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How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

nytimes.com

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Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#111

Post by adekok »

ch4s3 wrote: post #92
adekok wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See Florida for "lifetime alimony" Why would someone work if they can divorce, keep the kids, and get paid forever? Other states aren't quite as bad, but they're still bad: http://tomjameslaw.com/blog/what-judges-really-think-about-f... A study conducted in 2004 found that although the tender years doctrine had been abolished some time ago, a majority of Indiana family court judges still supported it and decided case…

Isn't this more an argument against living and marrying in Florida than marriage per se?

Other states are better, but still have major issues.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#112

Post by Mz »

adekok wrote: post #110
Mz wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once people get married and have kids, men take on additional work to pay for their kids. Women take on less work to take care of their kids. Women take on more work too, it is just not paid work. Mothers, whether they have a paid job or not, tend to be chronically short of sleep. Full time moms spend about 60 hours per week on household chores. Working moms spend about 40 hours per week. I am aware that there are tw…

> Women take on more work too, it is just not paid work Well, yes. I did say "take care of their kids". As for paid vs unpaid work, see:: http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=54757 In most western countries, men and women do roughly the same amount of total work. For men, more paid than unpaid. For women, the other way around. So again, just focussing on "women have it bad" misses a big part of the picture. > I a…

> Women take on more work too, it is just not paid work

Well, yes. I did say "take care of their kids".

This is what you originally said:

Once people get married and have kids, men take on additional work to pay for their kids. Women take on less work to take care of their kids.

You did not say that women do less paid work. You said they take on less work. This framing implicitly suggests that women's work isn't really work. This seems to be a common societal default assumption and that deeply held belief helps drive the feminization of poverty because the mental model is that women's work isn't real work and doesn't really deserve compensation.

The rest of your comment is simply gratuitously ugly, so I am done here.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#113

Post by thriftwy »

Blackthorn wrote: post #104
thriftwy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the ex dies, you will be penniless if you didn't also work Why not work? After some time in divorce (immediately perhaps) you are supposed, as an adult, to support for yourself. Especially considering you're going to send children into their own lives by 50, and retirement is only coming at 65. You definitely look forward for 15 years of work even if you are absolutely devoted to raising kids. > if you don't have g…

> Why not work? After some time in divorce (immediately perhaps) you are supposed, as an adult, to support for yourself. Let's say as a family you decided that the wife would be a stay at home wife to have and support children. Then fifteen years down the line you get divorced. The wife gave up fifteen years of career and career advancement for the family. Alimony is a damn appropriate compensation for that sacrifice…

> for that sacrifice

Was career a sacrifice or something that she was happy to get rid of in exchange to support?

I think I can find men who would be happy to do chores if a woman would be supporting them with high-paying job, and essentially zero women who will agree to such arrangement.

Staying at home without working is a bad decision and you certainly can't chain man over it when it doesn't work. Promising of life-time alimony, in some extreme cases for a wife who never had any children even, is just pushing women into making this bad decision.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#114

Post by thriftwy »

Mz wrote: post #101
thriftwy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Women have historically been provided for by husbands I hope you know that women were also historically accompanied by dowry? Just the woman herself, with her raising a family, was not considered sufficient offering to match the groom. If you hope to find a husband that would provide you towards the end of your life, you should (a) choose very carefully, and (b) have solid understanding of your own contribution. Ot…

A) What gets paid to support children is called child support , not alimony. B) I spent two decades supporting my husband's career. When we divorced, he still had a well paid job and twenty years work experience. I was starting over from scratch and was "lucky" to get a better-than-minimum-wage job to start. It aggravates me that the world as a whole acts like having kids and raising them is only a financial cost to…

> supporting my husband's career

This is a weasel right here. You claim you did something, but never specify what.

Indeed, successful women are not lining for men who will "support their careers" for a chunk of income.

I want children and I have, with a responsible woman who is a self-sufficient person herself. That's what makes marriage work. Not the good intentions, but objective and subjective value of spouses to each other.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#115

Post by _dps »

tetromino_ wrote: post #87
adekok wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you protect mothers by giving them welfare, you get more single mothers. If you give courts / child protection services a cut of the child support money, you get more divorces where the fathers are cut out of the children's lives. If you punish men in divorces, financially ruin them ("imputed income"), and don't let them see their kids, you get a massive increase in male suicide after a divorce.

> If you protect mothers by giving them welfare, you get more single mothers. Sure. But is it really worse for society to have single mothers on welfare than to have mothers trapped in toxic marriages for financial reasons?

> But is it really worse for society to have single mothers on welfare than to have mothers trapped in toxic marriages for financial reasons?

Surely this is an empirical question and not a theoretical one. Unfortunately it's hard to measure fairly. Let me offer a clearly flawed first pass.

If you take, just as a reference point, pre 1960 US society and post 1980 US society as exemplars of "lots of toxic marriage" and "lots of welfare mothers", then I think one would be hard pressed to show empirical evidence that the latter is doing any better than the former. Certainly by conventional measures of success, one could argue that the latter is worse (though there are so many confounding variables that I personally don't feel comfortable having an opinion).

