In response to Kay Hymowitz’s critique of responsibility-dodging single men, (see “They won’t grow up”), Dr. Helen argues that “men are on a marriage strike, not necessarily because they are perpetual adolescents or avoiding deep attachments to others but because the reward for being an adult in our society is so low, especially for men.”
Nowadays, for many men, the negatives of marriage for men often outweigh the positives. Therefore, they engage in it less often. Not because they are bad, not because they are perpetual adolescents, but because they have weighed the pros and cons of marriage in a rational manner and found the institution to be lacking for them. It’s a sensible choice for some and the video games, magazines, and humor websites that Hymowitz disses are a way to fill one’s time with fun activities that don’t tell you that you suck, are an “unfinished person,” emotionally detached or on your way to jail for fake domestic violence charges.
I don’t think it’s really that tough to be a man or that marriage is such a bad deal compared to living on take-out in your parents’ basement. Men, feel free to comment. And women, of course.
Update: Male models with muscles are unemployed, reports the New York Times. Ninety-pound weaklings are the height of fashion.
In terms of image, the current preference is for beauty that is not fully evolved. “People are afraid to look over 21 or make any statement of what it means to be adult,” (Kelly) Cutrone said.
. . . (Model Demián) Tkach said that when he came here from Mexico, where he had been working: “My agency asked me to lose some muscle. I lost a little bit to help them, because I understand the designers are not looking for a male image anymore. They’re looking for some kind of androgyne.”
Well, the fashion world always has been nuts.
To be an acceptable husband/father I need to keep my work commitments limited so that I can have some contact with my children. To be an acceptable performer in an upper-white-collar job I need to work over 60 hours a week (including overtime, work at home, business travel, and personal time spent on training & professional development, but not including commute). This is a nasty catch-22, and although I’ve chosen fatherhood and a less-prestigious job than I trained for I frequently wonder if I made the right choice. Society values what I’d have (presumably) accomplished as a single workaholic far more. It’s hard not to internalize that negative judgement and see fatherhood as a wasted life.
My wife, as a stay-at-home/homeschooling mother, has the same struggle: many, many more people tell her “what a waste of your education/your potential” than think she made the right choice.
Also see the following article on how the birth control pill has changed the economics of marriage:
http://www.slate.com/id/2182089/entry/2182090/
(You may need to copy and paste the link to access the article.)
I have seen responsibility-dodging on both sides and do not agree that this is a male only trait.
lessee, for many men, the choices are: I could live in a loft with other men, eating take out, seeing my gf whenever I want/have time and play video games whenever I want/have time, or I could live with my wife, still have take out since neither of us is home to cook, still be expected to be the major breadwinner earning enough to support our lifestyle, our future retirement, the mortgage and college funds, get stuck being yelled at for not doing more around the house, and risk losing half my money when she divorces me.
Dr. Helen is correct. When many women’s notion of “grown up” is “I will be in the workforce without taking seriously my own financial well being because otherwise, and with no thought to how we’ll manage the juggle of children and day care or someone opting out to stay home with them, and if you criticize this, you’re interfering with my right to CHOOSE my life!” men might as well opt out.
I also agree it’s not Male-only. I also concur that women of marrying age have got a rough row to hoe.I’ve heard this complaint from my female acquaintances ad nauseum.
Here in North America, we have effectively emasculated our men. Entertainment, education, and current accepted norms and images of men essentially put the male in a no-win, no-point role. There’s no “rite of Passage” that marks a boy’s step into manhood, there’s no general societal pressure/requirement/expectancy, so(me being a male,linear thinker) what’s the point?
I can sleep with and/or impregnate different willing girls of legal-age (you’d hope they’re legal age), change partners almost at will, and most of the time have no reprocussions of this behavior. The girls make their own money, do not need me for ________ (you fill in the blank), and are not interested in what I’m interested in. With sex drive and society out of the way, I can do whatever.
I have hopefully given better instructions to my son and daughter (in their 20’s) - both fight against the culture they swim in, and are asking the same questions - the boy thinks girls are “stupid”, the girl thinks boys are “jerks”
I remind them that maybe they’re looking at the wrong kind of boy/girl.
No man sailed a thousand ships just so that he could lead a lifestyle that included a woman serving him left over cheese casserole.
Ostensibly Marco Polo opted for the Chinese take-out.
