This is just about exactly my POV. Thanks for saving me a bunch of typing.
I agree with this. Warning: when I’ve said it here in the past I got quite an earful from happy Dads telling me I was an idiot.
Being married is transitioning from being a single human to being half of a Siamese Twin human. In well-chosen marriages the sum is more than the parts. In poorly-chosen marriages the sum is less than the parts. In the former case you gain a lot in exchange for some loss of freedom of action. In the latter case you lose a bunch *and *lose freedom of action. Small wonder people in the latter marriages bail out early and often. Or drink, cheat, get violent, or otherwise sabotage things unconsciously or deliberately.
Of course worst are the people who think they’re hiring a servant, not getting married. Note this latter goes both ways.
There’s the stereotype of the man as breadwinner employing a homemaker & occasional sex worker for (he thinks) a few percent of his salary and being surprised later when it costs him 50% in the inevitable breakup. Here’s Jerry Reed to explain it.
But there’s the opposite stereotype of the woman thinking she’s getting a meal ticket & a place to live in exchange for being cute and putting out now and again. Only to discover she’s paying a lot more in foregone happiness than she thought. Here’s the Eagles to explain this one.
My bottom line: IMO way too many people enter a marriage thinking of it as being profitable in some way for them. That zero-sum transactional mentality is the kiss of death.
they can come at me if they want. I clearly did not say “all” guys, nor even “most” or “many.” I meant to restrict it to the set of “guys who have soured on their marriage.” So, note to any fathers out there: if you’re happy with your family and enjoy being a parent, then I am not talking about you.
I kinda wish education about what marriage is and what to consider in a proper marriage partner was somehow a part of everyone’s life. My husband and I first started talking marriage shortly after we got together. At age 19. Among the topics were:
How many years should we wait?
Agreed: at least until we’re finished with college
Do we want kids? Here I talked about my desire to adopt.
Conclusion: We are both totally on board with adoption. After graduate school. He was adamant, and has remained adamant, that he wants an active role in his kid’s life and wants to share child-rearing responsibilities to the extent possible. Likewise, I made it clear that I care about my work and don’t want parenthood to become my sole identity or means of life satisfaction. In the ensuing 15 years, I developed a greater desire to invest time and energy into childrearing, and it has since become evident that his career is going to limit his parenting time more than we’d like - but we both started with fair and reasonable expectations.
What kind of standard of living do we want?
Conclusion: This was trickier because due to his relatively wealthier upbringing, his idea of ‘‘not too extravagant’’ was my idea of ''good money." After going around in circles we realized we were talking about roughly the same middle-class income level.
What roles would we have in the household? Finances?
This changed over time, but was always open for discussion.
We went through all that about four years before we officially tied the knot. And we revisited it often. And we still revisit it. Usually on our road trips to visit relatives we have the, ‘‘Okay, so is this where we want to be?’’ discussion.
I don’t know how we had the instinct to do that, because it certainly wasn’t demonstrated for us by our parents. But I meet a lot of married couples who seem to think if you’re in love with someone, you will automatically make such fantastic partners, and they never discuss these things at all. Or they do discuss it, but if they can’t come to a consensus or compromise, they seem to think the conflict will magically disappear with a wedding ring.
Now marriage certainly threw us some curveballs, as life will. He spent way more time in graduate school than originally planned and it was hard not to feel resentful at times when my career or desire for kids had to take a backseat to him finishing school. Then came the miscarriage, which was probably the lowest point of our marriage. There are things you can’t plan or account for in every case.
But we had this, I dunno, fundamental agreement about how to manage problems as a team, as well as a mutual respect that never dies. Eventually, that core value brought us back to center. There are times I go grocery shopping with my husband (typically his purview because I hate it) just to spend time with him. We enjoy doing stuff like cleaning out the hall closet together. We take a lot of comfort in each other. I know luck has a lot to do with it, but we made choices, too. We had those conversations.
I know and respect that marriage isn’t like that for everyone, but I think if people shifted their understanding of what it took to make a marriage work, and thought it through a little more pragmatically, it would be a happier arrangement for a lot more people.
As someone else with a successful marriage I think Spice Weasel hit a lot of important points. We approached life as a team, we discussed things and worked them out, we both made compromises at times to benefit the other, we promoted each other’s goals, and we would re-negotiate responsibilities periodically as circumstances changed.
But importantly, we both knew a happy life wouldn’t “just happen” - you do have to put some work into the project.
