How to Just Say No To Giving Up Your Freedom

Guys, especially if you're a certain age (and that age can vary by geography), people are going to hound you about how you should get married and crank out kids. It could come from your family, coworkers, neighbors, clergy, congregants at your religious institution, strangers in the supermarket, whomever. (If you're Mormon or an Evangelical Christian, lookout! And if you ARE Mormon, you're probably better off getting out of that whole thing entirely, but that's not my focus right now.)

If you're in a supposedly exclusive relationship, and you shouldn't be, they will be pressuring you to marry her (and of course she'll be doing that herself). If you're living together they will ramp it up. (Hit the eject button if you're living together!) If you're not in a relationship, they will try to fix you up.

But you should stay a free man.

If you're a free man, and you show no sign of getting married or even having an exclusive relationship, people might say crap about you, questioning your sexual orientation or maturity or responsibility or whatever else. They might call you selfish. Don't let that get to you. Enduring all of that is a small price to pay for being free.

I've given practical advice for avoiding relationships before, but that was mostly about dealing with would-be matchmakers, and I wanted to give some more useful advice in dealing with people who try to meddle in your life.

You probably have a very good set of reasons why you want to stay free. And it IS your default status; you weren't born with a wife or children and you have to DO something to get those people.  But you don't want to waste your time arguing or offending someone. So here's what you do...

At Work - You should refuse to discuss personal matters at work, let alone date a coworker or someone a coworker tries to set you up with. NO NO NO!!! Simply refuse to talk about any personal matters whatsoever. Establish that as your policy. Ignore attempts to get you to talk about personal matters, or, better yet, redirect the conversation. "Excuse me, I'm here to work." "When will those reports be ready?" "Here's what you requested. Is there anything else?" Come up with sentences like that to use based on how you know things are at work.

Your Family -  Many people get more pressure from family members than from anywhere else. You might risk losing your inheritance. And if your parents are going to be that way, well, you're better off not counting on an inheritance, assuming they even have much of an estate in the first place. If they bring up the ol' "When are you going to settle down?" you can get up and leave, you can end the call or texting conversation. Or you can say, "I am settled down." Or you can say, "When I find the home in which I want to die." "I like my life the way it is." is a good one to use. If they try the "Don't you want someone to take care of you?" Simply say "No." It's a short word and it can end things. If they insist on pursuing the topic, you can turn it around on them and start talking about all of the problems they have as a result of having a partner/spouse and/or children. But if you can, cut things off and redirect, or leave.

Your Friends - You're going to lose friends as some marry and their wives keep them busy and on a leash. Your buddy's wife especially won't want your existence reminding him of what his life could be (or used to be) as a free man. Heck, you might not want to hang out with him anymore if he becomes incapable of talking about anything other than his wife and kids.

Your married buddies might encourage you to marry, because they think that'll make it easier to get together, or because misery loves company. Don't fall for it. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that if you get married, you'll keep your friends who are married or marrying. There's no guarantee that if you married you'd still be friends. Your wives might fight. Your wives might keep each of you busy.

If your married buddy does start in on how you should get married, you can deflect it with something like "If you're happy, I'm happy for you. It's just not for me, and marriage is the kind of thing in which both people have to be enthusiastically all-in, right?" Avoid discussing the issue with or in front of his wife. All it is going to do is give her ammunition she'll use to tell your buddy you're a bad influence.

Beware of thinly disguised blind dates. Your friend and his wife might want to meet up somewhere, and when you get there, what a coincidence, your buddy's wife's friend or sister just happens to be along. If you really don't want to endure that, you're within your rights to feign getting an urgent message on your phone, or not feeling well, and leaving. If you do stay, your buddy and his wife might try to prompt you to talk about yourself, but reveal as little as possible, and instead pivot the topic right back to them, or, if you're willing, on the woman with whom they're trying to fix you up.

There's a good chance your buddy will, sooner or later, be divorced. So keep that in mind and don't burn bridges.

Find friends among like-minded men, so that them getting ensnared in marriage is less likely. There are various forums for free men (MGTOW and otherwise).

Your Neighbors - This depends on what kind of relationship you have with your neighbors. However, if you're close with some neighbors, watch out for them trying to fix you up with someone. They might do something like throw a party and, what a coincidence, they'll introduce you to some woman they know who hears her clock ticking or has bills to pay. They might even try to pair you up with a party game. See the "blind date" advice above.

