Live data from Hacker News

The Never Married, a New Normal

psychologytoday.com

131–140 of 450 posts

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#131

> Cohabitation has become a popular alternative; living together is a less complicated relationship model that comes with an easy escape hatch (compared with marriage) if the relationship fails This seems like a bit of a false promise... Once you commingle finances, own a house together, have children, and so on, there's no "easy escape hatch." Plus thinking of having an "easy escape hatch" probably does not do wonde…

Children? In this economy?

So you say and yet not having children or doing it later is correlated with more income and wealth rather than less.

E: Consider https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/01/15/for-most-...

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#132

> Cohabitation has become a popular alternative; living together is a less complicated relationship model that comes with an easy escape hatch (compared with marriage) if the relationship fails This seems like a bit of a false promise... Once you commingle finances, own a house together, have children, and so on, there's no "easy escape hatch." Plus thinking of having an "easy escape hatch" probably does not do wonde…

It says compared to marriage. And why in the world would cohabitation without marriage automatically include having children??

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#133

My spouse of 10 years is the child of serially married and divorced boomers. After seeing one of the parental units go through marriage #3 as a teenager they have zero interest in the whole song and dance and I don't blame them. Anyways, married or not, the feelings are the same and we go on living life the way we want to. Who cares? Also, if civil marriages didn't exist today and I tried to propose "hey, let's inven…

And yet cultures all over the globe have invented some form of this ceremony.

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#134

I’ll risk it and defend marriage to this crowd. To me getting married was about getting out of myself. As someone who got married later in life, I’d spent decades living only for myself, doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Relationships were shallow and lasted only so long as convenient. By choosing to get married and intentional build a family, I knew I was sacrificing a lot of ego and choosing to give…

[dead]

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#135
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try putting "I'd like someone willing to sacrifice a lot of ego and choose to give up a lot of freedom and self" into Tinder and see how it goes. And as bad as the dating apps are, I never got the impression that people were evaluating each other on much more than superficial metrics in the old school dating world anyway.

In my experience, all dating is superficial in the beginning, and attempting to short-circuit that process never really works in the long run. You can't speedrun getting to know someone. This is why "dating milestones" are such a trope.

[flagged]

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#136

Talk like this in the USA tends to equivocate between marriage (a legally sanctioned social and economic union) and marriage (a Christian sacrament, usually grudgingly including other major religions). IIRC the second kind of marriage has been in decline in the USA for decades because participation in organized religion is in decline and some states made it hard to get the legal status called marriage without involvi…

There is no state in the US that does not recognize a marriage by a judge or self-certified "minister" of no particular religious affiliation. There's also no requirement to be married in one's state of residence, or even country. It's absolutely trivial to arrange the legal status of marriage.

For many Americans, travelling out-of-state is a big deal. If its important enough many of them can make it happen, but many seem to have decided that formalizing their relationship in one legal category is not that important.

There are other reasons why Americans might become less likely to choose one legal form for their marriage, like an American friend of the right-libertarian persuasion who does not just object to marriage, he objects that the laws of his state declare that he and his long-term, live-in partner have various obligations to each other which they have not explicitly contracted. OTOH there is the daft way healthcare works in the USA which can create incentives to use a particular legal form.

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#137

I’ll risk it and defend marriage to this crowd. To me getting married was about getting out of myself. As someone who got married later in life, I’d spent decades living only for myself, doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Relationships were shallow and lasted only so long as convenient. By choosing to get married and intentional build a family, I knew I was sacrificing a lot of ego and choosing to give…

I can sacrifice my ego through meditation and acts of charity/volunteer work. No need to risk half of my current assets and future income on the whims of some potentially capricious other person, who probably doesn't like me very much anyways. Good luck to you, however.

I heard you can avoid that, Using some kind of pre marriage financial agreement, does that actually exist? I don't livs in the U.S. so I don't know.

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#138

> Cohabitation has become a popular alternative; living together is a less complicated relationship model that comes with an easy escape hatch (compared with marriage) if the relationship fails This seems like a bit of a false promise... Once you commingle finances, own a house together, have children, and so on, there's no "easy escape hatch." Plus thinking of having an "easy escape hatch" probably does not do wonde…

It says compared to marriage. And why in the world would cohabitation without marriage automatically include having children??

It wouldn't; it is one example of many circumstances that tend to arise in a long-term relationship that make it difficult to unwind regardless of legal status. The legal protections inherent in marriage can actually be desirable when unwinding a relationship.

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#139

> Cohabitation has become a popular alternative; living together is a less complicated relationship model that comes with an easy escape hatch (compared with marriage) if the relationship fails This seems like a bit of a false promise... Once you commingle finances, own a house together, have children, and so on, there's no "easy escape hatch." Plus thinking of having an "easy escape hatch" probably does not do wonde…

It says compared to marriage. And why in the world would cohabitation without marriage automatically include having children??

Compared to marriage that sounds even worse.

"I'd much rather have absolutely no legal rights if this shit goes tits up, I'd hate to have any sort of legal framework around dividing our assets!"

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#140

> Cohabitation has become a popular alternative; living together is a less complicated relationship model that comes with an easy escape hatch (compared with marriage) if the relationship fails This seems like a bit of a false promise... Once you commingle finances, own a house together, have children, and so on, there's no "easy escape hatch." Plus thinking of having an "easy escape hatch" probably does not do wonde…

[dead]
Post reply on HN