Personally (as someone who married at 23 and had a baby at 28) I find the notion that “adulthood = marriage and kids” insufferable.
I was married for ten years and lost her from sudden death in 2001. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Yet looking at what has happened to so many of my male friends for a young man to get married today he would be a fool.
My friends have been ruined by divorce. They never see their children. They have no money. They can’t save for retirement. They live in conditions well below that of their ex-wives and children. They are ignored by the courts.
Men should not marry at all. Ever.
Load up an editorial with stereotypes about “Men” and “Women” and you can provoke just this kind of controversy. It requires you, however, to ignore the tens of millions of young men and women who don’t fit those stereotypes.
The “child-man” is hardly a new phenomenon. Hugh Hefner turns 82 in April.
It’s not necessarily an issue of the penalties of marriage, but the lack of benefits in any monogamous relationship nowadays in some cultures.
In the past there was significant societal approval placed upon successful husbands and fathers, and a good helping of disapproval placed upon those men who were unable or unwilling to find a mate. These loners were viewed as being selfish and not aiding the collective.
Marriage also provided an opportunity for that great biological imperative - to produce children. There was a stigma placed upon those men who fathered children out of wedlock.
The benefits of reproduction and societal stature outweighed the negatives of providing for a family or losing the freedom to mate with anyone.
This has changed as social pressure to maintain families or to conceive children in wedlock has decreased. There are numerous examples of elder bachelors who are idolized. Men can father children without worrying about disaproving stares. Sure, the impregnated girl’s friends might say they dislike the guy, but soon after one of them will be in the sack with the same man.
I’m reminded of the saying “Why buy the cow when the milk is free?”
A sad illustration of this would be a recent event in my classroom. I teach a seventh-grade home and careers class. During a “what are your long term goals” lesson, a boy wrote that he wanted to have babies with three different women. He has been taught that this is perfectly acceptable, even desireable.
This is not a universal condition. Large parts of our society still follow the traditional route because they are parts of communities that place importance on family life. Remove that community, though, and those same individuals will resort to “free love” within a generation or two.
Well said, Mr. Antonucci!
An aside: Hugh Hefner is the poster boy for child-man as pathetic creature. Every month Playboy features at least a few candids of Hugh with his arms around several lovely young things. It is hard to tell which is the more pathetic — an 81-year old man trying to look hip and with it, or a 20-something young thing trying desperately to look as though she’s having a good time in his company.
“My friends have been ruined by divorce. They never see their children. They have no money. They can’t save for retirement. They live in conditions well below that of their ex-wives and children. They are ignored by the courts”
Unfortunately this is quite true. It’s so easy to get a divorce, and so profitable (usually for women) that there’s no real reason for them to stick it out. The courts and the assorted impedimenta are heavily stacked against men, no matter the circumstances.
Marriage is hard work, and it can be very rewarding. But often it isn’t, and I couldn’t in good conscience advise my son to get married without taking precautions.
Of course that’s some time in the future.
I’d add that even if we’re not talking about a mass movement where all men refuse to marry/all married men are in living hell, we can still be talking about a real change in marriage behavior.
These choices happen at the margins - that is, if marriage turns into a worse deal for men, then the men who change their minds and decide not to marry will be the ones on the fence who could have gone either way.
Similarly, men who would have wanted to marry young get unnerved by stories of take-him-to-the-cleaners divorces and decide to wait a year or two before dating seriously, men who have a relationship decide to hold off a while before buying the ring because know that they might turn out miserable, so it’s important to make really sure before proposing to her, etc.
I find the trend alarming because it can cascade. Being married is hard work, yes - and like all work, it takes practice and effort, with the chance that you’ll screw it up. One of the ways to get better at being married is to learn from an “expert” - that is, an old married couple that tells you the way things work.
If this generation has troubled marriages, the next generation will be even worse off. They’ll have fewer good examples from which to learn.
The tax consequences of marriage can be heavy, at least partially thanks to Dorothy Kellems. The benefits of a complete family are beyond price. 53 years and counting.
I must not know these men who don’t want to get married. I only know two single guys over age 21, the rest of the men I know are married.
My marriage isn’t about proving we’re adults, or having kids, it’s about having someone to share the fun and not-so-fun parts of life with. My husband helped me get through the death of my mother, a rough year at work, and health issues. I’ve helped him get through emotional and physical stress too. We have some shared hobbies and interests, and some separate ones. We have some shared friends and some separate ones.
