Danger said:
Great question. The risks of divorce rape will always be present. however, if she has never been milked, you have increased odds of a successful marriage.
Pre-nups do not address third parties. So she is pretty much guaranteed custody of the children and full monetary benefits as a result. So the one positive to getting married (raising kids), is linked directly to the largest disaster possible. Child-support rape.
Correct, and unfortunately child-support rape is a just as real of a possibility outside of a legal marriage. Just avoiding marriage does not offer you immunity in the event of children.
Danger said:
The possibility for a positive outcome absolutely exists. The anti-marriage crew does not dispute that.
What is in dispute is the return on those risks. In other words, what are the real benefits versus the risks? Not even close to high enough to justify it in my viewpoint.
Fair enough. Matter of opinion.
Danger said:
The data I gave back was not opinions, there were observations that your studies only showed benefits for women and society. The benefits to men were in no way able to show causality, just linkage. And anyone from this site should know that women will select healthier men for marriage, NOT that marriage makes a man healthier.
If you want to see the benefits of NOT marrying, just compare your divorced friends to your never married friends. You will without a doubt see the same general theme of destitution for the divorced and prosperity for the never married. Very, VERY few men get through divorce unscathed.
That's not really a logical comparison. There is no control. A better way to do it would be to look at X number of married vs never married men in the same age group, since we are essentially asking who is happier. Looking at divorced men (poor outcome) vs never married men (null because they never entered the marital equation) doesn't really tell us anything useful, because it's a given that a never married man probably has a higher level of happiness than a man recently divorced.
Your observations that there are no direct benefits to men are, again, a matter of opinion. True that these social studies cant really show direct causality, but I have still yet to see any data that shows correlation OR causality with regards to health and social benefits in never married men.
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Tenacity-
I am going to outline for you in simple format one last time why your ARGUMENTS (not your opinions) are weak:
1. The stats you gave us (2 links to CDC/Census Bureau divorce stats) only tell us
what we already know---divorce is high and women typically initiate it. They don't bolster your stance that never marrying leads to a superior outcome.
2. You propose that the odds of a negative outcome (divorce and the possibility of divorce rape) are so high that they negate any potential benefits of marriage, and that all said benefits can be attained without marrying.
The first part of your thesis is your OPINION (because first marriages have a <50% divorce rate, meaning greater than 50/50 odds of success, and you cant really prove what percentage of divorces result in divorce "rape", as it were. All you have are anecdotes.)
Here is where the sauce gets really weak:
Your
solution, never marrying and enjoying an endless stream of young women, replaceable at the first sign of duress, is incredibly shortsighted because not only is it unrealistic,
it does not absolve you of all the risks you hate about marriage.
Allow me to elaborate:
As I stated previously, eventually you are going to meet a girl (or girls) you really, really like. When this happens, human nature takes over and you will naturally start making each other a bigger part of your lives. If you have shared property (whether you own it or you both own it), there can be
legal issues. If you have a child together,
you are just as much on the hook as if you were married!
So you can come back and say you will never do any such thing with a female---and maybe you wont---but this is incredibly unrealistic. I have yet to meet a female who would remain a permanent gf without an eventual increase in commitment, be it living together, or a pet, or a child, or even just something more meaningful than going over to your house twice a week to bang you. Say you decide to go back to school and she works while you are a student. Or say you help her pay off her car while she has an illness. There are a million different scenarios where your live become intertwined. So while you may not be on the hook as deeply as if you were married, all relationships eventually progress to a point where you will be assuming some of the risks of being a married couple.
Here are the take home messages:
Marriage has risks, there is no way around that. However,
so do relationships in general. There are ways to mitigate these risks, but they can never all be eliminated or predicted. That's just life.
If you choose not to marry, totally fine. You do eliminate some risk of a nasty divorce. BUT---unless you manage to go though your entire life managing to never escalate beyond having a simple, entry-level girlfriend (incredibly unrealistic), you will eventually be assuming some, if not many, of the risks you so hate about marriage.
So what are the benefits of marriage then? Well, let's assume that the benefits I listed and substantiated earlier in the thread can all be had by simply cohabitating (at which point you assume marital risks anyways, negating your solution). If that is true, then marriage simply becomes a philosophical choice. There may be religious reasons, perhaps some legal reasons (military service, etc), or you may think like me that when you marry someone, the primary reason is to
make them your family. This is purely a viewpoint, not any sort of fact or necessity. It's more of a symbolic commitment, and frankly could be done without a marriage license. But since this thread is about risks and benefits, we should all know by now that by living
as if you were married to a woman poses many (and in some cases all) of the risks of actually being married. So, if you want to eliminate all risk, then just never have anything beyond a casual bang relationship (and let us know how that pans out).
Oh, and I'll make one prediction to go on record: I bet you, Tenacity, will be married within 5 years. If not I'll buy you a case of beer.
...and I'm out. :rockon:
