Great stuff. Also, marriage’s financial effects (dual income, sharing housing expenses, tax differences) are pretty evergreen. It’s very practical to share things if you can find someone you love and trust.
Hmmmm, I was primed for fashion today, but I am not the one running this show! I am glad to see this one again
I've been married for decades, and, for us, "the work" is usually a matter of commitment and forging through the less-than-stellar times with our heads down. Which people do through all kinds of situations anyway. When people say marriage is hard work it's a bit foreign to me. I'm from the Rustbelt, and I spent one summer working at the GM Hydra-Matic plant in Yspi - that was hard work. Although it's not a daily trip to Disneyland, marriage can be a lot of fun.
Yes I agree! All relationships are hard work, but hard in like a workout or gardening. Sometimes you need to do some heavy lifting, other times you hang out in the sun or sauna. Not overwhelmingly hard like doing a marathon without training.
I feel it leads to people enduring situations that are way to bad for everyone involved, because "it's supposed to be hard" or avoiding the difficult conversations with your friends/spouse/family because "emotional work is so hard".
I stayed in a bad long term relationship in part because I had misinterpreted what people meant by relationships being work. Then I learned that what people meant was things like scheduling date nights or giving your partner some grace during occasional rough patches, and not feeling like the relationship was a constant struggle and source of stress. I wish people had been more clear about this.
When almost everyone gets married, there is going to be a higher percent of folks with miserable marriages. When only the most eager and privileged get married, there won't be as many. The question is, what's going on in the middle? Are there actually a lot of young men and women today who have the potential to have good matches with each other who are rejecting marriage? How much can the rate of marriage be increased before the rate of miserable marriages takes a big jump?
If you marry someone who is kind, good and intelligent whose company you enjoy, you will probably have a great marriage. If you choose someone for dumb, superficial reasons like looks, money or status, you shouldn’t expect much.
I think it means, when things aren't working well for you and your partner (and kids if you have them), are you willing to go outside your comfort zone and do things that aren't as fun or creative as you would like in order to make the family work better? It could be going back to work even if you would prefer to have more of a domestic life, or being the partner who stays with the kids because your mate has the health insurance.
BronzZooCobra makes a good point about money. Everyone needs some to exist in the world. To a point more is better - more comfortable living, better prospects for the couple and their kids. It's a major cause of divorces and I'm guessing a major reason why some marriages don't happen. However, I take your point. Money can't be the ONLY reason, or possibly even the major reason. At some level a good marriage requires liking the person you're with, appreciating their talents, their attributes. You can be married without that, but it's not going to go well.
I don’t know why, each time I say it’s better not to marry for money, or to require money, that’s apparently understood to mean, “go ahead and marry a lazy partner who doesn’t contribute a dime.”
I’d expect both partners to contribute with some kind of job unless busy raising small children etc. I assumed that was understood!
My husband and I have had exactly one fight about money — it was him wanting to give some away that I thought we should retain. There’s much more to it, of course, but NO, fights about money are not inevitable — perhaps they are LESS likely in a marriage not chosen for financial reasons? Neither my husband nor I ever had much money and still don’t and never will. I know for sure he didn’t marry me for any reason but love because he gave up everything — his country, languages, family, friends, foods, UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE and more to come here!
The only real problem with marriage and motherhood is that it took me three paragraphs to realize I’ve already read this. But perhaps that’s just aging - I can’t rule it out 😘 Anyway, I now know what titles catch me
I’m interested in why rich dudes get married at the high % rate. The argument is the manosphere talking point is wrong because of the data but not a rebuttal of the logic since why wouldn’t a rich dude want a harem? Obviously there is the simple answer that marriage is better for the usual obvious reasons
One part is that just culturally, marriage is a little bit more of a requirement once you’re in the middle class or above, if you want kids. The idea of actively trying to conceive with someone you’re not married to certainly happens among wealthy but is a far more culturally accepted thing among people below the middle class.
