211–220 of 445 posts
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My SO and I are both software engineers, so blame me for taking one of the lady devs off the market.
My wife and I are too. Though we had our first child last week. She said earlier in the pregnancy that she would like to keep in the workforce. But as each day passes with the baby it feels more likely she'll decide to be a full-time mom. Either decision is fine in my book :)
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Makes sense! Just surprised — obviously love > all, but I'd prefer to date someone in a different field of work myself.
Makes two of us. Tech communities are all-encompassing to begin with. Tech cities, tech friends, tech hobbies, tech side-projects..... I need out of this echo chamber from time to time.
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You're crazy. My wife is an engineer and I'm a software developer. We make so much money. Want to know a great way to keep a relationship together? Never worry about money ever .
I agree that having money is great - but are you actually saying that the best relationship is one where combined income is maximized? Is there no room in your utility function for mutual growth, sum being larger than the parts, etc?
I just think that a lot of couples have problems and disputes that would not exist if they had money to throw at the problem to make it go away. Like a lot of stressful problems in life, marriage or otherwise.
To steal a line from comedian Daniel Tosh: "Money doesn't buy happiness. Isn't that what people say? Money doesn't buy happiness? I dunno if that's true or not- I don't have any money. I'll tell you what I have learned. Poverty doesn't buy happiness. That I'm positive of."[0]
It's also important to me that my wife is not dependent on me. She makes enough money that if I were an asshole she could walk out the door and never once worry about how she'll get by. Which means she is in this relationship because she wants to be.
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We had one woman in my graduating comp-sci class. One. And she had been dating someone seriously for a few years. We guys had better luck dating Early Childhood Education majors, which is supported by their chart.
Yes, I knew my wife before she went into teaching but it is a good match!
Many anecdotal guesses are validated by this data. Doctors and agricultural workers are the obvious standouts, but I see a few more too. Us programmers stick together. Quite a high rate of marrying within the community. Lawyers show a similarly high number. A criticism of the study, is that it does not normalize by how many of these professions are in the general population. So, it appears as though software analysts…
This is us only though. In my country, most programmers end up with psychologists, but because there are so many women psychologists and not a lot of female programmers.
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Men generally do not care about the income of their wife, as that's not what they're innately attracted to. Hypergamy is characteristic of women and hence they want to marry up, and won't settle for someone who makes less than them. The latter is a reason for why there are so many educated but unmarried women today in their 30s and 40s.
> women are attracted to money and status! Not men!!! Professionals I know in the 20-35 cohort only want to date other professionals. The ones that don’t want some weird stay at home trophy wife dynamic. There’s nothing provably innate about some men preferring trophy wives. There is a lot of availability due to cultural baggage. The phenomenon that you’re talking about is culturally bound. Anecdotally my wife makes…
You either want to be a power couple or just get the best partner you can and offer them a comfortable life. The relationships that are an exception to this are usually ones where both people started off equally and then one of them suddenly became massively successful but they still remain in love.
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Marriage is actually a great financial choice for most people. If marriage rates are dropping, I'd blame our culture — the financial incentives are clearly there.
Unluckily, you cannot insure yourself against the immense risk of alimony payments if a divorce should happen.
Basically, one of many things you can do - in any jurisdiction - is move all your assets to your private foundation and simply not pay yourself for the duration of the marriage, including what you personally make while in the marriage if anything. Non-profits can invest indiscriminately in anything so the money can keep growing and supporting almost anything you want.
During divorce proceedings you have pretty much nothing, except the history of earnings if any which indeed can be used to compute your alimony payments. But all your accumulation and assets are not in your name, so the alimony won't be consequential compared to the horror stories we've heard of ex-spouses having to check themselves into jail when they ran out of money to pay. Back to this plan, don't forget to load up on debt as a general lifestyle choice, way before the marriage has issues. Personally you should never have positive net worth, and there should also be a line of creditors such that anyone else has to get in line or fuck off.
Afterwards you can direct your foundation to pay you a hefty salary.
The purpose isn't to screw your spouse over, its to be judgement proof from all kinds of creditors (and maintain your standing in society as a philanthropist). That will include mitigating the folly of silly unlimited liability contracts such as marriage contracts. Simply put, the clauses could be better. Love, finances, much like a lawyer I don't really care about what emotional reasons people associate with marriage and those are always available whether you do 5 minutes of estate planning or not. In my perspective, removing the downsides allows for both spouses to focus on love or whatever they want to do together. Something more commonly associated with marriage, by at least one spouse.
"I donated everything to non-profits!"
You get to win through many life events here. A state judge will not be able to undermine the federal status of the non-profit. They do have discretion over the pre-nup agreement though. So if you have the money to make a ridiculously unsexy pre-nup agreement, you have the money to make a ridiculously sexy private foundation which gets to exist in subtlety.
If you are saving up for a downpayment on a house while your life is slipping away year after year and the whole goal is to leverage up with a spouse on a mortgage before you are an ineligible bachelor/ette, then this game has no applicability to you. There is nothing attractive about that game to me, at any earning level. Discussions about the top 10% or top 5% make no difference to me, because the circumstances are the same: wage workers that barely match the cost of living wherever they earn, slow accumulation, risks (health, employment, life events) that undercut growth simply because it takes too long. Better to just have, there is no profound message applicable because the message is that simple. There are almost too many advantages to just having.
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More and more, I'm beginning to think that a society in which there is widespread use of birth control and in which the majority of women enter the labor force and work full time in an office is not going to be able to maintain replacement level fertility rates. In which case, the future belongs to societies where women don't work and birth control is stigmatized. It could be that there is a reason why the world was…
The obvious solution is artificial wombs, but that is probably very far in the future. But since you're talking about who the future belongs to, that's who. Until then, probably low population density already-developed countries that have fairly open immigration policies to accept the children of foreign breeders. That has seemed to mostly mean the US for the past few centuries, but places like Canada and Australia c…
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School demographics matter a lot. The Harvard crowd isn't finding their future wife at school.
Huh that surprises me. I would have thought that's exactly the kind of middle-class crowd that'd want to marry-in?
In the gay community it used to be really common for white collar and blue collar guys to get together and that really helped form a power couple as one could handle the rough stuff and repairs and the other could handle the money and the paperwork. Nowadays that still happens, but it is rare because there is so much social conflict that the blue collar gays are more likely to just marry women and have men on the side because that is so much easier and the white collar gays stick to themselves.
Among straight people in the San Francisco Bay Area I have noticed a trend of wealthy techies, mostly but not exclusively men, getting hitched to ordinary folks like teachers and mechanics. It seems to mostly work out well as a way of dealing with the housing crisis, but at a basic level it seems like a deeply unbalanced and unhealthy situation.
Just some potentially related anecdata. Mileage will vary.