The Only Reason Why a Man (Or A Woman) Should Get Married
Dr. Helen asks the question at her blog: Name 5 Reasons a Man Should Get Married,
As I think about it, I wonder in today’s anti-male climate, whether there are financial and legal reasons that a man would want to marry. Maybe I’m being too cynical here. Can readers help me out?
No financial or legal reasons exist for a man to want to marry. I’ll go further: no secular reasons exist for a man to marry. Choosing marriage is an entirely irrational act, contrary to male nature and self-interest. It’s an act of self-sacrifice in which the man decides to give up his own life so he can take care of his wife and their children, giving them a better life than he knew himself.
There’s only one reason why anyone should marry: Because they believe in a religion that says you’re supposed to get married and have as many children as possible and that happiness will then follow. If a transcendent God doesn’t exist and death is the absolute end then what difference does it make if a man spends his money on a wife and kids or on toys and escorts?
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
Dave Swindle,
This topic is not complete without mention of the fact that quite a few men are deciding to hire surrogates (which are not expensive in India) and become single fathers. Toban Morrison is a Canadian man who did just that.
http://photogallery.thestar.com/1038282
And unlike single mothers, single fathers are using their own money, not taxpayer money.
Now, before anyone rails against this, about 41% of children in America are born to single MOTHERS on the taxpayer dime, so single mothers outnumber single fathers by about 1000 to 1. Fix taxpayer-funded single motherhood before you complain about self-funded single fatherhood.
I can complain about single fatherhood as selfish and stupid. That’s my method of fixing it. Intentionally choosing to bring a child into this world when you’re a single parent is cruel.
OK. Then, given that 99.999% of the children both to single parents are born to single MOTHERS, the decision of where to focus on is clear.
For every man who decides to become a single father (spending his own money), there are 100,000 women who do this (41% of all babies in the US are born to single mothers).
Behind every single mother there is a delinquent father who chose to run away from responsibility. It’s shameful for both the mother and the father to engage in sex for fun, and then leave their children to grow up without full parental support from a mother and a father.
You might want to check the statistics on who, men or women, initiates most of the divorces in this country.
And who gets awarded custody of the children by the courts in custody battles.
Deadbeat dads exist, yes. But so do disenfranchised dads. And there are lots & lots of the latter.
Women have almost exclusive control in avoiding single motherhood: Don’t get involved with losers, don’t get pregnant outside of marriage, and don’t dump your husband for frivolous reasons. (Unless it’s one of the 4 As — adultery, abandonment, addiction, or abuse — then, yeah, YOU are almost certainly the malefactor.)
Men have far less control in avoiding having their children taken from them against their will.
Markus,
No there isn’t, you ignoramus.
Behind every single mother there is a delinquent father who chose to run away from responsibility.
The law ruthlessly hunts down men for child support and jails them even if they want to pay, but lost their job. Check out the Bradley Amendment.
Also, women conduct paternity fraud all the time, just to get freebies.
Most single mothers are so by choice, and have ejected the father against his will. The ‘deadbeat Dad’s’ lie is just a meme to dupe gullible losers like you.
You seem to be OK with jailing an innocent man even if HE was the victim of paternity fraud, and even if HE (and the child) want to be in each other’s lives, but the mommy wants to have sex with biker gangs.
What a morally repugnant phony you are (like most Social Conservatives, who are really just rabid feminists at heart).
Markus just inadvertantly gave the #1 reason that a man should not have children, and should not marry, in America today.
Even if a man does everything right, and is a good father, the woman will divorce him ‘because she is bored’, and take his children as well as his life savings. The law allows her to spend the money on herself, not the children, even if it is labeled as ‘child support’. Even if the children are not even his..
After that, sadistic groveling whiteknights like Markus will line up to shame the man as a ‘deadbeat Dad’ even though HE is the victim here. These poseurs are not moral, but rather lustful, craven villains who think groveling to women is their duty (even though women hate grovelers like that).
These slimy whiteknights are very un-American, as they don’t believe in the basic rights in the US Constitution (fairness under the law, due process, personal responsibility) and would rather line up to slam men in the hopes that a woman will take pity on them.
So, once again, Markus has shown us why a man should not marry. The man can have unspeakable evil done to him, and still be painted as a villain.
You need to read the Misandry Bubble over at The Futurist and get some data before popping off again. It’s a very good read. Cheers -
http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html
Don’t you dare try to deflect the issue. I condemn all around for deliberately becoming single parents. If a woman does it, she’s scum. If a man does it, he’s scum. If a couple plans it that way, they’re both scum. Don’t make excuses. You can’t justify bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior.
mythbuster,
Your pseudo-moral sermonizing is phony.
You simply don’t hold women to the same standard of accountability that you hold men to. You use ‘religion’ as a mask for your cowardly, woman-prioritizing ways.
99.999% of single parents are women, that too mooching off of taxpayers. Yet you condemn the 0.001% who are men, and paying their own way.
You have shown why modern Christians have become a morally bankrupt laughingstock.
Read Dalrock to educate yourself on how rotten modern Churchianity has become :
http://dalrock.wordpress.com
“It’s an act of self-sacrifice in which the man decides to give up his own life so he can take care of his wife and their children, giving them a better life than he knew himself.”
THIS. You glazed right over the true reason– because it creates a better life for your wife and your children, which IN TURN increases your long-term happiness and satisfaction. It is putting off instant gratification in favor of extended happiness.
Your argument about religion — are you bashing religious people? — is irrelevant. Raising a solid family is gratifying from biological and emotional standpoints, even without religion.
Married people tend to have high levels of life satisfaction, and are also much more healthy and wealthy than single people.
The one reason to get married is: “Because it can help make you truly happy.”
A grain of truth wrapped in a pound of nonsense.
Is having children gratifying? Sure.
However, it’s also quite possible to be happy and fulfilled having not done so, and in most cases those with highly marketable skills are able to succeed to a much greater degree than married couples.
