About marriage

[Divorced w 3]

To respond to @AmsterdamAssassin about the couple who divorced:

They were a very attractive young couple, college sweethearts. They were both upper middle class backgrounds. He was extremely ambitious and was driven to financial success at any cost. Honestly he can be a major ass hole. Major. She got tired of his tirades and became a super b itch to deal with his being such a d ick. Things devolved from there & she realized that the ticket to escape him being such a d ick was to get away from him via divorce and take $$$$ as compensation for 30 years of being stuck with a nasty person that required her to be trapped at home (he insisted she not work).

So she didnt start out vapid & was never a model, lol.

He can be an entitled ass, I've seen it.

They have relatively well adjusted kids who have both completed degrees at upper eshelon universities.

Marriage can be beautiful. It can also be ugly, depends on the people in the marriage. Theirs was particularly ugly. Let's put it this way, he is attractive looking, sophisticated and very rich. No way I'd have dated him (and he made effort in that direction a few years back)...nope. I know too much about who he *really* is. No thank you. And his ex wife is ruined in my opinion, having become an awful version of herself along the way.

I am not as his worth as that’s a lifetime achievement but I feel this still.

 

[BaronOfHair]

It’s not our fault you chose to highlight the absolute worst example humanly possible to support your argument

It was not I who invoked Trump and Murdoch as paragons of marital virtue. In any event though: A rift similar to what's described here, between 24:00-25:02

Is clearly developing within The Manosphere, and perhaps among men throughout much of The Anglosphere more generally...

Fellas who go out of their way to broadcast how "radical" they are compared to the rest of so-called Normie Society VS Guys who desire nothing more than unimpeded access to The Good Life, then being left the hell alone to enjoy ourselves*


*Those of us who fall into this camp are heterosexual equivalents to dissident gays such as

And

I'm gay and I wouldn't blame Doug Ford for avoiding Toronto's Pride parade

Opinion: With Pride now so closely associated with radical anti-police NDP activists, any conservative who attends is walking into a hornets' nest

nationalpost.com

Rather than bullying people to celebrate Pride, let’s recommit to Canadian values: Josh Dehaas for Inside Policy | Macdonald-Laurier Institute

Rather than bullying people into wearing the rainbow, flying the Pride Progress flag, or sending their kids to watch drag queens, I implore my fellow LGBT people to recommit to respectful dialogue and other liberal democratic values. These values are the reason we have progressed so far so fast...

macdonaldlaurier.ca

 

[AmsterdamAssassin]

Marriage can be beautiful. It can also be ugly, depends on the people in the marriage. Theirs was particularly ugly. Let's put it this way, he is attractive looking, sophisticated and very rich. No way I'd have dated him (and he made effort in that direction a few years back)...nope. I know too much about who he *really* is. No thank you. And his ex wife is ruined in my opinion, having become an awful version of herself along the way.

We don't feel so much different about marriage, I think. It can be blissful or a total mistake.

And how you write about it can make a different perspective. When you wrote:

I have a personal friend (a very close friend from college of my best girlfriend) who is in private equity and has a net worth of over 100M. Private yacht, 40M home in San Francisco, other residences, etc. His marriage spiraled into depravity and imploded. His ex wife from his college days travels the world whoring about as she pleases and is as entitled and materialistic as they come, although she is remarkably beautiful, she is a vapid person.

In this description the guy sounds like a real catch and his ex-wife like a vapid person.

In your current post, the dynamic changes:

They were a very attractive young couple, college sweethearts. They were both upper middle class backgrounds. He was extremely ambitious and was driven to financial success at any cost. Honestly he can be a major ass hole. Major. She got tired of his tirades and became a super b itch to deal with his being such a d ick. Things devolved from there & she realized that the ticket to escape him being such a d ick was to get away from him via divorce and take $$$$ as compensation for 30 years of being stuck with a nasty person that required her to be trapped at home (he insisted she not work).

So she didnt start out vapid & was never a model, lol.

He can be an entitled ass, I've seen it.

So in your first post about them, it seemed like he wasn't to blame and she took him to the cleaners, in the second post he's a controlling abusive dildo and her post-divorce behaviour was the only way she could get financial compensation for his behaviour.

And there are always more than two sides to the story: I'm sure if I'd talk with them, they both have excuses for their behaviour and probably stayed together for the kids. Talk to any divorcees and they tend to shift the blame of the failed marriage on each other.