If you're not particularly close with your neighbors, it should be easy to redirect any of their questions back onto them.

Your Service Providers - This could be anyone from your doctor, accountant, dry cleaner... anyone. They work for you. You can take your business elsewhere. So it should be easier to shut things down any time one of them tells you that you should "find a nice girl" or "settle down". Redirect the conversation to the business topic at hand. They should get the hint.

Your Pastor or Bible Study Leader - I can't speak to every religion. Some religions treat free men as though they're some sort of threat to the flock. Or they try to rope you in to doing things for those poor "single mothers" in the congregation. "I don't feel called to marriage" might work, depending on the place you're attending. If you attend a Bible-as-the-top-authority church, you can make a point by asking for the passages that name Jesus' wife or those of the apostles and disciples. Surely, if getting married was necessary, the Bible would provide all of those. See here for more about this.

Stay Free!!!

Most men these days should be free men. So if you are a free man, good for you and I hope this will help you stay free. Women will try to get their hooks into you. They might try to "bait and switch" you or use "loss leaders"... behaving a certain way, making certain promises, saying the "right" things, until you've signed on the dotted line or they have your child. Don't let that happen to you. In social terms, she is depreciating in social value while demand is increasing for you. So don't enter into a bad deal.

Keep in mind all of things you get to do that you wouldn't if you were married, especially with kids, and had to do things the wife "needed" or wanted you to do. Remember that doing just about anything is less expensive and less of a hassle, from eating at restaurants to traveling to buying groceries, because you're a free man.

People who want you to give up your freedom will try to make it seem like marriage is blissful and helpful, so it's good to have good stories about the free life handy to remember or even counter with; it also helps to remember whatever troubles they've had with their spouse or children that they might not be thinking of at the moment. Usually, you won't have to actually bring those up, but they're good to remember when they're doing their sales pitch.

Remember: at work or with coworkers, play the professionalism card. "I don't mix business with pleasure." "I'm here to work."

In the other areas of your life, it should  be enough to say "I like my life the way it is. I'm happy." and repeat that as often as necessary. A couple of other good sentences are "I can't give a wife everything a wife should have."

Learn to say "No", and "I'm not going to discuss this" and "That's none of your business" and "That's private."

It's your body. It's your money. It's your time. It's your home. It's your life. Keep it that way!

Do you have any tips to add? Any good phrases? You can comment, including anonymously, below.

Marriage Transfers Wealth and Power

Guys, marriage transfers your wealth and power to a woman.

That's the primary thing it does when it comes to legalities and social realities.

It doesn't provide you with sex, love, affection, companionship, loyalty, exclusivity, respect, domestic services, or children from a woman. Those are things she can provide without a state marriage license, without a ceremony, without a ring, and getting married will not mean she will be legally or socially obligated to provide those things to you. She can stop providing them at any time, kick you out of your own home, and alienate your children from you. You, however, can be compelled by the force of law to keep paying her way through life, even for things you didn't want her to buy and didn't use, even things that benefit her other lovers.

What we now call marriage is emasculating.

A Free Man runs his own life, decides what to do with his earnings, and retains his power.

A married man only has power and control over his own life and earnings in so much as his wife allows.

Being in an "exclusive" relationship, living together unmarried, having children together is almost being married, when it comes to freedom and control over your life, with the biggest difference being the absence of the official state financial contract.

The best way to run your own life and control your own wealth is to stay free.

Do you think it would be a good thing to transfer your wealth and power to a particular woman, because you think she'd handle them better than you? Well, the fatal flaw in our current legal and social marriage is that most women are turned off by that. Despite what many self-identified feminists say, most women who marry want the man to take charge, even if those women don't say so or can't even articulate that to themselves. Most women who want a husband are turned off by emasculated men, and marriage emasculates men. These realities have killed many marriages.

Don't play that game.

Get your act together and keep your act together.

Stay free.

An Example of Married Life

My Wife: "I want X."

Me: "I don't want us to do/get X. Here are several reasons why: A,B,C, D, E."

My Wife: "YOU ALWAYS RAIN ON MY PARADE!!! I really, really want to do/get this."

Me: "I don't want to deal with it."

My Wife: "You won't have to."

[I have to deal with A, B, C, D, E, and F because of X. It costs me money, gives me stress, makes my life/my family's life worse, day in and day out, for years.]

Me: [YELLING] "THIS IS WHAT I TOLD YOU I DIDN'T WANT!!!"