7 years and counting, best thing I ever did. But I don’t talk about how happy I am around other people- it’s not the done thing. I think that’s part of the problem- unhappy people do nothing but talk about it, and happy people wisely keep their mouths shut.
And even when you talk about it, no one believes you. The common the idea is that people who talk to positively about their marriages, especially on social media, are just lying or covering something up.
Having lived in Australia where cohabiting couples have pretty much similar legal rights as married spouses, this concern over people not marrying or not wanting to marry is just very odd. More kids are being born out of wedlock but the difference is that the parents are still together (and not having their kids taken away for just that). More people seem happier to live together and enjoy that relationship to the fullest extent, including buying a house together and wait until it's a good time to marry. There was also a period of time when marriage was kind of seen as silly if it was only for a certain subset of people (that is, straight couples or more specifically upper middle class who never had to deal with the government in any way). The real question should be are we becoming more anti commitment or anti relationship now? Because the "loneliness epidemic" would be more telling of that than the lack of married couples.
I'm curious what would be 'a good time to marry' if you've purchased property together, had children together, etc. Sounds like the marriage has essentially happened already...
Yeah, that's part of what's jarring to me about articles like this, marriage and genuine long-term commitment being discussed as if they're one and the same thing, when in fact many people are fine with the latter without the former (though the US aren't quite there yet).
One theory on why girls today may be less interested in marriage than they were in the past is simply rising acceptance around being a single mom across all segments of society. I mean girls in 1993 were living in a completely different reality in terms of what a family should "look like." There were still "Leave it to Beaver" reruns on cable TV back then! Marriage has been much more decoupled from having children over the last 30 years and I have to think has played a part in this adjustment.
I think this exact same article could be written about kids and parenting. If I ever say things like “I enjoy being a parent” or “I love being pregnant” to people without kids they look at me pityingly like I’m either lying because I’m too ashamed to admit my misery or I have been brainwashed by the patriarchy. But most of the parents I know also like being parents, boogers and all.
Yes. To me the main point of this article is that the discussion around marriage has been pulled to the dark edges by the way we get information these days - by the algorithms powering social media and by people writing to please those algorithms. Not that those incidents don't happen, but they're not the whole story of marriage.
Well, the "I love being pregnant" part is largely biology. It's not hard to love being pregnant if you don't have morning sickness and you are built big enough so the baby isn't kicking you in the ribs or bladder or whatever and you don't have any scary pregnancy-related medical conditions and your hormones aren't making you crazy. It's usually not someone's fault if they have a rough pregnancy.
I find this perspective entitled and also it is giving Christian nationalism type information. There is no perspective on same sex marriage. Also while this may be true, I work with the public and constantly see women who are controlled and abused by men and vice versa when it comes to money. I have personally witnessed people cry about things that happen at home. If you think narcissism is not rampant in this country you are sadly mistaken.
Ok, you do not have to be a Christian nationalist to believe your median marriage is pretty happy. It also doesn’t negate the fact that some marriages aren’t! Like, of course.
As for same sex marriages, most of the anti-marriage discourse is specifically about opposite-sex marriage, but I also directly explain why I didn’t cover same-sex marriage.
You know that women can be controlled and abused by men they aren't married to as well? The fact that some portion of men (indeed, some portion of humans!) are terrible people who abuse their partners isn't proof against marriage as an institution.
I agree that modern marriage doesn’t have to be misery—and for many people, it isn’t. But saying that doesn’t negate the fact that some marriages are, including today. Both things can be true at once.
We have decades of research showing that a significant number of modern marriages involve emotional abuse, coercive control, or violence, and that leaving those relationships is often complex and risky. Acknowledging that reality isn’t a rejection of marriage—it’s an acknowledgment that legal and social progress hasn’t eliminated harm inside intimate relationships.
The danger is in treating “modern marriage” as a guarantee of safety or fulfillment. For people who are living inside a harmful marriage right now, being told their experience “shouldn’t” be misery can feel like erasure rather than reassurance.
