22 ms·

The Never Married, a New Normal

• alpineidyll3 3y ago
  The meaning of the word "marriage" has changed significantly even over the last 50 years in the west, and bears no resemblance to the the institution with the same name that existed before that. The idea that marriage would be chosen by the individual for romantic reasons, secular marriage, etc. etc. are new. Assumptions of fidelity have even changed and changed again several times since year 0. If anyone is thinking about marriage, or troubled by this article, I strongly encourage he/she to really study what marriage meant for prior civilizations. Our society encourages people to accept modern marriage as an eternal, teleological, essential and inviolable constant of society. Imo today's US marriage is a poorly developed, haphazard, and soon-to-be obsolete layer cake of ideas which does a lot of harm. Anything which isn't working for 50% of people, and which decimates family wealth when it fails, probably deserves critical thought. The promised miracle spouse of modern marriage, who is your business partner, sexual fulfillment, therapist, childcare specialist, etc. etc. DOESN'T EXIST.
• deterministic 3y ago
  I was married 20+ years. Don’t recommend it. Instead find a partner who has his/her own life and share the good times between you. Adjust time spent together up/down as needed to not get bored/complacent. Do not get involved with a person who aren’t mature enough to have their own life without you.
• dzogchen 3y ago
  In the Netherlands, there is virtually no societal difference between people that are in a long-term relationship and live together, and married people. To the point that people call themselves husband and wife if they technically 'just' live together. My German girlfriend was shocked to learn this, in other countries (and cultures) marriage really is more of a 'thing'.
  • tromp 3y ago
    > people call themselves husband and wife In Dutch that is just "man" en "vrouw", i.e. man and woman. For spouse they use either "partner" or "echtgenoot", only the latter of which implies marriage.
  • Semaphor 3y ago
    It depends. I’d say the biggest difference is that we (I’m also German) wouldn’t call someone husband and wife when they live together, but otherwise people don’t care much (at least here in the north, the south is usually more traditional). Tax and other benefits (I married someone from non-EU which gave her a residence permit) can make marriage a practical choice, though.
  • hotpotamus 3y ago
    In the US that would be called a common law marriage and basically ends up creating a marriage that is recognized by the law (for good or ill). Basically if you say you're married, then you're married. I assume the American tradition comes from English common law because of the name, but I doubt it's unique to those societies.
    • amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      Common law marriage varies state to state. My state doesn't recognize it, but some others do.
    • pengaru 3y ago
      > Basically if you say you're married, then you're married. I just wanted to note that, depending on the state, the corollary can also apply; If you say you're not married, then you're not married. The more witnesses of both parties clearly stating this, the better. I'm referring to states where common-law marriage potentially kicks in just by living together long enough.
  • dleslie 3y ago
    In BC, Canada, there is no practical legal difference between marriage and long term cohabitation. Not getting married and living together is rather normal, and comes with the same risk of financial segmentation and alimony or child support.
• biscuits1 3y ago
  A mentor once shared this wisdom, "In experimenting in human relationships, there is always an emotional outcome over time: lonely and irritated." Certainly, they were right.
  • paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Experimenting as in uncommitted dating?
  • erokar 3y ago
    Certainly, many married people feel lonely and irritated too.
  • happytoexplain 3y ago
    I can't tell what "experimenting" means here.
• mindvirus 3y ago
  Marriage is a tough proposition in the west these days. The cost of childcare has never been higher, both in terms of dollars and opportunity cost, not to mention housing. Of course there are other benefits to getting married, but without the goal of family feeling attainable to many, a major driver for marriage is gone.
  • giantg2 3y ago
    A lot of it is unknown costs too. You might know exactly what it costs to raise a child, but in the event of a divorce the support payments are based on a percent of income and not the actual cost. The courts can basically make any decision they want.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • kitsunesoba 3y ago
    It's because of all of this that I've for many years felt a need to have all my ducks in a row before even considering dating with the intention of starting a serious long-term relationship, let alone getting married. No judgement towards anybody with different feelings — everybody's situations differ — but I'd feel like I was irresponsibly leading on the partner in question if I weren't financially reasonably prepared for the commitment involved.