If marriage looks like such a raw deal, maybe you’re looking at the wrong partner pool. When I was dating I kept a list in my wallet of the character traits and behaviors I wanted in a partner, and measured the guys I dated more than a few times against the list. I watched for qualities like truthfulness, open communication, anger management and appropriate expression, self-sufficiency (not just financial but also emotional and intellectual), responsiveness to my requests for attention, and ability to share decision-making.
White people have abdicated their responsibility to raise decent future citizens for our country.
Our government is largely responsible for that, by socializing the benefits while leaving the costs to individuals.
Kai: That is interesting that you kept a literal list. I have often complained of women with unrealistic expectations about men and keep a mental list. They want me to put up with all their little quirks and hang-ups, but they have a mental list of between 50 and 1,984,245 characteristics that the perfect man “must have” and if I don’t have one of them? Forget it! I am glad your list worked out for you.
Engineers believe perfection is the enemy of good enough.
I love being married. I don’t want to go back to being single. That said, I can see how younger men would look at it differently.
My wife watches one of those “reality” model shows. I don’t know why- she thinks the skinny, anoxeric looking men are pretty awful.
Here is one possibility: Kay is simply wrong.
She writes:
Which is true as far as it goes, but the 1950s in the US saw historic lows for average age at first marriage and historic highs for percentage of people getting married.
From MSN Encarta:
If we are just going back to rates of ‘average age at marriage’ and ‘percent of population being married’ that are in line with historical averages, I’m not sure I see much of a story or crisis.
-Mark Roulo
‘…[not] such a bad deal compared to living on take-out in your parents’ basement.’ You mean like my divorced friends?
If you understand what that article is about, you’ll also be getting closer to understand our much discussed “boy problem.”
You can’t understand what the boys are doing unless you understand what the girls are doing. Otherwise, you’re trying to figure out a chess game by only looking at the black pieces.
The ideal of marriage has been beaten up pretty bad and hook-up culture has gained ground among many young people. The alternatives people try don’t work as well, for most people. People are still exploring the freedom they thought they won when the pill separated sex from reproduction, but they’re finding things aren’t as simple as they thought.
We’re not there yet, but I think in a few decades we’ll realize, once again, that the phrase “Not until you marry me” is foundational to civilization.
I hate the theme that marriage is a raw deal for men. I don’t know if I buy it. No one gets married thinking that they’re going to get divorced, and the post-boomer generations who experienced divorce as children is probably less inclined to immediately get divorced.
Personally, I think the problem is the failure of assortative mating as a dating paradigm. At some point, there was a shift (at least outwardly) from the idea of marrying the person who has the most qualities you want to marrying someone who is outwardly like you. There are two problems with this. The first one is that qualities that make men attractive to women do not make women attractive to men. For example, I am highly educated and work as an academic which is a high status occupation. Believe it or not, girls find this attractive. However, whether a girl has an advanced degree is of much less interest to me than if she’s well-read and witty (often academic women are not ). The other problem is that there may not be a lot of women like a lot of men. There are a lot of guys who work in tech. A girl who is attractive and who can relate to techy guys will be snapped up immediately. There are a lot of girls who work in low-level management like HR or in fields like marketing. They might be as an unable to relate to guys as the computer geeks are to relate to girls. But HR girls and tech guys might even be a good match for each other, but they are not going to be in immediate contact with each other. Instead the guys might stay at home and play video games and the girls might dish with their galpals and gay boyfriends and spend an occasional night on the town.
There are probably only a few places where assortative mating works really well for upper-middle class types. One is in big cities. The other is in elite private universities (I think a lot of the competition to get into them is motivated by this, but that’s another long rambling comment).
Some small fraction of men have managed to crack the code of seduction and do manage to sleep around and don’t feel a pressing need to marry. But anecdotally, I think this is a very small number, and it may only have happened because so many men are out of the dating market. This could be the white middle class version of the ghetto Don Juan. I think the hook-up culture is misrepresented. How often do you hear guys brag about how wonderful the girl he managed to hook up with is? Hooking up is often what you do with people who for some reason or another don’t pass your tests for dateability.
I realize that I am resorting to a lot of stereotypes here, but I think stereotypes are sometimes indicative of general trends.
Several posters seem to have missed an important point.
The problem that seems to be causing a “marriage strike” is not that married men are miserable. The problem is that divorced men are miserable, that 70% of divorces are initiated by women — often for pretty frivolous reasons and that once divorced a man will frequently lose contact with his children and be indentured for a lifetime of servitude to support whatever lifestyle the family court system decrees.
No one gets married thinking that they will get divorced? That is probably true. That is why men who think that thy might get divorced are not marrying.
Let me explain how a mine field works. Land mines are not buried beneath every square foot of the mine field. If you line up a bunch of people and force them to walk across the mine field, most of them will get to the other side without stepping on a mine. There are, however, enough people who step on mines and get blown up that most people will not willingly walk across a mine field.
No one gets married thinking that they’re going to get divorced,…
Unfortunately, WRONG: The Starter Husband, i.e. women marrying while planning to divorce.
Mark in Texas makes an excellent point, re: divorce men and misery. Marriage may not be bad but with the odds of divorce and being screwed by the courts, why bother? Ms. Jacobs misses the point completely and throws out a demeaning false dichotomy which displays some of the attitudes by women that drive away men.
I work with several guys in there twenties. None are in any hurry to get married. All are college educated computer professionals and all round good guys.
Joanne said:
I don’t think it’s really that tough to be a man
And you know this how??
You need to do some reading.
I think the issue is men’s selection. There is an article in the Atlantic (available online) here: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/single-marry
By Lori Gottlieb.
Short version, author was too picky, in her twenties and thirties, wanting the “perfect” husband and ended up an artificially inseminated single mother at age 40 or so.
The dynamic is: women have many suitors at the peak of their attractiveness, and overestimate how long that condition lasts (basically ends at their late twenties to early thirties). They then find that the most attractive men are married, and those that remain are less attractive.
The less “attractive” men, generally the non-A-Lister types, are less willing to compromise remake themselves, and women complain about their qualities and unwillingness to bend. Blogger “Dawn Summers” made the same complaint as the author, and on the flip-side is the infamous Craigslist rant about “what happened to the nice guys? You Did!” or something along those lines.
Not so unusual, men face the rejection risk in courting/dating, so after losing out in their twenties may often simply keep substituting a relationship with entertainment.
I don’t think this is a marriage strike. More like the inevitable consequences of women’s better social and economic position. Giving rise to expectations of endless suitors and overestimation of the amount of time a woman’s attractiveness is at it’s peak.
The point about assortive mating is quite right. I would say the the woman in HR probably overestimates her attractiveness level and would likely reject the geek in favor of the “Mystery” clone at the local bar. A downscale Bridget Jones I guess. Mediating institutions such as churches, various other groups that would allow men and women to meet and assess each other’s mating potential have gone by the wayside and the workplace is both fraught with danger and as mentioned, not very conducive to even power.
Just a thought, but why not remove the commercialism from divorce by letting each spouse keep what he or she has earned?
Similarly, get rid of child support. How much time you want to spend with your kids should depend on your love for them, not on how much money you can extract from your spouse. Can’t afford to take care of them? Go get a job, or get a better one. When you can look after them on your own, you can ask for more time with them.
Why should professional victimhood make one a protected parasite, coddled by the state and the extraordinarily incompetent family court system?
There was a recent case in which a divorced woman watched her boyfriend beat her son to death, then drove with him to Mexico to bury his small body. When the police finally caught up with her, the feministas leaped to her defense!
Who spoke for the little boy?
I don’t think it’s really that tough to be a man…
I disagree! It’s actually tough to be anybody - and probably even moreso if you are a man named “Joanne”. Just kidding.
If the truth be told, I married only to have children, foolishly believing also in the potential of all reasonably normally-acting adult humans to be responsible humans. Wrong! Take it to the bank!
Thirty years later, and after having been bled of $hundreds of thousands by 2 women - who went their “own” ways, yet somehow also remained critically dependent upon me, apparently because at the very same time I was never good enough - they have literally nothing.
One just died - quite bravely, in fact, in what had to be her finest moments/months - having accumulated virtually nothing over the subsequent 27 years following our “divorce”. The other one kind-of lives in Bars.