Society goes to hell due to a lack of principle and endless entitlements replacing pride and accomplishment. That has crap all to do with marriage, and I would submit that the workaholic single guy working 80 hours a day to employ a dozen people is doing a hell of a lot more for society on the whole than a random couple cranking out kids.
Certainly, a person is not devalued by not marrying. But I would suggest that the father working 60 hours a week and raising 3-4 excellent children who will one day also benefit society has a greater, long-term benefit to society than a your single man. Marriage, in many ways is like many vocations, it’s not for everyone.
Agree with James K. Mr. Lion presents a false dilemma: single guy working 80 hrs a week vs. shiftless breeders. Most men, and in traditional American society, the vast majority of men, are in neither category.
Benjamin @ 2: No, Dave is not bashing religion. If you were familiar with his posts you would know that he comes from a pro- point of view. And if you recognized the last picture in the post as that of a younger Mitt Romney, you would understand the compliment Dave is paying to the role of religion in healthy families & fulfilling lives for men as fathers.
I challenge you to re-read what you’ve written in several years without out cringing and being completely embarrassed.
It is Jake who should be embarrassed.
Note how men are the only group who do not deserve to have rights or choices. Villains like Jake have had a lot to do with that.
You’re the one sleeping with prostitutes. You’re the one advocating the exploitation of human beings via surrogacy.
Prostitutes? No.
Surrogacy? Yes. Why do you oppose services provided by consenting adults?
You are just a woman who wants to oppose anything that might give a man choices in life, while wanting women to have a lot of choices.
Shame on you.
I’m using the term more liberally to refer to promiscuous women in general, regardless of whether or not they’re actually paid for their relations. St. Mary of Egypt is an example of an unpaid prostitute turned Christian.
Concerning surrogacy, I despise it for the same reason I despise contraception and in vitro fertilization in general: it separates sex from reproduction. Were there no such thing as contraception, men and women would both be far more careful about who they had sex with. Sex is supposed to make babies, and severing sex from reproduction has disastrous consequences.
How many women marry and/or have an ‘Ooops!’ conception just to have a guaranteed financial annuity? Ever heard the term ‘Starter Marriage’? Hell, how many date and string along men they have no intention of marrying or sleeping with, collecting free dinners, lavish courtship gifts or payment of financial debts? And yet we are supposed to regard such behavior as romantic and proper.
Hypocrisy. At least prostitution is honest.
No such thing as an “oops” conception. If you have sex, you intended to conceive. At least, that’s what your actions say, never mind what you were thinking in that warped head of yours.
Is Jake a villain because you disagree with him?
I don’t think you’re interpreting Jake correctly. He has a tendency to do drive-by postings. From what I’ve observed with Jake, he’s quite the misogynist and inclined to agree with you.
And yet Jake doesn’t cringe when women turn themselves into single mothers by frivolously divorcing their loyal husbands.
@Jake and Sam,
You should be embarrassed at the current state of family law that leads to many men having attitudes like Dave.
The old deal was the man promising his resources in exchange for his wife’s fidelity; his wife in turn promised her fidelity in exchange for her husband’s resources. Everyone knows that ordinary men are usually very motivated to provide for their families and that motivation can and has been harnessed for the good of civilization. Which explains why societies and cultures that supported monogamous marriage across the breadth of all men and women living within tended to beat the crap out of every other social organization because of their ability to amass resources through the efforts of those ordinary men motivated to provide for their families.
But what happens in today’s environment? Women have learned how to access the resources of men via alimony, child support and/or government transfer payments so why would they feel compelled to promise fidelity to any man? No one should be surprised then, that men can and will question why should they work so hard if the women not only aren’t holding up their end, they are not held accountable for it. What commenters like Jake and Sam miss is that marriage is a two way street. And there are consequences for consistently letting one of those parties off the hook while still holding the other party accountable. That is your collapse of civilization in a nutshell.
And then people wonder why Western Culture is collapsing like a sodden cardboard box.
There is just so much raw “wrong” in this, from the base question, to the forced assumptions, to the haughty “conclusion”, that all there is to do is shake one’s head sadly, and contemplate whether this will survive long for future cultural historians to pass judgment on and how harsh that judgment will be.
So it’s a simple utilitarian idea for simple people and it’s carried out in sort of a simple adult version of Simon-Says? But let’s not stop there…. dear me no because religions are Chatty-Cathies when it comes to directions. How about when religion says to have many wives and children as in Osama Bin Laden’s family with 54 children. Notice I’m so thoughtful of your feelings Dave that I don’t even allude to murder (mass and other wise) and torture.
Dave you’re a nice guy and your hearts in the right place (we can hope so because one day a “religious” person may come acheck’n sans anesthetic) but isn’t there anyone you can show your posts to before, you know, you post them? I’m just say’n…
Really? Does Islam REQUIRE multiple wives? I understand the Ayatolla Knomeini worked to discourage polygamy.
At any reate, the idea that polygamy is immoral is entirely Christian. I don’t know what your problem with limited polygamy (when it does not become the norm; a culture that allows polygamy is not the same as a polygamous culture) is; I thought you weren’t Christian.
And I guess that polygamy is immoral is entirely Christian in origin explains monogamy in China, Japan, Korea, and multiple other Asian cultures.
Actually, at least in China, polygamy was traditionally practiced. There would be the tai-tai, the first wife, and then for men who could afford additional wives, there would be multiple wives. In Japan I think there was only one wife, but there could be legal concubines. However, in both cases, this was generally only for the wealthy. Most men could only afford the one wife.
From a functional POV, polygamy is really only viable when there are a lot more women than men in a society – perhaps because the men are dying in wars. Prior to the advent of things like washing hands prior to delivering children, women tended to die in childbirth at much higher rates than today. This resulted in LESS women than men (if there were no wars killing off the men) so that polygamy was impractical – if some men had multiple wives, other men would have no wives, and any one who has analyzed societies will tell you that one of the best predictors for instability, violence, etc., within a society is a large number of unmarried men.
