231–240 of 450 posts
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…
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> 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…
Why commingle finances at all? A large percentage of divorces are due to financial disagreements... joint accounts have proven to be a failed model at scale. If you want to share money, have separate accounts and transfer money between them as needed/on a schedule. No room for impropriety/mistrust. Everybody has autonomy. If we choose to be realistic, rather than idealistic, we would recognize that a large percentage…
What does this even mean, how do you "at scale" something between two people?
My wife and I have a joint account, all money goes in, things for the family come out of it, we get allowances out for our personal things. If one of us spends the money on our personal things without consulting the other, then that person values X over the family, QED.
I think you might be implying that "family values have failed at scale" but that's a different, cultural thing, that is probably tied to a lot of different factors especially media. It's not that family values themselves are bad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then they have their own account that you transfer $X/month into. If you can't agree as a couple on what each person should be spending, then the relationship is on bad footing to begin with.
You need then all of these: Budgeted amount for say toilet roll. Decide whose bank account to use for it. How to re balance as expenses change. For each expense or group of expenses. Each spend kinda needs to be tagged. It is a lot more work. Might be OK if you have no kids and are renting.
Fawk me. Nearly 40, hurts me in the feels. On the other hand… I’m for once a trend setter.
Only 22 but I know this will be me in a couple decades…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is some evidence that kids do better in aggregate in stable two parent homes. There is no evidence I'm aware of that kids do better in homes where their parents would have divorced but are compelled to stay together by social mores or legal compulsion and now hate each other. This is the problem with all these "marriage is best for the children" pieces that get published. They don't (can't?) look at situations…
I’m guessing in places where single parents are financially supported, childcare is abundant and affordable, sick leave is guaranteed and covers your child, workplace discrimination against single parents is illegal, that any observed difference will disappear. That is I suspect the evidence is actually describing poverty, not parenthood.
But also even if we allow that there is benefit in a stable, two-parent household in which the parents don't change around at all, if we can even isolate that variable away from other factors, it seems tautological.
To make an analogy that's close to my heart right now -
In a drinking water capture system, you can probably collect the most water in a pristine, well-designed system where all the pipe gauges are the same and the fixtures are all well fitting and designed for the duty they perform. But if you haven't got one of those, if the one you have is full of holes and leaking all over the place every time it rains, and the pipes are jammed onto each other with no consideration of size or gaps, then ramming bits of cork into the leaks and praying isn't going to make it perform as if it was. Sometimes you're going to get better results if you rip out the downpipes, dig up the junctions and fit major parts of the system again.
Sure, it still might not be quite as good as that well-designed, perfect system, and you're probably going to get PVA glue all over your hands and clothes while you do the work, but it'll be a darn sight better than watching your drinking water piss out all over the veranda every time it rains...
I'm not sure if this comment is about divorce any more. Right, I'm off to buy more pipe fittings, grrr mumble mumble.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Children, in your one and only life which is going to end soon enough. Economy will never be perfect.
My parents' generation could raise two kids on one full time job. No way I'd try raising even one on a single income any more. So my wife and I can have a much nicer quality of life with zero kids.
> 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…
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/television/2011/03/11/...
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…
Marriage isn’t a pre-requisite for any of that
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…
I don't think so at all.
In general, society (ours, and afaict all others too) has a vested interest in the formation and preservation of family units. This seems pretty obvious to me, for various economic, cultural and moral reasons.