This thread is about whether in these time 'Marriage as an Institution' has any benefits for men over just being in a committed LTR.

I think that marriage as a legal institution only makes sense when you have children and you want to protect their assets, but for most normal couples, getting married these days doesn't improve the relationship.

YMMV, of course, but objectively I don't see many benefits for men in matrimony.

 

[BeExcellent]

We don't feel so much different about marriage, I think. It can be blissful or a total mistake.

And how you write about it can make a different perspective. When you wrote:

In this description the guy sounds like a real catch and his ex-wife like a vapid person.

In your current post, the dynamic changes:


So in your first post about them, it seemed like he wasn't to blame and she took him to the cleaners, in the second post he's a controlling abusive dildo and her post-divorce behaviour was the only way she could get financial compensation for his behaviour.

And there are always more than two sides to the story: I'm sure if I'd talk with them, they both have excuses for their behaviour and probably stayed together for the kids. Talk to any divorcees and they tend to shift the blame of the failed marriage on each other.

This thread is about whether in these time 'Marriage as an Institution' has any benefits for men over just being in a committed LTR.

I think that marriage as a legal institution only makes sense when you have children and you want to protect their assets, but for most normal couples, getting married these days doesn't improve the relationship.

YMMV, of course, but objectively I don't see many benefits for men in matrimony.

Yes my post demonstrates the dynamic. But dynamics change through time. The guy became a controlling jerk as he earned more & became more entitled secondary to his income. Meanwhile the wife (who has always been beautiful and a stay at home mother/wife was not exponentially increasing in her value). They started out fine according to friends who have known them well throughout the life cycle of the relationship.

At any given time the dynamic is a snapshot. The husband started out fine & became more entitled as he earned more. Our own @Money&Muscle is heading down a similar path paved with entitlement. He thinks he is owed MORE now that he makes more, and that belies (in both cases) a marriage that is transactional at its core and always was, whether that was immediately apparent or not.

Men who marry with the right character build something together with the wife for the benefit of the family. If more money makes a man's eye wander he was never cut out for the committment that marriage entails. He should not marry.....but many men do it for many reasons that do not involve picking a life partner & committing to the journey together.

And lots of women pick for the wrong reasons as well when they marry. Let's be real.

Each man has to choose what is best for himself. And if he wants to marry he needs to choose a woman wisely and well.

The wealthy couple I am describing are an extreme example of where that leads when the man over time decides he can do as he pleases irrespective of his vows.

 

[jhonny9546]

Each man has to choose what is best for himself. And if he wants to marry he needs to choose a woman wisely and well.

women change with time too

 

[BeExcellent]

women change with time too

Yes. ALL humans change over time. We are dynamic beings.

In a healthy marriage the couple is committed to growning together over time through thick and thin. In an unhealthy marriage people grow apart.

Thr difference maker is the character and level of committment of the two people in the marriage.

Character counts. It is the thing men need to develop in order to be leaders; it is the most important attribite in a marriage worthy woman.

 

[AmsterdamAssassin]

Character counts. It is the thing men need to develop in order to be leaders; it is the most important attribite in a marriage worthy woman.

and perky boobs.

Don't forget the perks.

 

[AureliusMaximus]

With dating and the modern women is just not worth the risk of it. Found this video below and its something that is part of the risk for men of being legally married..

At the end of the day signing off your life on a piece of legal wedding paper is just a business transaction where you give as a guy minimum 50% of all your hard earned stuff.
It has nothing to do with "love". You don't need legal papers for that if you trust / respect / love each other.

 

[davidsonj73]

With dating and the modern women is just not worth the risk of it. Found this video below and its something that is part of the risk for men of being legally married..

At the end of the day signing off your life on a piece of legal wedding paper is just a business transaction where you give as a guy minimum 50% of all your hard earned stuff.
It has nothing to do with "love". You don't need legal papers for that if you trust / respect / love each other.

That was an eye opening video! I hope the two women in the video are not the norm!

 

[BaronOfHair]

With dating and the modern women is just not worth the risk of it. Found this video below and its something that is part of the risk for men of being legally married..

At the end of the day signing off your life on a piece of legal wedding paper is just a business transaction where you give as a guy minimum 50% of all your hard earned stuff.
It has nothing to do with "love". You don't need legal papers for that if you trust / respect / love each other.