You are incorrect. The idea that polygamy is immoral is not Christian, but secular. It was the government and its assigns that ruled against polygam, specifically bigamy, in Reynolds v U.S.(No religious right in opposition to social duty, similar argument used to prevent peyote use in American Indian culture)
The huge muslim population is practicing polygamy right now in the U.S. and they are doing it on the backs of taxpayers! We are providing welfare money to muslims with multiple wives, aka ‘extended’ family. And the US turns its head away.
Guaranteed that the polygamy issue and freedom of religion will be the back door that the muslims use to institute shariah laws in this country.
Jesus condemned remarriage after divorce as adultery because the first marriage is still valid. Logically, that means that polygamy is also adultery.
The idea that polygamy is immoral is not merely governmental, it is Christian.
Here’s a summary what Jesus taught in Matthew 5 and 19 and as expressed through the Apostle Paul’s teachings on the same topic, which he received from “the Lord”:
1. In the beginning, God intended marriage to be one man, one woman, life-long, no possibility of divorce, with separation resulting in eventual reconciliation in this life or the next, but never in divorce and remarriage. Remarriage is forbidden.
2. God designed human marriage to be a sign or type pointing to a reality (or antitype fulfillment) which is the love and embrace of Christ for the Church. That love is total, powerful, manly, fruitful, life-giving, self-sacrificial, involves real authority, forgives all wrongs (but without the weakness of ignoring them), and never trades one spouse for another. There is no serial monogamy in the marriage of Christ and His Church: He doesn’t divorce his unfaithful Christians in order to go take up with the Buddhists. Human marriage is intended, as Paul says, to mysteriously and supernaturally mirror this act of Christ.
3. However, the fall of man messed this up. The patriarchs practiced polygamy and impregnated their wives’ handmaids; and by the time the Israelites left Egypt, their ideas about marriage were so warped by the culture that it was all God could do just to get them to agree to “thou shalt not commit adultery.” Thus, as Jesus says, “Moses allowed you to give your wives a certificate of divorce, because your hearts were hard. But it was not thus from the beginning.”
4. Even in the Old Testament, however, God repeatedly indicated that the idea of divorce was “hateful” to Him, sending prophets constantly to restate the idea of the relationship between God and His people as the relationship between a faithful husband and a wayward wife, whom He always takes back after her adulteries, though he does not protect her from the consequences of them.
5. So, when the Messiah came, the Israelites were prepared for accepting the more difficult teaching that Jesus brought: That divorce-and-remarriage from a valid marriage was forbidden and a literal impossibility, because one could not become un-married from one’s first spouse. In Jesus’ teaching, divorce doesn’t exist and remarriage is simply adultery. The sole exception given for this is a Greek word “porneia” which, in general conversation could be used to refer to various kinds of sexual immorality, but in this context (as illustrated by the apostles’ list of forbidden acts in Acts 15), it refers to marrying someone with a too-close-kinship; e.g., your father, mother, stepfather, stepmother, brother, sister, et cetera. In short: Jesus allows for the non-existence of “marraiges” that were invalid to begin with for consanguinuity reasons, but that’s it.
6. The above teaching of marriage is entirely consistent with the commentary of the early Christians on the topic. As these persons were taught Christianity by the apostles, or by those to whom the apostles taught, their closeness to the original events makes their interpretation far more authoritative than 21st-century exegesis by people who learned their Koine Greek from books in a culture separated from 1st-century Palestine by an interval of 2,000 years.
Yet modern Christian churches and pastors often disparage the reliability of these early witnesses to the teaching of the apostles and the Church Fathers. They like to express uncertainty and agnosticism about what the limits on Christian divorce and remarriage are.
Why do they do this? Because this teaching is really difficult to follow. (The apostles, in their astonishment at Jesus’ teaching, say, “If that’s the way it has to be, it is better to not marry at all!”) It is the teaching of Jesus, but it is very difficult. Modern churches would rather have popular “singles’ ministries” populated by divorcees. These churches would rather avoid the discomfort of telling a couple they can’t get married in that church because their first marriages remain entirely valid and it would be, in the words of Jesus, “committing adultery” against their first spouses.
But the historical and exegetical record is clear. The teaching is what it is. The problem is that modern American Christians rarely follow it.
And it is because of this convenient agnosticism about divorce and remarriage — and modern Christians’ unwillingness to listen to the clear apostolic tradition evidenced in the writings of the early “Church Fathers” on this topic — that Christians have become ignorant about Jesus’ teachings on marriage.
And that is why they’re sometimes uncertain about whether polygamy is okay, or not. It isn’t. It’s one of many ways the Fall corrupted human sexuality and damaged the human family. God’s reformation of human marriage back towards its original glory took a long time, and was not stated fully until the Christian era.
But modern Christians in the U.S. would usually rather not study the topic too closely.
“How about when religion says to have many wives and children as in Osama Bin Laden’s family with 54 children.”
Just calling one’s ideas a religion doesn’t mean that they need to be respected.
The entire premise is wrong: it is “what selfish self-interested reason is there to get married?”. Well, none, but sefish self-interested people shouldn’t get married in the first place.
I thought the whole point is that you love someone and want to spend your life with them, not doing it because the bible said or because it is economically desireable.
Maybe it’s just me — I sure am not hearing THAT argument lately.
Great response. But it’s not as simple as the Bible said get married. It’s more like, “the Bible paints a great, beautiful picture of marriage that involves two people selflessly giving to each other so they may both more fully reflect God’s glory.”
Admittedly, many individual Christians do marry blindly because of expectations. But in the whole of the church, it’s this worldview of marriage that drives Christianity’s dedication to marriage and family, not a blind following of the Bible.
Depends. I’m Jewish, and “be fruitful and multiply” is considered the first commandment, chronologically. Everything he said is precisely true, from my viewpoint. Of course, disallowing sex (or in the case of my religion, ANY physical contact between the sexes) outside of marirage helps!
I always recall the verse, “and he married (lit. took) Rebeccah and she became his wife, and he loved her”. In that order.
