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> For most my friends, the question they pose is what is the benefit of marriage? You tie yourself down to monogamy, give up your personal life and risk losing half of it plus a life of child support and alimony in a divorce.

I’ll bite: If you do it right, you get to spend every night with the person you love the most in the world.

I’ve been with my wife for 20 years and we still stay up too late at least once a week because we don’t want to stop our conversation. It is the richest, most fulfilling relationship I can imagine.

Beyond companionship, she is the ultimate ally. If I tell her I need her help, she is there for me 100%.

No matter my ups or downs, successes or failures, I have someone I can trust for advice and lean on whenever I need it.

Of course, this reliance goes both ways, but I feel great when I can help her back. My identity has stretched to include being part of this amazing team.

Obviously, there’s a trade off, but for me it was minor. Dating always felt like the worst kind of interviewing to me. I’ll happily take 20 years of shared memories over a rotating cast of fresh faces.

> I’ve been with my wife for 20 years and we still stay up too late at least once a week because we don’t want to stop our conversation. It is the richest, most fulfilling relationship I can imagine.

> Beyond companionship, she is the ultimate ally. If I tell her I need her help, she is there for me 100%.

Congratulations and may it never change for you. I do however have to say that that is not the case for most marriages/ long term monogamous relationships.

If you could somehow set aside social pressure, shared financial burdens, guilt over messing up the kids etc. I think most existing marriages would break down. Few people actually share deep love, friendship and real, freely accepted commitment.

> Few people actually share deep love, friendship and real, freely accepted commitment.

I hope this isn’t true (I don’t know any statistics that support or disprove this), that’d be incredibly sad.

Luckily, I’m happily married and childless.

Yesterday, I spent a couple of hours talking to a friend of mine who's been in the dating world for several years now. He consistently tells me that he's out there looking for something serious, but in the interim it's become a science experiment and a way to get laid. My takeaway from this conversation is that dating is slowly turning in the least natural interaction between two people. It is constrained by a myriad of childish expectations and focuses almost entirely on personal attraction and not character or any other qualities. It's like a minefield and the more you walk on it the better you get at figuring out the expectations and getting laid, not by any means finding a partner. The saddest thing is that he's one of my many male friends who are perpetually single. Now, I'm a happily married male in my mid-30s and after having that discussion I really have no hope for millennials. We're up for some interesting times in several decades when the lonely, aging millennials will be needing care and there ain't anybody around to provide it.

> I personally believe low birth rates are being driven by men more so than women

Tinder says otherwise. Seems like women are rejecting droves of men who aren't in the top 10%-20% of good looks or height (this comes from Tinder's own data as far as I know). Another problem is there are now more female college graduates than men (in the U.S), and they prefer someone educated.

People that are actually successful using Tinder are definitely NOT looking for marriage/kids. It's a hook-up app.

You are right in your observation that women reject droves of men who aren't in the top 20%, not only in Tinder but in real life too. But OP is also right in his observation. The few males that are at the top have so many choices of women that staying with just one doesn't make too much rational sense.

In the end, we have 80% of males not being able to catch the interest of women, and the remainder 20% that do get female attention are not interested in long term relationships.

My conclusion: Low birth rates are being driven by the 20% of men as a result of the sexual preferences of 95% of women.

> You tie yourself down to monogamy, give up your personal life...

This is a ridiculously one side POV. I don't see marriage as giving up personal life. I see it as starting a personal live. There are so many things in my life I wanted to do "with someone" and by someone I mean someone I was in love with and who was in love with me. I see couples traveling the world, working abroad, supporting each other, having twice as many friends since both side bring in people, having twice as many activities to choose from ("should we go to party A or party B?") etc...

On top of that playing with kids is awesome fun.

Maybe your experience has been having a partner who's not a fit for you and so you wanted out?

You can be a long-term committed couple without being married on paper. You can do all the things you mention.

What's more, you can also have kids without being married on paper!

