Reasons to get married

[Orion]

What, marriage is still a thing ?

 

[DeusLuxMeaEst]

I've written this before on the forum, if it wasn't for the current state of affairs with women yielding all the power in marriage I'd probably be married. However, I just can't fathom losing half my stuff and living the life of the married men I know. Most married guys I know are pretty miserable after a few years, could I be an outlier? Doubt it, but it's possible.

The psychological effect he mentions in the video are real. I've noticed that when I was in a LTR with a girl I really cared about, I was more productive and thought differently than when I was single. My energy was more focused, I felt more relaxed, it's hard to describe. When I first had this happen to me I thought it was because my sex needs were taken care of. But I don't get the same feeling when I'm just getting laid or have a consistent friend with benefits, so there's something else going on.

Still though in the West I wouldn't do it.

 

[Thomas More]

Like General Stalin said, the title sucks. Shaming into submission at its worst.

Regarding marriage, I agree with the sentiment that nowadays marriage sucks, but I also view this from another perspective. My uncle got married three times, yet he failed to have children in each marriage. His second wife had a miscarriage and then decided she didn't want children, the third wife was too old and couldn't give birth; I don't remember what happened to the first one. None of these marriages brought him any good. He's old, sick and bitter, and his mental condition (he suffers from depressions) is bringing his current wife insane - she looks so battered and drained that I sometimes believe he'll outlive her by at least a decade, although he's the one suffering from Parkinson's disease.

His life story taught me several things:

1) Marriage isn't the shiny and wonderful thing it's advertised to be. It's usually an average deal. You get something, but you also lose something. Sometimes it can be good, and sometimes it can be a nightmare.

2) If you want to get married, choose carefully. Marriage has nothing to do with love; love is way overrated. A man who marries purely out of love is a fool. The characteristics that make a girl a suitable candidate for a wife are very objective an they can be easily spotted during the initial period of dating. It may sound funny, but choosing a wife is not much different from buying a cow at a farmer's market. Or a car.

3) The most interesting thing, which I haven't seen being mentioned in discussions regarding marriage, and which is a bit depressing:

Sickness and death.

As I mentioned above, my uncle has Parkinson's disease. He's just on the verge of losing the ability to walk. He's a bitter, disgruntled old man, and I believe it has a lot to do with him being childless. Now imagine how would his life look like if he had no wife to take care of him? He'd probably be in a nursing home, sitting there like a herb with almost no-one to visit him, and waiting for his death.

Another example - my mother has been battling a tumor for over five years now. She's a single mom, never married, and aside from my uncle, with whom she has an uneasy relationship, I'm the only piece of family she has left. Guess how does her life look like now? She's old, sick, depressive, has almost no one to talk with and share her feelings. She can take care of herself for now, but this is also slowly coming to an end. You can't possibly imagine her demeanor and outlook on life; she's like a walking depressant. A lot of her pain would be alleviated had she married in her youth and had more children. All of her health problems aside, now she'd at least have someone to talk to, or maybe have the joy of seeing a grandchild or two.

Now, why am I telling you all of this? It's because (I guess) a lot of arguments against marriage come from people who've never had to deal with people who were both severely ill and unmarried/childless at the same time. Yes it's easy to frown upon marriage when you're young and healthy. But when sickness and death come knocking at your door, things change a lot.

I personally intend to marry some day. My motivation is to have children and leave something behind on this world, and also to have someone to take care of me if I ever become unable to do so by myself. There's no way I'm allowing myself to endure what my mother and uncle have to endure now.

To conclude, I don't want this to be taken as an argument of the type "Get married now or you'll end up a bitter, lonely, old man". No. That's not how life works, and it's also an example of man-shaming which I'm against.

I consider this more like a matter of probability and considering options you've never considered before. "Yes, modern marriage sucks. If I get married, there's always a chance I won't be happy with my decision. But on the other hand, If I never marry, there's always a chance I'll get sick and regret my decision when I'm old". That's how life works - you weigh different options and make decisions accordingly.

Pretty selfish to get children for the primary reason of having someone take care of you in old age, imho. It reminds me of the "I gave birth to you so you owe me X, Y, Z" that narcissistic and sociopathic parents like to throw around. It's not true, a child is not indebted to their parents for their existence.

If you are worried about being taken care of at old, save money so you can pay a professional if need be.

I disagree in saying it's selfish. That's like saying it's selfish to want sex from your wife. There are benefits that come with having a family. Choosing to have a family and to participate with your extended family in order to reap the known benefits is perfectly rational, and society would benefit if more people did so.

 

[Khan]

Pretty selfish to get children for the primary reason of having someone take care of you in old age, imho. It reminds me of the "I gave birth to you so you owe me X, Y, Z" that narcissistic and sociopathic parents like to throw around. It's not true, a child is not indebted to their parents for their existence.