    • paulryanrogers 3y ago
      In general I'd agree, yet now that I married later and had kids later I think I waited too long. Emotional maturity can come with age and yet some younger folks with more experience or better mentors were years ahead of me. Sometimes I wish there were pre-child counseling focused on helping parents strategize before they're pregnant -- or at least before children are born. Regardless, folks need to do the math, especially if considering having many kids. And still consider their bodies aren't getting any younger or lives and longer.
• vsnf 3y ago
  I was expecting this article to be preachy, sanctimonious, and panicked. Instead what I got was a level headed article, one that even expresses some amount of admiration for the topic. Consider me pleasantly surprised.
• giantg2 3y ago
  "In fact, most never-married individuals come to see me for help dealing with parents or family members who insist that they live a more conventional lifestyle, not because they are unhappy with their choice of marital status, a lot of married people cannot say the same." That took an unexpected, refreshing, turn. It seems to me that the legal system around marriage is outdated and flawed compared to societal norms today. Marriage licenses are cheap, easy, and quick to get. That's not necessarily a problem on it's own. Then you have a large number of marriages that end in divorce - a process that typically costs as much as each party buying a car, and takes months or years to complete. It's never truly over as I've heard stories of people seeking amended alimony years after the divorce. It seems many of the decisions maid by the courts in this realm are absurd (like the lady who was forced to pay for her husband's "lifestyle" or watching PPV porn; or not amending monetary obligations when income changes). It truly baffles me how alimony is even legal today. Based on how alimony is treated, marriage is essentially indentured servitude. If any company offered terms that are typically found in marriage/divorce without any disclosure/consult, they'd be getting sued by AGs. People talk about the student loan epidemic/issues, but I feel that this one is much larger and more costly.
  • 35997279 3y ago
    > It truly baffles me how alimony is even legal today. Based on how alimony is treated, marriage is essentially indentured servitude. The US has no guaranteed parental leave. If you have a kid and want one parent to spend any significant time with that kid, someone is sacrificing their career advancement. This usually hits women harder. If you want to see the end of alimony, you’d need to make it easier to choose to have kids. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be a priority in the US.
    • nico 3y ago
      > you’d need to make it easier to choose to have kids. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be a priority in the US This seems to be the case in every “developed” country Society turns into a work machine that devalues having and raising kids The US is particularly bad, but this is happening everywhere
    • 3y ago
• jitl 3y ago
  My partner and I have been together for 7 years, we bought a house together, haven’t found a compelling reason to get married. Marriage is a complex and binding contract that for two high earners is a tax disadvantage. The most prominent benefits I’ve learned are some situations around visitation rights, and avoiding being compelled to testify against your spouse. It comes from a very dubious history of the husband essentially owning the wife. The “commitment” of the legal marriage obviously doesn’t prevent people from falling out of love or breaking up, not that it should – if one partner stops loving another they will still leave the relationship one way or another. So, why marry — besides “tradition” and “society wants you to for whatever reason”?
  • 0xB31B1B 3y ago
    Married people report significantly higher levels of happiness/life satisfaction in the middle and later stages of life than non married people. This is a durable finding across many studies.
    • jitl 3y ago
      Is it the marriage contract that brings the happiness? Or is it a lifelong relationship with someone they love? Do such studies have a reporting group for “we’ve been together 40 years but didn’t get married”?
      • Kye 3y ago
        I would definitely like to see those studies broken down by how happy the marriages are. Somehow I doubt it's accurate for married couples who are constantly at each others' throats.
    • rullelito 3y ago
      Doesn't mean marriage affects your happiness.
    • andrei_says_ 3y ago
      Married people vs singles or vs long terms partners living together?
• swayvil 3y ago
  30 year anniversary coming up. Never married. We figure what's the point. Sometimes we say husband and wife just to simplify the conversation.
  • bckr 3y ago
    Do you have power of attorney in a medical emergency? Also congrats on building a relationship that has lasted.
• mkl95 3y ago
  I wonder if it relates to the decline in fertility in the last few decades. Is having kids a motivation for marriage? Could it be the other way around?
