Or, alternatively marriage is the fundamental glue of society and the germ of new life across the vastness of time and in basically every culture through disasters and war. One of these perspectives is fair to the most ancient institution.
OP is perfectly fine to just focus on the degree and know the world will continue on while OP works.
Your framing this as something more than it is is abhorrent.
Framing marriage as something more than "a societal complication of a relationship" is abhorrent? Do you think maybe that's a little harsh?
Also, you said "OP is perfectly fine to just focus on the degree and know the world will continue on while OP works." but the post you're responding to never said anything to the contrary. They were just speaking about marriage in general - at literally no point did they tell OP not to focus on their degree.
What if that's the correct selfish viewpoint on an individual level, but the wrong decision for overall society?
These are certainly some complex and nuanced issues, but just as a counterpoint, what if having a family is arguably the most important thing that somebody capable of completing a PHD likely does? Unless a PHD invents some important new technology that transforms humanity (and most PHDs probably don't get anywhere close to that level of contribution), the most likely valuable contribution they could make to the world comes with having large families, being a pillar for the community, and helping guide their children well. Successful families are the foundation for a stable and prosperous long-term future.
Idiocracy presented a very satirical look at the future that emerged from the smart people being too focused on education and careers over actually maintaining the society they were given. We all see the news stories coming out where there's the claim that average IQ rates are dropping, right? OP might not be able to solve that problem on his own, but if every PHD candidate made the same decision to put off family, maybe society eventually gets into some trouble.
Marriage is societal cancer.
Am curious, as the Saudi's seems to be "going ok" (for the males) with their harem approach. Not so much for the females I guess (no idea). That being said, their society seems to have lasted that way for a fair while now.
Also:
>All of them.
All of whom? Surely you can give us specific examples. Your certainty must based on solid archaeological and anthropological evidence, right?
All of this is to say that marriage is a fraught societal construct, not a societal neccessity.
This thread took a bit of a wild turn, but I felt I had to respond :)
Marriage isn’t integral to all societies, so much as monogamous partnership is (excluding some rare poly societies).
You also don’t need marriage to procreate , and several societies are built around the concept of children raised by the community.
That said, marriage is certainly the most persistent form of long term bond in history, but it’s not always borne out of mutual desire. It’s often been as much a means of politics as it has been of love.
1. What is a successful society? You may have a different definition but imho it’s one that hasn’t torn itself apart or causing active harm to itself.
2. I never said they didn’t have a concept of marriage, just that it’s not integral.
Both those points however are dramatically affected by colonization. Particularly Christian colonization, but not restricted to it.
Colonization both destroyed many otherwise successful societies and forced their own concepts onto the ones that remained.
As such I don’t think there’s any society that does have absolutely no concept of marriage, but there are some where marriage is not integral.
Various indigenous groups did not have a formal marriage, but did sometimes have a vow. Even within the US, you’d have the ancient traditions of hand fasting among settlers, which wasn’t a marriage but an informal vow.
The Mosuo/Na people of China famously do not marry.
Hence why I disambiguate between marriage and monogamous binding. heck, monogamous bindings for life are present in a lot of non human social norms too.
But marriage is different in that it’s a formalized procedure to do the binding, and in many cultures was tied to the religious or governmental authority figure as a form of bookkeeping and control, or to show political bindings.
And back to the point of causation/correlation, is marriage integral to success? I’d argue not since hand fasting continued into very relatively (to human history) recent times.
Should we continue by saying “no it isn’t/yes it is, you’re wrong” repeatedly at each other then?
Warren Buffett says the factor which most contributes to your future wealth is who you pick to marry. Do you feel lucky?
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Happily-Ever-After-Enduring/d...
If you are not married and one partner makes significantly more than the other, what's to stop the wealthy partner just deciding 20 years into the relationship that they want a newer model and just leaving the former partner destitute? It creates a massive power discrepancy in the relationship. "Do what I want or I'll leave you in the street."
Married people work towards the same goal as a unit. Do whatever you want it's your life but marriage has very much been a net positive in my and my kids lives. I'm the primary earner in my relationship.
Divorce is a very real outcome of marriage, as are prenups.
Many countries also have rules around care for a previous partner by means of common law partnership etc…
Married people often don’t work towards the same goals anymore than unmarried couples.
Marriage can also be a form of entrapment for abused individuals, a means for political gain or forced on people. Even in countries that don’t think those issues are common like the USA where child marriage is more common than people think.
Imho you have a very idealized perception of marriage that doesn’t line up with the various shades of grey in reality.
Marriage can be a societal contract and/or it can be a vow of love. The former is archaic
I appreciate you letting me know about reality as I have led a sheltered life with no real world experience.