Everything seemed to magically disappear in the cases of these two females - mattresses, furniture, animals, cars, you name it. The first one payed on a house purchase for about 12 years, ending up owing more on it than when she started, while having a gross income over a period of at least 20 years averaging $80-100,000/yr.. The second one gave her F-350 Power Stroke Crew Cab Truck to one of her now ex-boyfriends. He refuses to give it back. And so on.
Hell, these two almost managed to make me disappear.
Strangely or not, my 3 adult daughters are in fact wonderful, responsible people. I just barely never let the “Family Courts” beat me, but it was agonizing almost beyond description. I did everything except for my non-visitation time when I was almost always at work doing 24-48 hour shifts. I did all the 250-600 mile round trip driving, provided the neglected dental visits and haircuts, the other home the children were “accustomed to”; I would have been happy to have their mothers simply disappear, etc., etc., but it was never enough. I kept getting sued for becoming more productive, always being portrayed as some kind of ogre, and worse.
Sound familiar? Well, if not yet, it just might-could be your future, guys. It’s still rigged against men. And against children: that’s the thing that really tortured me.
And that’s the way it works in general: the more responsible you are, the worse it gets, thanks to the parasites and bigots of all sexes. But you can’t just stop being responsible if that’s the way you are. Even my daughters are finding these things out - much sooner than I did.
I don’t regret any of it. But I would highly recommend to the truely serious Yutes of America to marry only if you’ve known your potential spouse virtually since childhood, or perhaps have experienced at least a several years’ trial in which your very lives depended upon each other - in order to get a good look at his/her character. It’s the only thing that matters.
Yes, lets start with the assumption that men who won’t marry aren’t capable of renting or owning their own place or cooking their own food. Or paying their own bills apparently, because they live in mom’s basement.
Hey, why didn’t dad kick him out of the house? Oh that’s right, dad was kicked out earlier by mom because she was unhappy and got his half of the property and paychecks for life. The son saw what a raw deal his dad got and decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.
What this post really boils down to is “He’s not willing to be a financial slave to a self centered woman who thinks she is entitled to his stuff, with no real responsibility to provide for anything in the relationship so, therefore, he is immature”.
IMHO I read Joanne’s “parents’ basement” line more as a flippant remark than a serious criticism.
I personally don’t buy the “divorce laws are bad so We’re on Strike” meme. It’s the equivalent to the radical feminists “I won’t get married because it’s nothing but a Patriarchal institution that exploits womym” meme.
Both are excuses that have at their core some rebellion at responsibility and maturity. Loving someone else and committing to them is hard, it is work and it means choosing to live life as a “we” not as a “me”.
And a lot of males and females just want to sing their own song in one note: “me, me, me, me”
A spouse means having to coordinate for harmony. Children even more so.
And nothing more demonstrates a lot of this “me, mine” then the “divorce robs men” stuff above.
If one lives in a community property state, the law is pretty straight forward. basic premise: What property is one’s separately before marriage remains separate, gifts and inheritances specific to the person remains separate and property earned, acquired after marriage is community property - ie each partner has a 50% interest. Which makes the wiki entry on the “marriage strike” questionably biased on its face — under the heading “Divorce penalty” is this line:
“Typically, a woman will receive 50% ownership of the couple’s assets on initiation of divorce.”
If its the COUPLES assets, why is her 50% legal interest considered a “divorce penalty” to the man?
For every grasping female who kicks out a husband for “no reason”, there’s a grasping male who kicks out a wife and kids for “no reason”
divorce brings out the worst in a lot of people. It takes two to make a relationship but only one to destroy it.
I agree with SuperSub statement regarding societal pressures are absent, particularly among men, that being a husband and father not only desirable but mandated between men for entry into business, professional and social institutional groups.
Marriage as an institution is a hallmark of civilization, and unique to civil society. If you compare larges segments of single male population, their sex and dating habits, as well as that of significant numbers of women with long house primitive social tribal groups in Africa and Indonesia today, and hundreds of primitive societies documented by anthropologists, anyone can readily identify the same gangs, male-female group behavior patterns evident to society today.
The tiers of male peer groups that are required to maintain civil society, at least of the last 7000 years, are now absent in urban populations. The result is predictable. In California the prison population has risen from 24,000 in 1980 to 237,000 in 2006. Almost 2% of the male population of California is in jail or prison.
