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The Never Married, a New Normal

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Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#431

Post by everdrive »

silverquiet wrote: post #58
throwaway1492 wrote: post #49

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…

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.

Tinder is not a place to find a spouse. Maybe some outliers can and have. But for the vast majority of people, Tinder is a place to be ignored. For a plurality of women and a minority of men, Tinder is a place to schedule hookups.

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#432

Post by Pet_Ant »

midoridensha wrote: post #420
ux-app wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's a lot of what ifs. we don't live in the 50s any more. My wife and I were living together for 8 years before we got married. That sure would have been one doozy of a long con if she turned around and suddenly became a totally different person once the ink dried on the marriage certificate. Picking the right person is not the same as buying a lottery ticket, lol.

An 8-year trial run is completely unrealistic for most couples, especially if they want to have kids.

Now you are moving the goal posts. There are many valid reasons to get married that do not involve having children. There you can take your time.

Honestly, if you want to have children, have them with someone you can see yourself co-parenting with, not someone you love. Children place a lot of stress on a marriage, and even if you are personally compatible but have different attitudes on child-rearing it will ruin the relationship. Having kids within a romantic relationship is a terrible idea, IMHO. Be practical about it.

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#433

Post by emodendroket »

realjhol wrote: post #381
emodendroket wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems strange to say that confidently if you don’t even know what it means.

Equality is a nebulous concept. Equality of what? Because in a sexually dimorphic species there's one thing you can say more certainly than anything else: men and women are not equal.

In this instance it means that neither party is subordinate to the other. It does not mean "equal" in the mathematical sense that two things are identical. With this knowledge perhaps you can go back and make sense of the discussion.

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#434

Post by noirbot »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #427
noirbot wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I've always found even the more progressive legal systems to be such that they're often, reasonably, less loose than most progressive cultures. I was discussing this with folks recently about Canada's proposed asylum class for trans/nonbinary folks. There's obviously folks who neatly fall into either category, just like how three people who live together and have a communal sexual relationship could be neatly co…

> If I live with one person in a committed relationship, but also have a relationship with 4 other people I don't live with, how often do I have to see them before they have a claim on me? I believe BC law is pretty clear that people need to live together in order to be considered common law. I know marriage doesn't have the same requirement, but there is no legal marriage to multiple people at this moment. I don't t…

As an asexual person myself, who is not aromantic, I'm well aware what asexual means. Obviously sometimes they're cleanly married or in a committed emotional relationship with one person. In general though, most people consider sexual and emotional intimacy to be tightly linked, and I've certainly had multiple times where I was in a long-term emotional relationship with multiple people I was not sexually involved with. Having to determine which of them, or none of them would have counted as my partner would have been hard to determine.

Defining at what point a non-sexual relationship with someone I live with crosses over into something closer to a common law marriage would be rather more difficult.

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#435

Post by ceejayoz »

Dalewyn wrote: post #415
hiatus wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the would-be parents can't reasonably guarantee a happy household going forward, having children is the epitome of irresponsiblity. Who can do this? Who can possibly guarantee anything about the future, especially when it involves other people?

It should be reasonably possible to ascertain whether you and your spouse will have a pleasant or unpleasant future. If the latter, why the fuck (pun intended) would you have children?

Protracted job loss? Major illness? Death of a child? War?

There are a lot of variables that go into the success of a marriage that can't be predicted, especially over a 20+ year timeframe. The idea that you can reliably predict if someone'll be happy in their marriage decades later is... unsupported.

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#436

Post by gffrd »

Glawen wrote: post #305
illiac786 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see a lot the argument that having kids is bad for the environment? Can I ask where? I do not disagree, I just rarely hear it, it's something people are afraid to day out loud in my social network, it's socially unacceptable, but it's changing a bit.

When I ask younger people why they don't want children, many answer me that they don't want to raise children in a world doomed due to global warming. It is not exactly the same argument, but the idea that children are bad for the environment is implied (at least that's how I understand it)

Woah, really? That many people believe the future is so without hope??

As in "I think the world will such a bad place to be a human being, that not being a human at all would be preferable"?

That's a lot of fear and fragility …

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#438

Post by pcthrowaway »

noirbot wrote: post #434
pcthrowaway wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I live with one person in a committed relationship, but also have a relationship with 4 other people I don't live with, how often do I have to see them before they have a claim on me? I believe BC law is pretty clear that people need to live together in order to be considered common law. I know marriage doesn't have the same requirement, but there is no legal marriage to multiple people at this moment. I don't t…

As an asexual person myself, who is not aromantic, I'm well aware what asexual means. Obviously sometimes they're cleanly married or in a committed emotional relationship with one person. In general though, most people consider sexual and emotional intimacy to be tightly linked, and I've certainly had multiple times where I was in a long-term emotional relationship with multiple people I was not sexually involved wit…

> Defining at what point a non-sexual relationship with someone I live with crosses over into something closer to a common law marriage would be rather more difficult.

If it were me, I imagine I'd be looking for things like the following to determine if the relationship is more like a standard roommate situation or a romantic relationship?

- "do we have long-term shared financial obligations/commitments like having bought a house, or maybe even an expensive car, together?"

- "do we share finances to the extent that more than half of one of our incomes is shared with the other?"

- "have we gone through a legal marriage ceremony"

- "do we have children who we collaboratively parent?"

I think "the spirit of" how legal benefits for marriage are structured are based on the (dated) assumption that married people are doing one or most of the above together.

On the other hand, friends who live together but who are not romantically involved and never were, are very unlikely to do any of the above (outside of legal shenanigans like getting someone immigration status)

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#439

Post by salawat »

deprecative wrote: post #403
illiac786 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, somehow this doesn't reflect in birth rate decline. The decline has started long ago and continues roughly at the same pace, no massive acceleration [0]. [0] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/1_Demographic%20Profile...

My ignorant as all hell take is that this is tied to the collapse of the enforced nuclear family social construct. Women grew their careers and were able to have financial independence. As women began to have the option to choose not to have children many decided to take that approach. Once the decline really sets in it's during the wealth extraction of the middle and lower classes by Reagan and the destruction of le…

To hell with the nuclear family; all that was was a barely veiled attempt to maximize the consumption factor of the economic equation by seperating disparate generations in seperate homes.

Re: The Never Married, a New Normal

#440

Post by anon291 »

sangnoir wrote: post #388
anon291 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marriage and family and community are historically preventative of the types of exploitative individuals and groups you talk about. In your model the causation is that profiteers caused the breakdown of marriage but we shouldn't confuse correlation with causation. It's also plausible that the decline of marriage caused the preponderance of profiteers. Indeed given the modern day 'profit above all else mentality' that…

> In many families the father's are totally normal incomes and we have a fair share of people making below average. I'm guessing those families are not living the conspicuous-consumption that has been the "new-normal" for decades now. I'll note that it's easier to have a single-income household when you're inheriting a house from grandma, or if dad will help with the deposit for buying a property. However, if both pa…

Well yes.. we live an alternative lifestyle I suppose.

As for wealth.. I can't speak to that but we look out for each other and there are several families I know who do not have that kind of support.

> live a more modest lifestyle than their peers.

you mean are less greedy than peers.

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