Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons

Even in the remaining 6 states you generally have to represent yourselves as married in some context like filing taxes jointly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage_in_the_Uni...

PS: California does accept common law marriages formed in another state.

Then a mild kicked in the balls aching will follow for weeks.

Three hours after my vasectomy I went straight into work, against instruction. I was a pharmacist then so fairly active. The anesthesia wears off an about one hour. I chose not to take any ibuprofen throughout. It was fine. I don't have heroic levels of pain tolerance either.

I was a security guard at a casino and went back day 4. First half of my shift I was ok, but I went home half way through my shift because walking the patrols was becoming a little uncomfortable.

Here is a rather controversial opinion of mine, hope it is not out of place here:

I would highly encourage all men to get a vasectomy and to freeze your sperm. It is the only way to have sexual agency. Once the woman is pregnant, your consent does not matter and you only are along for the ride.

I just want to clarify here, I believe in Her body her choice. I just believe that the man should have this be a choice as well, and this the only option as far as I see. I would like to hear of alternatives if anyone has them.

Even if you feel sure of not wanting kids, freezing sperm is much cheaper then reversing the vasectomy. People change, and so can you.

Yes, get to know someone before having children. But I'd argue that you should have children with someone that seems like they'll be a good parent even if the relationship is over. Its OK to talk about it upfront, too.

Also, a note about "getting snipped": In some countries (like the US), it is almost impossible for a childless female to get sterilized. "You'll change your mind" "you don't have children, so no" "Why don't we ask your spouse" (these last two happen to men as well). You don't have the right to be sterilized. Other places, you must wait until you are 25, but then everyone - male or female - can get sterilized so long as they can pay for it. So, good luck, poor people.

When I was in college I read a story about a boy who was raped and then the courts required him to pay child support (IIRC the woman was a caregiver in a state facility).

I then read a story about a man who had his child support payments based upon his _SAVINGS_ rather than his income and after he went broken and could no longer make the full payments, went to jail.

I then read about a man who had 3 children with a woman and at some point his wife left him for his best friend. He had all 3 children tested and he was not the father of any of them. The courts still required him to pay child support.

After the 3rd story I decided the risk for me as a male was too great and I would never marry, nor have children.

I've been with my current SO for over 7 years and definitely consider her my life partner, but she understands that:

1. We will never marry, 2. We will never present as married (to protect against common law) 3. We will never have children (she cannot, so this works out for both of us)

---

It's easy to pass men like me off as MRA or disenfranchised or any other number of labels, but the truth is I don't think I've ever been on an MRA site, by all accounts I'm considered successful, and the opportunity has definitely been there.

The truth is I was physically and mentally abused until I left home for college and the result of this experience is that I'm very anti-authoritarian and in general much more guarded against the world than most. Once I realized just how stacked our legal system is against men I chose to protect myself. I just cannot imagine being told I can only see my children on a schedule and having to pay for the right to do so with the threat of jail.

Society pays a very real cost for its decision to treat men so badly. And this is not nearly as uncommon as you think, the ones who have made these sorts of decisions just tend not to talk about it.

Perhaps, rather than dismissing this as a toxic attitude you should endeavor to understand and perhaps help right the very real injustices that happen to men.

There are enough fish in the sea that you do not need to take these characteristics into a marriage.

Find someone that shares your values, your vision of the future and ideally has a similar background to your own - unless you’re the one with the warning signs and are trying to “marry up”.

I don’t mean to diminish the importance of love, attraction, and personality compatibility, but for marriage it’s all that and a bag of chips.

Can you beat the odds? Sure. The point is the aforementioned attributes will make your life much, much harder than it already will be.

Being out of job just gets you back into the same situation you were in before.

Being out of marriage (even more so, marriage with kids) can get you into a much worse situation, financially-, mentally- and emotionally-wise, in comparison to where you were before.

Between 40-50% of US couples divorce[0].

Prior marriages substantially increase the chances of divorce[1].

41% of first marriages end in divorce.

60% of second marriages end in divorce.

73% of third marriages end in divorce.

I'm not against marriage but it's important to understand what's involved.

