Oddbean new post about login | logout JFC You’ve thought a lot about this. From your reply seems there’s a lot of love and trust lost. Taking care of the home is hard fucking work. Taking care of children and a husband is perhaps 10x more. I could never be positive force as a stay home husband.
Most people have had bad previous relationships or have seen them in their immediate environment, and their choices in their current relationship are aimed at defending against this. Many wives want to work, for instance, to protect themselves against being financially trapped in a bad marriage, for instance. It's all very reactive.
Yes but can’t hedging against a bad marriage actually be a lack of commitment to a marriage? Like having one foot out the door? For example, should a man keep in touch with old girlfriends to protect himself from being emotionally trapped in a bad marriage? (Obviously not - but why is a woman having her own job outside the home so different?) The needing each other to survive and committing to each other no matter what is the important part and if you take that away, marriage is just another relationship (and you see this with the rise of the vague term “partner” for even heterosexual relationships - people are too non-committal to even using specific language about the deal)
I think hedging is normal and natural (spouses eventually die or become incapacitated, for instance). A healthy society takes common risks into account in the structure of the marriages. Our society does not do that. Rather than ensuring that men have emotional connections outside of marriages and housewives own property independently, we set everything up as if bad things never happen and let everyone slog it out in court or squabble over child support. So people increasingly hedge by avoiding marriage, altogether, or approaching their new marriage like it's a war zone. Which collapses the birth rate and we all suffer.
Maybe oversimplified, but still seems like a form of deferred responsibility. Which I keep finding myself pointing fingers at.
You can point wherever you want, but it isn't going to help us get the birth rate back up.
Monkeys don’t masturbate in the wild, but they’re widely known to do it in captivity. I think it’s important to realize we’re in captivity in the modern world. Nihilism and anti-natalism are part and parcel.
Perhaps, but I have yet to see anyone make any suggestion toward reforming marriage to better fit our new reality.
There's also the fairly strong possibility that they don't want a new reality and instead are doing everything that they can do to return to the old ways. Cognitive dissonance can take a huge mental toll. A surprising amount of the global population flat-out doesn't like to learn and adapt to changing circumstances. 🤷♂️
That's always been the case. There are a few forward thinkers and everyone relies on them to show how to adapt.
Also, my suggestions are actually a return to (Germanic) tradition, focused on property ownership, away from the modernist system of income redistribution, based upon monetary debasement.
We also should account for the fact that berating people to stay committed to their marriage, while their acquaintances are divorcing, is fruitless moralizing. If people see parallels between the lives of the people divorcing their own lives, they will be inclined to follow suit. That is why divorce tends to be "contagious". Better would be, if they saw fewer commonalities and could view the divorces as "weird, personal unfortunate" incidents. That requires removing such commonalities.
Berating people to stay unhappy and unhealthy is definitely wrong. It’s hard to have strong marriages and strong families when everyone is here in modern captivity, instead of engaging with survival every day together. When people needed each other acutely, marriages and families were stronger.
I think adjusting incentives toward making productive behavior more attractive than unproductive behavior can go a long way to strengthening families.
At the end of the day it comes down to communication and balance. If those don’t happen every marriage is doomed to fail.
Unpopular view: A piece of paper from a government does not undo sacred vows taken before God and men. Also, government marriages were a 20th century invention in the US - and the initial purpose was anti-miscegenation. Segregation is useful to totalitarian rule.
Muting conversation as it went too deep in mythology