  • bckr 3y ago
    I think it has more to do with the decline in religiosity in the US. Why get married? Typically there’s a wedding. That’s a ceremony involving you, your partner, both partners’ family and friends, and a religious and/or civic authority. You’re throwing a big party saying “we are committed to each other”. When you’re very religious, this is required to become partnered and accepted as an adult in the community. When you’re not religious, this is an incredibly expensive way of getting a bunch of other people involved in your relationship, which has a 50/50 chance of ending despite the life vows. For some it might be beautiful. For others, there’s just no real point to it. Personally, I’d be interested in a ceremony celebrating a commitment to cohabitation and partnership that sheds the baggage of a wedding and marriage. Something like a domestic partnership housewarming party.
    • paulryanrogers 3y ago
      > I'd be interested in a ceremony celebrating a commitment to cohabitation and partnership that sheds the baggage of a wedding and marriage. Especially if it didn't involve renting a venue, 25% mark ups, hurt feelings from non-invited folks, decades of expectation building, and an industrial complex focused on money extraction.
      • bckr 3y ago
        Precisely
      • ux-app 3y ago
        ehh, it's a choice to buy into any of that bullshit. we eloped $3,000km away to the tropics to get married. it was more of a holiday with a wedding day thrown in. we loosely, no expectations, invited a few friends and family and were pleasantly surprised to find 30 people met us there. The whole thing, holiday and all cost us around $10k and was a total blast. I found the traditional wedding day routine to be super claustrophobic and rigid.
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  I imagine there's a bimodal distribution at work here: wealthier couples could choose to get married in a traditional ceremony (which is often an economic flex as much as anything else), although in such circles prenup agreements related to divorce-related division of wealth seem increasingly common. If you're going to have a prenup, why get married at all? There are issues related to end-of-life-decisions but the living will solves that problem. This is where 'changing social values' apply, in that non-married living arrangments don't lead to social ostracization as they might have in the past. The other side is simply economic - getting married and raising a family is an expensive proposition that many people (at least in the United States) can no longer afford, and there's no real social safety net that ensures medical care and quality education for low-income families - so raising a family in poverty is not an attractive proposition. There's also good evidence that birth rates track economic recessions pretty closely: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/04/06/us-birth-rate-decline-linked-to-recession/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/04/06/us-birt... This economic factor seems universal, as the high cost of housing in China is associated with a decreased marriage rate (although unequal numbers of men and women related to the now-defunct One Child policy is another issue): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01400-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01400-4
• lukevp 3y ago
  This is really surprising, but also interesting to hear. I think there’s a lot of societal pressure to both get married and to have children, especially in the south, where I’m from. Thankfully, my family never pushed these on me. I’ve been with my wife for 13 years now, and married for 8. It’s been an awesome experience for us, but I know neither of us considered marrying any of our previous partners. If we hadn’t found each other, I’m not sure I’d be married at this point. Marriage in and of itself should probably not be a goal. It’s contingent on finding someone who you really want to be married to. Having kids is the same way. It shouldn’t be the default, it should be the thing you do when you truly feel it would add value and meaning to your life, and be worth the tradeoffs you’re making. I hope that society moves more in the direction that both marriage and having children is something that you can choose to do, or not, and there’s not an implicit judgement on you for failing to meet norms that honestly don’t work out for the majority of people.
  • kitsunesoba 3y ago
    > I think there’s a lot of societal pressure to both get married and to have children, especially in the south, where I’m from. I don't know where things stand now, but there was a similar pressure in Appalachia ~15 years ago. If you'd been out of high school more than a couple of years and hadn't gotten married or at minimum found someone you'd intended to marry, people would start asking if you were closeted or something, which seemed crazy to me — how on earth could I possibly find it a good idea to get married before I'd even had a chance to get some clue about how to function as an adult or figure out who I was? A lot of people succumb to that pressure. I think out of everybody in my class and the classes both before and after me I'm the only one who wasn't at least engaged by age 22.
    • hotpotamus 3y ago
      If a society didn't find some way to last beyond the lifespan of a human, then it wouldn't be much of a society.