My point here is that I don't think we can presume the welfare-single-mother outcome to be, a priori, obviously better than the old toxic-marriage status quo, when measured by society-level outcomes. There is ample evidence that both cases are clearly inferior to stable, non-toxic, two-parent households. So the question is an empirical one of the lesser of two evils, and I don't think we have a clean way to answer it so far.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#116

Post by dragonwriter »

thriftwy wrote: post #99
Mz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you don't have goals, interests and earned income of your own But we can only put the very latter in alimony. Can't put goals there. If you got married and started a family because raising a family was a goal, alimony is related to that. Women have historically been provided for by husbands. For women, marriage has historically been a viable alternative to getting a job. It isn't like buying a lottery ticket. Be…

> Women have historically been provided for by husbands I hope you know that women were also historically accompanied by dowry? Just the woman herself, with her raising a family, was not considered sufficient offering to match the groom. If you hope to find a husband that would provide you towards the end of your life, you should (a) choose very carefully, and (b) have solid understanding of your own contribution. Ot…

> I hope you know that women were also historically accompanied by dowry?

In some cultures. In some cultures, the groom (or his family) paid her family a bride price, and in some cultures the groom paid her (personally, not her family) a dower. In some cultures, in fact, a combination of these existed simultaneously.

Of course, pretending that dowry alone was the dominant tradition is necessary to your argument that what the wife brought was viewed as insufficient value on its own, but it's not actually accurate.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#117

Post by Blackthorn »

thriftwy wrote: post #113
Blackthorn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not work? After some time in divorce (immediately perhaps) you are supposed, as an adult, to support for yourself. Let's say as a family you decided that the wife would be a stay at home wife to have and support children. Then fifteen years down the line you get divorced. The wife gave up fifteen years of career and career advancement for the family. Alimony is a damn appropriate compensation for that sacrifice…

> for that sacrifice Was career a sacrifice or something that she was happy to get rid of in exchange to support? I think I can find men who would be happy to do chores if a woman would be supporting them with high-paying job, and essentially zero women who will agree to such arrangement. Staying at home without working is a bad decision and you certainly can't chain man over it when it doesn't work. Promising of lif…

> Was career a sacrifice or something that she was happy to get rid of in exchange to support?

Does not really matter what sort of words you want to call it. She still gave up her earning potential for the family. These decisions are made by two people, not one. And now, as a result of that, in divorce, they are woefully uneven going forward. Alimony is there to balance those scales. Don't like it? Don't have a stay at home family.

> I think I can find men who would be happy to do chores if a woman would be supporting them with high-paying job, and essentially zero women who will agree to such arrangement.

My friend group alone includes one planned stay at home husband, so you are quite incorrect on this point.

> Staying at home without working is a bad decision

Then don't do it.

> and you certainly can't chain man over it when it doesn't work.

Why all the concern for the man here and none for the woman? She's "chained" to lower earnings for the rest of her life as a result of this.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#118

Post by Mz »

thriftwy wrote: post #114
Mz wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A) What gets paid to support children is called child support , not alimony. B) I spent two decades supporting my husband's career. When we divorced, he still had a well paid job and twenty years work experience. I was starting over from scratch and was "lucky" to get a better-than-minimum-wage job to start. It aggravates me that the world as a whole acts like having kids and raising them is only a financial cost to…

> supporting my husband's career This is a weasel right here. You claim you did something, but never specify what. Indeed, successful women are not lining for men who will "support their careers" for a chunk of income. I want children and I have, with a responsible woman who is a self-sufficient person herself. That's what makes marriage work. Not the good intentions, but objective and subjective value of spouses to…

My ex husband was career military. Military spouses face significant challenges in getting a job at all and it is nigh impossible for them to establish a real career, in part because you move every few years, employers know this and would rather hire a local who will stick around.

Your comment comes awfully close to a personal attack. Given that you have a successful two career couple arrangement, I fail to comprehend the hostility. Your ability to make it work in no way negates the very real challenges involved in establishing a two career couple and also having children. Most people find that having one spouse with a serious career and one spouse who may work, but whose career takes a back seat to family needs, is simply much more viable.

I also have special needs kids and other personal burdens that complicated the situation. Not everyone has a situation that makes a two career couple a viable option. I wanted a career. It didn't happen. I have done a lot of reading to try to figure out where my life went wrong and how to fix it. I expected to have a career. Other people expected me to have a career and make good money. Life does not always go as we expect.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#119

Post by dguaraglia »

atomical wrote: post #100
dguaraglia wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure not getting married is pretty popular with professional women too. Turns out they also have a career they care about. Who would've thought of women as humans, right?

Popular as a minority position?

Not sure what you mean. Considering there's slightly more males than females in the US, staying single must necessarily be an even smaller "minority position" for males.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#120

Post by nunez »

kop316 wrote: post #8

I wonder if this is also due to the high cost of the actual marriage ceremony. A (cheap) engagement ring can cost over $1000, and can easily jump to $5-10K. Then a traditional ceremony can easily be over $10K, with no upper bound on how expensive it is. This was the cause of me no longer being with an ex, they were already in debt $80k from school, but still wanted a ceremony that could have easily cost $40K. I had n…

As a countepoint, my fiancée’s sister and her husband have been married over 10 years and spent less than $1000 on the whole thing. A marriage certificate in my town costs $100. You can still get married on the cheap.

(We are spending less than $10k on ours all in)

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