[0] https://www.apa.org/topics/divorce-child-custody

[1] https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/

There's also the dubious assumption that increasing the divorce rate is a bad thing. Kids can sometimes suffer more from an unhappy marriage than from divorce. Especially older kids who are more aware of the situation.

If they have the skills and just choose to be a slob, that's on them. But many young adults seem genuinely lost.

This is true, but it's also your responsibility to help them gain wisdom and experience. Making decisions for them may leverage your wisdom and experience wonderfully, but sometimes it's important to let them make mistakes and learn from them.

As I recall, I didn’t take my parents’ daily fighting, even my mom screaming and throwing things, as much to heart as some might think. I’m glad you used the word access because that’s precisely what I valued most, and the biggest loss. Second to that was the devastating financial strain (2 apartments, 2 cars, etc but same income).

This is unhelpfully extending the metaphor into a straw man. It's simple enough to see the point.

Failing to see how this debunks either 'lifetime committment' or 'positive relationship' which are the only logical assertions I made - I did not attempt to qualify how to ascertain 'positive'; financial benefit can also be construed as 'positive'.

But parents aren't just two people. Life outcomes for the children of divorced parents are significantly worse than for children whose parents remain together.

I remembered a case of of a obstetrician impregnating multiple patients but a Google search(1) easily proved this was not an isolated case as the first few links are all separate incidents.

(1) https://www.google.com/search?q=obstetrician+used+own+sperm

As immoral as this strategy sounds I admit it is probably the most effective strategy from an investment/returns pov. It is cheaper than becoming Genghis Khan(2) and the effect is comparable.

(2) https://www.nature.com/news/genghis-khan-s-genetic-legacy-ha...

For example, if one or both of them prioritize their careers over their marriage, and spend no more than an hour or two a day even in the other's presence, let alone quality time, for years on end, because they're busy at work or with something else...it's entirely predictable that they grow apart. That was the failure. They chose economics or the corporate ladder or an app that's changing the world or...over their marriage.

It's generally considered a fact that women have a slightly (statistically) more difficult time than men to find a partner after their 20s (and the reverse is true - men have it tougher in their 20s compared to women), and GP's comment is discussing why that complicates things wrt divorce.

> Notice that the comment never mentions that high-quality women would never want to raise someone else's kid.

I think that "high quality" means that they don't want to be second best to another man/woman. Totally understandable.

> Notice that the comment never mentioned that men shouldn't divorce because they are past their 20s when they should be finding a wife.

> Notice that the comment never mentions that high-quality women would never want to raise someone else's kid.

> GP's comment is less valid because it is from an era where women were less-than.

In what world do you live in where on average older women are considered more desirable partners than older men? By and large men are attracted to looks (or they prioritize looks a lot more than other qualities) while women are attracted to a set of qualities besides looks (or they prioritize other qualities a lot more than looks).

You can argue that's sexist and old-fashioned, but that's just how attraction works. Good luck changing the world!

There is a deal of sex-based difference here: being an older mother is harmful for the mother and the child; being an older father is far, far, less so (older fathers might be better for their kids?). Young women can choose a mate from all ages of men. Young men need to choose a mate -- if they wish to procreate I mean -- from the pool of fertile and healthy younger women. Medical science has eroded a little of that difference, but it still starts to get dangerous for women to fall pregnant in their late-30s.

An example of how that difference plays out is that in a childless couple at age 50 the woman basically has no chance to have children of her own, but the male could quite reasonably be expected to be fertile for a couple more decades. Thus, if a couple are unable to procreate and the male wishes to do so, then there is a tension; a biological impetus towards them leaving their wife and finding another partner.

On the matter of kids and "high quality", I made no comment on that earlier, and I make no comment now.

Only 5% of all married couples in the United States got married with a prenup. The fact that signing a prenup is so completely in everyone's interest and the fact that only 5% of marriages have them proves my point - no one is anticipating or looking forward to their own divorce.

Heinlein put it well: "We always marry strangers."

He was married 3 times. I'd be willing to bet he had 2 of those divorces behind him when he wrote that.