      • monissiddiqui 3y ago
• dubeye 3y ago
  I'm guessing this is more to do with declining birth rates than anything else. Much of the value of marriage is to enhance the child's claim to both parents' wealth and income. If married, it's much harder for one partner to tap out of parenting, in financial terms
  • paulryanrogers 3y ago
    So unmarried father's have less financial responsibility than married ones? Is this because of alimony assuming mothers will reap less income to care for the kids?
  • giantg2 3y ago
    "If married, it's much harder for one partner to tap out of parenting, in financial terms" Child support can be determined independently from being married. Whether one is married or not has no bearing on one's financial obligations to children, to my knowledge.
    • dubeye 3y ago
      I'm not just talking about child support. If married, if you want to leave your wife and kids and go live in the next town and not see them ever, it will likely cost you more if married, than if you are single.
      • giantg2 3y ago
        That doesn't have anything to do with tapping out as a parent. The costs are all the same except for divorce and alimony costs, which are separate from someone checking out as a parent.
• paulryanrogers 3y ago
  > If they have sufficient resources, and most of the [permanently single] ones I see are financially independent, they are relatively content. Rest of the article suggests "financially independent" as working a job to support oneself. Though I wonder if a significant portion of their clientele are wealthy enough to not work or only work a small portion of the year. When I was single and made enough to live alone it actually increased my desire to seek a partner, not necessarily get an official marriage document.
• throwaway1492 3y ago
  I’ll risk it and defend marriage to this crowd. To me getting married was about getting out of myself. As someone who got married later in life, I’d spent decades living only for myself, doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Relationships were shallow and lasted only so long as convenient. By choosing to get married and intentional build a family, I knew I was sacrificing a lot of ego and choosing to give up a lot of freedom and self. But I was ready to do it. I firmly believe what we’ve created is greater than either one of us, and is worth the irritations sacrifice.
  • nunobrito 3y ago
    Fully agreed.
  • paulryanrogers 3y ago
    How much of that was making the marriage official or just committing to a long-term partner? I know someone who was with their partner for years, and has been engaged for years more. I've come to the understanding they'll likely never actually marry. They appear to just want some negotiated commitment. Actual marriage appears to carry strings they're reluctant to accept. (Funds appear to be kept separate as well.)
    • gameman144 3y ago
      I can speak to this in some degree: marriage is much more significant than a negotiated commitment for me personally. A negotiated commitment takes a specific form (the terms of the negotiation) but a marriage defines a commitment to be committed. I've heard some folks of my generation say things like "we got divorced because we fell out of love", which sharply contrasts with my view of marriage and falls more in line with a standard committed relationship. To me, a marriage is a commitment to consistently try to fall back in love and work through things, even at those points you might otherwise quit. Granted, I'm a religious guy and my view on marriage is flavored from that perspective, but making the marriage official was certainly key to the commitment for me personally.
      • 3y ago
• akokanka 3y ago
  My brother married then his wife started to beat him up. He tried to escape has been forced back every time. It was either prison or wife. She reported him beating her same way. After lots of stress they finally dissolved their marriage. I'm planning to never ever marry anyone.
  • tjr225 3y ago
    [dead]
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  When you look at some repeatedly married people, both now and in history, and ask "why?" the only conceivable answer is, "They both felt they had to BE married." For all the usual reasons, they thought it was unacceptable to be single, both to society and to themselves. For the latter, it was the feeling, "I'm a loser whom nobody wants." In many societies, it IS almost unacceptable to be single. Thankfully that's less so in Western societies these days. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but if we're looking at the big picture, that's a huge part of it.
  • candiddevmike 3y ago
    What would happen if folks could only marry once in their lifetime? Nothing to stop you from having a partner after a divorce, but you could not marry them.
• Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
  Marriage happens in the heart. I perceive the big event as the opposite of something healthy. The need for a legal thing is resolved in Canada: if you live together for 1 year, that's basically equivalent to being married. I have been living with my partner for 13 years (I'm 34), we both work from home so that's some 24 x 365 x 13 hours together. I occasionally ask her to marry me, for fun, and she says yes. At times she says maybe to joke. But really after living together for that long, does that even matter? So there you go, another reason to never marry We have two children.
  • throwaway1492 3y ago
    > But really after living together for that long, does that even matter? FYI she’s not joking, you should surprise her and do it.