-Women can attempt to frame us for battery


-A sociopathic colleague who lusts for our title and position can slander us out of a career we've spent many moons developing

-We could fall in the bathtub in the middle of a warm, relaxing shower, crack our skulls wide open, then bleed to death alone

-The steak we order at Tony Romo's one night could be infected with E. Coli, on account of the chef using it as a TP substitute, after a torrential case of the sh-is

-We could be kidnapped by The Tijuana Cartel, then subjected to a Santeria ritual in which our still-beating hearts are carved from our chests and offered up to Santa Muerte, if we say "Yes" to that free trip to Baja


Life's filled to the brim with dangers, the likes of which we can do little more than lessen to varying degrees. Anyone who can't make peace with that is well-advised to stay in bed for the remainder of his days

 

[Pierce Manhammer]

Damn dude I worry about you.

-Women can attempt to frame us for battery


-A sociopathic colleague who lusts for our title and position can slander us out of a career we've spent many moons developing

-We could fall in the bathtub in the middle of a warm, relaxing shower, crack our skulls wide open, then bleed to death alone

-The steak we order at Tony Romo's one night could be infected with E. Coli, on account of the chef using it as a TP substitute, after a torrential case of the sh-is

-We could be kidnapped by The Tijuana Cartel, then subjected to a Santeria ritual in which our still-beating hearts are carved from our chests and offered up to Santa Muerte, if we say "Yes" to that free trip to Baja


Life's filled to the brim with dangers, the likes of which we can do little more than lessen to varying degrees. Anyone who can't make peace with that is well-advised to stay in bed for the remainder of his days

 

[BaronOfHair]

Damn dude I worry about you.

That last hypothetical ("We could be kidnapped by The Tijuana Cartel, then subjected to a Santeria ritual in which our still-beating hearts are carved from our chests and offered up to Santa Muerte, if we say "Yes" to that free trip to Baja")is actually inspired by a true story

Murder of Mark Kilroy - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

My general point remains though: Every activity we engage in carries it's share of dangers. Using that as a rationalization for retreating from life is a recipe for inertia

 

[BaronOfHair]

YMMV, of course, but objectively I don't see many benefits for men in matrimony.

A fella's bank account fills out like Alyssa Milano in the years between Commando and Embrace Of The Vampire, once the missus croaks, following a mysterious Valium overdose + The life insurance payout State Farm subsequently sends his way.

And things between the sheets go from artic to incendiary, once he replaces the ol'ball'n'chain with a 21 year old secretary from his firm, less than a week after the ex was chucked into the dirt at Forrest Lawn

The enterprising mind contorts benefits out of even the most dreary circumstances

 

[BaronOfHair]

Take a Wife … Please!

Why are married people happier than the rest of us?

www.theatlantic.com

Quote: "
Peltzman didn’t explore why married people are happier, but other researchers have, and they fall into two competing camps. Camp No. 1, that of cynical libertines like me, believes that marriage doesn’t make you happy; rather, happy people get married. One 15-year study of more than 24,000 Germans, for instance, found that those who got married and stayed married were happier than the unmarried ones to begin with, and any happiness boost they got from the marriage was short-lived. “Most of the research indicates that the happiest couples marry, not that marriage causes happiness,” Brienna Perelli-Harris, a demography professor at the University of Southampton, in the United Kingdom, told me over email. According to this theory, Americans stopped being as happy, and they stopped getting married, and either the two trends don’t have much to do with each other, or glum people aren’t in the mood for wedding planning.


The first camp’s argument makes sense if you think about the kind of person who gets married: This person has a sufficiently winning personality to run the gantlet of online dating. They are desirable enough to get their Hinge match to propose to them. They are optimistic enough to promise to love their Hinge match forever, forsaking all other Hinge matches. This person is, in other words, already pretty happy.

When people aren’t happy in marriage, they tend to divorce, which plunks them into the unhappy single pool and makes the married pool look happier by comparison. “We have very high expectations of marriage. So that tends to mean that people don’t get married unless they have a strong, close, and supportive relationship,” says Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. “You’re not going to get married and then find that you are much more happy.” As the classic Adam Sandler sketch goes, you’re still going to be you on vacation. You’re still going to be you when you’re married. If you’re sad now, marriage probably won’t change that.