Ok, but you're arguing against an argument that no one here is making. Saying that marriage isn't terrible is hardly "treating “modern marriage” as a guarantee of safety or fulfillment."
And again, I've not seen any research that shows that unmarried women are at a lower risk of intimate partner violence than women who do marry. The fact that IPV happens isn't an argument against marriage unless you can demonstrate that married women are disproportionally at risk.
It's also not the responsibility of happily married people, or research-minded people studying marriage, to just be quiet about the fact that marriage can be good and fulfilling to avoid making unhappily married people feel bad.
If anything, parroting the idea that marriage is terrible drudgery makes people more likely to stay in bad marriages, or even enter bad marriages in the first place! Because if everyone else is also a little bit unhappy about marriage, it's not that big a deal if your partner belittles you, or refuses to share chores, or even gets mad and starts punching the drywall from time to time.
I’ll just say that people who are sharing that dumb survey are forgetting that it’s 1) a single survey and 2) and that it was done along *12th graders*. I mean we’re talking about 17 and 18 year olds here
Great stuff. Also, marriage’s financial effects (dual income, sharing housing expenses, tax differences) are pretty evergreen. It’s very practical to share things if you can find someone you love and trust.
Or, as I found out a little while back, if you fork up your knee so bad that you can't reach down to tie your shoes for a few weeks...
Yeah, or crash a mountain bike and break multiple ribs...
I thought our bedroom was in hospice,
then CHH gave me permission the be horny! Can I resubmit my answers to the married sex survey!🔥
Wow this is so inspiring!! That survey is closed but I might want to interview you?
Hmmmm, I was primed for fashion today, but I am not the one running this show! I am glad to see this one again
I've been married for decades, and, for us, "the work" is usually a matter of commitment and forging through the less-than-stellar times with our heads down. Which people do through all kinds of situations anyway. When people say marriage is hard work it's a bit foreign to me. I'm from the Rustbelt, and I spent one summer working at the GM Hydra-Matic plant in Yspi - that was hard work. Although it's not a daily trip to Disneyland, marriage can be a lot of fun.
I’m experimenting with some stuff since I have such a huge backlog and no MST- but there will be fashion next week!
Yes I agree! All relationships are hard work, but hard in like a workout or gardening. Sometimes you need to do some heavy lifting, other times you hang out in the sun or sauna. Not overwhelmingly hard like doing a marathon without training.
I feel it leads to people enduring situations that are way to bad for everyone involved, because "it's supposed to be hard" or avoiding the difficult conversations with your friends/spouse/family because "emotional work is so hard".
I stayed in a bad long term relationship in part because I had misinterpreted what people meant by relationships being work. Then I learned that what people meant was things like scheduling date nights or giving your partner some grace during occasional rough patches, and not feeling like the relationship was a constant struggle and source of stress. I wish people had been more clear about this.
Yeah, there's 'work', and there's 'survival situation'. Can require the same effort but very different things.
Yes. It's work that you do gladly because you like the other person. Most of the time it feels easy, too.
Relationships take EFFORT. If it feels like work, it’s probably not healthy.
When almost everyone gets married, there is going to be a higher percent of folks with miserable marriages. When only the most eager and privileged get married, there won't be as many. The question is, what's going on in the middle? Are there actually a lot of young men and women today who have the potential to have good matches with each other who are rejecting marriage? How much can the rate of marriage be increased before the rate of miserable marriages takes a big jump?
Yes, I wonder about this often! It's a great deal of what I write about.
Now I get why my memoir proposal of "Forty Years of Married Bliss" has yet to attract offers!
If you marry someone who is kind, good and intelligent whose company you enjoy, you will probably have a great marriage. If you choose someone for dumb, superficial reasons like looks, money or status, you shouldn’t expect much.
Many marriages founder on the rocks of low ambition and low earnings. It's great to marry the kind smart musician but that don't pay the bills.