My Wife: "Thank you for yelling." [Proceeds to be in a crappy mood for days or weeks, takes it out on the kids, gets passive-aggressive, acts/gets snarky/snide like a bratty teenager. This distresses our mentally ill kid (or, the one we already know is mentally ill).]

 

Meanwhile, I continue to have to deal with A, B, C, D, E, and F.

Repeat. 

*****


You unmarried guys, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

[This is something I wrote a while back and I’m bumping up. I learned to stop yelling. I also stop arguing almost as soon as I realize there is a disagreement. Now, I just stew silently in quiet desperation, a beaten dog who knows my time, energy, and money will be spent on things I didn’t choose, because I was foolishness enough to choose to marry.]

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 be forced to 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

Yet Another Example of Why Men Should Avoid Marrying

Every once in a while, the mask slips.

January 4, 2022, this, screencapped below in case it disappears, was posted on the Dr. Laura Program official Facebook page. [This entry has been bumped up.]



Many women commented on it, about how men need to jump through more hoops in order to get sex from their woman.

Typical right? We hear and read that all of the time.

About 24 hours later, this was posted on the very same Facebook page, again, screencapped below in case it goes away.



How can this be reconciled with the first post? Simple! Tell the boyfriends to stop doing so much for her. Right??? I mean, then her sexual desire will be reduced. Right???

The men had fun with this one, commenting on this second posting:




Dr. Laura does monitor and comment on her program's official Facebook page (unlike Twitter, which she doesn't personally check), so it will be interesting to see if she responds to this, deletes something (including some comments from men), or what.

There is a larger point here than two apparently contradictory posts on the same page in about a 24-hour span.

It is that many (most?) women DO NOT need ANYTHING in order to be sexual. The proof is in how women behave, often from first dates (or hookups without even going on a date), all the way until their wedding or the birth of a child. The proof is in affairs. The woman in the second post doesn't need her boyfriend to jump through hoops. She wants sex with them.

A BIG tell is single mothers. If she was able to have sex with him plenty when they were dating, even though she had LESS help around the house, and then he marries her and thus is doing more than before they were married, and the sex dwindles, that shows "he needs to do more" is dung. (Don't date or marry single mothers, though, guys.)

The only way "Hey, husband, you need to jump through more hoops" is true is if he needs to do more because she is now less attracted to him because of age and/or marriage, and if that is common, then it is all the more reason for men to STAY FREE and date women who are more attracted, or go into monk mode.

None of this is to say men who've been ignorant, delusional, desperate, or masochistic enough to marry shouldn't contribute around the home or shouldn't romance their wife. Rather, this is to again demonstrate an inconsistency between what woman (and marriage sellers) say, and how women actually behave.

See something I wrote before about this topic.

Why Sign Away Your Earnings?

To help Free Men with what they say to others, and to help explain why men stay free, I will occasionally post sample dialogue.


Marriage Seller: Why aren't you married?

Free Man: Why would I want to sign a contract that legally shifts over half of my earnings to somebody else?

MS: You're not looking at marriage the right way.

FM: I'm looking at it the way the law treats it.

MS: Marry a woman who has a job?

FM: Why? My income pays for my lifestyle. Why would I want to add someone to my home who earns less than I do, meaning my earnings will still be legally shifted to her, who will increase expenses and take over most of the spending decisions, purchasing things and services I don't want and won't be using? I could be obligated to make ongoing payments to her should she leave me or should I find I can't tolerate her anymore. Also, she can quit her job and it will be like she never had one, as far as community property and alimony goes. What happens if my career path becomes incompatible with hers? If she has a bad day at work I can forget about sex that evening and have someone in a bad mood darkening my residence. No thanks!

Stay free, men!

Wanting to be a Husband or Father

Guys, there's nothing inherently wrong with having a desire to be a "husband and father."

What I mean by that is that most people want some amount of companionship, and most people want to reproduce.

Society has traditionally channeled these into marriage. When most of us were living on family farms, that made sense. A man could get his own farm hands (and before that, hunting assistants) by growing them himself. Eventually, he'd get injured or ill or otherwise feeble and his progeny could take care of him and then bury him. To get those farm hands, he needed at least one woman. The woman would also provide companionship for him. He had incentive to protect her and the young children and make sure they had food to eat, and to teach those children (what some might call "mansplaining"). A woman could often feed the youngest children from her own body via breastfeeding.