California has the largest captive male population in the world, more than China or Russia, and 7 times the European rate. California now spends more on criminal justice than it does on K-12 education. This year California is choosing between prisons and schools as these are the two major State expenses. Funding for education is being cut to pay for the prison system. Prisoners and guards now total over 2.5% of all Californians.
The per capita number of single males in prison or jails is a indicator of how healthy a civil society is. As is the success of the education system. The institution of marriage is another barometer. California is a bell weather state. It is just an example.
Without going on with an analysis of each succeeding tier of males, by age, education, and profession, what people are seeing is civil society dissolving from the bottom up.
There never has been a “men’s movement”, nor will there be. It is called “civilization”.
Actually, Darleen, it’s more like for every seven “grasping females” there are three of the male variety. But who’s counting? It’s a lot easier to make arguments sweeping important figures under the rug by saying everything is all square.
Yep.
Which one can clearly see here:
http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/BudgetSummary/SUM/1249561.html
K-12 education: 31.0% of budget
Health and human services: 25.3%
Higher Ed: 10.3%
Business, transportation and housing: 9.5%
Corrections and rehabilitation: 7.3%
2007 California adult prison population: 173,312
2007 Adults under DOC juristiction: 323,203
2007 California juvenile prison population: 3,072
CA DOC Employees (for Adults): 57,641
CA DOC Employees (for Juveniles): 3,776
California 2007 prisoners (adult + juvenile): ~180K
California 2006 estimated population: ~36,400K
Prisoners plus DOC employees: ~ 0.5% of California’s population
http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Divisions_Boards/Adult_Operations/Facts_and_Figures.html
http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/summarys.html
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html
Darleen said:
“If its the COUPLES assets, why is her 50% legal interest considered a “divorce penalty” to the man?”
Passing a law that says a horse and a cow are the same doesn’t make it so. Assume that the man works hard and makes most of the money, while the woman doesn’t (the same argument would apply in reverse, btw). Then by what logic can you say the money belongs equally to both?
This isn’t to imply that all women are greedy, self-centred, uncaring shrews. Some of them are quite marvellous - but a lot of them aren’t, particularly the ones who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of entitlement. They’ve never quite believed that there are more important things in life, particularly when you have kids, than implants and stretch marks.
From an Atlantic article by a Lori Gottlieb, via Kai Jones’s blog
“Even women who settle but end up divorced might be in a better position than those of us who became mothers on our own, because many ex-wives get both child-support payments and a free night off when the kids go to Dad’s house for a sleepover.”
Quite telling.
Juvenile CDC inmates: 2,647
Adult CDC inmates: 173,312
Total: about 176K
Approximately the same number of people are
parolees as are incarcerated, so double these
numbers to get the total number of people
under CDC jurisdiction.
Employees for juvenile CDC: 3,776
Employees for adult CDC: 57,641
Total: about 61K
Total inmates plus CDC employees: about 240K
http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/summarys.html
http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Divisions_Boards/Adult_Operations/Facts_and_Figures.html
California population (2006 estimate): 36,457,549 (about 36,450K)
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html
240/36,450 is about 0.65%
Counting all the people on parole as prisoners (which isn’t quite right
as they aren’t in jail…) is about 1.1% of the population.
Over 90% of the prison population is male, however, so if most of the
guard population is also male (a good guess), then we could see about
1% of the California male population in prison or working
as a guard. About 2% of the California male population could be
considered as “under the jurisdiction of the CDC or a guard.”
Juvenile CDC inmates: 2,647
Adult CDC inmates: 173,312
Total: about 176K
Approximately the same number of people are
parolees as are incarcerated, so double these
numbers to get the total number of people
under CDC jurisdiction.
Employees for juvenile CDC: 3,776
Employees for adult CDC: 57,641
Total: about 61K
Total inmates plus CDC employees: about 240K
2007 numbers from the CDC (blog won’t let me submit a link)
California population (2006 estimate): 36,457,549 (about 36,450K)
Estimate from the census bureau
240/36,450 is about 0.65%
Counting all the people on parole as prisoners (which isn’t quite right
as they aren’t in jail…) is about 1.1% of the population.
Over 90% of the prison population is male, however, so if most of the
guard population is also male (a good guess), then we could see about
1% of the California male population in prison or working
as a guard. About 2% of the California male population could be
considered as “under the jurisdiction of the CDC or a guard.”