Excellent posts both of you. But for some trivial detail changes it could describe my almost 30-year marriage.
Reading the dating threads, it seems the recent trend in daters (of most all ages) is that folks winnow the field in the first couple of minutes of knowing somebody, and nobody gets a second date unless the first date was really great.
That pretty well assures that the only people such a dater will ever know well enough to consider marrying are the ones with the maximum obvious superficial attractiveness. Plus … Because everything involving humans is an arms race, this also teaches everyone that the way to succeed is to become a better sketch actor.
Said another way, first they gather an undifferentiated harvest of wheat kernels mixed with straw. Then they deliberately throw out all the wheat and pick the “best” of the straw to make their daily bread. Sounds like a recipe for indigestion or malnutrition to me.
I agree it seems clear the per capita (which is what really matters) rate as well as absolute number had a local peak echoing the huge increase in marriages at the end of WWII, but it was highest in the 80’s. However divorce rate is a single stat trying to capture a complicated picture. For one thing it’s not meaningful without considering the marriage rate. Same thing always come up in the chapter of ‘Red v Blue challenge’ where it’s pointed out certain old northern states have the lowest divorce rates (MA IIRC is usually bottom), certain relatively newer (OK, AR) southern states have the highest, seemingly completely at odds with ‘cultural conservatism’. But the marriage rate is also significantly lower in the low divorce rate states. Not enough to make the ratio of this year’s divorces (of prior marriages) to this year’s marriages higher, but that ratio varies considerably less by state than just the divorce rate. A good deal of the rest is simply a higher % of Catholic v Protestant family background, which, even for post-religious types seems to make a difference. Culturally conservative immigrants are another factor.
I don’t think the state thing is a complete tangent, because the national comparison over time contains some (not all) of the same factors. Importantly including, what does a divorce rate alone really tell you? Likewise for the pluses/minuses of fewer people getting married to start with, but that can’t be ignored. Many reasonable non-quantitative points have been made generally in favor of recent decade’s more positive societal view of divorce: there might be criminal level abuse; the family environment (married) might be genuinely toxic for kids despite lack of outright abuse; if there are no kids what’s the actual practical point, aside from beliefs of a religious tradition, of sticking to it no matter what? etc.
OTOH my own opinion and experience is that kids of divorce tend to be more f’d up by their childhood (everyone is to some degree )*. Many react ferociously to such an opinion, ask for ‘cites’, feel vindicated in their differing opinion if none are produced, but there just aren’t ‘cites’ for something like that. The total societal effect of changing societal attitudes toward marriage/divorce rates is firmly in Rorschach Test territory. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but that’s all it is.
*my dad was a somewhat abusive drunk who stayed married to my mom, not some nightmare but I’m not oblivious to the potential downside of sticking together; I think my kids’ intact home environment was better but I guess you’d have to ask them.
Online dating seems like just a nightmare to me, but I do know a lot of strong couples who met that way. Probably the most astonishing one was when an asexual friend of mine found her guy on OKCupid. In his profile pic, he had his pet spider on his shoulder. Their first interaction was her comment: ‘‘Nice tarantula.’’
No sleight of hand for either of them - she wrote in her profile that she’s asexual, and he explained during their first date that he put the pic of the spider in there because, if a partner can’t appreciate Harriet, there’s no hope for them.
If an asexual and a tarantula lover can find true love through online dating, the sky’s the limit. I guess it’s just about taking those practical considerations and values and using those to separate the wheat from the chaff, rather than appearance.
I’d also say the ‘keys to a good marriage’ post are useful under an assumption of certain shared cultural values, by the pool of potential mates, but are also relative.
We got married, 35 yrs ago, after knowing each other for 6 months, though not extremely young (26/24). We didn’t have a ‘plan’ but ‘just expected it [a happy marriage] to happen’. Which it did. Of course that doesn’t prove anything statistically…but OTOH neither do run downs of the success of more thoughtful slower moving (pre marriage) couples. I think the things more ‘quasi-modern’ older couples say is the reason for their success are true for them, I’m not rejecting those experiences, for them. But we were (are) just pretty stubbornly Catholic. Divorce was/is not an option. It can be argued that attitude is a suicide pact (figuratively at least) given a fundamentally bad situation. But it’s a strong reason to work things out in a fundamentally good situation with inevitable rough spots. So, would I suggest everyone adopt it? Obviously that’s entirely unrealistic; it’s just to point out that recipes for success make cultural assumptions.