Sorry. Reread your comment, and I see that I should have done this as a separate comment.
Swindle’s argument convinces me. It is not new as Gilder made a similiar one many decades ago. I can say from my own experience that being married got in the way of my career, leaving me at retirement at a much lower level. I spent so much time with my career blocking children that I just could not reach the heights of my INDIVIDUAL potentiality. What do I have to show for my stunted career other than some wonderful children? Given today’s society, I have been a fool as much as women who stay home to tend children are foolish. Yet, I would not trade the pinancle of success for my family life and my children. Persuade me that my family stands in the way of my REAL needs to be ME and send me back in time, and today’s society would be minus some marvelous people. And I could die alone in an Old Folk’s home.
There is one more “scientic” reason evident in David Goldman’s “Why Civilizations Die?”. Those who do not live in families (particularly religiously oriented in a non liberal way) do not reproduce themselves and are fated for exstinction!!! A mathematical necessity! This shows that the living of life as a single is, from the point of view of evolution, not fit for survival. The style of singles lives off the children produced by others, thus revealing the style to be that of leaches. Let the host die, the leach dies. Let the single style become dominant and the style becomes unfit for survival and adios!
Many thanks. And you’re right that I’m not saying anything new. I intend to update my list of counterculture conservative books to include Gilder’s http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2012/10/20/23-books-for-counterculture-conservatives-tea-party-occultists-and-capitalist-wizards/
If “God” is all-powerful and wants us to get married, why are our country’s laws and courts specifically designed to shaft men and privilege women?
Because we have free will.
The more we remove God and his moral principles from the realm of public life, the more destructive laws will become. The church as a counterweight to the State should be obvious to any professed secular conservative. Surely you’ve noticed that the anti-male laws have accompanied this demise of the ecclesiastical? Yes, indeed, we have free will.
Religion is an embodiment of ethics and morality. It isn’t good behavior in and of itself.
Turn society into a theocracy, bring God back into public life with a vengeance, and it won’t matter one damn bit. Not if the entire edifice is built upon empty piety and theatrical worship.
It’s not something that can be legislated or decreed from on high. Civic virtue can only come from citizens themselves, either out of empathy for their fellow man, or callous self-interest that they cannot survive without playing nice with others.
Just an afterthought. Any group whose members advocate and live a lifestyle that induces the said group not to reproduce itself (e.g. 2.1 children per woman) is doomed to disappear from existence. It is the law of mathematics. Germans evince a birth rate of 1.3 children per woman. If this continues there will NO Germans by the 22nd Century. I leave aside the problems children have in a one-parent (usually female) family, formally married or just single. What concerns me is any style of life that does not reproduce itself. Those who live a singles-style of life do not implicitly want that style to survive and hence are not fit, i.e., evolutionary unfit, for further existence. Such a group style can find new bearers that maintain the group only as leaches. New members comes from children producing families. Convince enough men that fatherhood limits the fulfilment of their “ME” (as inspires women’s liberation) and even women willing for children will not find mates. As the host dies, so too does the leach die! It is simple mathematics. Somebody, perhaps Dr. Helen, anybody, just refute me.
Marriage differs from culture to culture. Modern American marriage has evolved from the days of the gold rush and the American Civil War where men became scarce and is specifically designed to protect women and children from abandonment with no legal recourse. Marriage is a contract for women. Likewise, prostitution in America is usually illegal or at the very least frowned upon because prostitutes are the equivalent of union “scabs”, that is working without a contract. Women have more political clout than is obvious on the surface.
The reason men marry women is because deep inside they intuitively understand that their role is to support women with food, shelter and protection in order to create children and in doing so, the future. Women are the only source of sons and daughters. While it may start out as pure sexual drive, a man that finds a compatable loving women will soon find fulfilment and happiness and that is the reason that men marry women.
There is something called “the paradox of headonism” where we find that people who pursue pleasure end up being unhappy in the long run and those who seek to help others and delay gratification for practical reasons tend to have more contentment. This helps to explain that married men live longer, have better sex lives, enjoy better health and earn more than their single counterparts.
When I see how some men only think about immediate pleasures without a thought to the future, I shake my head in bewilderment and think “they just don’t get it, do they?”
The only reason to get married is that you can’t join a biker gang. In the 50′s and 60′s biker gangs epitomized antisocial behavior, now getting married does. Society has spoken and it’s said “thou shalt not marry”. Never has “marry in haste, repent in leisure” been more applicable. The benefits of marriage may be brief and ephemeral while the toll society exacts will be harsh and long-lasting.
Get married, be “John of Arc”, see if the remake turns out any different. Incentives work, perverse incentives work even better.
As one half of a childless irreligious married couple, I’m going to call shenanigans. There are a lots of arguments for married life, provided you’re both committed to making the best possible lives for yourselves. Everything from “two can live as cheaply as one” to “someone to watch the meteor showers with.”
See also, Will and Ariel Durant. Heck, I’ve got atheist friends who are married with a child (one only, though, sadly. They only want one.) As well, Stephen and Melissa Green here.
Thesis: If a group does not produce enough children (2.1 per woman), it will disappear. That is math. Germany has a birthrate of 1.3 children per woman. By the end of this century, Germans will be no more. That is math. (And they know as they seek to lead Greece to that situation). ,Let us look at the singles’ life style.
By definition, single life, the pursuit of fulfil ment of “ME”, does not reproduce itself with children. Ergo, it will disappear as it, as evolution demands, is not fit to survive. You singles, enjoy your kicks, your class is dying. That is math. Let enough men loses interest in marrying, and, even should women want enough children for reproduction (as opposed to the death-wish of liberation feminists), they will have no mates. The unfit are scheduled for self-annihilation! You singles as a group are a temporary abberration of evolution whose existence will follow the German trip into population nothingness. Carpe diem, for tomorrow you are not!