For a man, underlying the desire to raise children was his desire to create his own assistants and allies. The desire for female companionship usually, conveniently, enabled the creation of those children.

But life has changed.

Answering Marriage Seller Assertions, Talking Points, and Questions - Part 6

Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here and Part 3 here and Part 4 here and Part 5 here.


It sounds better to say "This is my wife" instead of "This is my girlfriend."

This is another assertion of made by marriage sellers that requires you to simply accept and agree in order for it to work. It's based entirely on personal preferences. In contrast, Dr. Laura, herself a marriage seller, has encouraged her married listeners to think of, and call, themselves their husband's girlfriend or their wife's boyfriend.

For people who say this, like Dennis Prager, it is based on his emotional fixation on marriage. My own convictions have me reacting almost entirely in the opposite way, meaning I feel better when a man introduces me to his girlfriend than his wife. When he introduces me to his wife, I usually feel sorry for him, and when he introduces me to his fiancee, I want to pull him aside and warn him.

So, again, there are several ways to respond to this.

A) That's your personal preference. My preference is different.

B) It sounds even better to say "I get to do what I want to do."

C) Men who run game don't introduce their dates at all.

It is amazing that people like Dennis Prager want to you sign a terrible state contract because he thinks it sounds better to say "wife" instead of "girlfriend."

A word of caution. Yes, you can call a woman your "wife" even though you're not legally married to her. Depending on where you live and the other things you do, though, that might put you into the same legal/financial jeopardy as getting legally married. So, "girlfriend" is definitely better.

Part 7

Cancelling the Wedding

If you're scheduled to be the groom in a wedding within a few months, a week, even later today, you can still cancel it, and you probably should.


EMERGENCY - If the wedding is today, tomorrow, or days away, you can still cancel it.

If this is the day of the wedding or the day/evening before, inform her privately (take a reliable witness, just in case, like the officiating pastor) or send someone to do it. Inform the officiant.

If this is the day of the wedding, have someone apologize to the guests.

[This is assuming you don't have children with her. If you do, you really don't want to start a war with her.]

For more about what you need to do, see further below.

Will cancelling the wedding be a mess?

Yes, it will be a mess, and the closer to the wedding the more of a mess it will be, but it's far better than being married, especially being married and then divorced. For most men, there is nothing wrong with cancelling the wedding; it's usually the best thing to do in the situation you're in. You can do it. And most likely, you should.

The pain, the mess, the effort, the costs, the losses of cancelling a wedding pale in comparison to the downsides of marrying, even more so marrying and divorcing.

Do not fall into the trap of thinking "Well, we live together already and/or we have all of these plans and shared things." If you marry, it will be the last significant decision over your own life you'll be able to make in peace until she divorces you or you decide to divorce. If you marry her, all power you have (other than to divorce, which will be very expensive and destructive) shifts to her.

You are better off free, and if we believe all women, she is, too.

So here is what you need to do:

1. Accept that your relationship with your fiancee is over. Accept that there are people who know both of you who will drop you (this may include having to leave your religious congregation or other shared activities or groups). Accept that this might feel embarrassing. Reject any notion that this is a failure. Letting it go further would be a failure. Divorce is common. You're avoiding years of misery in marriage and then a divorce.

2. Be strategic about what you do when. For example, if the wedding is still six months away and you're living together and sharing some accounts, you've got a little time to do this, and you need to do as much as you can to dis-entangle yourself from her and protect yourself and your assets before she realizes you're cancelling the wedding. Once she knows, you might need to have a reliable witness with you whenever you interact with her. Document/record/get copies of everything that matters: paperwork, conversations, whatever might become an issue.

3. If you two have obtained a marriage license from the county/state, at some point you should destroy that so there's no chance it gets signed and filed.

4. If things have been paid for and finalized, you should cancel with anyone or any venue or business with which you have the power to do so. If you or your parent were the one paying, you should have that power. That might involve the wedding coordinator, rehearsal dinner restaurant, tuxes (and bridesmaid dresses, depending), florists, photographers, DJ/sound, musicians, cake bakers/decorators, officiant, church/wedding venue, reception venue, caterers, honeymoon travel and accommodations, even bachelorette party stuff. You may lose money, especially on deposits, but it is a small price to pay to save money over the coming years and retain your freedom. Don't fall for the "sunk costs" mentality of saying you don't want the money to go to waste. Getting married would result in exponentially more wasted money. If you still want to do what would have been your bachelor party, rehearsal dinner, reception, etc. that's up to you, if you're the one who put in the money. Those can be turned into a celebration of your freedom. (Having the contact information of everyone involved, including invited/RSVP'd guests, is helpful.)

