pressure. If someone told me they were "married", but hadn't actually been legally married, I would find that odd. I'm ambivalent on the whole thing; I tire of people gossiping about how so-and-so are "finally" getting married (if they're together and are both happy, that's enough), and I would be fine being in a long-term, unmarried relationship, but I don't feel so strongly anti-legal-marriage that I would make it a showstopper for a relationship of my own.
    - erikpukinskis 7y ago
      If you can’t legally drain each other’s checking accounts, then you’re not “participating in the cultural institution”. It’s about trusting someone to merge legal entities with you, and trusting someone to pull the plug on your life support at the right time, and all the cultural baggage that entails. If you want a roommate you coparent with, that’s awesome. Go for it. But that’s not a marriage.
- yodsanklai 7y ago
  Also immigration and tax benefits. Sometimes, getting married is the only way to be able to live with one's partner. For instance, a friend of mine married his gf so he could get a visa to follow her after she got a job in the US (they had a child already, but didn't plan on getting married).
  - nordsieck 7y ago
    > immigration That's fair > tax benefits I don't think marriage is a net positive if you were to do an "expected value" calculation and included the risk of divorce. However, I could be wrong.
    - epicureanideal 7y ago
      You're absolutely right, and here are some approximate numbers to go with that. Based on a Bay Area tech salary of let's say $200,000 per year, you would save about $5,000 on taxes assuming your partner earns very little and you enjoy almost the maximum tax advantage. If you get divorced after 10 years, you've saved $50,000 in taxes, half of which will belong to your partner, so you've gained $25,000 assuming you kept your half so far. A cheap divorce might only cost $5,000 and so you'd come out ahead, but a high conflict divorce could cost $100,000, or $200,000. And on top of that if you were actually getting "tax savings", that means your partner earns much less than you, which means you'll be paying a lot of alimony to them for possibly the rest of their life, or at least half the length of the marriage. Even in the case of a "cheap divorce" of $5,000, the alimony will surely eat up far more than the remaining tax savings. If you're earning let's say $200,000 and your spouse was earning much less, you're paying $1,000+ in spousal support per month for several years at least. So yeah, the math definitely doesn't work out.
      - henrikschroder 7y ago
        Things I have never understood about the US: Why does a divorce cost money?
        7y ago
- klodolph 7y ago
  > In most relationships, one person is more of a spender and one person is more of a saver. Marriage is one big F-U to the saver. If you view relationships in these win/loss terms they are never going to make sense. The same kind of logic can be used to tear down other types of relationships—like founder/cofounder relationships, business/employee relationships, or business/vendor/contractor relationships. All of these relationships will have unequal benefits to the two parties.
  - nordsieck 7y ago
    > The same kind of logic can be used to tear down other types of relationships—like founder/cofounder relationships, business/employee relationships, or business/vendor/contractor relationships. The legal structure around these relationships promote, rather than attack the alignment of incentives. The legal structure cannot be a replacement for trust, but it does have an effect (which is why it exists at all). > If you view relationships in these win/loss terms they are never going to make sense. Everyone views relationships in this way. The more intimate and trusting the relationship (e.g. marriage), the more advantage there is in decreasing legibility [1] in order to enhance stability. However, people still track contribution in low legibility relationships, just more fuzzily. If there is an imbalance that is too great for too much time, the relationship will tend to fail. ___ 1. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
    - klodolph 7y ago
      > Everyone views relationships in this way. This is obviously false. The degree to which you track contributions is germane and you cannot dismiss it from the conversation by saying that “everyone tracks contributions somewhat”, because the degree is important. It’s also not true that everyone tracks contributions, people in relationships are notoriously irrational and blind (especially if you define rationality relative to some “homo economicus” standard). If you cannot imagine how people could have aligned incentives in a marriage then I think your model of marriage is incomplete. If you think that marriage is a big F-U to the person in a marriage who tends to save money, I simply don’t think I have a basis to argue that point, because your model of marriage and relationships is so completely alien to mine that I don’t know where to begin to find common ground. Your viewpoint may be somewhat incomprehensible to me.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Money is something to be sure you're aligned on before getting married. I'd argue that marriages that're based on alignment on money, kids, and lifestyle tend to do much better than ones that are based on passion, attraction, and wish-fulfillment. Unfortunately the popular image of love, dating, and marriage doesn't really reinforce this. (As a side note, I think pop conceptions of dating are seriously broken: there's this idea that it's about impressing the other person and making yourself more desirable, while you're significantly better off if you just be yourself and continue letting people reject you until you find the one person who doesn't reject you.)
  - lifeisstillgood 7y ago