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
      We discussed that in a serious context too, so I know what she thinks on the matter. We also didn't want to deal with the additional cost of being married but not being citizens yet of the country we would marry in (we are now citizens though).
  • Spivak 3y ago
    I'm in that boat, we got married but it was a formality and an excuse to throw a party for both our families. We had been all but the paperwork married for a decade. I like marriage as a ceremonial recognition of a thing that's already happened better than the maligning a commitment version.
• i2cmaster 3y ago
  [dead]
• jankyxenon 3y ago
  Marriage is a signal of commitment to society. It used to be that more social opportunities, status and privilege were afforded to married people. The prevailing culture cares less about this signal. Or rather - there’s less of a prevailing culture than there used to be.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• fogzen 3y ago
  This is deeply connected to the drop in childbirth. Yeah, if you don’t want children and you just have a friend you have sex with, why get married?
  • JenrHywy 3y ago
    Maybe, just maybe, there's more to marriage than having a friend you have sex with?
    • fogzen 3y ago
      Marriage is a commitment to stay together for life. Family is the most compelling reason to make such a commitment, as children are naturally a lifelong relationship and long-term shared responsibility. Caring for the spouse is an extension of caring for the child. Sure, people can get married without choosing to have children. There's just way less on the line. Divorce is much easier. Just split the assets and move on. No need to worry about custody issues, where the child will live, all the relatives that have a relationship with the child, etc.
• jankyxenon 3y ago
  When marriage was more common, having multiple close social / family ties was also more common. Modern marriage makes you concentrate all that emotional energy on one person. It’s a lot.
• flangola7 3y ago
  The current legal institution of marriage is also not a great option for anyone who is polyamorous, which is gradually becoming more widely accepted and acknowledged. The law only recognizes one pairing, meaning you have to decide which one of your partners gets very literal special extra rights. Picking which of your partners gets guaranteed visitation rights and immunity to compelled testimony against you is incredibly unfair, so the answer for many people ends up being none of them.
  • sidlls 3y ago
    Polyamory is at best a rounding error in all relationships of any sort. The vast majority of people are monogamous, serially or otherwise. I've seen quite a few poly relationships: when they weren't shallow excuses for openly having multiple concurrent sex partners (which I found amusing: just call yourselves single/casually dating--that's what that is, not a poly-relationship, and there's nothing wrong with it), they were tension-filled drama-fests because invariably one pairing in the group formed a stronger bond than the others.
    • flangola7 3y ago
      Ok? I don't see what being a "rounding error" (assuming that it is even accurate, which I don't believe it is) or your tangent has to do with my point. If we're going for personal experiences, I've known and been in multiple polycules and I can't say there's been any more drama than in mono land. Having multiple concurrent sex partners doesn't mean they're not relationships; I sleep with a lot of people ranging from my partner who I've lived with for 7 years to someone who is a hiking friend I met last spring, but they're still relationships. With full respect, your comment sounds like someone who has only external observation with the poly community/experience - i.e. the IT department phenomenon, you only get noticed the few times something is going wrong and are invisible when the ship is sailing smoothly the rest of the time. But again this is all beside the point, being part of a "rounding error" is not comforting at all to me or providing equal human rights.
• romusha 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • denimnerd42 3y ago
    you can’t even come up with a couple rational reasons one might settle into a long term partnership and have children?
  • ChatGTP 3y ago
    Have you ever heard of “fun” and “love” ?
• pixodaros 3y ago
  Talk like this in the USA tends to equivocate between marriage (a legally sanctioned social and economic union) and marriage (a Christian sacrament, usually grudgingly including other major religions). IIRC the second kind of marriage has been in decline in the USA for decades because participation in organized religion is in decline and some states made it hard to get the legal status called marriage without involving a church. In most places there are other legal forms of sexual and social partnership such as common-law relationships in former British colonies. I have trouble taking anything in this genre by an American seriously unless it clearly communicates the definitions it is using.
  • slavboj 3y ago
    There is no state in the US that does not recognize a marriage by a judge or self-certified "minister" of no particular religious affiliation. There's also no requirement to be married in one's state of residence, or even country. It's absolutely trivial to arrange the legal status of marriage.