If you are worried about being taken care of at old, save money so you can pay a professional if need be.

It's not the primary reason, I agree with you that a child is not indebted to their parents for their existence. Of course if it comes to the worst, I'll pay a professional, that's not in question. I just feel I'd feel like crap if I had to die all alone without having left some kind of a legacy.

 

[El Chinito loco]

There's zero compelling reason to ever get married in most of the anglosphere and other parts of the world with family courts which mostly side with women.

You are basically taking on a binding legal contract which could result in extreme punitive financial action and liability should you decide you want to exit this contract at some point.

Just from a business point of view it's the worst thing imaginable. Just think about what you would say if someone offered you a unspecified return on your investment but should you break contract they get 50% and maybe more of your assets.

You'd rightly tell them to go get fucked.

Doing this for some fickle and completely non substantial concept such as "love" is even worse.

I don't believe marriage in a traditional minded country with sane laws is a bad thing though.

 

[Orion]

Man should not produce any children to a society that does not grant him supreme power over his household and wife. Full stop.

 

[FireStarter]

This video argues it's case by presenting only the positives of getting married. (Not sure that working significantly more is a positive but that's how it's presented). And most of the positives are best case scenarios, there's no guarantee that you're going to earn more money if you're married.

There's absolutely no point in the video where he addresses any of the risks involved in marriage. Or any of the disadvantages. If you had the time you could easily tear apart each one of his arguments.

 

[CRR]

The overall point makes sense, but of course it puts all the responsibility on the man.

I have several friends who are happily married. What they all have in common is that they have a humble, fit, supportive wife. Not a fat, ball busting feminist cunt of a wife.

It's as I've always said, more men would be married if not for the fact that there are so many unmarriiageable women. Men don't want a dumpy, shrill, selfish, self important mid-30s cubicle jockey. Yet we've read countless articles printed in the mainstream media written by women like this, and yet we still are told to 'man up'.

At least here, we know how to 'man up'. It means to keep yourself in shape, your finances in order, and your game tight. And if a man does that, he can continue to casually date women in there 20s no problem. So along with the previously mentioned divorce rules that favor women, what incentive is there to get married? To have a family, sure. But again, considering that there are so many unmarriiageable women, the odds are not great.

So again, yes it is important for men to hold up their end of the bargain. But it's long past time for women to get called out to do the same. And this doesn't mean that women get to choose what makes them marriage material. Men will decide that, just like they do for us. Marriage material is a sweet, humble, feminine wife who is supportive, selfless and cares about her appearance. Marriage material is not some worn out, mid-career aggressive hussy who is proud of her three abortions and fifty feet of cock.

It would be wise for women to remember that for all of the standards and demands that are placed on us, the likewise is true as well, and this should make them very nervous and question the feminist lies they've been fed.

 

[BassPlayaYo]

Is bachelor life really the good life? Playing the field, traveling the world, and focusing on career sounds better than tying the knot. But is it possible that married men have more sex and make more money than their single counterparts? Brad Wilcox, sociologist at the University of Virginia, explains.

This is the description at the bottom of the video on youtube. The video opens with a story about a guy that's working a minimum wage job living in his mom's basement. Note he's not playing the field, traveling the world or focusing on his career.

 

[Elster]

So far the only valid reason I ve found for actual marriage as in legal, are residence permits /green cards in the case of alien men in foreign countries.

 

[Easy_C]

If you want to have kids and raise them with a joint family.

That's it....and historically, that's very literally been the only reason to ever get married. My recommendation would be to just do a church marriage and not get a civil certificate.

 

[Durango]

Many men would be willing to marry if they were getting 18-20 year old virgins, whose work would be taking care of the home and children, rather than their labor being taxed and benefiting a corporation. Also, the promise of being married for life being legitimate, without a chance of divorce (excluding deaths, crime, etc)

The current social system disincentives men to be married, and telling men to "man up and marry those sluts" is not what I would call persuasive. Where are the videos telling women to "be a woman, get married," disavow careerism, higher education, and devote their lives to their men, children, and family?

 

[Guriko]

Family is the only reason to get married. I believe the most stable building block of a great civilization is a family bonded closely together with the help of a holy ceremony. Not a civic ceremony. Fuck the state when it comes to this matter, but a holy one. A symbolic one where the man holds the power and the responsibility. His wife is to be loyal and live to please him. If she does not hold her end of the bargain than the man also needs not to uphold his promises and may seek for greener pastures.

But we all know how the whole thing is engineered today.

 

[Pride male]

Love.
Constant sex.
Companionship.
Mental health.
Tax breaks.
Someone to look after you when sick or old.
Societal pressure.
Kids.
Money, if she has it,
Spur of the moment.