    >> you're significantly better off if you just be yourself and continue letting people reject you until you find the one person who doesn't reject you.) Woody Allen joke: (Girlfriend leaving him for good): It's over. You weren't like this when we first dated. You were passionate and attentive (Allen): I couldn't keep that up - I would have had a heart attack. I think there are heuristics to help find a good partner (the above idea is a doozy, and then the well known secretary problem). But in the end this is just helping you get past the, say, 80% of people who don't match you. Getting from 80% to The One is probably impossible - and after twenty years of marriage I would say not needed - marriage is about growing together, working on the problems and fixing things. If you marry literally the most perfect partner on the planet, and then fail to spend 20 years understanding or working on the relationship you will probably be in worst state than picking the first person on plentyoffish and putting in the effort.
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      There isn't really The One in an objective sense - there's a whole lot of people who would be bad matches and then a smaller group who would be decent ones. There's a One in a subjective sense, in that once you find a decent one and commit to them, you stop looking and work on making your relationship with The One as strong as possible.
      - 7y ago
epicureanideal 7y ago
Except the terms of the contract tend to favor one side much more than the other side. If anything marriage creates an incentive for one partner to leave after sufficiently "vesting". It's much more so an act of trust for only one side of the deal, and for the other side it creates a ton of misaligned incentives.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  So you’re saying that having someone be a stay-at-home mom or dad, giving up career prospects is something that should be gone into without marriage? That places all the burden of uncertainty on one partner. Will they just walk if their partner decides to be unfaithful? Their entire life hinges on them. Not marrying is fantastic if you do not intent to rear children and just both keep up with your jobs, but otherwise...
  - babaganoosh89 7y ago
    He never said anything about being a stay at home parent, he's saying the lower income partner is the one who benefits financially and in some states alimony is perpetual after some amount of years.
  - david38 7y ago
    You 100% made that up out of whole cloth. He said no such thing. 1) Most married women with husbands who would be worth something in a divorce don’t stay home. 2) Why do you assume she gave something up? Suppose she wanted to be a stay at home mom for ten years, then took a job in marketing at a tech company making decent money, but not as much as him? 3) Divorce laws often say she is entitled to the lifestyle she was used to. This is crap. Two households now, both can’t live “how they’re used to”. Why does she get to? Btw, he’s used to sex every night, the court doesn’t grant him that. 4) The consequence of women having access to the broad workforce is expectation to participate in it. I don’t get a choice, why should she? She can stay home for a short amount of time and then go back to work. This way she’s can’t complain she’s dependent on him, so she should feel free right? What people fail to understand is when there is little advantage in something because of poor treatment by the courts or whatever, people will stop participating. Women got divorced in droves when it became legal. It was their right. They walked away from it. Now men are often seeing little advantage and are walking away.
dropit_sphere 7y ago
> But like most contracts, marriage is an exercise in giving up freedom Thankfully, we have progressed beyond this.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  For both parties. You give up certain freedoms in order to get something more valuable.
mirimir 7y ago
That sounds great. But that "each know that the other has their back" ends at divorce. And indeed, that vow ends with "until death do us part". So for it to actually mean anything, divorce would necessarily be impossible. But divorce is ~50% likely. So the entire contract is fraudulent, and cannot be binding.
- spacesword 7y ago
  The 50% divorce rate is a myth
  - kentrado 7y ago
    Source?
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      It was true in the 1980s, but there are a few caveats with it: 1.) It measures the chance that a given marriage will end in divorce, not the chance that a given person will get divorced (which was closer to 40%). The stat is skewed upwards by a few serial divorcers: 60% of second marriages end in divorce, and 73% of third marriages. [1] 2.) The divorce rate has fallen: Millenials are 18% less likely to get divorced than Baby Boomers are (largely because they're less likely to get married in the first place unless they're in a stable relationship). [2] 3.) It's heavily class-based. College educated professionals have only a ~20% chance of getting divorced, while unskilled blue-collar laborers have a ~50% chance of getting divorced. [3] [1] https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/ https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/ [2] https://time.com/5434949/divorce-rate-children-marriage-benefits/ https://time.com/5434949/divorce-rate-children-marriage-bene... [3] https://qz.com/1069806/the-highest-and-lowest-divorce-rates-in-america-by-occupation-and-industry/ https://qz.com/1069806/the-highest-and-lowest-divorce-rates-...
      - epicureanideal 7y ago
        Millennials are still young. Maybe they just need more time to catch up to the previous divorce rate.
bhl 7y ago
In game theory, we call this a "precommitment mechanism" [1]. I have to say that, before reading this comment and viewing it through incentives, marriage did seem to me as an outdated institution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precommitment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precommitment

