From the “Can women and men be friends” thread, I got very inspired by the marital problems and concerns people have shared. It seems like men just want to conquer the world, or at least every woman they get their eyes on; women always live in fear and worry about their cheating husbands, while perfectly find being the other women… it leads me to think, why get married at all?
For some, it’s a cultural/ religious reason. That i am NOT going to discuss at all.
For others, it’s peer pressure, including friends, family and media (think about all these companies trying to make money from us via engagement, bachelor’s parties, wedding reception, gowns, rings, floral, honeymoon…)
As some others already mentioned, the divorce rate in some countries is 50%, it seems like marriage is no longer a commitment and a lot of people do regret making that decision (only 50% of people actually get a divorce filed, think of how many more are trapped in unhappy marriages).
So what’s really in it for men? And what’s in it for women?
Some get married or stay in a marriage because of kids, which to me, does more damages to kids. What are your thoughts? Perhaps from someone who’s been through that as a parent and/or as a child?
I know you said “in some countries” but the divorce rate in the US never hit 50%. It’s a total myth that was taken from bad stats. Here’s an article on it if you’re interested. The real rate is more like 30%.
Whether or not you should get married is entirely up to you. It’s been great for me and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Kids are a nice bonus but I’d be happy living the rest of my life with my wife even if it was just the two of us.
Some people aren’t built that way and highly value their independence. Different strokes for different folks.
Even if 40% of marriages end in divorce, this does not mean that 40% of people who get married will divorce. Many divorcees are repeaters, and they push up the statistic for marriages that end in divorce.
Anyway, marriage is still advantageous due to the way laws and societal conventions are set up. For instance, you get tax breaks, estates that pass to your spouse, better societal support for kids, shared health insurance, and other benefits. Most people want these things - lower taxes, cheaper healthcare, stable household for children, etc. Therefore, marriage is aligned with the interests of most people at some point. The fact that most people get married (and stay married) is evidence of these benefits.
Of course, a separate question is to what extent today’s marital rate is caused by historical reasons, as opposed to contemporary factors that would indepedently determine the equilibrium rate. Clearly, many laws regarding marriage were written for different times. If we were to wipe all these laws that subsidize marriage, what would people do? That remains unclear.
Perhaps we can look to certain Nordic countries like Iceland, where two thirds of babies are birthed by unmarried women. People in Iceland still have long term relationships, but many of them do not think that marriage is a necessary component of that relationship. Marriage is ultimately a legal definition, after all.
“Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.” ― Albert Einstein
Riffing off Ohai’s last statement, I recall reading somewhere that the two highest rates of births-out-of-wedlock in the US are for inner-city African American women and wealthy highly-educated white women in their mid 30s.
Neither result surprised me on its own, but they are extra interesting when presented as data points together.
^Bringing in stereotypes (which have a little truth behind them, but wrong to use as generalizations to discriminate), I would bet the former case is due to lack of education in contraceptive methods and the pregnancies are generally accidents or unwanted whereas the latter case likely has a higher proportion of women with that very independent spirit who neither need a man nor want a man but want children and so use methods like artificial insemination. In these cases, I’d assume most of the pregnancies are wanted. Just a hypothesis.
I can see there are many economic benefits of getting married, tax credit is just one of them. If financial benefit is a prime reason, whey do people spend so much $$ on weddings?
And i do believe one what you said about Icelanders, marriages and having kids are two complete separate issues. Being married does not mean they will commit to each other or to their kids, and NOT married does not mean you will throw away your kids should you have no love for your spouse anymore.
Dayyyyyym. Come to WC to get some racist jokes to relieve myself of the L3 pressure. All I see is NANA’s threads based on some random Cosmo articles she read.
NANA - most people get married because most governments incentivize (through taxes) the act of getting married. If I was given tax cuts for staying single (and arguably a more responsible human), I’d stay single all meh life.
Taxes are also the reason people justify having kids. Again, the act is incentivized by most governments.
You may or may not be right, but it sounds like you are assuming a lot more about me having “an agenda” than I do.
There’s a whole history of things that make it challenging for African American families to be stable. Poverty alone in the inner city is one, a history of families being deliberately broken up in slave times has meant that the tradition of trying to make families stable is centuries long for most racial groups in the US, but only about 150 years old for African Americans (through no fault of their own). The fact that African American males have such high incarceration rates (whether deserved or undeserved: that’s a separate debate) makes stable marriage difficult. The fact that inner city regions are often violent areas contributes.
Trying to figure out why out-of-wedlock births are happening in those communities is complex, and there are a lot of factors contributing, and each factor could potentially be spun in ways with fair or unfair overtones. Maybe being unwed as a parent is rational decision on the part of women; maybe it’s rational for the men; maybe women don’t have enough power relative to men, or maybe they have too much power and so the men stay away from committment. I don’t really know. All I’m saying is that I know that African Americans in the inner city have a tough life and are up against a lot of things I don’t have much experience with, and yet they are human beings with human urges and, by-and-large, fewer resources to deal with some of the unplanned things that go along with them.
My observation was simply that it is interesting that births to unwed mothers seem to be highest at the lower and the upper ends of the wealth and education spectrum, and it’s the middle that seems to be more into the “we’re pregnant, therefore we’re getting married” (or, alternately “we’re married, therefore we’re getting pregnant”) approach.