 

[LouEvilSlugger]

Marriage is a not celebration of love. It's a legal structure to a start a family.

 

[BassPlayaYo]

Marriage is a not celebration of love. It's a legal structure to a start a family.

It's just a legal structure...you can start a family without being married and you'd still be liable for child support.

 

[Cobra]

Me: a guy that's been married almost 9 years.

Pros:
-3 beautiful kids and a wife who I love and cherish.
-A wife that's absolutely dedicated to me and willing to listen. This was not always the case and it's because of the forum and red pill that I got her there.
-Someone that understands me better than even I do.
-Being patient with me through some very rocky even destructive times making me a better person as well.
-A life that in and of itself is a motivating factor that makes me work harder and build a bigger and bigger book of business at work.

Cons:
-I can't be an international playboy like you guys. Believe me I've tried (see: any post of mine from a year ago, eg Approach Thread)

Am I regretful I didn't learn game before I was married and slept with a slew of women. Absolutely yes. However, am I glad that I have a healthy family life that I'm coming to terms with. Resoundingly, yes.

I'll say this. Knowing me and how obsessed I was with game, I probably would have let it overtake my motivation for true self improvement (eg doing a better job at work for myself and my family). I would have been constantly thinking of pussy and let it affect all other aspects of my life. It was a shallow source of motivation then, and it would be a shallow source today if I would not have realized it.

My point is that if you want a traditional life and want to raise children in a healthy family environment, you can have that, even if it's not in America or any progressive western culture. I just don't believe sleeping with a bunch of random women overtakes this in its most genuine form. It gets your dick wet over and over but what's there beyond that? It's gotta get like groundhog day for some guys.

 

[Brodiaga]

I was married for 23 years. There were pros and cons

(snip)


She will take all of your shit in a divorce. But, no matter. You don't need all the crap to be happy. I had a 3800 sq ft McMansion. Now, I live in a 600 sq ft apartment and I love it. As long as your cock still works, everything is good.

Here's the problem, though. Men these days have very little room for error.

Decades ago, a man could get a degree without accumulating 5-6 figures in student debt, then get a stable job, buy a house without worrying too much about losing that job and not being able to pay his mortgage or having to move elsewhere to get a new job. He could afford to deal with the consequences of bad decisions or bad luck, such as getting divorced and having to pay alimony and child support. He could still get back on his feet after falling down.

Good luck with that now. Many younger guys can't afford a 600 sq ft apartment even though they've never been married and divorced. Education and health care are many times more expensive as a %age of income. Unless you come from money, you have very little or no room for error. Getting divorced and having to pay child support/alimony means having to work until your 60s hoping you don't get fired and replaced by a young somewhere Bangalore or Manila who gets paid less than the total cost of your health insurance.

In this new gig economy, you can only rely, to some extent, on your accumulated assets to generate income and pay your bills when you get old and unemployable. Getting divorced, especially if you have children, can easily result in losing half or more of your assets and having to pay the equivalent of another mortgage for the next 18 years. There are people out there who can afford it. I'm definitely not one of them.

 

[therealpoder]

The only benefit I see out of marriage is having a healthy environment for your children. All the other benefits aren't really benefits at all, such as working more. And then the other benefits can be obtained without marriage.

What's most annoying about these videos and articles is that they don't attempt to analyze why men aren't marrying. All it is is shaming. Maybe they are very oblivious. Or naybe they feel that if they tell the truth about modern dating they would piss of women and feminists.

 

[Sumanguru]

The guy who made the video wrote a follow-up article supporting the vid.

http://family-studies.org/maxim-masculinity-one-legacy-of-the-divorce-revolution/

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I’d earn the ire of a character named Turd Flinging Monkey, the nom de plume of a popular online men’s rights activist. A leader in the MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) movement, which encourages men to avoid romantic relationships with women, Monkey did not take kindly to my new Prager University video talking up the benefits of marriage for men. In the video, I noted, among other things, that married men work harder (about 400 more hours), smarter (they’re less likely to quit without having found another job), and more successfully (they make about $16,000 more per year) than their single peers. I described these as features, not bugs, of married life for men.
monkey masculinity

In response, in a video of his own, Monkey unloaded on marriage, arguing that the things I had described as features of marriage were in fact bugs.

For men, marriage equals slavery: “Marriage, in essence, is a man choosing his slave master.”
For men, marriage equals unrequited sacrifice: “So married men work 400 hours more per year than single men; that’s not a good thing. They’re not hanging out with their friends… They’re sacrificing their life for other people. Now, you may think that’s noble, but that’s not a benefit for the man.”
For men, marriage equals emasculation: it means “giving a woman power over your life, power over your income.”
And above all, for men, marriage equals a soul-destroying divorce: “talk to the men in MGTOW who have had their wallets ripped out their a** in family court. Go to the graves of men who killed themselves after they were unemployed and couldn’t afford child support and faced jail. Talk to those men about how wonderful marriage was… Ask them about the hundreds of hours they work extra each year to avoid going to prison because they owe so much child support or alimony that they gotta move in with their parents.”