nordsieck 7y ago

> it's a way of aligning incentives so that two people can each know that the other has their back But it doesn't align incentives. Instead, it creates unaligned incentives. In most relationships, one person is more of a spender and one person is more of a saver. Marriage is one big F-U to the saver. As far as I can tell, the real reasons to get married are the medical decision making and visitation rights. That's about it.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
> As far as I can tell, the real reasons to get married are the medical decision making and visitation rights. That's about it. Perhaps there is something more to an arrangement developed all over the world spanning a variety of cultures. Yes, one aspect of marriage is the business partnership. But there are other aspects to a marriage relationship that can’t be codified in law. Maybe it’s not as necessary with women now having just as much economic power as men.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > Perhaps there is something more to an arrangement developed all over the world spanning a variety of cultures. Yes, one aspect of marriage is the business partnership. But there are other aspects to a marriage relationship that can’t be codified in law. I have nothing against the cultural institution of marriage. It's probably a good idea for most people. However, most people are unwilling to participate in the cultural institution of marriage without also having a legal marriage. At this point in the US, the laws surrounding marriage and the cultural institution have almost nothing to do with each other. For example, almost all of the laws around the sexual aspects of marriage: for cause divorce, alienation of affections, etc. are gone in most places. So when people are evaluating marriage, the most important thing to evaluate is the law, because that's what affects people lives the most.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - kelnos 7y ago
    > However, most people are unwilling to participate in the cultural institution of marriage without also having a legal marriage. I don't think it's a lack of willingness, I think it's social pressure. If someone told me they were "married", but hadn't actually been legally married, I would find that odd. I'm ambivalent on the whole thing; I tire of people gossiping about how so-and-so are "finally" getting married (if they're together and are both happy, that's enough), and I would be fine being in a long-term, unmarried relationship, but I don't feel so strongly anti-legal-marriage that I would make it a showstopper for a relationship of my own.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    If you can’t legally drain each other’s checking accounts, then you’re not “participating in the cultural institution”. It’s about trusting someone to merge legal entities with you, and trusting someone to pull the plug on your life support at the right time, and all the cultural baggage that entails. If you want a roommate you coparent with, that’s awesome. Go for it. But that’s not a marriage.
yodsanklai 7y ago
Also immigration and tax benefits. Sometimes, getting married is the only way to be able to live with one's partner. For instance, a friend of mine married his gf so he could get a visa to follow her after she got a job in the US (they had a child already, but didn't plan on getting married).
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > immigration That's fair > tax benefits I don't think marriage is a net positive if you were to do an "expected value" calculation and included the risk of divorce. However, I could be wrong.
  - epicureanideal 7y ago
    You're absolutely right, and here are some approximate numbers to go with that. Based on a Bay Area tech salary of let's say $200,000 per year, you would save about $5,000 on taxes assuming your partner earns very little and you enjoy almost the maximum tax advantage. If you get divorced after 10 years, you've saved $50,000 in taxes, half of which will belong to your partner, so you've gained $25,000 assuming you kept your half so far. A cheap divorce might only cost $5,000 and so you'd come out ahead, but a high conflict divorce could cost $100,000, or $200,000. And on top of that if you were actually getting "tax savings", that means your partner earns much less than you, which means you'll be paying a lot of alimony to them for possibly the rest of their life, or at least half the length of the marriage. Even in the case of a "cheap divorce" of $5,000, the alimony will surely eat up far more than the remaining tax savings. If you're earning let's say $200,000 and your spouse was earning much less, you're paying $1,000+ in spousal support per month for several years at least. So yeah, the math definitely doesn't work out.
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      Things I have never understood about the US: Why does a divorce cost money?
