I have 2 relatives where in both cases, they were formally married but at one point the wife in the relationship just up and decided she wanted a divorce. No, the husband wasnt abusive or being unfaithful. He was doing his best to be a provider to his family. In both cases the wife just basically decided she either could do better with someone else or decided the husband wasnt fulfilling her every needs. She just felt unhappy in the marriage. So she filed for divorce and of course, took half his money.
They say in the US about 85% of divorce are filed by the wife. Now personally, I have NO PROBLEM if she divorces him because he was fooling around or being abusive to her or the children, or he was a lazy bum sitting on the couch all day. But I think to just up and walk away because say they want to be “free” or they were not happy is just plain wrong.
Remember this was a wife who at one point made a vow to stay faithful, to have and to hold, till death. They knew exactly the kind of man he was when they married him.
My son was hurt by one of these because he truly admired his uncle. I want him to know not all women will just up and leave their husbands.
Do you all think this issue will keep men from wanting to get married?
Are you serious? What about all the women who get divorced and then have to raise children without any help from the idiot they married and cheated on them?
Divorce sucks for both people. If you are thinking about what would happen when you get divorced, then don’t get married in the first place.
I think most people put the bare minimum thought and consideration into marriage so no, it probably won’t scare them off. When two people are in love they will do astonishingly short-sighted and stupid things.
I guess that is an even more cynical take on it! I am happily married 11 years but it took us four years to even get married. There is always a risk that things won’t work out but you can minimize that risk by thinking really critically about the person you’re marrying and considering how their strengths will complement yours, and exactly how to navigate their weaknesses.
i don’t get it. did your uncle also die? was your sons admiration of his uncle based upon him being happily married? what changed? why does he not admire him anymore? I’m confused.
That’s pretty much my first marriage and divorce in a nutshell Urban.
My two older boys have both put off marriage, but not ruled it out. Instead they have both said they want to take their time and be absolutely certain before taking that step to join themselves legally and financially to their respective girlfriends. OTOH, that hasn’t stopped either of them from blessing me with one grandchild each.
My now wife and I dated for six years and discussed it a LOT, about every aspect, every set of circumstances we could think of, before getting married.
Scare them off, nah, not most people. Like Spice Weasel said, people do dumb things when in love.
My Ex divorced me this year after 8 years of marriage, and two kids together. I’ll admit things became pretty volatile at the end but I never wanted the divorce. When I made that vow I took it seriously, I didn’t want to end up a statistic, and I really didn’t want my children to suffer and they have suffered greatly.
I always felt that my Ex made a rash, emotional decision, I never begged her to stay but I told her that I thought things could be worked out, but nobody could change her mind. Both our standards of living and the life my children had grown accustomed to as far as time with their parents and living conditions dropped in a sharp manner.
Initially it was maybe one of the darkest periods of my life, I cried frequently and sometimes even fantasized about suicide, but I worked through the grief. My Ex started dating two months after the divorce but it didn’t work out. About 6 months after the divorce she began calling my hysterically crying all the time, telling me she loved me and begging to get back together. Since that time she has been severely depressed, had lots of health problems, and gained weight. I told her the truth, that I would never get over the fact, that she immediately rushed out and started dating after 8 years together, to me it made me feel our marriage had meant nothing, it’s the one thing I can’t forgive.
I’m generally an upbeat, happy person and didn’t realize till after we got divorced how miserable I really was, I feel way happier now on a daily basis while she tells me all the time how much her life sucks. I’m glad now I may have the opportunity to find someone that actually wants to be with me. I pay my child support on time every month, visit my children during the week, and I get them EVERY weekend, not every other. I am hesitant to ever get married again, but I don’t absolutely rule out the possibility. I would have to seriously date a woman for a long time and really make sure she is the right one though, not rush into marriage after a year of dating like I did with my Ex, though we had been friends before that. Even so there are no guarantees in life and I don’t regret the marriage because I gained a lot of life experience and perspective and did get my beautiful children out of the deal.
It scares me off. I am well known on this board for being anti-marriage in general. I believe truly happy marriages exist somewhere but I have only seen direct evidence of a few of them in real life and some of them are probably faking it.
I personally think that marriage for men (and possibly women) today is one of the worst decisions you can make up there with riding a motorcyle drunk and high except the latter is probably a little safer. It is mostly risk with little reward in the long run. I can understand the need for companionship but that is what boyfriends and girlfriends are for.
Marriage is a legal contract that is exactly as romantic a house deed. It was never designed to be romantic or to bring happiness to either party involved. It evolved from the idea to promote social cohesion plus family stability. That last part is gone now because it is easy to get a divorce and lose almost everything, including your home and kids, if you catch your wife running a 3-ring sex circus in your own house.
If you want to be with someone, just be with them, if you don’t want that anymore, just leave without getting lawyers involved. Some of that is impossible to avoid, especially the kids part, but the rest can just be done piecemeal like an ongoing pre-nup. There is no need for a hugely expensive wedding for a marriage that may end within just a few years or even months. I have seen the latter happen too many times. Sometimes one or both people involved secretly didn’t like each other but loved the idea of being married, a few times one of them was really homosexual and others were hiding very deep skeletons in their closet, especially oppressive debt.