Finding a partner to pay your bills is more of a sugar baby or prostitution situation. I wanted a soulmate.
Sounds like you define “ambition” only financially.
Money is not the most important thing. You can be happy without much of it. You can’t be happy without meaningful human relationships.
It's about someone not being willing to pull their weight.
You mean … marriage is pay to play? Only money is an appropriate contribution?
I think it means, when things aren't working well for you and your partner (and kids if you have them), are you willing to go outside your comfort zone and do things that aren't as fun or creative as you would like in order to make the family work better? It could be going back to work even if you would prefer to have more of a domestic life, or being the partner who stays with the kids because your mate has the health insurance.
Lacking money causes a whole host of problems that can be ameliorated by earning more of it. Somehow I think you know this.
Having family wealth can do the same. That kind smart musician might not be a liability if it turns out that he has a trust fund. Life is not fair.
BronzZooCobra makes a good point about money. Everyone needs some to exist in the world. To a point more is better - more comfortable living, better prospects for the couple and their kids. It's a major cause of divorces and I'm guessing a major reason why some marriages don't happen. However, I take your point. Money can't be the ONLY reason, or possibly even the major reason. At some level a good marriage requires liking the person you're with, appreciating their talents, their attributes. You can be married without that, but it's not going to go well.
I don’t know why, each time I say it’s better not to marry for money, or to require money, that’s apparently understood to mean, “go ahead and marry a lazy partner who doesn’t contribute a dime.”
I’d expect both partners to contribute with some kind of job unless busy raising small children etc. I assumed that was understood!
My husband and I have had exactly one fight about money — it was him wanting to give some away that I thought we should retain. There’s much more to it, of course, but NO, fights about money are not inevitable — perhaps they are LESS likely in a marriage not chosen for financial reasons? Neither my husband nor I ever had much money and still don’t and never will. I know for sure he didn’t marry me for any reason but love because he gave up everything — his country, languages, family, friends, foods, UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE and more to come here!
The only real problem with marriage and motherhood is that it took me three paragraphs to realize I’ve already read this. But perhaps that’s just aging - I can’t rule it out 😘 Anyway, I now know what titles catch me
I’m interested in why rich dudes get married at the high % rate. The argument is the manosphere talking point is wrong because of the data but not a rebuttal of the logic since why wouldn’t a rich dude want a harem? Obviously there is the simple answer that marriage is better for the usual obvious reasons
One part is that just culturally, marriage is a little bit more of a requirement once you’re in the middle class or above, if you want kids. The idea of actively trying to conceive with someone you’re not married to certainly happens among wealthy but is a far more culturally accepted thing among people below the middle class.
7 years and counting, best thing I ever did. But I don’t talk about how happy I am around other people- it’s not the done thing. I think that’s part of the problem- unhappy people do nothing but talk about it, and happy people wisely keep their mouths shut.
And even when you talk about it, no one believes you. The common the idea is that people who talk to positively about their marriages, especially on social media, are just lying or covering something up.
Having lived in Australia where cohabiting couples have pretty much similar legal rights as married spouses, this concern over people not marrying or not wanting to marry is just very odd. More kids are being born out of wedlock but the difference is that the parents are still together (and not having their kids taken away for just that). More people seem happier to live together and enjoy that relationship to the fullest extent, including buying a house together and wait until it's a good time to marry. There was also a period of time when marriage was kind of seen as silly if it was only for a certain subset of people (that is, straight couples or more specifically upper middle class who never had to deal with the government in any way). The real question should be are we becoming more anti commitment or anti relationship now? Because the "loneliness epidemic" would be more telling of that than the lack of married couples.
I'm curious what would be 'a good time to marry' if you've purchased property together, had children together, etc. Sounds like the marriage has essentially happened already...
Yeah, that's part of what's jarring to me about articles like this, marriage and genuine long-term commitment being discussed as if they're one and the same thing, when in fact many people are fine with the latter without the former (though the US aren't quite there yet).