In Camp No. 2 are the romantics, who believe that getting married makes you happy, because there’s something special about marriage. In a research brief for the conservative Institute for Family Studies, the research fellow Lyman Stone crunched the GSS data again and found that getting married does boost happiness, for at least two years after the wedding, and it does so even when you control for the person’s previous level of happiness.

The logic of this camp goes as follows: Close, supportive, long-term relationships make you happy. Finding those types of relationships through friendships is possible, but it’s hard. People move away; they get busy. Most friends don’t buy houses or raise children jointly—the kinds of activities that glue people together and force them to cooperate. Marriage, says Andrew Cherlin, an emeritus sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, is “the usual way to find a durable, caring relationship that undoubtedly makes you happier than you would be if you didn’t have it.”

Perhaps the strongest evidence for this camp’s thinking comes from a 2017 study of thousands of British people that found that those who got married were more satisfied with their life than those who didn’t, even when you control for how satisfied they were before they got married. It also found that the married Brits were more satisfied years later (meaning the happiness boost wasn’t fleeting), and that marriage inoculated the couples somewhat from the midlife dip in happiness that most people experience. The people who felt the biggest happiness boost from marriage, that study found, were those who said their spouse was their “best friend.” Those people got almost twice as much satisfaction from marriage as other people did.

From the December 2014 issue: The real roots of midlife crisis

A spouse, then, is like a super-friend. Ideally, they’re “committed to spend their entire life helping you in everything that matters to you,” Stone says. A good spouse will buffer you from the stress of your job, your kids, your family of origin. They’ll give you emotional, and sometimes financial, support, allowing you to “feel and think with double strength,” as George Eliot put it. Because you live in the same house, your spouse is always there. (Boy, are they always there!) It can be exasperating—until the day comes when you really need a friend"

 

[BaronOfHair]

Cont:

Does Getting Married Really Make You Happier?

Does getting married make you happier? The proverbial wisdom of many societies has been that marriage was an essential part of a good, happy life. But, in modern societies, this is more debated. Gallup polls and the General Social Survey (GSS) alike show that fewer Americans believe marriage is...

www.aei.org

"What makes these trends especially galling is that they are in some cases empirically wrong. Indeed, married people are happier than unmarried people: across nearly five decades of surveys, data from the GSS shows that 36% of people who have ever been married (including divorced, separated, and widowed people) say they are “very happy” while just 11% are “not too happy,” compared to 22% and 15% for people who have never married. Despite changing public views, the truth is married people really are happier.

But there’s a more charitable way to interpret the views of the growing number of people who are skeptical of the benefits of marriage. Maybe married people are happier, but it’s not because of marriage. Indeed, maybe happy people are just more likely to get married! There is some strong empirical evidence for this view. One very influential paper showed that in several decades of German longitudinal data, self-reported happiness began to rise just before getting married, peaked in the year of marriage, then declined within a year of marriage, with larger effects for women than men. Other papers have built on this, such as a prominent recent paper which compared cohabiting and married people, and found that higher happiness in marriage was due to other contextual factors, not marriage itself. These findings and others like them have led many people to discount the happiness benefits of marriage as just a product of bias and selection: happy people get married; marriage itself doesn’t make people happy. This research, however, turns out to be even more pessimistic than it sounds: the same methods that suggest marriage doesn’t impact happiness also tend to suggest that many other life experiences like unemployment and widowhood also don’t impact happiness much. In other words, this research implies that the reason poor, unemployed, lonely, or disabled people are less happy isn’t that bad things happened to them: they’d be unhappy no matter what.

Other recent research, however, has challenged this pessimistic view. Data from a large British panel survey show that marriage increased long-run happiness, suggesting that “selection” isn’t the whole story. Perhaps marriage doesn’t make Germans happy, but it does seem to make the English happy. Likewise, a paper using panel data from Taiwan has found somewhat more durable positive effects of marriage (though this there was a lot of variety in happiness trajectories, and Christians might get more happiness from marriage than other people). However, research on happiness is bedeviled by a problem: there are only a few datasets which track people over time and measure their happiness. Many longitudinal surveys (like the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth in the United States) don’t ask about happiness at all. Indeed, the United States has proved to be a major blind spot in happiness literature, as there are few longitudinal surveys in America that ask about happiness.

