Most Marriages Fail

Here are some facts about marriage:

• A smaller percentage of the population in the USA is married than at any time in the country's history
• Absent an extensive and upheld prenuptial agreement specifying otherwise, legal marriage is a wealth transfer mechanism through which the wealthier/higher-earning spouse will pay the other
• Most women who marry will marry men who do, or will, earn more income than they will
• Legal marriage usually assigns paternity (which means two decades or more of financial obligation) to the husband, regardless of how the wife conceived the child, thereby using the force of law to perpetuate paternity fraud in the case of adultery
• Wives are far more likely to file for divorce than husbands
• Most marriages fail. 

That's right. MOST MARRIAGES FAIL.

If by success we mean "lasting and generally happy", which most people do, most marriages fail.

1) 33-40% of first marriages end in divorce. Subsequent marriages have a much higher divorce rate.

2) Of the marriages that don't legally divorce, easily at least 20% (and probably much higher) fall under one or more of the following categories:
  a) legal separation
  b) physical separation (some people stay legally married for decades after they've split, even if they haven't seen each other in years)
  c) sexual separation (ongoing infidelity, whether or not the spouses are still having sex with each other)
  d) emotionally dead (they are roommates, perhaps with shared financial accounts, largely indifferent to each other)
  e) hostile/abusive
  f) quiet desperation on the part of one or both spouses
  g) miserable (whether or not a-f is involved)

The reason the marriages in category 2 don't end in divorce are a varied: 1. One spouse murders the other, whether or not they then kill themselves (other than the person who claims to have found the body, the default suspect in the murder of a married person is their spouse... what does that tell you???) 2. Before divorce can take place, one or both spouses die (whether suicide, overdose, illness, accident, disaster, violent crime, etc.) 3. They were too chicken, masochistic or otherwise mentally ill, or too much creatures of habit to bother divorcing.

So, 33 (which is a lowball) and 20 (which is also lowball) add up to 53% of marriages being "failed" marriages. 

A failed marriage isn't just a problem emotionally/psychologically/socially/spiritually, for a breadwinnining man it can be financially devastating:

• Wives make 80% of the purchasing decisions in a marriage, meaning the earnings of a breadwinning man usually go to buying goods and services he'll never use and maybe never wanted. If she incurs debts, those debts are also his.
• In a divorce, he can be compelled to pay for her legal team as well as his own.
• She can get 50% or more of the marital assets, meaning anything he earned during the marriage, no matter how bad of a spouse she was.
• In some places, like where I live, ten years means she gets lifetime alimony. In the UK, a husband divorced for many years started earning much more income, only to have the courts compel him to pay even more alimony!
• She is more likely to get (more) custody of children, thus getting child support through college.
• Even if the husband didn't want another child and his wife conceived one with the neighbor, the husband can be compelled to pay child support for that child through college.

Since most marriages fail, and the state marriage contract punishes breadwinning men, what is wrong with warning men that most of them should avoid getting legally married? Shouldn't they be warned before they spend large sums of money, time, and emotional labor and capital on an engagement and wedding, and subsequent anniversary gifts, and arguing and counseling/therapy/retreats and all of the other things they don't want to do, and divorce lawyers? Given the statistics, isn't it a responsible thing to strongly caution men?

Some marriage sellers, even if they sometimes claim marriage will make men happier, dismiss happiness as a measurement of success. Catch them while they're in the right mood, and you'll find them saying that marriage is a duty or obligation and your happiness doesn't matter a hill of beans. They want people to marry because:

• They think it will mean more children, and more children raised in good conditions, because studies have shown that children raised in legally intact marriages have done/behaved better than children raised in other conditions.
• They don't want people fornicating.
• They don't want men doing other things they like to do, like play video games or hang out in bars, so it is better to have them running errands at the behest of a woman.
• Women and children are less likely to be on the dole if there is a father/husband in the home.

That's right, men. You are supposed to stop doing what you want to do, and pay for other people and do what they want you to do. "But women don't want to do family-generated chores and errands either!" All the more reason not to marry!!!

Marriage is extremely expensive for a breadwinning man, and most marriages fail. Bemoan these facts if you want, but they are facts, and we have to deal with reality.

Having a Family Doesn't Guarantee Happiness

Men Going Their Own Way

You Don't Need a Wife

To What Should Males Aspire?

Why You Don't Want to Get Married