So I do understand people who don't see the point of getting the government involved and making it a thing that's very complicated to end if it doesn't work out.

While true, this is irrelevant to the topic of birth rates.

So is the comment I was replying to.

That gets you all kind of problems with the legal system if one if you is in the hospital or dies.

> This is a ridiculously one side POV. I don't see marriage as giving up personal life. I see it as starting a personal live.

There is some truth to this though. It's just you personally don't see it that way.

A number of my single friends, 35+, love their life - exactly the way it is. They want a relationship but not bad enough to give up specific aspects that are called 'freedoms'. One of them being able to hook up and many others.

I'm married with children and wouldn't want it any other way, but that's me.

My personal take, yes please do not get married if you don't want to.

It is VERY difficult to find marriable woman who would be a good mother. Most NYC women who are "pining for commitment" really do not fit into that category.

They go on to become mothers later.

> For most my friends, the question they pose is what is the benefit of marriage? You tie yourself down to monogamy, give up your personal life and risk losing half of it plus a life of child support and alimony in a divorce.

I lived in New York for many years and can confirm your experience. However, what interests me more is where all these ideas and decisions are coming from. Is it because it's trendy (Joe is not coming to the party tonight.. he is now, you know, married), which down the line means fear of losing status, or because people are free to choose what they want. I lean towards thinking it's the former (edit: I would rather say it's not the later). When the world is driven by TikTok and Instagram, I believe many people are measuring themselves up to the other people's standards rather than defining their own.

So it's driven by men yet women are predominantly the instigators of divorce which causes that fear?

Don't think you can so easily pin one of the two as the drivers.

The philandering of rich young NYC men is not exactly an unbiased sample.

> If you’re a medium to high earning male in NYC, there are so many women to choose from that are pining for commitment (I believe biology plays a factor here).

NYC is well known for having more women than men.

The parent comment of yours read like standard misandry. My eyes rolled as well.

"Marriage - and any other contract - is a deliberate effort to constrain your future actions so that you can make long-term plans that heavily affect other people - your spouse, but also your future children - without them having to constantly worry about you running off to any Siren you hear." [0]

No-fault divorce basically destroyed that institution for the working classes, with divorce rates sky-rocketing in a decade.

Children living with both biological parents:

Affluent families in 1960: 95%

Working class families in 1960: 95%

Affluent families in 2005: 85%

Working class families in 2005: 30%

[1]

> Most of my well to do friends are uninterested in marriage and are just churning through girls.

This is cruel and sad, but I'm not sure falling marriage rates are even the fundamental factor in the overall decline. The problem goes deeper.

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/theres-a-time-for-ever...

[1] https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1178310819332984832

> For most my friends, the question they pose is what is the benefit of marriage?

Marriage helps to raise kids … isn’t that the answer ?

^The pseudo-intellectualism that seeps through HN comments makes my eyes roll.

Here’s my take.

Stuff is expensive. Marriage is a lot of responsibility. It’s not 1950 anymore. Shit changes.

Biology doesn’t.

Marriage isn't biological, it's a social construct. Birth control and abortion are also not natural in that sense but human-made.

Human evolution is biology btw, but evolution doesn't necessarily mean that humans have to reproduce like rabbits until everyone starves to death from overpopulation. There is a reason that the birth rate is generally lower the wealthier and better educated a population is.

I disagree. We live in the most materially abundant country in the most materially abundant time.

It is not a material problem. It is cultural. Society is feeling like a less good joyful place for children. "It takes a village to raise a child". There have never been fewer villages.

18k a year for a kid is expensive. Like a quarter of the median household income.

Not to mention the time commitment. My friends lives were never the same after they had a kid.

It’s a no for me dog. At least rn.

Can you please provide some context what these 18k stand for?

Stack. Band. G. A Rack. 1000s bro. 18,000 USD.

Anectdotally, for me, just moving to an apartment with an additional room increased my expenses for rent by about 15k€ per year.

There are lots of things that are expensive. Sometimes because they are worth it.

