Canadian Men Shouldn't Fall For It Either

Here we go again! Canada has gone misandrist-matriarchal and people there can't understand why more people aren't getting married.

This time, either Peter Shawn Taylor was duped or he's trying to dupe readers under the headline of "The Marriage Secret: It Makes Your Richer and Happier" (I know, try not to laugh.)

Earlier this week a survey of 1,520 Canadians by the Angus Reid Institute asked “When two people plan to spend the rest of their lives together, how important is it to you that they legally marry, meaning exchange vows in a public ceremony, whether civil or religious?”

Exchanging vows is not the same thing as signing a contract that's mostly about wealth transfer. I'm not sure how Canadian law works, so maybe you can't exchange vows without it bringing on the legal contract, but let's not pretend that people promising to care for each other henceforth is the same thing as the wealth transfer mechanism. People could care for each other without sharing finances. Really, they could.

Fifty-three per cent said it wasn’t important. According to the pollster, this means a majority of Canadians now think “marriage is simply not necessary.”

Nobody should be surprised by this. When people can get literally everything they want out of a relationship without a government contract, when a country has decided that marriage is about the feelings of adults above all else and thus two women can marry and that a groom is no different than a bride, when husbands have been denigrated constantly in media, isn't this result to be expected???

In 1981, over 60 per cent of Canadians above the age of 15 were married; today that’s fallen to 45 per cent as cohabitating couples and lone parent households rise in step.

And, people are getting married later and divorcing (earlier). And who thinks 15 year-old should be marrying in this day and age?!?

Beyond the ring and the ceremony, marriage offers substantial and persistent benefits in terms of health, wealth and well-being for both spouses and their children.

It does appear to have some benefits for children, but those are almost entirely about the behavior of the parents. Parents can behave that way without a state contract, however. And it certainly has benefits to a woman who earns less than her husband: guaranteed financial support, and tagging him with paternity even if she got knocked up by the pool boy. It doesn't actually have any proven benefits for breadwinning husbands that they can't get without being legally married.

Many of these advantages are not present to the same degree in cohabitation arrangements—despite the fact Canadians apparently don’t see any difference between the two types of relationships.

Sure, when you take all cohabitation arrangements and compare them to all marriages. But what happens when you compare compare cohabitation arrangements that were deliberately planned between two independent, established adults? And we really don't know if any specific cohabitating couple would be better off if they married instead. We can't compare them to themselves.



What legally marrying does is that it puts people into a Mexican standoff with the state. So a guy who is miserable stays because he doesn't want to pay for two legal teams and have some stranger in a robe divide the assets and order to pay a certain amount of alimony and child support. Sure, that can have benefits for a wife and kids.

Entire television channels appear to be dedicated to promoting the notion that weddings have become impossibly elaborate and expensive.

In addition to the actual expenses of the wedding itself, my wedding cost me my freedom, my financial stability, my emotional well-being, over half of everything I've earned, and a heckuva lot of future funds.

But it would be a grave mistake to put off or abandon marriage simply because of the cost of a chocolate fountain for the reception hall.

Right. It's far better to avoid marriage because it is a bad deal and a living hell.

If financial stability is your goal, the best advice is to get married as quickly as possible.

Sure, if you're marrying someone who has more wealth than you and will consistently earn more than you and doesn't make poor financial decisions.

One of the few groups in Canada to make a crusade out of proclaiming the benefits of marriage is Cardus, a faith-based think tank based in Hamilton, Ont.

In other words, they're people worried that other people are out there fornicating. They want them to get married so their sex won't be fornication anymore. And tough darts if they're miserable marriage.

It’s 2014 report “The Marriage Gap between Rich and Poor Canadians,” by former Statistics Canada chief economist Philip Cross and researcher Peter Jon Mitchell, parses census data to lay bare the powerful connections between marriage, income and inequality−those who marry are far more likely to end up atop the heap.

But here's the problem. Correlation does not prove causation. People are more likely to marry and stay married to "winners" and less likely to marry and stay married to "losers". To imply that getting married caused people to be winners is a leap honest people can't make.

“The differences in marital status between income groups is quite dramatic,” the study observes.