It’s not really that jarring when you remember that I’m American and so are most of my readers lol
One theory on why girls today may be less interested in marriage than they were in the past is simply rising acceptance around being a single mom across all segments of society. I mean girls in 1993 were living in a completely different reality in terms of what a family should "look like." There were still "Leave it to Beaver" reruns on cable TV back then! Marriage has been much more decoupled from having children over the last 30 years and I have to think has played a part in this adjustment.
I think this exact same article could be written about kids and parenting. If I ever say things like “I enjoy being a parent” or “I love being pregnant” to people without kids they look at me pityingly like I’m either lying because I’m too ashamed to admit my misery or I have been brainwashed by the patriarchy. But most of the parents I know also like being parents, boogers and all.
Yes. To me the main point of this article is that the discussion around marriage has been pulled to the dark edges by the way we get information these days - by the algorithms powering social media and by people writing to please those algorithms. Not that those incidents don't happen, but they're not the whole story of marriage.
Well, the "I love being pregnant" part is largely biology. It's not hard to love being pregnant if you don't have morning sickness and you are built big enough so the baby isn't kicking you in the ribs or bladder or whatever and you don't have any scary pregnancy-related medical conditions and your hormones aren't making you crazy. It's usually not someone's fault if they have a rough pregnancy.
I kinda want the list of things y'all bicker about... I think it would be amusing
I find this perspective entitled and also it is giving Christian nationalism type information. There is no perspective on same sex marriage. Also while this may be true, I work with the public and constantly see women who are controlled and abused by men and vice versa when it comes to money. I have personally witnessed people cry about things that happen at home. If you think narcissism is not rampant in this country you are sadly mistaken.
Ok, you do not have to be a Christian nationalist to believe your median marriage is pretty happy. It also doesn’t negate the fact that some marriages aren’t! Like, of course.
As for same sex marriages, most of the anti-marriage discourse is specifically about opposite-sex marriage, but I also directly explain why I didn’t cover same-sex marriage.
You know that women can be controlled and abused by men they aren't married to as well? The fact that some portion of men (indeed, some portion of humans!) are terrible people who abuse their partners isn't proof against marriage as an institution.
I agree that modern marriage doesn’t have to be misery—and for many people, it isn’t. But saying that doesn’t negate the fact that some marriages are, including today. Both things can be true at once.
We have decades of research showing that a significant number of modern marriages involve emotional abuse, coercive control, or violence, and that leaving those relationships is often complex and risky. Acknowledging that reality isn’t a rejection of marriage—it’s an acknowledgment that legal and social progress hasn’t eliminated harm inside intimate relationships.
The danger is in treating “modern marriage” as a guarantee of safety or fulfillment. For people who are living inside a harmful marriage right now, being told their experience “shouldn’t” be misery can feel like erasure rather than reassurance.
Ok, but you're arguing against an argument that no one here is making. Saying that marriage isn't terrible is hardly "treating “modern marriage” as a guarantee of safety or fulfillment."
And again, I've not seen any research that shows that unmarried women are at a lower risk of intimate partner violence than women who do marry. The fact that IPV happens isn't an argument against marriage unless you can demonstrate that married women are disproportionally at risk.
It's also not the responsibility of happily married people, or research-minded people studying marriage, to just be quiet about the fact that marriage can be good and fulfilling to avoid making unhappily married people feel bad.
If anything, parroting the idea that marriage is terrible drudgery makes people more likely to stay in bad marriages, or even enter bad marriages in the first place! Because if everyone else is also a little bit unhappy about marriage, it's not that big a deal if your partner belittles you, or refuses to share chores, or even gets mad and starts punching the drywall from time to time.
lmao
Marriage is a gift from God!
I’ll just say that people who are sharing that dumb survey are forgetting that it’s 1) a single survey and 2) and that it was done along *12th graders*. I mean we’re talking about 17 and 18 year olds here