I've been alive and married (20+ years) for longer than I was alive and single. Its been pretty ideal.
How long were you married for before you learned these things and formed your real world marriage experience that I am unaware of? If you were married and it failed then I can understand your negative view of it. I'm sorry it did not work out for you, the end of a marriage / relationship can be hard.
"Divorce is a very real outcome of marriage, as are prenups." lets change that to "Divorce is a very real possible outcome of marriage". prenups are a before marriage thing. So is a long happy life together.
My sister is going through a divorce because they married for reasons other than love and it was clear that it was not a marriage of 2 good people in it for the other.
My brother has also been married for longer than he has been single. Been through some incredibly tough family issues (deaths) that if they were not married would have probably broken them up. Years on they are very happy.
Marriage if done right and again entered into by people that care about each other is an incredible bond and one I feel has contributed strongly to society.
There are negatives to everything but again if its a good match the positives far out weigh it.
Marriage can be a wonderful thing, If its not for you then more power to you, there is no reason to knock the institution that has worked for so many others. Its been around and working for many people for tens of thousands of years. Maybe be open to the fact that there may be some good things that you are missing rather than that through all of human history people have been dumb.
Saying that marriage is not as important to society has no bearing on what value marriage should mean to you. I also never said that marriage is bad, or not for me. I’m married myself, but like I said, i saw it as a vow of love not a societal contract, unlike your statements that were all matters of societal contract that are neither solved by marriage but are also provided for by common law partnerships.
You inferred something because you took things too personally and saw things in the argument that weren’t there because you clearly took it as a personal attack.
In fact, your marriage is largely irrelevant to the discussion altogether since it’s purely anecdotal and doesn’t expand to the entirety of the human population, let alone the population of a single country like the USA where 1/5 of first time wed couples end in divorce, and who knows what percent of the remaining 4/5 include forced marriage or abuse.
Like I said, I’m married and I don’t think marriage is bad. But I’m also not so arrogant or narcissistic to extend my own life choices and extrapolate them to being integral to society.
I’m also not so narcissistic as to ascribe the success of marriage to the value of the people in the marriage. People change with time. Circumstances change. Marriage shouldn’t be a chain holding people together for eternity to the detriment of each person.
Also to be clear, I’m not saying you’re being a narcissist, though I do think your world view is clearly projected from your life choices based on your response but that’s not enough to judge someone online. Im saying that if I extrapolated my choices to others I’d consider myself a narcissist. Before you reply saying that I’m calling people names.
Marriage as a societal contract is archaic. I didn’t say it was dumb historically (marriage has a long and varied history, where love was often never a factor but made sense for the time), but it is archaic. Those aren’t synonyms.
So you like to force your spouse to stay in an otherwise unhappy marriage by putting a ring on their finger and have them sign a paper? So romantic!
Kidding aside, among the many reasons people like to marry, this is one of the worse ones.
You might as well be telling someone to just be very lucky.
I very much understand that I sound like a guy that started a business, beat the ods and was wildly successful telling you to open your own business while ignoring the reality that most businesses fail. America stands on the shoulders of those that tried and succeeded though.
I understand that marriages fail and that people get screwed over. I know I have been incredibly lucky with my marriage to my wife. There is really no way to know and I always recommend dating and living together for years before thinking about getting married. We roll the dice when we cross the street. Everything is a risk with no guarantee of a happy ending. For me the gamble was worth it and has paid massive returns far outstripping any financial concerns.
With that said some people get shafted and I really do feel bad for those people. Dedicating your life to someone to discover they are not who you thought must be a devastating experience.
And yes... live together for 3-5 years or so and then get married if you want. I wouldn't rush it.
> When I left software development for 5 years What did you do? Freelancing or left software dev in those years?
Was it easy to get back into it?
It was relatively easy to get another job. It was an entry level job making 55k but I only kept it for a couple years. Which is really a shame because it was the best software job I've ever had but it was a small company and I had kids to provide for.
I’m in a similar position as you, thinking about pivoting to something else for a while, but hesitant to make the jump because of economic uncertainty.
Thanks for the insight.
Out of curiosity, why is that particular situation a red line for you?
I am very prone to emotional detachment so could adapt to being alone and be quite happy relatively quickly (probably within days). When my dad died I just flew up to my moms, organized the finances, organized the funeral and handled everything while everyone else mourned. I just moved on. I loved my dad a lot. I just detach. I haven't cried since I was a child. I'm not advocating one way or another for the healthiness of this but its just the way I am and see no need to change. Its allowed me to just trudge through things that should have shaken me up for months or years.
This is not a knock on my wife, she is amazing and I very much prefer her company to that of my own. I very much married up.