Let one of you refute me. Please, for I am only adding one man and one woman leading to 1.3 childern in Germany and deriving the tentential result of “0″. Unlike the “Herrenrasse”, singles do not even produce a single child as a logical function of the group ideology (just a failed contraceptive, something which Obamacare will abort–costing nothing). Oh well, you misfits of evolution, adios.
Well, this is why the Dems have not been able to dominate politics despite their assertion that “demography is destiny”. They don’t reproduce. It takes a lot of illegal immigrants to make up for that.
Furthermore, liberals’ pro-abortion stance affects them disproportionately. I’ve seen it theorized that the margin by which Bush won Florida in ’00 (and thus, the Presidency) was smaller than the difference between the number of Democratic voters lost to abortion vs. lost Republicans. Roe v. Wade was long enough ago now that it is starting to affect the composition of the electorate.
Generally speaking, both men and women are better off married. Men who are married live longer, and both benefit financially- especially in a down economy where one of them could lose their jobs.
And if if it isn’t a down economy, it’s very common for the wife to have a “safe” job with good benefits so the husband can become an entrepreneur or take on a more rewarding job than the old 9-5. In my area, there are hundreds of nurses whose husbands are small businessmen, hunting & fishing guides, or working in the Bakken. I know men who can keep working the family ranch only because their wife has a job in town with health insurance and a 403(b).
The key, of course, is to avoid divorce. That’s a very expensive proposition for all involved- the last I read was that on average it would result in a net loss of $200,000- though I’m sure that figure is much higher now. And, despite all anecdotes of gold-digging, it’s the ex-wife and kids who generally see their standard of living drop, not the ex-husband.
Anyway, I tell my three kids (two boys, one girl)- that the best recipe for avoiding poverty is to get married, stay married and don’t have kids out of wedlock. For most people, the kind of job you pick is much less important than who your life partner is.
“The key, of course, is to avoid divorce.”
Yes, that is the rub, isn’t it? And I don’t need health insurance, because I’ll just avoid getting ill.
Married men may live longer, but only marginally longer than those that do not marry. Factor in that male life expectancy goes into a nose dive after divorce, and the risk of suicide skyrockets, and it’s a lot of risk for marginal rewards.
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.ca/2012/10/the-married-life-expectancy-premium-is.html
“If a transcendent God doesn’t exist and death is the absolute end”
You realize that a transcendent god doesn’t necessarily imply an afterlife, don’t you? A god could, without logical contradiction, have created human life without any meaning or purpose.
Do you understand the difference between “a god” and “a transcendent God”?
> If a transcendent God doesn’t exist and death is the absolute end then what difference does it make if a man spends his money on a wife and kids or on toys and escorts?
Hey, Dave, men and women figured out long ago that something of us lives on in our children. Some part of us continues, shares in the ongoing experience of life, even as one’s individual moment dissolves into the absolute nothingness. Every man’s immortality. That’s a difference. And, I suspect, that discovery is what led to the invention of “(G)god(s)”, transcendent and otherwise, as an attempt to explain that inscrutable truth about “life”.
The author asks if we know any financial or legal reasons for a man to marry. The answer is yes. As I understand it, when two individuals only cohabit, neither party has a legal claim on the assets of the other. If one of the individuals should pass away or simply decide the grass looks greener, it is easy to see where the other might be left destitute. Call that a moral obligation if you will. To my mind, the moment you decide to hove up, you have purchased the cow. From that point forward the feeding, the watering and the veterinary bills are all yours. Real men don’t try to avoid or walk away from responsibility.
Real men don’t try to avoid or walk away from responsibility.
Neither do real women. It’s a damned shame there seem to be so few of either kind anymore.
Amen.
The problem is that, under the existing legal and social system, in the marriage of a responsible person and an irresponsible person, the irresponsible person wins. Combine that with the legal advantages thst post-modern feminism provides for women, and the problem that Dr. Helen wrote about will continue until the dependent population outnumbers the productive, and then it’s game over.
For men, the risk-reward ratio is simply not there. All of the things that Dave Swindle wrote about in the original post can be taken away at the stroke of a pen, leaving only the obligations. After twenty years, the divorced father will be rewarded with financial insolvency, a ruined reputation, and a set of PAS’ed, sullen children who refuse to speak to him.
Marriage is a great way to get rid of your fear of death. It’ll be a blessed escape.
There were a lot of happy couples living under polytheistic religions.
There are couples happily living today in Amazonia, Papua or Central Africa or other places untouched by monotheistic religion or who value shamanism.
We were made in pairs. Check out dolphins. Pigeons. Penguins. Some couples last for a lifetime and there is nothing “religious” about it. Men and women of different religions do not marry because of religion but rather in spite of.
Sexual pulsions do not explain everything, just ask Karl Jung. This article is a dud.
great article. you pose good questions. deeply important ones. you are in a very small class of journalists.
marriage, as created by God, is an absolute Good, and without explaining why this is a truth to the philosophically blind, who cannot yet understand anyway, i’ll answer your question, via my own “secular experience.”
if you have lived and experienced failure and taken responsibility for it, and you have made any kind of partnership to accomplish some joint life purpose, you may have understood that you have strengths and weaknesses as an individual, that were mitigated by your partner.
if you are married to a good partner (in my case, my darling and indispensible wife melissa), experience would have taught you that you are far better as a duo (for say the purpose of raising a family, say for the purpose of voting, making financial decisions, etc.) then you would have been apart trying to do the same things alone.
if i’m on point, that is why you may be wrong when you say there is no secular advantage to marriage. the advantage of a good partnership is that your weaknesses are mitigated by your partner and vice versa. the problem for couples who don’t have faith, is that they are trying to produce their “marriage” independently of god, instead of allowing God to produce it for them.
Um…do we need another reason than to look at the two pictures? Which one shows true happiness? I don’t have kids, so it’s not reallly about the children for me. It’s about the love.
Sappy, I know. Uncool. But yet another reason to vote for the fine man Mitt Romney.
