Oddbean

> physically and emotionally ground down. • Why is the marriage the source here? Everyone gets exhausted by their situation sometimes, but if someone says their marriage caused this, my assumption would simply be that their relationship may be unhealthy for some reason. But that isn’t a problem of marriage, that’s just what happens to unhealthy relationships of all kinds. > underemployed or in dead-end jobs. • Similarly, how is this the effect of marriage? I’ve never known any situation where someone married with a bad job was unable to fix it until they got divorced, then suddenly their job opportunities exploded, or vice versa. > physical freedom is curtailed and social life is policed. Also, in what way does marriage relate to this? Are you suggesting that without a marriage couldn’t be a problem? My take, and I hope this isn’t taken as disrespect, is that you have misunderstood the source of the problem. A normal relationship and a marriage are functionally no different at all. Getting married or divorced will neither fix nor create problems, unless the problem is *the relationship.* Marriage is a label, it doesn’t even exist. It’s like saying you live in “a house” vs living in “a home.” It’s the same building either way. If your house is rotting, calling it a home won’t fix it. If you were asking for thoughts and opinions, what you describe just sounds like an unhealthy relationship, but whether it’s label a “marriage” or not makes no difference. If the relationship, and job situation, and social life have problems, “marriage” isn’t going to make it better or worse or even meaningfully change it. Only the person themselves and/or their partner’s choices and behavior are what create those problems.

Not every house is a home. Not every relationship is a marriage. They're qualitatively different things. Namely, a marriage is a relationship you are inclined to stay in, even when it isn't fun and easy. That is, after all, why people often don't want to marry. If they were identical things, the choice to marry or not would be completely random. Marriage tends to correlate with higher fertility and increased familial responsibilities through an expanded extended family, and (for most wives) the burden of combining them with paid employment. That's why wives tend to look run-down: they have more responsibilities and work harder. They also (ironically) tend to earn higher salaries, provide more childcare, do more housework, and get less sleep, than never-married women, including single mothers. They are more-likely to be successful entrepreneurs and savers, and are more-likely to be actively involved in their communities. The idea that being a wife carries no additional responsibilities, sacrifices, labours or stresses, denies the reality that young women can readily observe around them and denigrates the greater efforts wives are exerting. Which further contributes to their stress and makes the role even less appealing. People used to understand that being a wife isn't just about having sex with some man that lives in the same house. It's a real vocation.

In my thinking, those responsibilities are tied to having a family, not a consequence of marriage per se. In that context I would certainly agree that having more responsibilities means “carrying a heavier load.” But the partnership of a marriage is meant to lighten it, not weigh it down further. In my personal opinion having a family is well worth all of that, especially looking toward the future. My framing has always been thinking about what I want to have when I’m 70. Responsibility today means a big family when I’m older where I can finally let a lot of that weight off and I won’t be alone and wishing I had made different choices or cared too much about what my job had been. Basically it seems to me like choice between living without responsibility today, and being alone without options in 30 years. Or carry those responsibilities now, and be vastly better off and have a supportive family in 30 years.

Statistical evidence across the population and in every country studied, underline my argument that wives are doing more than any other group of women. They are the closest to men in most aspects of productivity or politics, for that reason. Their marriage lessens the load of any particular responsibility, but it also expands their responsibilities far beyond the scope that unmarried women are expected to carry. They are therefore more likely to struggle under the weight of their own responsibilities, if their husband can't carry his half (death, divorce, disability, unemployment, etc.), or one of their responsibilities becomes a particularly heavy burden, by circumstances or their own personal decline/aging. Being a wife arguably has a bigger impact on a woman's entire existence, than even motherhood does, and wives are more likely to be mothers and to have more children, on average. Wives are also more-likely to care for elderly or disabled family members because marriage expands the number of such family members that they have.