That's true but nobody was arguing that. The disagreement wasn't about whether they are failures (a description) but whether they failed (an action). I would say they definitely failed.

While obviously not that consistent, as a kid I perfectly accepted that logic. If I try to place myself in that same mindset, I think I’d find the definition of “marriage is together until further notice” far more concerning than knowing some divorced parents.

It isn't the divorce which creates those rights, it is the marriage. The divorce rules only make it so that those rights are not abruptly suppressed after the dissolution of the marriage.

Median household income in my county is $80,000/year. That’s a bit under $5,300 month take home for a married couple. Which is fine—you can buy a 4BR house here in a good school district for $1,450 per month in mortgage. But no way the couple can afford to keep the house if they get divorced. Rent alone in a studio will be $750/month. (Like most normal places, it’s much more expensive to rent here than buy.) Even if the spouse moving out lives like a pauper that’s realistically a $1,500/month hole in the budget few families can cover. So Dad moves into a studio, mom and the kids move into a cheap 2BR, and you’re paying like $1,750 month for housing (total) because you’ve given up the cost advantages of home ownership. And say there is another $750 in new non-shared expenses. So that’s $1,000/month that’s no longer there that was going towards savings/college/enrichment activities, etc. They’ve traded a 4BR house in a nice suburb for two households that are struggling to get by and have no margin. If they’re lucky, the kids got to stay in the same school district, but they’ve probably been taken away from their neighborhood friends. This happened my step siblings in law recently. It’s extremely shitty.

I don't. I was specifically responding to yellowbeard's comment, which read:

> Childless parents as a result of self aborting male fetuses would not show up in the study.

Yellowbeard provided one explanation for the fact that, despite male fetuses being more likely to self-abort, there is no difference between divorce stats of young male and female children. My response said why that explanation was wrong. I wasn't saying that the self-abortion delta affects divorce ratios, only that it might.

(Indeed, I do expect that it does have an effect, but that that effect is miniscule and unlikely to be measurable.)

That's maybe half a step away from a personal attack. That's not "my opinion." That's how society tends to treat things and that observation is based on lots of reading of stuff with solid studies behind it.

This is like saying "men tend to support their wives children at the expense of their own children".

No, it's not. Not at all. For one thing, two people can be married and have their own children separately from a previous relationship.

if only men could wrap their mind around this one then they might be able to fix all the issues that they maliciously create.

Give me a break. This is not a position I am a proponent of. I rarely talk about the so-called "patriarchy." I do not advocate an idea that sexism is rooted in men being intentionally malicious assholes and I don't think I ever have.

This is not a good faith engagement of the point at all.

The fact that women can have babies tends to impact the lives of all women, whether they want babies or not. They get a lot of social expectations hung on them that are rooted in the idea of father as breadwinner and mother as full-time parent in part because that's a model that is more reliable than mother as breadwinner and father as full-time parent.

By reliable, I mean it tends to withstand things going wrong that you can statistically bet on happening in some percentage of cases. Pregnancy can really seriously impact a woman's body and health in a way that becoming a father doesn't do to a man's body.

As just one really minor example, she can be incontinent for a time after the birth and need to account for that, which is tougher to deal with if you have a paid job than if you are a homemaker.

No. Well before there are children, women will fairly often do things like follow her husband or boyfriend to a new city when he gets a job offer there. When a person moves to a new city because they got a job offer there, they tend to be getting a promotion and a pay raise.

When a person moves to a new city to follow someone else and then start their own job hunt, they tend to be hurting their career and will typically get a less prestigious job with less pay than what they left. Do that sort of thing often enough along gendered lines and the cumulative effect is pretty harsh.

(what appears to be your contention, paraphrased) 'men bear a grudge against alimony because they can't enslave women for menial work'

Please don't do this. It's hard enough to participate here as a woman without someone intentionally twisting my comment in such an ugly manner.

It takes two people to create a baby. There is a long human history of placing various expectations on both men and women to account for that reality. The expectations related to that are long and varied and tend to be gendered, such as expecting women to be virgins on the wedding night but not expecting the same of men.