***My perceptions may be colored a little by the fact that almost everyone in my family gets divorced, often multiple times, before they learn. I learned it on the first try. The ones that aren’t divorced either will be soon enough or wish they were. I wish I thought that was an isolated case but, sadly, it isn’t. Most of the people that gave me advice when I was having trouble used their “happy marriage” as an example are now divorced too. They were just better at hiding it.
My best friend’s wife realized she was a lesbian sometime during her pregnancy with their second child. He was full-time caretaker of both kids at the time she finally left him. They were together as long as me and my husband, we all met in college.
It’s been absolutely crushing to witness him go through this, especially as he’s been largely focused on his art for the last decade and doesn’t have much job experience. Because of his children, he’s stuck in the state where they live, totally isolated from his family and friends. Meanwhile, she was bringing girlfriends over to the house and their divorce isn’t even final yet. And she decided they never were in love, really. She decided that for him, he never was really in love, they were always just friends, according to her.
And of course in the aftermath, all this info has come out about how she treated him all this time, including some instances of physical abuse. She took responsibility for it and got help, but as I love him, I don’t really care how bad she felt about it. I’ve really grown to dislike her.
But she is not, of course, representative of all potential wives. (Also, marriage statistics may seem dire, but they also vary significantly by education level and other factors that contribute to stability.)
AIUI, this has long been a talking point of MRAs and MGTOW men. Namely, that women are quick to divorce men because the rules of divorce and society favor women.
I think it’s more likely because women are statistically more likely to unhappy in marriage, and do most of the housework and child-rearing and deal with other types of gender-based inequality. It’s easy to fall into this pattern even in well-meaning egalitarian households because society is still structured in many ways to support traditional gender roles. Speaking with the recent experience of my best friend in mind, it’s quite difficult to leave someone when you have no career prospects due to years of child-rearing, so the fact that women go through the trouble of divorce speaks quite highly to the level of unhappiness they probably feel. The evidence seems to demonstrate that men are happiest when they are married, and women are happiest when they are not married. And of course, the lowest point for both genders is having children. (Statistically speaking.) It seems that the less education (read: income) you have, the greater this burden is felt. (Also, fun fact: the more equally childrearing and household labor is shared, the healthier and happier everyone in the family becomes.)
Millenials have a markedly low marriage rate relative to later generations, which also appears to increase the marital success rate. So maybe we are getting smarter about who we marry. I’m pretty fucking happy in my marriage and** Sr. Weasel** feels the same. But we fit that happy marriage profile: Milennial, highly educated, egalitarian. And we don’t yet have children.
The level at which people are obligated to commit in a marriage is an interesting question worthy of its own thread.
TIME Magazine interviewed Gore Vidal once and published the interview. This was at a time (IIRC) that same-sex marriage was starting to be discussed but long before it was a thing.
The following excerpt is paraphrased as best I can remember how it went:
TIME: What is your view on same-sex marriage?
Vidal: Marriage is such a disaster of an institution, why in the world would gays want to imitate it?
Harry Browne, author of How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World, expressed anti-marriage views. He made the point that marriage is a three-party contract between a husband, a wife, and the State. (This was long before same-sex marriage was considered.) With lots of the usual terms and conditions imposed by the State. His argument was that nobody should need to have the State as a party to their marriages, so forget about getting legally married.
The issue though is that being married still comes with a ton of financial benefits. Tax breaks, insurance coverage and all that good stuff. Theoretically, it’s pretty dumb to involve the state in a family affair, and kind of arbitrary in terms of conferring privileges that single people don’t get. But those benefits will be very difficult for people to let go of, and as long as it remains an economically preferable situation, people will continue to support the idea of state-sanctioned marriage.
I think the OP has presented a rather backward and sexist way of looking at it. But IMHO, the answer is “yes” and the “why” of it is largely irrelevant. That is to say, I can see plenty of men (and women) not wanting to bother signing up for a “till death do you part” contract that might end long before death (or might have them wishing for death long before the contract ends).
I don’t want to go off on a rant, but I could very quickly come up with a list of shit I hate about being married and having kids.
Or to put it another way, I don’t think any guy ever decided “you know what? I’m sick of waking up when I feel like, spending my day doing what I want with whom I want, and then going to be when I feel like it to enjoy many hours of uninterrupted sleep. I think I’ll find someone to fuck all that up for me.”
My wife and I were one of those couples for over a decade before we got married and had kids. And I’m seeing that a lot more now where I meet unmarried couples that have been dating exclusively for years. It becomes a lot more complicated if you start co-mingling assets or have kids.
If that’s true, I think a big reason is that for a long time, women were more or less completely dependent on their husbands of their livelihood.
Marriage is a legal contract. So, by definition, consisting of terms and conditions imposed by the state. Like you can’t marry someone younger than the legal age of consent.
The reason gays want to imitate it is because being married incurs certain legal rights with respect to inherited property, health related stuff.
I think y’all misunderstand the nature of marriage. The state doesn’t create marriages, it recognizes them. We need the state to recognize marriages because they are a real thing, independent of the state: two people come together and form a familial relationship. The state needs to recognize marriage for the same reason it needs to recognize that parent/child or sibling relationships are different than friendships.
As far as the 85% of women file divorce–I would like to see that controlled for the % of women that take care of all the paperwork bullshit like schedule doctor’s appointments, fill out school enrollment forms, deal with insurance companies, etc. I think that’s heavily skewed toward women as well, and dealing with the paperwork of marriage is just one more example of that.