How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege? • Hacker News Board

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#81

Post by dpark » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

msla wrote: post #66

mfoy_ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That frame of mind implies that marriage is something women want and something men do not want. Why? It sounds like you're making some weird assumptions about sex-positivity, child-rearing, or finances.

Or just making assumptions about how well single women get on in life, which is, in turn, an assumption about how well women do in the workforce. If a woman's best life strategy is to get married so she doesn't have to take in laundry or become a shopgirl or take some similar low-pay/low-status job, marriage becomes seen as something the man is roped into, because men can (presumably) do just fine for themselves on t…

> or require chemotherapy (vide mercury treatment for syphilis)

Huh? Syphilis has been curable with antibiotics since penicillin. I don't think mercury is a common treatment for syphilis at this point.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#82

Post by msla » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 4:57 PM UTC

dpark wrote: post #81

msla wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just making assumptions about how well single women get on in life, which is, in turn, an assumption about how well women do in the workforce. If a woman's best life strategy is to get married so she doesn't have to take in laundry or become a shopgirl or take some similar low-pay/low-status job, marriage becomes seen as something the man is roped into, because men can (presumably) do just fine for themselves on t…

> or require chemotherapy (vide mercury treatment for syphilis) Huh? Syphilis has been curable with antibiotics since penicillin. I don't think mercury is a common treatment for syphilis at this point.

That's my point: If you're treating syphilis with mercury, it's hard to have sex-positive culture.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#83

Post by bob_neumann » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 5:00 PM UTC

How incredibly frustrating: The correlation between marriage and the general wellbeing of a middle class income is well-known. It leads folks like Ben Shapiro and Larry Elder to say, "if you want to be middle class, 1. don't have kids outside of marriage, and 2. keep some kind of full time job." Makes perfect sense to me. However, the leftist NYT, reading the same correlation, instead comes to the conclusion of, "Oh look, now those rotten rich people have even taken MARRIAGE away from the poor people!" If that ain't fake news, what is?

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#84

Post by bryanlarsen » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 5:01 PM UTC

xenihn wrote: post #11

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.

Personally, any figure over 10% is high to me.

If you're both between 30 & 34, both on your first marriage, and both have college degrees, the rate is below 10%.

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

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#85

Post by ashark » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 5:02 PM UTC

humanrebar wrote: post #56

ashark wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article's full of that. Mostly it's about how all these now-unemployed and uneducated men aren't worth marrying. Which makes all the posts in this thread about how it's caused by men not wanting to marry women because it's too risky kinda funny. Article's all about too few men being marriage material. They end on a hilariously useless and misguided piece of advice that wouldn't be out of place in The Onion's version…

> The idea is that if people follow that sequence, their odds of landing in poverty are much lower. Half of all babies are accidental, regardless of marital status. If sex is in the equation before "degree" (it is), then the whole sequence is flawed.

I like that the advice is nearly indistinguishable from "be born into a family where you'll be socialized to follow this pattern and provided resources to help follow it and to help get you back on track if things go awry, and golly, you probably won't be poor!"

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#86

Post by dpark » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 5:10 PM UTC

msla wrote: post #82

dpark wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or require chemotherapy (vide mercury treatment for syphilis) Huh? Syphilis has been curable with antibiotics since penicillin. I don't think mercury is a common treatment for syphilis at this point.

That's my point: If you're treating syphilis with mercury, it's hard to have sex-positive culture.

My apologies. I misread your comment and didn't interpret that part in the context of the "1940s and 1950s".

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#87

Post by tetromino_ » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 5:14 PM UTC

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.

> If you protect mothers by giving them welfare, you get more single mothers.

Sure. But is it really worse for society to have single mothers on welfare than to have mothers trapped in toxic marriages for financial reasons?

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#88

Post by Mz » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 5:14 PM UTC

adekok wrote: post #44

ch4s3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 case…

Why would someone work if they can divorce, keep the kids, and get paid forever?

Because unless your ex is very wealthy AND your alimony increases over time to keep up with inflation, alimony tends to not adequately support a middle class lifestyle by itself.

Because women tend to outlive men and tend to marry men who are older than them (average: about four years). When the ex dies, you will be penniless if you didn't also work.

Because as the kids grow up, if you don't have goals, interests and earned income of your own, your life can wind up very empty.

I'm a divorced single mom (with adult special needs kids who still live with me) who gets alimony. These are some of my reasons for working to build an income of my own.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#89

Post by smileysteve » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 5:20 PM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #23

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…

Perhaps those are the weddings we focus on and we forget all the cheap ones? I've known quite a few people (myself included) who did it for a few hundred quid (turned out Tuesdays were cheaper so we did it then at town hall). Of course, it's cheaper if no family come. Remember, all those gifts they give you are a social debt for which they will want to collect.

The average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is around $30k.

Re: How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?

#90

Post by dqpb » Mon, Sep 25, 2017, 5:24 PM UTC

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.

That depends on your definition of win. From an evolutionary point of view, winning is maximizing your number of offspring who also go on to reproduce.

This point of view has interesting implications for gender specific mating strategies, since women can only conceive every 1-4 years and men can impregnate every 3 days.