      - 7y ago
klodolph 7y ago
> In most relationships, one person is more of a spender and one person is more of a saver. Marriage is one big F-U to the saver. If you view relationships in these win/loss terms they are never going to make sense. The same kind of logic can be used to tear down other types of relationships—like founder/cofounder relationships, business/employee relationships, or business/vendor/contractor relationships. All of these relationships will have unequal benefits to the two parties.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > The same kind of logic can be used to tear down other types of relationships—like founder/cofounder relationships, business/employee relationships, or business/vendor/contractor relationships. The legal structure around these relationships promote, rather than attack the alignment of incentives. The legal structure cannot be a replacement for trust, but it does have an effect (which is why it exists at all). > If you view relationships in these win/loss terms they are never going to make sense. Everyone views relationships in this way. The more intimate and trusting the relationship (e.g. marriage), the more advantage there is in decreasing legibility [1] in order to enhance stability. However, people still track contribution in low legibility relationships, just more fuzzily. If there is an imbalance that is too great for too much time, the relationship will tend to fail. ___ 1. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
  - klodolph 7y ago
    > Everyone views relationships in this way. This is obviously false. The degree to which you track contributions is germane and you cannot dismiss it from the conversation by saying that “everyone tracks contributions somewhat”, because the degree is important. It’s also not true that everyone tracks contributions, people in relationships are notoriously irrational and blind (especially if you define rationality relative to some “homo economicus” standard). If you cannot imagine how people could have aligned incentives in a marriage then I think your model of marriage is incomplete. If you think that marriage is a big F-U to the person in a marriage who tends to save money, I simply don’t think I have a basis to argue that point, because your model of marriage and relationships is so completely alien to mine that I don’t know where to begin to find common ground. Your viewpoint may be somewhat incomprehensible to me.
nostrademons 7y ago
Money is something to be sure you're aligned on before getting married. I'd argue that marriages that're based on alignment on money, kids, and lifestyle tend to do much better than ones that are based on passion, attraction, and wish-fulfillment. Unfortunately the popular image of love, dating, and marriage doesn't really reinforce this. (As a side note, I think pop conceptions of dating are seriously broken: there's this idea that it's about impressing the other person and making yourself more desirable, while you're significantly better off if you just be yourself and continue letting people reject you until you find the one person who doesn't reject you.)
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  >> you're significantly better off if you just be yourself and continue letting people reject you until you find the one person who doesn't reject you.) Woody Allen joke: (Girlfriend leaving him for good): It's over. You weren't like this when we first dated. You were passionate and attentive (Allen): I couldn't keep that up - I would have had a heart attack. I think there are heuristics to help find a good partner (the above idea is a doozy, and then the well known secretary problem). But in the end this is just helping you get past the, say, 80% of people who don't match you. Getting from 80% to The One is probably impossible - and after twenty years of marriage I would say not needed - marriage is about growing together, working on the problems and fixing things. If you marry literally the most perfect partner on the planet, and then fail to spend 20 years understanding or working on the relationship you will probably be in worst state than picking the first person on plentyoffish and putting in the effort.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    There isn't really The One in an objective sense - there's a whole lot of people who would be bad matches and then a smaller group who would be decent ones. There's a One in a subjective sense, in that once you find a decent one and commit to them, you stop looking and work on making your relationship with The One as strong as possible.
    - 7y ago

epicureanideal 7y ago

Except the terms of the contract tend to favor one side much more than the other side. If anything marriage creates an incentive for one partner to leave after sufficiently "vesting". It's much more so an act of trust for only one side of the deal, and for the other side it creates a ton of misaligned incentives.

