The Case Against Marriage – What You Lose When You Gain a Spouse | Hacker News Reader

The Case Against Marriage – What You Lose When You Gain a Spouse

theatlantic.com

40 pointsbasicplus223 comments

The article has a few interesting points about community ties, but it's generally long on word games and short on substance.

The article equivocates between marriage as legal privileges, marriage as lifelong monogamous commitment, marriage as cultural ideal, and marriage as signaling mechanism about relationship seriousness.

Yes, this is par for the course for the "Case Against X" template -- shift seamlessly between different meanings of the word X, because the whole point is it's a polemic and not a careful argument. But it's still frustrating and sloppy thinking.

Then there's the other side of the coin: What your spouse loses when (s)he gains you.

Second-time-arounders who take their time and spend several years with their partners before marrying again tend to choose more wisely.

My first marriage: 16 and a half years. My (2nd) wife's first marriage: 18 and a half years. Our partnership: Four years as de-facto partners, 28 years married. 32 years together so far.

Big lesson from first marriage: When you "win", you lose. My first wife and I were always arguing and fighting. My second wife and I have never argued. We both refuse to fight. (We've had some terse words, but never a fight.) We agree on so many things that nothing else is important enough to lose angst over.

It's not acceptable to speak of, but marrying does chain you to a person. If they decide they don't like you any more, or just plain go crazy, they can easily drag you over the cliff, financially and in ways that are even more important.

Yes, you can break the chain, but not necessarily quickly enough to save yourself. A "successful" divorce requires a certain level of decency on both sides, and you won't truly know whether that's there until it's too late.

I hope for the best when people marry, but I also know a part of just how bad a bad case can be. And reading personal accounts on the Internet (and in the press), I'm aware that my experience is far from the worst.

The problem is you guys are marrying the wrong person.

My wife and I do everything together, including late night code sprints.

Find a best friend and marry them when you have that feeling you had as a kid when you had to go home after a sleep over. Everyday feels like a sleepover.

I'm a workaholic, but I work from home right beside my wife so we can still chat and hang out.

I spent DECADES looking for a partner (not just a compatible female). Someone who had a similarly difficult upbringing (difficulty literally surviving it), which colors our standards for happiness or just what's "good enough" and what's qualified as beauty and peace. We are NOT similar in our professions or hobbies, but it works. We got married after 40, after dating increasingly over a decade (we knew each other for a long time) so there's that.

While I agree with this sentiment, not everyone's "right person" is someone you want always at your side.

I disagree. I am an introvert and I hate socializing. I always wanted to be alone. With my wife though it's like being alone with myself because we're one person. A more social person I feel like would love the dynamic even more.

You're very lucky. Unfortunately, IME it's almost impossible to tell whether someone is a right person until you've been together several years.

And even more unfortunately, your perfect mate can turn into an evil menace right before your eyes. Been there.

IME it's almost impossible to tell whether someone is a right person until you've been together several years.

Well...yeah. Don't get married until you've been together for several years, so you have some track record to know if they're the right person.

> IME it's almost impossible to tell whether someone is a right person until you've been together several years.

I disagree. My wife and I got married the year we met, engaged the first month we met.

We had an instant connection of lust and similar interests. After two dates, I invited her to go overseas w/ me for two months. We knew we'd either hate or love each other by the end of it. It took 1 week for us to realize we were deeply in love. We got engaged 2 weeks later and married the same year.

This was all after I had given up on finding anyone. You need to get to know yourself and what you want, then find someone that wants the same things. Straight up talk to them about the important things the first date.

The important points for us were the things that had caused past relationship issues. Weed friendly, really sexual, introverted, dark humor, knows depression, same political belief, same religious belief. Yes it's good to be able to compromise, but ideally you don't want to.

> And even more unfortunately, your perfect mate can turn into an evil menace right before your eyes. Been there.

We know that neither of us could take that. We would kill ourselves if we didn't have each other, so propping each other up is actually propping ourselves up.

Some might call that an unhealthy dependence, I call it being soulmates.

Sure but your example illustrates the key point of the article, your marriage is much like a two-person island. Which is great, as long as you two each are happy and well-matched. But it becomes hell as soon as the match is unbalanced. Stresses once managed by a community are now loaded more and more on two-person islands. If everyone turns all their energy into their two-people island and leave no room to invest in community, marriage all of sudden becomes too necessary for survival. Again awesome when you're well matched but the very definition of hell if you aren't.

Debatable if all that is true, but it does seem like the increasing atomization of society affects the nature of marriage.

Groups are unstable IME, two person islands are a much better social dynamic and it's much easier to master 1 persons mind.

Is your wife single? If not, your advice is unhelpful.

How many men like to write code, and how many women do?

I taught her

Interesting quote from the article attributed to Anton Chekhov: “If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.”

There are very few things worse than being lonely in a marriage. On the other hand, a good marriage is absolutely worth it.

And it's hardly trivial to derisk. People grow apart (even if you were perfect together at marriage), and the cost of splitting can be enormous (emotionally, financially, and socially).

Do you like to gamble? Marriage is a gamble.

You grow apart. Every year to year-and-a-half, we've had to deliberately grow back together.

Unfortunately, that takes two.

Marriage is an investment. If you buy high and sell low, you are going to have a bad time.

No one can predict the future. Investment values evaporate outside of your control, "black swan events".

Not much, just your freedom, happiness, dignity and money.

I agree with jdm2212. This was not a well thought out article. The ultimate purpose of marriage is to provide a stable environment for raising children. The fact that she mentions being married reduces her after-work beers is the point which zooms right over her head.

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