This makes sense, but I also think that the relative newness of gay people getting married has led to some irrational exuberance in the gay wedding market. People who never before pictured themselves as married are suddenly able to get married and are enjoying the opportunity. I suspect the divorce rates will even out in the next twenty years, probably as the term “gay marriage” fades out and becomes just plain, boring, old “marriage.”
As for the OP - I think the problem is that marriage is a legal and financial arrangement but modern marriages are discouraged from discussing this stuff because it’s unromantic and it sounds like you’re marrying for money (whichever one has the money). I think it would be a good thing if shows like “Yes to the Dress” were sidelined in favor of “Yes to the Prenup”. I think everyone should have a pre-nup, and I think the negotiations - watching the couples work through their practical ideas about what’s fair and right - would be great tv. Someone get Hollywood on the phone and make this happen.
If your wife only married you for your money, I pity you.
I know quite a few guys who have never understood why their wives asked for separation; some who eventually got it once their friends spelled it out Sesame Street-style. The second group often straighten up, not to win her back but because they realize it’s about time they learned to care for themselves, and often do end up back with her the next time one of the two gets seriously sick. The reason for the separation is obvious to any woman who’s known those guys for fifteen minutes and for any less-clueless guys: the wifes eventually said “ok, I gave birth to two children: why am I taking care of three, of which one insists in screwing me and my attempts at raising the other two correctly?” Division of labor is very much a matter of economics, but it is not one of money; those women don’t want a man who makes more, they want their man to do more than dump everything on them; they don’t want another man at all (that’s why they stay separated instead of divorcing), but they also don’t want to be obligated to a supposed adult who can’t put his own underwear in the goddamned dirty-clothes basket.
Amount of extras seems to correlate with stress, but at least in part it seems to be that more high-strung families are more likely to sign their kids up for every extra they can find, or to get them tutoring as soon as a grade slides half a point.
The problem is that it is not really possible to predict what you will want in 20 years–and it’s not fair or practical to hold someone to something that they decided 20 years ago, or act like changing ambitions are a failure to live up to a compromise. It’s like kids–it’s easy to think, at 25, that you know what you want, but there’s so much you don’t know and so much can change.
It’s better and more important, imo, that couples be good at talking and compromising and understanding each other–and sincerely committed to each other’s happiness–than that they come to an agreement about what their priorities are going to be in 20 years.
It takes two people to make a marriage, and if one is extremely unhappy, it makes no sense to force them to stay in it out of some idealized notion. I do think that people can make rash decisions, and it is important to give a relationship time to see if divorce is the right choice.
I also want to throw into the pile of “why we got married” from my view many times young women say in their early 20’s, well they see their girlfriends getting married, they get to be bridesmaids a couple of times, they see all the attention and awesome stuff the bride gets (especially if its a sister) and yes, they want all that too. So they jump into marriage the first chance they get.
A few years later they are divorced. I was at one wedding years ago with 6 beautiful bridesmaids who all got married within 2-3 years and 10 years later, all but maybe 1 were divorced.
Also add in that there is often alot of pressure from family. I remember getting tired of hearing “so when are you going to get married?” from my parents. Especially as you approach 30.
Problem there is was mentioned above, Prenups get thrown out all the time. About the only thing I can see staying in one persons hands is property inherited before the marriage.
As to your tv idea, I think it is sad to say but yes, people do marry for money. Hey who couldnt resist if your future spouse owns a condo on the beach somewhere?
I hope whatever it is you want/wanted, you were able to find it.
I know it’s ultimately coming from a good place. It’s just hard because, well especially now, the wait is hard for me too. But it could be another two or three years before we have our first child, and we just have to accept that.
Only one solution to this problem - be lucky enough to have parents and in-laws who got bugged about this. My wife and I took forever to arrive, and our parents got the “when are the kids coming” all the time. When we got married, our parents never bugged us, not once.
So, like everything it is the fault of your parents.
This. My parents’ kids came late, and so once married I got no pressure from them; they’d gotten quite an earful from *their *parents.
My wife had the different good fortune that her younger sister got married before she did and had a kid a decent interval thereafter. So my wife’s Mom was a known grandma-to-be at our wedding. That took a LOT of pressure off my wife. Though MIL still makes wistful noises about it occasionally. My wife being 60+ now that’s pretty funny.
It kinda sucks (for me) that I’m going to be somewhere between 35 and 38 when I first become a parent, but on the bright side, it probably ups the statistical odds we’ll stay married. It will be stressful, for sure, but we’re more financially established and stable than we were at 23.
I have never had a divorced woman tell me that single parenting is harder. Never. Not once. :eek: I have had a few tell me online.
This is one reason why.
ETA: I just don’t get it when men act this way before the kids arrive, and she has PLANNED children with him anyway (the “children” is deliberate; they almost always never figure it out after the first one) and then wonder why this is the way it is.
I’m pretty sure she didn’t. She makes her own money, which I’ve always supported. Also see below.
One of the things my wife didn’t want was the sort guy you describe here who thinks of his wife is a sort of housekeeper/manbaby sitter. We’ve seen a few of our friends marry those sort of guys and we were able to predict their divorce pretty accurately.
I don’t think it’s fair to just blame the man. I also know plenty of men who married women who expected to be treated like princesses. I suspect that their divorce may have been due to some combination of their lifestyle not being the fairytale they expected, or they found their financially successful man boring and wanted something more exciting.
Economics could play a role, but that article implies it is because women have more expectations from a partnership than men do.
I did find this.
Of the causes of lesbian fights, housework was #4 and money was #7. But a different chart in that article implies by years 5-10, money and housework are the 2 main causes of lesbian fights.
I still believe that lesbians have a higher divorce rate because due to biological and cultural reasons, women expect and need more from a romantic pairing than men. Overall, men are lower maintenance in a romantic pairing. There are obviously going to be exceptions, but I believe that is why gay men divorce less, and why men initiative divorce less. However as someone mentioned, supposedly in non marriage relationships, men initiate breakups as much as women. So who knows.
i definitely wasn’t presuming the odds of anything regarding an individual. individual couple I’ll assume is what you meant.
i also wasn’t presuming anything about any specific couples chances or odds of anything. i made a reference (and a conservative one) to the average failure rate of all marriages. unless the over time, global failure rate were to be 100%, then of course there will be couples that emerge as success stories (to simplify, I’m saying staying married = success. in life, it’s much more complex than that.) that’s how averages work.
*i haven’t read thru all the posts in this thread to know if, or how well, this has been covered, but how much someone ‘knows’ what their marriage’s likelihood of ending in divorce means not squat. in your case, all you’re doing is taking how you feel, merging that with what you’re being told about how someone else feels, sprinkling in a seemingly solid set of circumstances & then predicting a successful end result based on that.
well, a lot of people have felt like you do about your marriage at some point, only to feel differently later. a lot of people feel like you do the entire time and then are hit with the reality that their partner either never did or at least doesn’t feel the same way now. a lot of people ‘have it all’, yet yearn for something more.
money, location, similar interests, similar backgrounds, religious faiths or lack thereof, etc… never hurts, doesn’t always help.
there’s a multitude of other scenarios that play out regarding people’s marriages, there’s some that on paper seem to be the recipes for success, some that seem doomed to fail, some this & that. all i was saying is that on the average, 60%+ of them end up in divorce.