Sure, whatever. Obviously it’s a personal choice.

Live small with less material and less consumption. Less services too. And you will do just fine. But no. That is not what you have been taught to do. That is not the sacrifice you have been told to make.

I have known that when I start, it will be the smallest of homes with the cheapest of foods and reduced living which means no internet, no cell phone service, no tv. For the simplest of things, I would go to the library or the nearest cafe or use some known Wi-Fi point. And I am ok with starting life like that. How many other people are ok with that?

I am not okay with that because internet and computers are very cheap. A single rental payment is enough to pay for almost two years of 100mbit internet. Three rental payments are enough to pay for a reasonably high end PC which lasts 6 years (no I don't mean a PC with a thousand dollar graphics card).

And we are still talking about a cheap 500€ per month apartment with only one bedroom here. In practice you would pay more. Products made in Asia are a drop in the bucket compared to rent in even the cheapest parts of Germany.

I don't think 500€ is an excessively high rental price, I just disagree that anyone would have to do without these products.

I'm not sure how you can say something like this in good faith

Sure, in raw numbers, maybe that's true

Compared to previous decades where you could get on the housing ladder reasonably easily and support a family with only one full time income, not so much

In the 1800s they had 6-8 people living in a single room in NYC, with no windows and no plumbing.[1]

My grandma (still alive today) grew up in the US without plumbing. She had to use an outhouse.

There's an inverse relationship between wealth and fertility. Wealthy countries are less fertile than poor countries. Within wealthy countries the wealthier people are less fertile than the poorer people.[2]

[1] https://youtu.be/RL7BECNn-RI?t=151

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

You can easily get 1950s quality housing and support a family to 1950s quality of life on today's single income. Our parents and grandparents quite simply expected much less from life than we do today.

It is really quite blatantly clear: as societies get wealthier, the fertility falls instead of rising.

You can easily get thrown out of the workforce due to offshoring, AI automation or ageism. Our grandparents didn't need to deal with all that they had strong unions and kept the same job till retirement. I'd take the 50s if this is the future the elites are planning for us.

>Our grandparents didn't need to deal with all that they had strong unions

Larry Page's grandpa was an autoworker, and had to carry around a pipe with a hunk of lead on it to avoid getting beaten up by his employer.

https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-pages-grandfather-kept...

Some things got better and some things got worse, we can all find interesting anecdotes. You're saying the average American's story is more closely resembling Larry Page's than the one I described? I'm really not so sure that's true.

Your understanding of the past is very mistaken. Our grandparents had to deal with the same issues.

I live Washington, and frequently travel around the rural areas here. The state is littered with coal mining towns abandoned a century ago, with lumber mills closed before WWII, with towns like Index, WA, which was established in late 19th century, and had its population and industry peak in 1920s-1930s.

Our history is history of dynamism and change, and while some fraction of Americans lived and retired working for the same big factory in Detroit, this has by no means been an universal experience of our ancestors. In fact, if you look at the data, people today move for work less than our ancestors had. Our past was indeed glorious, but it was not a past of wealth and stability.

> In fact, if you look at the data, people today move for work less than our ancestors had. Our past was indeed glorious, but it was not a past of wealth and stability.

Indeed it depends how far you go back. I mostly talk about the baby boomer generation (who are "our" parents in many cases as many people here are 25-50 years old). In general they experienced more financial and occupational stability than us since they had much stronger unions and globalization was only starting.

There was a brief period in American history where workers were quite well off, but it had more to do with the rest of the industrialized world being bombed to pieces than with unions.

When boomers started entering job market en masse in 1970s, they entered the economy of prolonged stagnation and high inflation, saw rationing of fuel, and by no means enjoyed significant stability. When they were buying houses, the nominal price was low, but mortgage rates were 8% at best times, 16% at the worst, making the mortgage payments scarcely more affordable than they are today. When they were entering job markets, the unions were already declining for two decades, and only something like a quarter of people were in a union in 1970.