    • pixodaros 3y ago
      For many Americans, travelling out-of-state is a big deal. If its important enough many of them can make it happen, but many seem to have decided that formalizing their relationship in one legal category is not that important. There are other reasons why Americans might become less likely to choose one legal form for their marriage, like an American friend of the right-libertarian persuasion who does not just object to marriage, he objects that the laws of his state declare that he and his long-term, live-in partner have various obligations to each other which they have not explicitly contracted. OTOH there is the daft way healthcare works in the USA which can create incentives to use a particular legal form.
      • slavboj 3y ago
        Name a state that doesn't have civil marriage. This is a non issue.
      • fred_is_fred 3y ago
• theoldlove 3y ago
  The underlying Pew research study has a lot more meat than this pretty thin blog post: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-share-of-u-s-adults-are-living-without-a-spouse-or-partner/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...
  • pixodaros 3y ago
    And good for them defining their categories "married" and "partnered" right at the start of the press release!
• exabrial 3y ago
  Fawk me. Nearly 40, hurts me in the feels. On the other hand… I’m for once a trend setter.
  • Group_B 3y ago
    Only 22 but I know this will be me in a couple decades…
    • tjr225 3y ago
      [dead]
    • exabrial 3y ago
      If I could go back in time, the lesson would be to take a class on empathy a lot sooner. You've got lots of time and a bright future.
      • randyrand 3y ago
        which class do you recommend ?
  • stevekemp 3y ago
    I'm married, but I live in a separate house to my wife. I've started to see others in similar situations and apparently it's a trend these days. "Living Apart Together", or "LAT": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_apart_together https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_apart_together
    • Glawen 3y ago
      What does it mean? You see other partners?
      • stevekemp 3y ago
        Yes, but even without that there are a fair number of people I'm aware of who live (monogomously) in seperate flats/houses to their spouse.
• emodendroket 3y ago
  > Cohabitation has become a popular alternative; living together is a less complicated relationship model that comes with an easy escape hatch (compared with marriage) if the relationship fails This seems like a bit of a false promise... Once you commingle finances, own a house together, have children, and so on, there's no "easy escape hatch." Plus thinking of having an "easy escape hatch" probably does not do wonders for the relationship.
  • shadowgovt 3y ago
    Children? In this economy?
    • emodendroket 3y ago
      So you say and yet not having children or doing it later is correlated with more income and wealth rather than less. E: Consider https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/01/15/for-most-highly-educated-women-motherhood-doesnt-start-until-the-30s/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/01/15/for-most-...
      • ameminator 3y ago
        Be careful not to fall into the correlation=causation trap. It's entirely possible that only the wealthy are able to get married and stay married.
        • emodendroket 3y ago
          That's possible but I don't see what it has to do with wealthier people having children later in life.
    • nine_k 3y ago
      No. Children, in your one and only life which is going to end soon enough. Economy will never be perfect.
      • 3y ago
• morkalork 3y ago
  My spouse of 10 years is the child of serially married and divorced boomers. After seeing one of the parental units go through marriage #3 as a teenager they have zero interest in the whole song and dance and I don't blame them. Anyways, married or not, the feelings are the same and we go on living life the way we want to. Who cares? Also, if civil marriages didn't exist today and I tried to propose "hey, let's invent a system where you register who you're fucking with the government", you'd think i was insane. Rightly so.
  • emodendroket 3y ago
    And yet cultures all over the globe have invented some form of this ceremony.
  • zrezzed 3y ago
    > you'd think i was insane I don't think so at all. In general, society (ours, and afaict all others too) has a vested interest in the formation and preservation of family units. This seems pretty obvious to me, for various economic, cultural and moral reasons.
• mathgladiator 3y ago
  I'm married (15 years), and I wish there was a hardcore mode where not even death would end it.
  • ngngngng 3y ago
    That’s called Mormonism
    • Prickle 3y ago
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      • ngngngng 3y ago
        Do you have a source for any of those claims? Higher divorce rate or rate of violence?
        • Prickle 3y ago
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          • ngngngng 3y ago
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            • Prickle 3y ago
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              • ngngngng 3y ago
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• lvl102 3y ago
  I know this is a touchy subject but I hate the fact that I am married. If it works out you’re golden but if it doesn’t then it’s going to be a constant source of depression for the rest of your life.