This is Turd Flinging Monkey’s view of marriage. And judging by the thousands of internet comments and emails my video making the case for marriage to men has garnered, I’d say his perspective resonates with a substantial minority of men. There are lots of men out there who harbor a deeply misogynistic view of the opposite sex, an unremittingly negative view of love and commitment, and a complete lack of faith in marriage to deliver on their deepest dreams and desires.

Some of this, it seems, is about a kind of Peter Pan syndrome, where guys don’t want to grow up and settle down. Some of it is about a kind of individualistic hedonism, where guys don’t want to forego the opportunity to set their own work hours, hang out with their friends on their own terms, and score as much with the ladies as they can. One correspondent, a 29-year-old man named Craig, put it like this: “I bet I’m getting a lot more with high quality women with no commitment” than the average married guy, adding that he has time to “work out and exercise because I don’t work those 400 extra hours a year” that married guys typically do (responding to a point Robert Lerman and I noted in a recent AEI/Institute for Family Studies report).

But a lot of this negativity toward marriage is about divorce. The stories and the invective I’ve heard in response to my video make clear that a lot of the MGTOWers think marriage is a bad bet for men. It’s a bet that often ends with the man losing primary custody of his kids, a substantial share of his assets, and control of a large fraction of his income. Social scientists estimate that about 42 percent of first marriages end in divorce and about 66 percent of divorces are initiated by women. This means that a lot of men are divorced unwillingly, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for not-so-good reasons.

It’s the experience of divorce, or the expectation of divorce, that leaves many men reluctant to tie the knot.

It’s this experience of divorce, or the expectation of divorce, that leaves many men reluctant to tie the knot. In Craig’s words, “I’m currently dating an attractive girl who treats me very well compared to my friends’ girlfriends but I would never get married… nor will I ever have kids with any woman unless guaranteed 50-50 custody with no child support was made into [family] law as it should be.” Needless to say, given the character of family law today, Craig is unlikely to be heading to the altar anytime soon.

The outpouring of rage, pain, and despair my video triggered suggests that one unintended fruit of no-fault divorce, and the larger divorce revolution of which it was part, is that a large minority of men are increasingly ambivalent towards or openly hostile towards virtues like sacrifice, commitment, and love—not to mention women and the institution of matrimony. And judging by the emails, comments, and videos my Prager University video engendered, many of these men think the best they can do is score with lots of women rather than settle down with one woman (and then be discarded). In the words of one correspondent, “I’d rather just pump and dump women then be the sucker left with the tab.” These men’s orientation to marriage is the inverse parallel of the ambivalence and hostility that a large minority of women now have towards men and marriage (cf. Kathy Edin and Maria Kefalas’ Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage).

One tragic consequence of what we might call the Maxim Masculinity view of love and marriage is that fewer men will seek to cultivate the virtues that make them good lovers and husbands, to their detriment and to the detriment of the women in their lives. Another tragic consequence is that more men will end up uncared for, unhappy, and unhealthy in later life—that is, if they make it into late life: unmarried men live almost 10 years less than stably married men. (Needless to say, findings like these suggest that for most men, marriage bears little resemblance to slavery.) And the biggest tragedy of all is that many of these men will end up having sons who end up just as disconnected from women, marriage, and family life as their MGTOW fathers.

Thanks, divorce revolution.


Bradford Wilcox is senior fellow of the Institute for Family Studies and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He is the coauthor of For Richer, For Poorer: How Family Structures Economic Success in America.

--Didn't take long for the misogyny card to come out.

--I'm seeing a lot of blaming of men here, no criticism of women. Nor do I see the criticism causing him to take a moment to self-reflect, and perhaps ask a few men about why they're so vehemently against marriage. I'm a regular lurker over at Dalrock's website, where I often read "Man Up and Marry!" screeds like this one, and they have the same problem that this one has--none of them actually *talk to* the men they are telling to man up. They talk *at* those men, and wonder why the men ignore them or tell them to STFU.

--He brings up *some* of the criticisms leveled against the video, but doesn't address them. While a guy working hundreds of extra hours a year is undeniably a good for society, and for the family he's supporting, how exactly is being a societal wage slave with no freedom a good thing *for the men himself*?

--He acknowledges that the Divorce Industrial Complex (I just realized what that acronym is, lol) takes a lot of blame for men not wanting to marry, but he doesn't actually offer any solutions for men in this regard. Nor does he temper his enthusiasm for marriage in the previous part of the article with this new revelation of danger (divorce) brought to light. Therefore by his own admission he is encouraging men to the marriage slaughter.