Guys who don't earn money have trouble attracting and keeping a wife. Duh!!! People getting government benefits are less likely to marry if it will cause a loss of those benefits. Duh!!!

While living as a couple can offer many advantages in terms of expenses and savings, ample research confirms significant differences between married and cohabitating spouses, particularly with respect to financial arrangements.

A guy is less likely to marry a woman if she's irresponsible with money, but might be willing to shack up with her because shacking up with her doesn't give her legally-forced access to his income.

Married couples, for example, are far more likely to pool their money into one pot and treat their combined finances as a single, cohesive planning unit.

Right, and for people who will earn more than their spouse, this isn't always a good deal. Then there's divorce.

In the U.S., where the relative success of racial groups is an area of intense focus, research by the Brookings Institution points to the “success sequence” as a key factor in avoiding poverty. This refers to a multi-stage process of finishing high school, getting a job, getting married and then having children. Do these steps in this order and your chances of entering the middle class or higher rise dramatically, regardless of race.

And what about career-minded men who finish high school, get a job, do not marry, do not have children, and intentionally spend as little on women as possible, spending no more than $40 on a date and never letting a woman live with him? I'm certain that a study comparing those to married men will find that those unmarried men are better off financially, even more so when it is taken into account that half of the marital assets belong to the wife.

Research published last year by two economists from the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia examines the impact marriage can have on reported happiness and life satisfaction levels of married couples. “Those who marry are more satisfied than those who remain single,” say professors Shawn Grover and John Helliwell.

Or, happy people are more likely to attract and keep a spouse and unhappy people are less likely to attract and keep a spouse.

Again, how about comparing people who are intentionally unmarried to marriage people? Of course if someone has bought into the idea that they need a spouse and "everyone" has a spouse and they really want that they think is going to be a fairy tale of a wedding and marriage is going to be unhappy if they aren't married. And some (not all) of the married people claiming to be happy are living with a variation of the Stockholm syndrome.

But given this lengthy list of benefits arising from marriage, why isn’t all this information more widely available?

Because people can see for themselves what marriage has been like for their parents, aunts, uncles, older siblings, friends, etc. especially the men in their lives. Most marriages fail! Take my younger, unmarried sister for example. She points out that she doesn't have any good examples of marriage in her life. Our parents' marriage fell apart while she was still a minor. My mother never remarried (she couldn't find a man who would provide her with more than my father's alimony payments). My father remarried and my siblings are pretty sure his marriage is bad and he feels stuck. My older sister's husband is out of town "working" more than he's home. I have no idea what is really going on there. Anyone who reads this blog knows that my marriage is hardly a great example.

Our governments are certainly not shy about telling us how to live our lives in so many other regards. We are constantly nudged, poke and cajoled to make healthy choices and avoid unhealthy behaviours: what to eat, what not to eat, how to get to work, how much to exercise, what to recycle, how to treat your neighbour etc. etc.

So let's make it even worse?

Marriage remains a deeply personal decision that can only be entered into by two committed individuals.

Why just two? Is this guy some kind of a bigot, or something?

Let's recap:

1) Correlation is not causation. An honest person who understands how these things work can't actually say with certainty that marriage is causing these good things. They certainly can't tell any specific person that if they get married, it will improve their life.

2) Statistics are about a population. Individual cases vary wildly, meaning there are people who marry who later become worse off financially, physically, and emotionally as a result. Like me! Heck, some people are murdered by their spouse, and if they hadn't married that person, they likely would have been somewhere else at the time of the murder.

3) These studies tend to group men and women together, count divorced people as unmarried, and lump all unmarried (or, if they do bother to separate divorced people, never-married) people together, and also all cohabitating people who aren't legally married together. It is a far different matter to be living on your own because you want to and have fended off people who've tried to get you to marry them or move in than to be single and desperately lonely. It is a far different matter to be shacking up because you kept spending time with your girlfriend, who lives with her parents, and finally you just never left than it is to be shacking up because you sat down with your girlfriend and decided you two no longer wanted to live alone in separate places and you specifically discussed expectations, responsibilities, and goals before establishing a joint residence.

There needs to be a study that tracks and examines men who are intentionally unmarried and childfree and refuse to shack up in comparison to married men and divorced men.