Luckily, since 2006, the GSS has included a longitudinal follow-up component. Because the GSS asks about happiness and marital status, this data can be used to see how happiness changes around key family events, in particular marriage, divorce, and widowhood. With several rotating panels of respondents totaling about 9,600 two-year-change observations, the GSS provides a fairly small sample size with a fairly short follow-up period, so can’t provide an exhaustive test of the effect of marriage on happiness. Within that overall sample, there are just a few hundred changes of marital status. But some respondents, about 4,300, were followed for four years rather than two, making longer-term analysis possible.

Despite the small sample size and short time window, the GSS is a longstanding survey with high data quality, and as one of the few U.S. surveys with any longitudinal happiness data, it provides an invaluable window into whether married might boost happiness in the U.S. as it does in Taiwan and the United Kingdom and in the short run in Germany. Figure 2 shows the estimated effect on happiness (on a scale ranging from 1 to 3) of four changes in family and social life. It shows results from three models: first, a model looking at all two-year changes in happiness individually, so showing short-run changes in happiness after marriage; second, a model looking at all four-year changes in happiness individually, so showing slightly longer-run changes in happiness after marriage; and third, a more technical model using “fixed effects” which estimates effects of marital status on happiness within individuals across multiple time periods. All models also show the effect of any person spending about 2 more evenings a month hanging out with their friends, estimated among the same respondents. Because the frequency of spending time with friends changes a lot more than marital status, results for social time with friends are estimated more precisely.


Effects for major family changes are all estimated imprecisely, with wide error ranges. Nonetheless, some important conclusions can be reached. Getting married significantly increases happiness within a 2-year time frame, and while the effects at the 4-year window are somewhat diminished and no longer statistically significant given the smaller follow-up sample, the estimated coefficient seems broadly similar. The overall effect, an increase of around 0.05 to 0.1 points of happiness on a three-point scale, may seem small, but the average happiness change was just 0.02, and a change of 0.1 points is similar to the effect of a decade of aging. Happiness on a 3-point scale just doesn’t change all that much. The panel model finds larger and more significant effects. In other words, “newlywed” happiness boosts are very clear, but even in the longer run, it seems like being married is associated with a person being happier than before marriage.

Moreover, there are other reasons to think being married might boost happiness. The fact that all models indicate negative effects of divorce and spousal death, sometimes quite significantly so, is striking. If exiting marriage makes people less happy, it stands to reason that being in the marriage was a component of happiness.

While there is some attenuation of effect over time, the central estimate of marriage’s impact on happiness at four years is much larger than was found in, for example, the German data described above. The Taiwanese example found significant happiness effects around 2 years, but noisier effects beyond 3 years, similar to what I find in the GSS, suggesting that marriage in the U.S. has effects more similar to the positive cases of Taiwan and the UK.

One other change should be mentioned: friendship. One reason many people today believe marriage is not vital for happiness is the rise of “chosen family” and the idea that a close circle of friends can substitute for more traditional kinds of relationships. The GSS provides no support for this idea. When people reported increased frequency of “social evenings spent with friends,” even large increases, there was essentially no associated change in happiness. This doesn’t mean that friendship is irrelevant for happiness, of course, especially since “social evenings spent with friends” is a very crude measure of true friendship. But this does suggest that, at the high level, filling your life with game nights and book clubs and outings with friends is unlikely to yield as much happiness as marriage. There simply is no substitute for marriage"


Now, I'm not a married man myself, nonetheless we do ourselves a disservice by ignoring data like this. And not getting serious about causes like agitating for revamping and modernizing our family courts + Proving more readily accessible vocational training, so that more folks (Particularly more men)have access to marriage, if they so desire

 

[Murk]

I'm gonna propose to my chick this week. Marriage is a beautiful thing ordained by God. It's what he wants.

 

[AmsterdamAssassin]

I'm gonna propose to my chick this week. Marriage is a beautiful thing ordained by God. It's what he wants.

Do it after banging the three other women you have lined up. You don't want to break vows to your fiancee.

 

[Murk]

Do it after banging the three other women you have lined up. You don't want to break vows to your fiancee.

What's a conscience?

 

[Pierce Manhammer]

What's a conscience?

It’ll weight heavy on your soul. I can just say it matters, the way the mind works often is:

“well I did it once, won’t hurt to do it just one more time!”

 

[Murk]

It’ll weight heavy on your soul. I can just say it matters, the way the mind works is

Sad to say but I've danced this dance before