I’ll be bold here and assert that the author is right. He’s right in his assertion that if there is no God and no after-life, then indeed, it should make no difference how one lives today. Self-gratification all the way, right? Why do anything else, because, frankly, it just does not matter. All is for naught. IF there is no God.
Fortunately for me, I do believe in The God and have accepted Him whole-heartedly as my Lord and Saviour. Married for life with grown children, raised likewise. Looking forward to happy grandchildren, raised likewise.
Many thanks.
History is hindsight and is always 20/20.
History shows clearly and has been echoed previously by national leaders that Strong Families create strong Nations and even empires. Families have been the backbone of all successful nations & empires in the past…. Families are committed to each other and the collective well being of the whole (family unit) which translates into people working hard to bring home the bacon and to provide for their partner’s and their offspring. The continuity and consistency of the family unit has always bonded people together for the common cause of the unit.
Marriage used to be that key linchpin when it was valued, respected and even honoured… Fast forward to 2012… Marriage is an industry, Divorce is an industry, the values are fading and the commitments & continuity is shrinking at an extreme level.
Marriage or Union has been practised since BEFORE ANY RELIGION SANCTIFIED IT. It went on for thousands of years before “modern religious organizations got into it” but society has devalued it into something that is not entirely attractive for many. It got families through the Good Times, Bad Times and Rough Times because it was a “Committed Partnership” that endured through the bad times and benefited in the good times. There has always been “Good Marriages” and “Bad Marriages” yet the constant focus on “BAD” has essentially wiped out the “good” and the systems (political, legal & special interest groups [see feminists, inter-gender etc]) have jumped on-board with their own agenda’s discarding values and altering it into something other than what it was.
Ironically, when people used to marry, they knew they were making a long term & pretty much permanent decision to join into such a partnership. In 2012 people jump into marriage without thinking of it as a long term thing because in the back of their heads they know they can back out and use any number of clauses to terminate their commitment… It’s only a commitment in terms of signing the dotted line, no need to be accountable, responsible, prudent or even well thought out, they know they can cancel it and move on. We are now seeing children from broken homes having children in broken homes and there is little example of how to live together with a partner, how to get through the rough times together & lean on each other… These kids (now adults) have no clear role models to show how to work it and succeed in a relationship / marriage / partnership, it’s just easier to bail out & cash out, which is what they have learned from seeing a world full of that role model.
Some Tangible, Credible & Reliable data on the subject to ponder:
Top 10 Divorce Countries:
# 1 United States: 4.95 per 1,000 people
# 2 Puerto Rico: 4.47 per 1,000 people
# 3 Russia: 3.36 per 1,000 people
# 4 United Kingdom: 3.08 per 1,000 people
# 5 Denmark: 2.81 per 1,000 people
# 6 New Zealand: 2.63 per 1,000 people
# 7 Australia: 2.52 per 1,000 people
# 8 Canada: 2.46 per 1,000 people
# 9 Finland: 1.85 per 1,000 people
# 10 Barbados: 1.21 per 1,000 people
* Single parents are no longer in the minority — in a poll taken March of 1996 – 52% of ALL parents in the United States are single parents – with different challenges than two parent homes.
* Single parent homes are also associated with criminal activity in the U.S.A. Children from a single-parent household account for 72% of teenage murderers, 60% percent of people who commit rape crimes and are eleven times more likely to exhibit violent behaviour.
* Single motherhood is by far the most common instance of single parenting; in the U.S.A single mothers outnumber single fathers four to one.
Male or female, we as a society have fallen shamefully away from the idea of anything that brings real growth or maturity. Being a real adult is kind of sneered at these days, isn’t it?
Being a real adult means that if you take a partner, you’re with him or her through the wonderful, eleven-on-a-scale-of-ten days and the days that make you want to crawl under the covers and stay there for a year or two.
Being a real adult means that if you have children, they’re a part of you and your mate, not an inconvenience. Don’t get me started on some of the people I see at work, who are only ‘parents’ because they happened to combine reproductive material with someone of the opposite sex.
And enough of the ‘OMG, woman bad, woman evil’ business, people? There are more than a few conservatives using the heinously unfair treatment of men by women in the legal system to insinuate that we’re *all* like that,all ready to nail a man to the wall and take him for every penny when the evil whim strikes us. Believe me, you’ll find a lot of women who don’t think it’s right that _anybody_ gets screwed by the system. In an adult society, the situation is evaluated by need, not gender. There are going to be a lot of circumstances where neither person should be paying the other anything! (Neither side should be willing to let kids suffer just for spite or selfishness.)
I know not everyone here is a believer, but speaking as a Christian- if you are and really *live* your beliefs, the idea of just tossing your mate for ‘freedom’ is beyond comprehension. I have seen several friends and acquaintances over this last year who decided ‘freedom’ was worth more to them than a family and its responsibilities. It’s caused a lot of pain for those around them. (And no, it’s been men and women alike who have gutted their families for ‘freedom’.)
Marry for the right reason, because you have found someone with whom you want to face life. You will find everything else as you go. My husband often tells people, “You can’t treat each other as the problem. You have to stand side by side and face the problem together.” If you want and can have children, it’s wonderful- if you don’t, or can’t, you’ll find other good ways to spend those energies.
Sorry, I’m rambling-but these are things that bother me deeply, whether I see them in conservatives or liberals, believers or non-.
Blessings to all of you, and here’s hoping the next four years are not going to be an even bigger challenge for all of us.
Why should men not get married? Never buy a depreciating asset.
If you are simply looking at the financial aspects, you could possibly make a case.
Then again, marriage is not – or at least it shouldn’t be – about finances.
Instead, it’s about – or should be about – a greater value than mere monetary gain. In a good marriage there is nourishment for the soul.
Beyond that, you can fast forward a few decades and consider two outcomes.
In one, you are sitting alone, a lifelong bachelor with no children and all of your friends and any close family dead and gone. Nobody who knew you is still around.
You spent your life chasing after the latest toy, the latest career goal, the one night stand, the next girlfriend….yet at the end you are sitting there alone with nothing to keep you company but your memories and whatever time your temporary room mates in the nursing home will provide to you before you cease to take up space in this world.