5. It'll be best if you have some trustworthy people who have your back and can be your witnesses, and it will be helpful if those include both men and women. Have them help you move what you need out of your shared residence (if you're sharing one). Consult a lawyer if you need to about any entanglements you have with your fiancee, especially if it is YOUR residence you are sharing (the lawyer might tell you NOT to move out, in such a case). If you need to temporarily go somewhere else for your safety (and to avoid confrontations with her/her family that could end up with police getting involved and/or false allegations) consider a friend's place or a hotel, but it has to be kept secret.

Although few may say it, most people will understand, and most of them will think you made the right decision. Of course SHE and her family and friends are likely to be upset with you, especially at first. Unless they already control your life, it shouldn't matter, because you're going to be avoiding them.
.
Rather than repeat myself about everything else, see this link and follow the the links at that post, too.

Guys, even if the wedding date is set, even if the plans have been finalized and payments made, the guests attending verified, even if the wedding is tomorrow or later today, you can still back out, and you probably should. Be sure to consider your safety, whether physical, financial, reputational, or emotional.

You need to be thinking about what is best for you. Nobody else is.

How to Keep Your Friends Free - Intervention

As I wrote in the first entry of this series, Prevention is ideal when keeping the men you know free.

Sometimes, Intervention will be required, because some of these men won't stay free. They will tie themselves down to a woman.

When a man is in, or heading towards, an "exclusive" relationship or the marriage trap, your assistance will mostly have to be more subtle to prevent him from getting locked in. He's getting sex from her (or, in rare cases he's not but he thinks he'll be getting some later), and he thinks it's the best or only sex he's going to have. He won't want to give it up. He might also be feeling pressure from his family or a religious congregation.

So, subtle will usually be the way to go. Being repetitively direct and blunt probably won't work. He's in LOOOOOOOOOOOOVE. You're probably not going to get through to him with a frontal assault. 

Don't Oppress Or Burden Women

Before the wave of feminism that grew in the 1960s and 1970s, women who were housewives were oppressed and depressed from having to tend to a husband, the children, and home, while being treated as less than human since she couldn't have assets and accounts without her husband's participation or approval. Many of these women wanted careers, but were prevented from having them. Some of these women wanted to freed from servitude to a man or children, but they didn't have real options.

And those are just the white women with high earning husbands. Women of color had to have jobs on top of all of the rest of the stuff.

Now, although they can have careers and bank accounts, so many women are with men who don't contribute enough at home, don't do enough of the emotional labor, sexually harass and rape their wife, fiancee or girlfriend, and are terrible lovers.

Men are a burden on women. Women don't need men. Women don't like husbands.

These are things you'd know if you were enlightened by social media or certain college classes, movies, or books.

Guys, STOP IMPOSING UPON WOMEN. Respect their independence, autonomy, and capability. Do not move in with them. Protect a woman from her own temporary miscalculation by refusing to her let move in with you, don't impregnate them, don't propose marriage to them, and don't marry them. It's OK to be available to them, temporarily, when they want you around, but don't burden any woman by staying with her or being demanding of her time. Never be so cruel as to make a woman a housewife or stay-at-home mom. If that's what a woman says she wants, she clearly must be suffering from the inadequacy of our mental health system or misleading patriarchal indoctrination; don't take advantage of her!

Avoid mansplaining at work and in your personal life.

Stop bothering women. Leave them alone. Date when they come to you, but keep those dates short.

Respect women, guys!

Don't Do Things You Can't Afford

Matt Walsh writes a lot of good stuff. I follow him on Twitter. I haven't listened to his podcasts or read his book. Every once in a while, I disagree with what he writes, and this is one of those times. [This is bumped up from May 2017.]

This time, Walsh wrote to encourage people to go ahead and have children young. Walsh is greatly disturbed that so many people his age are still living with a parent, but even if they're not, he's still bothered that they're not marrying, and not having children. And it probably bothers him a lot (though he doesn't say it in this column) that most of them are fornicating and/or masturbating.

I generally do think people should move out of their parents' home when they finish with college or before, but it doesn't bother me in the slightest that people are not marrying and not having children.

I was 27 and broke when we had kids.

And that was irresponsible of Walsh.