  • Otek 3y ago
    Sorry for your situation, but since you shared I feel it's okay to ask. Why is divorce not an option for you?
• xupybd 3y ago
  I'm married with one child and another on the way. Raising children seems to require both of us to work together closely. We pool all our recourses to provide for our children. I work to provide financially but that wouldn't be possible without my wife at home with our very needy 8 month old. The contract of marriage makes this easier than I imagine it would be without it.
• Saigonautica 3y ago
  Looking at the first 3 causes they list, that's pretty much my wife and I. I'm an immigrant to Asia, so got my life in reasonable order a bit later than most (picking up and moving across the world will do that). Early marriage in a culture I didn't fit in to yet, would have been a terrible idea. I hear lots of disaster stories in this domain! We decided to ignore local cultural norms and share a residence before marriage. This was in hindsight a wise decision that let us build a life together in confidence. I had my immigration paperwork properly in order before we met, but had not yet made any real money. We were both pretty broke, at the time. We held separate finances at the start, but shared expenses, which improved our financial security quite a bit. Honestly, we would have continued this way and ignored pressure to get married... except that it's somewhat difficult for me to gain citizenship. Without citizenship, no land/home ownership or access to many financial instruments -- so it's optimal that I hand over 100% of any income. Marriage provides me with at least a few rights in this context (at least de jure), so we went for it. It was simply the least suboptimal choice. I feel if it wasn't for the weird legal context of being an immigrant to a country that receives few immigrants (Vietnam), we may not have bothered getting married, social pressures be damned.
• mlindner 3y ago
  The new normal on how civilization gradually ends. People need to stop not having kids. You’re destroying civilization in the long term.
  • rrgok 3y ago
    At the risk of being downvoted to hell. I'm genuinely trying to understand: what would the issue if civilization collapse and, in the extreme case, human species goes extinct? If you are not alive by then (which is probably the case), would you feel something?
    • lotsofpulp 3y ago
      > what would the issue if civilization collapse Generally, a collapse is considered a bad thing. Surely for those underneath or on top of the thing that is collapsing.
    • mlindner 3y ago
      Yes of course I would feel bad. I care about the future of humanity. If we're going to cease to exist then what's the point of trying to achieve anything with your life?
• j7ake 3y ago
  Today, it is now possible to live entirely independently, with little reliance on a large family. Government and society provides (at a price) many things that used to be provided by extended family : eg child care, unemployment benefits, food, social activity, clothing, housing. This new “society provides most services” favours being single with one other person (and maybe one child). Being married and having children is more suited for older days when society provided almost no security and protection from economic and natural realities.
• azubinski 3y ago
  Well, extinction is also a form of evolution.
  • rrgok 3y ago
    Nicely put. People sometime forget that fading away is part of existence. Also, humans going back to be fish again would be part of evolution too.
• helen___keller 3y ago
  I’ve been married for 5 years, together for 10. The main reason we got married is because my new job had really good health insurance and her graduate school had crap health insurance. We didn’t do a big (or any) wedding, buy expensive rings, etc But I guess we were already “committed” to each other in the intellectual / spiritual sense so marriage was just a formality. The whole “escape hatch” thing didn’t really apply, we just don’t give a shit about the institution of marriage and associated ceremony
• maweaver 3y ago
  One of the main legal benefits of marriage is being able to be financially dependent on someone else in a secure way. If one spouse decides to put their career on hold (or never begin one in the first place) while the other one works, they don't have to worry about being penniless and unable to provide for themselves in the case of the relationship ending. This becomes less crucial if both are working, which seems more common than ever.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• 2devnull 3y ago
  The 4 reasons all boil down to reason #3, money. “Coffee is for closers.”
• SergeAx 3y ago
  People confuse marriage and family all the time. First is a legal and economical concept and has nothing to do with feelings, empathy and intimacy.
• fortyseven 3y ago
  I may be miserable and lonely, but at least I'm not putting myself in the position of making things even worse once the (literal) honeymoon is over. My misery is a known quantity that I've learned how to live with. :I