In the other outcome, you have spent decades building a relationship of trust and love with another human being, who in turn gives you their absolute trust and devotion. You might outlive her, but you have the memories of that love. If she outlives you, you have someone who you’ve spent your life with who knows you as well as you know yourself – and yet still loves you anyway who accompanies you for the remainder of your days and you are never alone.
You may have children who come to see you, make sure your affairs are taken care of, who still care about you.
You may have grandkids who climb on your lap and want to know about how things were when you were a kid, who call you “grandpa”.
Heck, you could even have grandkids visiting.
You will be remembered for generations to come as long as someone who knew you still lives, and even when they are gone your memory is still vital as it’s part of a family lineage.
There are far more things of value than those, but this is just a short example.
Which old man do you want to be – the one who is forgotten as soon as he’s buried, or the one who left a legacy and was loved and loved others in return?
Go live a little, and then in a few decades you’ll have enough life’s wisdom to be able to discuss this subject in realistic terms.
Here is the most likely outcome for a man: You will be divorced, your finances destroyed, and your children will not speak to you. There will be no grandchildren climbing into your lap – just fading hopes and growing regrets. Oh your children will be devastated by your passing – devastated to find out there was no money hidden in an offshore account. You will be cremated and your ashes will be forgotten in a public storage shed. That is what will happen to you. The most charitable thing you can do for your children is not to have any. Or how about this cheery outcome: you end up widowed and bankrupt because of the hospital bills incurred from your wife’s ultimately unsuccessful battle with cancer? And then you find out that your children really don’t have any time to spend with dear old dad and you once again die alone and forgotten. Have fun living in your Leave it to Beaver fantasy land.
So your solution is to guarantee that he dies alone?
WOW! Holy Smokes…Wow Dekkard! I really think you need a hug! I hope to heavens y
sorry Dekkard… itchy trigger pinky! to finish… I hope to heavens that whom ever hurt you so, gets their just desserts, or to whoever it was that you watched suffer so.
To be fair, what you said is true. We would be foolish to say that it doesn’t happen. Famous stories have been written about it. (King Lear) But don’t forget that loving people do exist. More than you think. And just like Lear, we often times don’t recognize love, or those that really do love us until it’s too late.
Much love to you, and I hope your heart will heal.
How is this “the most likely outcome”?
Every man who’s funeral I have attended (and in some cases acted as pallbearer) who was married was surrounded by family in his final days and hours. This even includes men who were married multiple times, and those who did as well as did not have children.
They had developed interpersonal relationships over years.
I’ve known one man who was a confirmed bachelor into his elderly years – and HE is the ONLY one who died with nothing left in this world to show he was even here. He also tended to spend his days working and traveling a lot.
Heck, they were still rounding up pallbearers the day of his funeral as they couldn’t find enough people beforehand! Even the preacher who gave his eulogy commented how surprised he was, and that was the only funeral where he had to both give the eulogy AND act as a pallbearer!
Another thing about this individual was his personality – it was very snide. Even the most ill-natured married man seemed sociable in comparison. He just did not develop long term relationships over the course of his life and it showed.
Admit it, your jaundiced view of marriage is nothing more than a soured opinion devoid of facts that would allow your opinion to apply to the majority of marriages.
I re-iterate my own opinion, that you need to live a few more decades before pontificating on such matters to the rest of us.
okay, well, we keep speaking as if the children of single mothers are of the same quality as children of single fathers, and the same quality as children in two parent families. I think they are different. I speak as a child of a fractured marriage, raised by grandparents, who then met and lived with my father, then my mother.
I married, and we have three children. My children are qualitatively and quantitatively different than me. They are more similar to their father, who was raised in an intact home.
We have lived in crappy neighborhoods,and in poor, conservative ones. The house next door is Section 8. The families that have lived there live materially different lives than the neighbors- one lived better on welfare than the rest of us- one is more squalid. Neither were polite, well-mannered, self-governed, suitable sorts of families. Regular families recoiled from them. Not in dramatic ways- in very quiet, polite, self- governed, not-talking to them, not listening to them, making a blind-spot sort of ways.Nothing photographable, nothing measurable, but still there.
I talk- they are my neighbors and I’m commanded by God to care for them. But I don’t go ” Girlfriend! You go!” I say “You’re good at fixing cars? Have you considered ITT Tech? My friend has a good life that way.” or ” this is a church where they’ll say hi, it’s good to see you.” and they say ” church people are mean!” and I say “I’m a church person. Some are, these ones aren’t. You might like it.”
I don’t know that girls from single mothers know how to negotiate, or ask for something from a man, or win an argument, or anything. I know to ask, then wait. The grumbling is just gears turning. I’ll get my yes if I’m reasonable. My MIL, raised by a single mom, does not know this. She rushes in, spluttering, if you don’t answer immediately. Even as a woman, I feel like I’m being insulted as she begins piling up reasons, arguing an argument that I haven’t made, while I’m sitting here quietly trying to figure out on my to-do list where I can say yes, or not. My daughter is learning this: “Dad, I want to see a movie….” “Mom, I want new earrings.” She knows she’s going to get a yes a no, or a time-frame. She doesn’t need to panic.
Second, single moms have how many kids? Religious families have how many kids? At some point, there just aren’t that many only children around, to gum up the works with their special snow-flake interpretive dance.
Single moms, as well,- and I really, really do not understand this one- have no clue about men. They say ” All men are dogs.” and they can’t sort dogs from men. I don’t get that. The very pretty drug-dealer will only be pretty for about two years before he goes to jail and gets his teeth beaten out. The pudgy engineer will pick up Esquire and Men’s Health, and be the fittest, smokingest, hottest, best-dressed guy in a sports-car by the time he’s 26 to 29. And he’ll stay that way, and his pay will go up, as he goes along. The biggest problem there is that he’ll want you to get breast implants and run marathons with him. Other than that, no problems.