It’s probably correct conventional wisdom it’s better to take things a little slower all else equal. Whatever our a priori chance of success was, I accept it would more likely have been higher than lower following the conventional modern advice, all else equal. I just think the impact of basic attitudes and beliefs probably dwarfs that, and it’s unlikely in today’s society people waiting longer and planning better than they now do would have that much effect on societal well being as it relates to marriage (which is the end goal, it seems most agree that a certain divorce rate per se is not the goal). Basic attitudes and beliefs have changed, in general. The way people meet one another has changed as discussed. The economic environment has (the stratification of divorce rates, low for the college educated, high for the lower educated must in some way be related to the greater economic divergence by education level, whether cause, effect or a combination). Attitudes about roles for the sexes. And on and on.
I wonder how much of that is the kids *per se *and how much of that is just the bathtub curve effect over marriages in general? On average, kids come pretty early in a marriage. So are the kids just correlated or causative of early divorces?
To be sure, kid(s) dump a lot of incremental stress onto a marriage. So I suppose it could be that the marriages that survive that early stress are likely to continue a good while longer and those that are stress-tested to failure will fail early.
Meanwhile, the kidless marriages (like mine) will never have that particular stress bomb dropped on them. Other than kids most of the stresses a marriage might encounter are either weighted towards the later years, e.g. chronic health problems, or are randomly distributed, e.g. crippling accidents, economic setbacks, substance abuse problems.
I grew up with my two brothers and my Dad while Mom was mostly absent. My wife grew up with her sister & Mom while her Dad was mostly absent. We are both the oldest of our sibs and used to being in first position.
To say the early months contained some discoveries and adaptations neither of us expected would be quite the understatement. You do what??!?
Oh absolutely, that does sound horrible and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of divorces are due to “shitty partner”. But there are shitty people of both sexes, and it doesn’t explain the disparities between gay and lesbian divorce rates.
I’ve always loved babies. And kids do grow up. And sleep through the night.
We had ours five years apart so that we wouldn’t have to pay for two colleges at the same time (good move on our part) and so the older one was more sane by the time the younger one was born.
I agree. My WAG on the gay and lesbian divorce rates is economics. Gay male couples, statistically, make a lot of money. Gay female couples, not so much.
Honestly, with all the stats I’ve seen on factors that contribute to divorce, the number one factor seems to be economics.
It makes sense on so many levels. Let’s say the traditional gender roles are present in a couple with a high household income. But we’ve got money as a mediating factor to ease out the disparity. Dad’s working, but he’s probably working as a higher-paid professional, getting more satisfaction out of his career, and so forth. Mom can afford daycare while she goes to the spa, or whatever. Kids can be involved in multiple extra-curriculars, reducing the stress for both parents at home.
I’m not one of those people who believe money solves everything, but up to a certain point it seems to make a fairly substantial difference in life satisfaction.
Consider 1950s gender roles. Plenty of people today still subscribe to a nearby variant of model. They’re probably concentrated in small towns and the South and in certain religious groups, but they’re out there in their millions.
Now connect that social expectation/ideal (as seen by them) with 2017 wages and living expenses and material expectations, not the 1950s stuff.
Woah, headrush! Major disconnect. Real soon that couple will be drowning financially. His working class wages don’t pay for a small house and a pickup truck and cable TV and 2 mobile phones. She still wants to make babies & play house. But unlike in 1950 that equation doesn’t add up any more and so that story can’t have a rosy working class ending with three cute kids, two in hand-me-downs, and enough money for the occasional vacation or splurge.
Whether it ought to still work is a separate question from whether it does. The former is certainly arguable. The latter is unequivocal; it doesn’t. Not even close. Which means it sucks to be them. For every single couple trying to live this particular page out of the book of American Dreams.
I’ve seen a lot of debate in various places about whether Mom should be at home, or working, or what, but not a lot of acknowledgment that many working class mothers don’t have a choice. When it comes to whether or not to be a SAHM, it’s a difficult conundrum for many women, but it’s also a privilege. There are a lot of people who would love to be home with their kids every day but can’t or else their kids will starve.
Yes, our babies are the best. Until 2am and one of them decides to wake up screaming for no reason and not go back to bed. And then my wife gets mad at me for expressing that I wished I had a time machine so I could send a Terminator back to cut off my own dick.