The reason for expecting virginity for girls is it's a form of birth control and it's the only one that's really reliable and it wasn't that long ago it was the only one a lot of people really had ready access to.

One college, I think in the UK somewhere, used to give scholarships to "virgin girls" and their test historically was "a girl who had never been pregnant." They had to update their criteria at some point.

The last time I saw data on it, a "normal, healthy fertile woman" was defined as a woman who would get pregnant within a year if she was sexually active and not using protection.

Someone asked explicitly for "a personal perspective" and I gave some of that. The degree to which I am being given crap for having done that is quite aggravating.

You don't have to care what a woman thinks, but I give a woman's take here from time to time simply because this is an overwhelmingly male space and I post as openly female. Sometimes, that goes okay. Sometimes, it's appreciated and respected, but it's never an easy thing to do and it always opens me up to being given a ridiculous amount of crap for making a good faith statement.

It never matters how carefully I word it, someone will inevitably have a problem with a woman daring to give the female side of the equation here.

It always sucks when a baby is conceived that wasn't actively and intentionally wanted and planned by both parties. This is part of why there is so much societal baggage concerning human sexual stuff and why the entire world wants to be judgy about things like how many people you sleep with, did you do it before marriage, is it a serious relationship or a casual one and on and on and on.

That's not because women are awful bitches to men and it's not because men are awful bastards to women. It's because when 1 + 1 suddenly and unexpectedly = 3, that impacts many lives, not just the two poor fools who bumped uglies one night without thinking too much about it (as just one scenario -- I'm well aware there can be others).

I'm already finding this discussion amazingly tiresome on a day when I already feel incredibly raw about men being assholes to me, so I think I probably need to walk away. It's really, really hard to constantly be expected to be the one who worries about the feelings of nine zillion men on this forum while it sometimes seems like not a single soul gives a damn about me, my feelings, my life, my welfare -- anything.

So if people want to just downvote my comments to hell and then have some giant pile on of ugly takes outright twisting my words, I guess y'all can have at it. Because nearly twelve years of posting here in good faith under incredibly difficult circumstances seems to have made not a damn bit of difference in how my words get interpreted here. I can still count on getting openly hated on for simply being a woman who dares to open my damn mouth.

People who attempt suicide to seek attention are still suffering serious problems and it's not something to judge as "not a real problem".

Men and boys engage in risky activities which aren't classified as suicide attempts but may be exacerbated by wanting to die, such as violence, drug abuse, dangerous driving, even extreme sports.

Men sometimes commit suicide in very deliberate and carefully planned ways that ensure success. That's bound to be more successful than spontaneously running into the bathroom and swallowing every tablet in the medicine cupboard. Sometimes this is because they believe they've failed their social obligations and will never be respected. Eg. cheating on their wife, beating their wife, being unemployed, etc.

Twin studies with m/f twins outside of an environment shaped by external imposition of traditional (or otherwise differentiated) gender roles and gender-based expectations and treatments?

If so, how was that acheived?

If not, you haven't supported the conclusion of differences even if you fix environmental differences.

Except the joke wasn't a reply to you, but someone else, so you can be assured they were not hitting on you on that one.

Also, you don't even know 'irrational' and 'ineedasername' genders and sexual preferences, so you cant say 'he' was trying to hit on 'her'.

BTW, I'm a guy, and I'm trying to be friendly, and I can assure you I'm not looking for a date.

The last time I was in the ER was due to falling off a skateboard and needing stitches in my chin. I was trying to learn to skate, at 45. My son got me a skateboard for Father’s Day. I always wished I’d learned to skate as a kid.

Pry 50% of my ER calls are due to bike wrecks. My wife always says the day I buy a motorcycle is the day she buys a black dress and veil :D

That is the key. And until he is able to realize that it isn't necessarily true this situation will persist. Keep in mind that his parents may have had a toxic relationship but that he doesn't really see it that way: to him this was the time when his parents were together and he could see both of them, to him you are an obstacle on the way to achieving a re-run of that situation. Little kids are pretty good at knowing what they want, extremely good at being angry at anything and everything and not so good at realizing any of this so you have your work cut out for you.