It is a complicated topic and most wives pretend like it isn't a problem, but the high female divorce rate and young womens' increasing reluctance to marry, speak for themselves. It doesn't help much, to tell young women that they will benefit in 30 or 40 years because: 1) young women live in the moment and often have trouble imagining anything beyond a few years 2) they see lots of women who made the choice and then ended up alone, anyway 3) the caveat, that the effort is worth it only if the marriage is "healthy" is very discouraging, as they know so many people who have struggled with their marriages 4) a lot of them live geographically-separated from their parents, so the concept that children will "be around later" doesn't ring true to them. People have been attempting to raise the appeal to young women with big, fancy weddings and bachelorette parties, and etc. but I don't know how effective that has been and young couples are increasingly too poor for that.

The piss poor situation today I think stems from a failure of our money and culture (which also kind of follow from each other actually). It might seem hopeless, but that’s because the larger systems that demoralize entire generations are extremely hard to both see or control. So it feels like an inevitable reality, when it is actually a definable breakdown of core incentives. Not disagreeing with your points here, btw, just pointing out how few understand how those problems become so huge as to encompass an entire society and why they arise to begin with. I know to most it would sound bonkers to say, “our money caused this,” but a much deeper investigation reveals and extremely compelling story with an eerily large set of historical examples of the very same thing occurring.

Oh, I agree with that. And I don't think it's hopeless. I'm just saying that changing the way we speak about wives and marriage, in general, could have an effect of making marriage more appealing to young women. We have to frame our arguments for the audience we are addressing, and I think we have collectively failed to do that. One of the small, but effective, things we can do, is to simply openly acknowledge and clearly state that we are asking them to sacrifice personally and do something that is difficult and challenging, and that we value their willingness to adopt that burden because it is good for all of us, in aggregate, and their family and neighborhood, in particular. Tell them the truth. No more gaslighting. No more romanticism. No more decades-long search for Mr. 6/6/6. Return to the concept of marriage as a vocation.

“One of the small, but effective, things we can do, is to simply openly acknowledge and clearly state that we are asking them to sacrifice personally and do something that is difficult and challenging, and that we value their willingness to adopt that burden because it is good for all of us, in aggregate, and their family and neighborhood, in particular. Tell them the truth. No more gaslighting. No more romanticism. No more decades-long search for Mr. 6/6/6. Return to the concept of marriage as a vocation.” 1000% this 👆🏻 Our culture has come to some belief that we should want things because they are easy and we should desire no responsibility and everything is supposed to be easy and always happy. Rather than understanding the meaning and value of those things that are explicitly hard, and accept that. Our culture has been gaslighting us into believing utter nonsense about all of our choices, pretending there are no trade offs, and that the key to happiness is to escape all responsibility… when life is nothing of the sort. The secret to life (imo) is accepting and taking head on the inescapable hard things, understanding and being open to the clear trade offs we have to make, and not deluding ourselves with nonsense and fairy tales.

I also think my own religion has a very strong frame, for promoting marriage, with the idea that our marriages are a tangible way that we can learn more about the relationship between Christ and the Church. Because we can. That means that even a difficult marriage has value to us. And it means that we enter into marriage realizing that it can be difficult, so we aren't as disappointed if it doesn't end up like something out of a romantic comedy.

Well said. Live like no one else today, so you can live like no one else tomorrow. The difficulty of raising children is more than fairly rewarded by having a strong family to help you in your elder years, and to have people you can pass your wisdom onto in return! It's truly sad that the FIAT system isn't just stealing our savings and wages, it's actually stealing our families too. The family's that we would otherwise be able to afford to build if we were on a sound monetary system. 'DINK' being a movement is purely a consequence of constant FIAT debasement, they're enjoying life without kids when they're young, and they'll be extremely alone when they're in the final years of their lives. Bitcoin truly fixes nearly everything that's wrong with the world today. It's beneficial effects fix every far reaching consequence of FIAT, and it cannot be stopped. nostr:note1rau7de52r88hmadxfxw47lnjwpw868ejrwmxvm3f0y77x3j0nzqqs6xqek