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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?

#41

Post by dajohnson89 »

tomp wrote: post #25
19guid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per CDC (2014), the marriage rate in the United States is 6.9/1000 people while the divorce rate is 3.2/1000 people. [1] I'd say that's very high. 1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm

That's about 50%, which is the commonly quoted figure. However, IIRC that figure is skewed significantly by second (and further) marriages (i.e. by people who "like" getting divorced). The figures for first marriage are somewhat lower.

Does that really mitigate the point of divorce rate being high?

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#42

Post by kop316 »

glbrew wrote: post #33
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…

You're highly biased because those are the weddings you see. The average wedding cost is a very small fraction of these numbers. I know a number of people who could afford to throw large weddings but just had a ceremony in their backyards instead.

Sorry, I wasn't clear in my comment. My point was more if that is expected of someone from their family/significant other, that would certainly be major factor in not wanting to get married. Wedding ceremonies can certainly be done affordably, and I think it is smart to do that.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#43

Post by ringaroundthetx »

mlrtime wrote: post #3

Many men are understanding that marriage is a no win situation. You find yourself working your entire life to support your wife and family only to have a high percentage of ending in divorce. Your assets will be taken from you and you will be lucky if you get 50% custody. If you do not wand children there is no point in getting married.

Its a bad contract, but it gets infinitely better and a lot less consequential if you are rich before marriage and spent five minutes on financial planning.

Your assets will only be taken from you if they were earned during the marriage. So for anybody that wanted to work on something, like a house, any time between now and the next 30 years, then yeah marriage with the non-negligible probability of divorce will destroy the equity you dumped into it, no matter what proportion you and your spouse contributed.

If you already had properties, even income producing ones, they can go in a trust before hand, and you don't even have to worry about the stigma of a "pre-nup", and nothing of consequence will be split from you in a divorce.

Then you have the flexibility to actually enjoy the marriage, make any number of conditions to actually use the money or support a family or make grand children set, and if it falls apart, the financial things you worked for are still in place and hopefully A LOT more valuable.

A trust can also help keep alimony and child support payments restricted to amounts that even the bread winner would find reasonable.

This article talks about how marriage is declining amongst the poor, and staying steady amongst the privileged. It makes a few assumptions about why such as "women don't want men that can't provide", while my analysis has been devoid of gender. All around, it looks like education around how bad the default contract is has taken hold, even amongst the poor and uneducated, who previously had been greatly skewing the marriage and divorce rates.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#44

Post by adekok »

ch4s3 wrote: post #17
mlrtime wrote: post #3

Many men are understanding that marriage is a no win situation. You find yourself working your entire life to support your wife and family only to have a high percentage of ending in divorce. Your assets will be taken from you and you will be lucky if you get 50% custody. If you do not wand children there is no point in getting married.

What a depressingly cynical outlook. >find yourself working your entire life to support your wife You do know that lots of women have careers now right? You can arguably do quite well as a team pooling financial resources and saving for retirement. It also makes you more resilient to changes in employment. >If you do not wand children there is no point in getting married. What if you just want to engage in a mutually…

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 cases coming before them consistently with it.2 A survey of judges in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee found a clear preference among judges for maternal custody in general.

Even in jurisdictions which have 50/50 custody as the default, judges still overwhelmingly favor one side over the other. i.e. judicial prejudice is well known, wide-spread, in defiance of the law, and ongoing.

See Florida again. Action groups have successfully fought against equal custody by default, because saying "we're for equality" means "fight against equality", apparently.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#45

Post by jasonmaydie »

I don't buy the authors assertions at all. Who thinks being married is a privilege in the United States? We went through the last 10-15years liberating ourselves from marriage and now somehow it's being viewed as a privilege? It's like saying male/female parenting is privilege. It's not.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#46

Post by nkrisc »

mlrtime wrote: post #3

Many men are understanding that marriage is a no win situation. You find yourself working your entire life to support your wife and family only to have a high percentage of ending in divorce. Your assets will be taken from you and you will be lucky if you get 50% custody. If you do not wand children there is no point in getting married.

It depends on how you approach marriage, I suppose. I see people getting married after dating someone for only a year or maybe two. That's completely insane to me. My wife and I lived together for about seven years before deciding to finally get married. Our strategy was simple: don't marry someone you're going to divorce. We felt that by living together for so long and knowing each other so well, we were more sure we were making the right decision.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#47

Post by hellogoodbyeeee »

19guid wrote: post #12
moomin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to investigate the "high percentage" figure. It's one of those talking points that isn't really grounded in any solid numbers.

Per CDC (2014), the marriage rate in the United States is 6.9/1000 people while the divorce rate is 3.2/1000 people. [1] I'd say that's very high. 1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm

Your statistic is skewed by people that get married young and have low education.

College graduates have a divorce rate closer to 25%

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor...

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#48

Post by bryanlarsen »

mlrtime wrote: post #3

Many men are understanding that marriage is a no win situation. You find yourself working your entire life to support your wife and family only to have a high percentage of ending in divorce. Your assets will be taken from you and you will be lucky if you get 50% custody. If you do not wand children there is no point in getting married.

High percentage?

If you are both between 30 & 34, and it's the first marriage for both, the divorce rate is 10%. Between 25 & 29 it's 14%.

If you both have college degrees, it drops even further.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201...

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#50

Post by thriftwy »

adekok wrote: post #35
thriftwy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your assets will be taken from you and you will be lucky if you get 50% custody This is an interesting situation from the point of how economy, politics and people work: If you protect X, you will get less X. If you protect women in marriage by giving them more assets and custody on divorce, you make it harder for women to find a spouse. Those who already had one, benefit. If you protect home renters by putting con…

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.

> give courts / child protection services a cut of the child support money

This one I don't understand how anybody could ever think a good idea.

> If you punish men in divorces,...a massive increase in male suicide

That's external locus ("avoid"). What should be a real concern for ladies that it would greatly dry up their pool of potential mates.

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