And, well, there are cultural lies floating around. Children, short of a violent, degraded, morally bankrupt marriage, don’t give a shit if you’re happy or not. They care that they are happy. Unhappy spouses tend to nurture their kids in lieu of their spouse. So the kids get showered with more attention than otherwise. So, the question becomes: misery as a grownup, with the ability to seek out compensations, or misery as a child, followed by a lifetime of misery and poor health and wretched outcomes? I’d pick being miserable and watching romance movies and eating popcorn with too much butter, than ruining, quite directly and permanently, my biggest job: raising my children. I’m sure there are times when my husband makes the same calculation- porn’n'hotwings, vs direct ruination of his most important job.
And, the kids are different. Kids in intact families expect to be listened to and respected. They aren’t flipping out, they aren’t as loud and aggressive. They are quieter, more malleable, more agreeable. They just are. I know people get upset about this, but it’s everything I’ve ever seen. They expect their parents to help them with a problem- they have coaches at home. My kids play with kids from fractured families- that’s it, if something goes wrong. If they have a bad day with a kid from an intact family- they come back- and they say “My mom said we should try….My dad says….” and there are more brains and coaches advocating for these kids to succeed in dealing with each other.
I know I give feedback- “Hey, your kid was so caring with my son when his brother did this…thank you…” and the mom is happy. she wants that feedback. My kids share that down to the kids coming up- caring for toddlers at church socials, or volunteering to tutor reading at school. There’s more there, there.
And, bluntly, we write about the outcomes- 90% of the suicides, rapists, murderers, burglars? They were hyper- out- of-control flipped out freaks before they landed in jail in the first place. They were stressing their peers out before they stressed out the juvenile hall system. Most people are compassionate. When you are young, you are by definition, inexperienced. So young, inexperienced, and overwhelmed by oddballs….I don’t know that the oddballs don’t get cut out, to deal with each other, only. I know my son has cut off kids ” too much to handle” and that’s in elementary. They are kids that I find charming, and no big deal to handle- but I have practice, and my radio receiver IS set for suicidal basket-cases.
And, well, loudness. I know 42 moms in one playgroup. Two publish, both divorced. Both terribly self-centered, vacuous human beings. 40 remain married, and quiet. They don’t need to broadcast for affirmation.
So, journalists get divorced? Journalists are leftists? Leftists can’t hold it together for anyone, for any reason, for anything greater than their belly-button lint? Patriotism isn’t their thing- they don’t believe in American exceptionalism, or love of their country. They don’t believe in God. They don’t believe in fidelity. Why would they believe in marriage? Or have what it takes to march through the years? They can’t even march through basic training and two years service to their country. They can’t kneel at the altar and humble themselves before God. They are defective, small human beings. Why is it so hard to say that?
Small people tear down. It’s what they do. Big people build up.
Tearing down what you don’t understand is the mark of a very small, petty person.
Oh- and why marry? B/c you want to move out of Fishtown, and into the married people’s town- you get respected as a man. Your boss, if he’s married, is likely to see you as serious. Your casual friends will treat you more carefully.
And, yeah, God said marriage+ family= joy.
and, marriage rates. Jane Austen’s time, Regency times and Victorian times: there weren’t 90% marriage-rates. It was more on the order of 40- 50%.
America has tried a peculiar hat-trick- everybody married, to get the benefits of being married. We had a marriage bubble in the 50′s. All sorts of unsuitable couples signed up, and then went maritally bankrupt, and then wrote about it. Noir is as much a part of that, as anything. Some people have no business being in a civilized house with other people. Some people have no business being around kids. We’re still sorting out that mess, three generations in.
Christians, and religious Jews, right now, have higher educational rates, more children, more stable marriages, more household financial stability. This is the outward manifestation of social capital. It’ll keep getting to be a bigger, more vibrant difference, as more people double-down on social decay.
As usual, I only have the Dead White Guy’s prophecy, for the most part: “Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”
But it looks like men are finally figuring out that this course of action hasn’t been all unicorns and candy trees for them, either.
BTW, both Gramsci and Bella Dodd wrote about Communism’s goal of demolishing the American family in order to turn the people toward Communism. One fascinating excerpt: “The party did all it could to induce women to go into industry. Its fashion designers created special styles for them and its songwriters wrote special songs to spur them…. War-period conditions, they planned, were to become a permanent part of the future educational program. The bourgeois family as a social unit was to be made obsolete.” (“School of Darkness”, p 153)
Here is another possible angle to consider; the natural law. Just as polar bears do not thrive in Hawaii and dolphins fail to reach full potential in Antarctica,individual human beings and human society appear to require certain social circumstances to attain full development of their faculties.
Every scientific and social study conducted produces evidence of a direct correlation between intact, permanent bi-parental marriage and developmental markers; both individual and societal. Where you have two parents in permanent union as the norm, you have decreased incidents of what we consider less-than-optimal human behavior – crime, drug-use, poverty, low scholastic scores, mental illness and cyclical teen-pregnancy to poverty dynamics. The welfare state also follows the emergence of non-intact family. The intact family corresponds to the opposite findings in the overwhelming majority of cases.
The universality of this scientific information indicates the presence of an optimal set of circumstances in which the human species thrives, outside of which human beings are inhibited from development. We all speak easily of the fact that other creatures can’t simply flourish in environments hostile to their innate characteristics. We hear objections the moment we affirm that human beings require, for total mental, physical, and social health, that two people unite permanently in monogamy because this requires, not the exercise of instinct, but freely embraced natural virtue.
Very few religions advocate the integrity of a marriage in which both men and women strive for loving, mutually nurturing and enhancing conditions. Most religions permit divorce and the fastest growing religion in the world, Islam, contains core prescriptions that decimate the human dignity of half the population – at least as it is practiced in many regions of the world.
It would seem that the same Intellect that designed us to thrive within very specific familial perimeters would also author a religion that supports this precise condition and protects the mental, physical, moral and social health of humanity those who seek Him.