If someone does not confess immediately (like within a day) or cheats multiple times (even in the same day) or even worse has a lengthy affair I believe that is one of the worst things you can do to a person short of the obvious things like murder, violence, etc.
For me personally there can be no forgiveness. I'm not the moral police though, everyone is free to forgive as they want. If someone is cheated on and feels that its not a show stopper then that's their choice, I'm not them. This is very much just a personal thing, for which there can be no forgiveness. Divorce and separate lives is the only option. I would of course still co-parent (I would assume 50/50 custody) my kids with them and be civil (similar to how I interact with my kids teachers) but any emotional attachment would die. I would tell the kids why we are divorcing when they are old enough. This may just be a me thing its very easy for me to do the whole "dead to me" thing and just move on.
This is not a moral judgement on anyone else. People are free to forgive, pursue polyamorous relationships or whatever sexual agreements they want with the consent of their partners, etc. They key to all of these is knowing consent. My wife and I both know our rules around infidelity and its one of the pillars of our relationship.
Note: I'm writing very lengthy responses lately, I'm working too many nights and weekends and this is a distraction.
You never actually marry. No institutional stuff. No expensive dress to fuss over and never wear again. No huge expensive party for a lot of people that you actually don't like but have to invite. No expensive "honeymoon" vacation that has to be super special and that everyone around you wants to fuss about. No other expensive big party for all those people at 25 years married etc.
Instead you just get the same tax benefits as a married couple for having lived together for a certain amount of time. You stay together as if you were married for however long it lasts. Which in lots of cases is the same 50+ years some people stay married. Or not. No need for a paper. If you guys work out long term you work out long term. If you don't, you don't.
I'm glad this is finally past us in at least some places in the world. Unfortunately not everywhere. Not even in Canada or the US and other such countries.
I think the 50+% divorce rate in itself isn't the bad thing. It's not the root cause. It's just a statistic that shows how unhappy a lot of marriages have always been. But until recently-ish (and still in some places) people couldn't get out of it and endured it all and you can't tell me that they were better off that way.
You can treat "it" as a life-long treatment without all the pressures and the paper and all the other stuff.
By all means, forgo marriage but many of us quite like being married. I love it. Most of the time!
This is one of those often misrepresented statistics. The divorce rate for first time marriages is much lower - off the top of my head I think it might be sub-20%?
This statistic gets skewed because some people go through multiple marriages. And I think it’s one of those things where it’s common that people have only been married once or like 3+ times. I’d imagine if you leave when one marriage gets tough you’ve opened the door to that being a viable option.
I don't know the answer to this massively complex problem, but I don't think it's easy to reduce things to "marriage = dumb", especially with the world so divided and angry.
Cheer up, chief. Maybe divorces can be prevented by getting better at setting the terms of marriage. Like pre-marriage counselling.
We did some marriage counselling last year and it was great for us, highly recommended.
Still, monasteries didn't produce any children.
The rate dramatically changes with demographic, for example many of those were married young and did not complete education.
> who you pick to marry
The quote doesn't say whether :) Married men also tend to make more money and work for longer periods of time. There is a cynical view of whether that's good or not, but 40-50 year old single men don't seem to be a particularly successful demographic.
I’m just working back to first principals. You can be happy without the legal Russian Roulette of marriage is my overarching thesis, and I apologize again it took so many words to arrive at my point.
Just to add, here are a few other things that also limit your day to day freedom and add some risk of legal nightmares:
- operating a business
- owning a home or other building
- running for political office
- raising a child
- using a professional license (medical, law, civil engineer, etc)
So OP, a 28 year old male still in the process of completing education?
I agree with ianai and toomuchtodo, marriage can wait (assuming one is even interested in it) until you've made your place in the world and have time and room to think about such things.
IMHO the reality is a marriage os neither something required nor something to avoid, it lies along side professional life and again IMHO, recommending one to get married or not doesnt deserve a place alongside how one should pursue their career goals. They should be equally pursued in a balanced fashion suited to the individual.
Too early to say. It is possible (though by no means certain) that by 2200, the Earth will be inhabited by a mix of the Amish, the Haredim and various Salafist creeds which, while distinctly non-modern, never stopped reproducing themselves, while all the modernized groups did.
Edit: interesting that this comment attracted two downvotes but no rebuttal. I would say that the process is at the very least visible in Israel, at its conception in 1948 a very secular state whose demographics has since then changed a lot due to high TFR of the Haredim. And the Israeli politics seems to be following its demography.
Meaning, the "validity" of marriage is built into the power hierarchy. The same power hierarchy that determines whether a couple should stay together. People are going to get together. Wouldn't it be better if they could just be together without the need for an authority?