281–290 of 450 posts
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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.
This trait also naturally removes itself from the gene pool.
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 think this is a big thing, and one that in the end will ruin us as a society if we let it. There's something innately wrong about this constant rat-race I see in some friends where they effectively say "oh, there's something wrong with this partner that in my previous X relationships I didn't see before. let's go find another one". Modern communication methods (social media and dating apps in particular) have created a situation where you can constantly compare your partner to the rest of the world, while at the same time (theoretically, for most people I'd argue partner choice hasn't increased at all, or even decreased) widening the dating pool. The idea of commitment becomes... Alien, because it's so easy to just go and trade her in for a newer/better model, not realizing that we're all flawed in our own particular way and that part of a relationship is sticking with eachother and growing because of that.
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> Why commingle finances at all? Because it's simple and easy? I trust my partner; she trusts me; we discuss expenses beyond some fuzzy threshold that we both seem to understand intuitively. The alternative seems to require spreadsheets. Who pays for the kid's daycare? Who pays what percentage of the mortgage, and what ownership stake does that represent? What if someone's income goes dramatically up, or dramatically…
Until your partner decides one day that they no longer are going to abide by that trust and find someone else, raid the joint account, the investments, and sell things right from under you which they are allowed to do with no repercussions due to the marriage according to the government and on top of it disappear with the children. Trust me from experience. You may think you know someone until they up and change on y…
My partner and I have been together for 7 years, we bought a house together, haven’t found a compelling reason to get married. Marriage is a complex and binding contract that for two high earners is a tax disadvantage. The most prominent benefits I’ve learned are some situations around visitation rights, and avoiding being compelled to testify against your spouse. It comes from a very dubious history of the husband e…
Married people report significantly higher levels of happiness/life satisfaction in the middle and later stages of life than non married people. This is a durable finding across many studies.
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How much of that was making the marriage official or just committing to a long-term partner? I know someone who was with their partner for years, and has been engaged for years more. I've come to the understanding they'll likely never actually marry. They appear to just want some negotiated commitment. Actual marriage appears to carry strings they're reluctant to accept. (Funds appear to be kept separate as well.)
I can speak to this in some degree: marriage is much more significant than a negotiated commitment for me personally. A negotiated commitment takes a specific form (the terms of the negotiation) but a marriage defines a commitment to be committed . I've heard some folks of my generation say things like "we got divorced because we fell out of love", which sharply contrasts with my view of marriage and falls more in li…
Fawk me. Nearly 40, hurts me in the feels. On the other hand… I’m for once a trend setter.
I'm married, but I live in a separate house to my wife. I've started to see others in similar situations and apparently it's a trend these days. "Living Apart Together", or "LAT": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_apart_together
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This seems very biased to me since it's often that both parents make career sacrifices, not just one. Even if we accept what you're saying, that still doesn't address why this should be legal. You even say "want", so it is a choice. There's absolutely no reason that an able-bodied person of sound mind can't support themself. The state forcing another person to pay for that person's higher standard of living is absurd…
> This seems very biased to me since it's often that both parents make career sacrifices, not just one. With adoption, maybe, but carrying and bearing a child has a life-altering impact on a woman's body. It's not like you can give birth and go back to the office on Monday. It takes months to recover and even after that you likely won't be at full performance like you were before the pregnancy. Common side effects li…
Are you aware you are praising women for something any female in any species does ? Sure it is not always easy, but if a woman has children it's (unless some quite obvious reasons) because the benefits outweighs the inconveniences. This is not some heroic deed.
> The notion that two people make equal sacrifices when they have a child is laughable.
You only focus on the short-term (potential) medical issues, but if you take into account the long-term and a broader view, things average out and can even be a net benefit for women through the current laws in most western countries.
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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.
> No need to risk half of my current assets and future income Most people see being in a position of vulnerability with respect to another human being whom they trust as a wonderful thing, which gives them a great deal of every day happiness. You see this vulnerability as merely negative, a threat to your individualistic pursuit of wealth ("assets and income"). You have a right to live however you want, of course, bu…
Of course some people are getting something valuable. Marriage works out great for some people, and of course those people are happy to tell the world how great marriage is because it worked out so well for them.
For other people, however, it's a complete disaster.
Basically, marriage is a huge gamble. The odds are better than going to the casino, but not by that much. If you win, great, but there's a huge potential to lose, big. There's a reason the divorce rate is so high, and more recently why more people just aren't getting married in the first place. People try the "dating" process to attempt to mitigate the huge risk that comes with marriage, in an attempt to "vet" the other person before making such a huge commitment, but there's countless cases of people spending significant time dating someone before marriage, only to wind up getting divorced after a few years anyway, so clearly 1-2 years isn't really enough time to get to know someone well enough to determine if the relationship will work out, and people just don't live long enough (and more importantly, women aren't fertile long enough) for couples to spend 10-20 years dating before marriage and kids.
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> Depending on your location you might already be married in a common law marriage. Generally, where common law or informal marriage is recognized at all, it requires both shared intent to marry and publicly presenting as married. I know I’ve seen fiction where it requires little more than cohabitation, but that’s not a real thing.
In Canada all you need to do is live together in a "conjugal relationship" for 12 continuous months.
Revenue Canada has their own definition of common law, for tax purposes only (not litigation), which is independant of that and is 12 months.
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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.
>No need to risk half of my current assets and future income life is risk. marriage is a great way to de-risk many aspects of your life. 2x income for only 1.3x increased expenses. Easier debt/mortgage access. Support (financial/emotional) in case of illness or income loss. >other person, who probably doesn't like me very much anyways Marrying the right person is the key (hanging out with your best friend forever is…
Then what happens when you get married, and your spouse soon quits their job or is fired because they're a terrible employee, and you didn't see signs of this while dating? Now you have 1.3x expenses on 1x income. Worse, what if your spouse is terrible at money management? Now you have 2-3x expenses on 1-2x income.
>Support (financial/emotional) in case of illness or income loss.
What if your spouse only seemed to be emotionally supportive before you got married, but afterwards (or when you got sick) the facade was dropped? What if they drop you like a rock when you get sick?
>Marrying the right person is the key
Of course. Similarly, if someone loses the lottery, you can just tell them, "that's your own fault: you should have picked the winning ticket".