Really, the boomers only made a killing in last decade or two, resulting from the low interest rates pumping values of assets. They certainly did not have it easy or stable in their youths, when they were forming families. I think your understanding of economic history needs more research.

Our economic position is just as bad and probably worse than the 70s - on top of inflation we have the biggest debt since WW2, much worse demography, weaker unions and AI is just beginning to wreck havoc. Really not great to be middle class now in my eyes. I do agree though, these comparisons to the past need to be done carefully, there is a lot of nuance.

> You can easily get 1950s quality housing and support a family to 1950s quality of life on today's single income. Our parents and grandparents quite simply expected much less from life than we do today

I'm curious what you think makes a 1950s quality of life? I agree that people expect more material things today, but many of those things e.g. computers are de facto requirements to be a member of society. It seems to me that it is significantly more expensive to afford a good meal or a decent sized apartment.

Qualitatively, I know a large number of people who grew up in the 50s and their experiences of the time are different qualitatively. None of them ever struggled to meet their housing needs as long as they were able-bodied, and then generally only needed 20-40 hours of work (this include lower end work: construction, landscaping, retail).

While I don't have the stats handy* materially we know that during the mid 1900s the bottom 50% of americans owned a higher percentage of private property than in any time in history. Since then, we have reverted to a much more unequal distribution. It's hard to imagine this does not impact the current feeling of people feeling they can barely afford a place to live.

*if you have access to a copy of Capital and Ideology I believe you can find references in chapters 9 and 10

The issue is, your kids will need / expect as much as other kids.

So you might be happy with having little, but it's not going to be easy to send your kids to school and tell them they shouldn't have an iPad or an international holiday so mummy doesn't have to work.

It's even harder to teach them that what one knows, what one does and what one gives, is more important than what one consumes and what one has. But I think it will be worth it.

People on HN and Reddit seem to think the only “past” that exists is 1950s America

Not like life in America today is better than 99% of the rest of the world past and present. Spoiled people.

Materially abundant nowadays means cheap felectronics, clothes and low cost flights. However, supporting family was much easier in the 50s because housing was so much cheaper and much better job security with less education. It’s insane what boomers could afford by their 30s.

People in ye olden days didn't get married because they "felt good and joyful" about raising children, they did it because it was the only way to have sex and the only way to have children, which was not just for fun, but because you needed helping hands on the farm and somebody to take care of you in old age.

It’s funny everyone is oblivious to this, or wants to be. In almost all religions and cultures, universally, having sex outside of marriage is outlawed. In order to have sex, you must get married.

>> When looking into the Maya world of Yucatán, we find that during the 18th century and beginnings of the 19th century, it was the custom for males to marry at age 17 or 18, and females at age 14 or 15.

>> The parents preferred, for their sons, girls from the same social class and town. As well, it was considered petty if the male looked for a companion for himself or his children, rather than obtaining the servces of a professional matchmaker (ah atanzah).

>> Once the matchmaker was selected, the ceremony and the amount of the dowry were discussed. This usually consisted of dresses and other items of little value, which were paid by the father of the groom to the father of the bride as a marriage pledge; for her part, the groom’s mother prepared the clothing for her son and for her future daughter-in-law.

What drives you to have children, as a human male, is the desire for sex. Once you remove that, many will pick to not have kids anymore.

So your theory is that extra-marital sex is a modern invention?

I would say your example of the Maya shows more that many old societies had extremely powerful marriage pressure put on what we would consider children or at best adolsecents, who would have been far less able to resist such pressures than today.

I don't see any agency about sex in the citation you give.

I think you're mistaking "we don't talk about pre-marital sex" with "we don't have pre-marital sex".

Material is cheap, I can get a new TV or a set of tools for a fraction of the price they cost in the past. But actual necessities (education, shelter, healthcare) are incredibly expensive.

I’d be happy to trade my cheap plastic crap from Walmart for a $45000 house and a $1200/y tuition

The future is unevenly distributed.

I make 6 figures and I get rejected by girls that work at Chick Fil A