Aeolun 7y ago
So you’re saying that having someone be a stay-at-home mom or dad, giving up career prospects is something that should be gone into without marriage? That places all the burden of uncertainty on one partner. Will they just walk if their partner decides to be unfaithful? Their entire life hinges on them. Not marrying is fantastic if you do not intent to rear children and just both keep up with your jobs, but otherwise...
- babaganoosh89 7y ago
  He never said anything about being a stay at home parent, he's saying the lower income partner is the one who benefits financially and in some states alimony is perpetual after some amount of years.
- david38 7y ago
  You 100% made that up out of whole cloth. He said no such thing. 1) Most married women with husbands who would be worth something in a divorce don’t stay home. 2) Why do you assume she gave something up? Suppose she wanted to be a stay at home mom for ten years, then took a job in marketing at a tech company making decent money, but not as much as him? 3) Divorce laws often say she is entitled to the lifestyle she was used to. This is crap. Two households now, both can’t live “how they’re used to”. Why does she get to? Btw, he’s used to sex every night, the court doesn’t grant him that. 4) The consequence of women having access to the broad workforce is expectation to participate in it. I don’t get a choice, why should she? She can stay home for a short amount of time and then go back to work. This way she’s can’t complain she’s dependent on him, so she should feel free right? What people fail to understand is when there is little advantage in something because of poor treatment by the courts or whatever, people will stop participating. Women got divorced in droves when it became legal. It was their right. They walked away from it. Now men are often seeing little advantage and are walking away.

dropit_sphere 7y ago

> But like most contracts, marriage is an exercise in giving up freedom Thankfully, we have progressed beyond this.

toasterlovin 7y ago
For both parties. You give up certain freedoms in order to get something more valuable.

mirimir 7y ago

That sounds great. But that "each know that the other has their back" ends at divorce. And indeed, that vow ends with "until death do us part". So for it to actually mean anything, divorce would necessarily be impossible. But divorce is ~50% likely. So the entire contract is fraudulent, and cannot be binding.

spacesword 7y ago
The 50% divorce rate is a myth
- kentrado 7y ago
  Source?
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    It was true in the 1980s, but there are a few caveats with it: 1.) It measures the chance that a given marriage will end in divorce, not the chance that a given person will get divorced (which was closer to 40%). The stat is skewed upwards by a few serial divorcers: 60% of second marriages end in divorce, and 73% of third marriages. [1] 2.) The divorce rate has fallen: Millenials are 18% less likely to get divorced than Baby Boomers are (largely because they're less likely to get married in the first place unless they're in a stable relationship). [2] 3.) It's heavily class-based. College educated professionals have only a ~20% chance of getting divorced, while unskilled blue-collar laborers have a ~50% chance of getting divorced. [3] [1] https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/ https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/ [2] https://time.com/5434949/divorce-rate-children-marriage-benefits/ https://time.com/5434949/divorce-rate-children-marriage-bene... [3] https://qz.com/1069806/the-highest-and-lowest-divorce-rates-in-america-by-occupation-and-industry/ https://qz.com/1069806/the-highest-and-lowest-divorce-rates-...
    - epicureanideal 7y ago
      Millennials are still young. Maybe they just need more time to catch up to the previous divorce rate.

bhl 7y ago

In game theory, we call this a "precommitment mechanism" [1]. I have to say that, before reading this comment and viewing it through incentives, marriage did seem to me as an outdated institution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precommitment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precommitment