They were twins, so we became a family of four right out of the gate. We didn’t really know anybody where we lived, and we were about 600 miles from the nearest family member.

Bad planning.

I wasn’t making much money at my job, we had nothing in savings, and we were pretty far in the red because of medical bills and my wife’s student loan debt.

This is what you SHOULD NOT DO, kids.

...it’s clear that we were not in what our society would consider the “ideal” position to get married or have kids. We weren’t ready. We couldn’t afford it. And yet we did get married and we did have kids.

Which was irresponsible.

And here we are. All of us (five of us now). Still breathing, somehow.

Yes, it is called debt, handouts from family, and, for a lot of people, public assistance in one form or another. If Walsh avoided all three of these things, I'd be very surprised.

My generation has been stuck in neutral for years, not wanting to get married, not wanting to have kids, refusing to move out of mom’s house and be adults, always insisting that we aren’t “ready.”

People can be living on their own and still not want to get married and even if they do want to marry, still not want to have kids.

What Is the Marriage Strike?

 
The Marriage Strike is refusing to legally marry (or, refusing to legally marry again), and usually it also involves refusing to socially marry. More and more men are refusing to marry. That is a fact.

Why join the marriage strike?

There are many reasons, not all of which need to apply to you:

• You don't want to marry.
  
• Marriage is a bad deal for most men.
• Marriage is a bad state contract.
• Marriage brings the government further into your life. 
• Most marriages fail.
  
• Current marriage culture is misandrist. 
• Most marriage counseling, therapy, and popular advice is misandrist or otherwise terrible.  
• Men are punished for being husbands.
  
• A lack of wife material women.
• A lack of accountability for wives.
• Marriage doesn't help you reach your goals.
• Marriage brings guaranteed limitations, obligations, and risks with no guaranteed benefits you can't get without marrying.
  
• You prefer to retain power over your life. 
• You prefer to live alone.
  
• You prefer to stay free.
• You can't be sure the woman you'd marry isn't being trafficked into marriage. 
• If you're a Bible-following Christian, you can't be sure you wouldn't be unequally yoked if you married.
  
• And many more!
  

Weddings Are Highly Visible But Marriage Isn't A Wedding

Weddings are highly visible. They are often prominent in both fictional media and "reality" media, including news and gossip outlets. They are announced all over, there are save the date notices, formal invites, and thank-yous. There are wedding registries. There are special dresses. There are entire websites/shops dedicated to weddings. There are wedding rings. There are bridal showers, wedding showers, bachelor parties, bachelorette parties, rehearsal dinners, receptions, anniversary celebrations, elaborate proposals, engagement announcements, engagement rings, wedding photographers, wedding planners, cakes and cake tasting, flowers, on and on it goes.

If the people getting married are happy through those things, that's fortunate.

But marriage isn't a wedding.

Here are some of the things about marriage and its aftermath that are hidden or far less visible:

• One spouse having to pick up after another
• The spouse who has/earns more money having to pay for bills generated by the other, especially for things the paying spouse didn't want or couldn't enjoy
• One spouse feeling stifled by the other
• Abandoned dreams
• Alienation from family of origin
• Alienation from friends
  
• Arguments, disputes, conflicts
  
• Cruel words
• Mood swings
  
• Loneliness
• Disappointment 
• One spouse not being able to sleep or relax because of the other
  
• Walking on eggshells
  
• Nagging
• Frustration
• Disrespect
  
• Irritation and annoyance
• Emotional rejection
  
• Sexual rejection
• Boredom and monotony
  
• Affairs
  
• Marriage counseling
• Indifference
  
• Contempt
  
• Visits by law enforcement due to reports of possible domestic violence
• Actual domestic violence
  
• One spouse murdering the other
• One spouse subjecting the other to their substance abuse
• Abandonment
• Physical separation
• Legal separation
• Consulting divorce lawyers
• Paying divorce lawyers
• Court battles over divorce
• Dividing assets
• Ongoing payments, such as alimony
  

What if those things were as visible as weddings? What if people were to tell you and put on their social media "We're going through a really crappy time in our marriage right now" whenever that was the case? Do you think there might be fewer weddings?

There are many people who have an interest, especially a financial interest, in other people getting married. People have been selling marriage. They emphasize the good and keep the bad quiet. Talking about the bad is "tacky" or a "sin" or a "betrayal" or a "negative confession."

But what if reality wasn't hushed up so much?