Just got my final dissolution decree. My married days are over. Yeah I got screwed. Screw marriage.
Maybe if women didn’t spend the entirety of their teens and twenties whoring around, men would be more willing to marry when women decide that adventure time is over and want to settle down in their thirties. The prospect of marrying such a used up slutbag is repulsive. Most young women I would say are outright incapable of monogamy. And that’s even leaving out the anti men quagmire that is unilateral divorce.
You’re right in your initial sentiments: men have weighed up the situation and have decided single life is a far better option. It would almost be a case of Stockholm Syndrome for men to marry the women that used and abused disposable penises for so long in women’s more nubile years.
Just because someone here has not seen many cases of what has been statistically proven out, does not mean that therefore the results are invalid.
Please, counter arguments with statistics or peer reviewed information .. not opinion based upon some small set of people you personally know.
Mostly , that would be you ladies .. denial ain;t a river in Egypt.
Mark in Texas - how to say? You hit the nail on the head!
Typically, a woman will receive 50% ownership of the couple’s assets on initiation of divorce.”
If its the COUPLES assets, why is her 50% legal interest considered a “divorce penalty” to the man?
I’m not going to do the thinking for you, Darleen.
“I don’t think it’s really that tough to be a man or that marriage is such a bad deal compared to living on take-out in your parents’ basement.”
Those aren’t “perpetual adolescents”. Those are divorced men.
Here’s the ofer on the table:
“You have to do what we say, we get to control our children and say what is or isn’t acceptble and if we want to take them away from you, we can, and you have to pay for the privilege, and them, and me, and our roof, clothes, cars, vactions, and what-ever-bloody-else we say you do, the courts will completely suport us, ignore you, and all we need for a reason is whatever we feel like saying you did or didn’t do”.
Gee, I dunno…
Can I get back to you?
I hate to break it to you, ladies, but 30 years of accusatory posturing, television shows that make all men out to be mindless, selfish, and ignorant children who need constant management through overt disappointment and shaming language - and the utter ****holes that are the family law precepts that have evolved from this hype - makes marriage about as attractive as ****ing on an electric fence.
As far as takeout, I am a fantastic cook.
As far as sex, 30 years of feminism has brought us an entire generation of women who, apparently, aspire to be lapdancers, so there’s no lack of that, about.
As far as the rest, feminsism has indeed changed things.
It is now necessary to bring something to the table besides a fork.
Don’t worry, though. Plenty of places offer takeout.
I’m married and man oh man do I ever regret it. Of course the paradox is that I love my little daughter to pieces, but the marriage part is horrendous.
Women can talk about men marrying and having a family, but the truth of it is, the way everything’s arranged these days, we’re really NOT members of our own family’s. We’re sort of like second stringers.
AS men in today’s world we are really only members of our own family’s at the discretion of the children’s mother. If she decides to redefine our role to an uncle with severe financial responsibility’s, there’s a fairly robust legal infrastructure that will enforce that for her.
Now, women — imagine yourself in that position. You’re husband can completely redefine your role as a mother whenever he wants. Anyone with kids will realize that this is sheer terror.
But don’t you think that the real problem is no-fault divorce laws? I can understand Darleen’s arguments to some degree - it is utterly unfair when a man leaves his homemaker wife of 20+ years for a secretary and the wife is left destitute. On the other hand, Darleen, you forget that there are many more women who break their marriage contracts without a better reason than that they were bored. To reward such a woman or an adulteress with the cheated husband’s money is utterly unfair to the husband. I think such immoral women shouldn’t be awarded custody, either. Marriage is a contract and it used to be a binding contract. The party which breaks it should suffer financially, and not be rewarded. It is immoral to reward immoral people.
In my family, everyone except for both grandparents, and one cousin have been divorced, I’ll take my chances in singledom.
And, I’m done wasting my time playing girl games. If you see a personal add and she says no more games, guess what?, she’s a player and likes the player types, and wants another. Most men don’t live a live of half truth’s, where for women it is ok to change your mind every other second. I took orders from my Mother for 17 years, that was about enough for me
I have never met a divorced guy who advocated for marriage, and few married men.
Having done this twice now, I have to say that the root cause has to be the gross difference in expectations and accountablility.
As long as we continue to subsidize single moms, we’re going to have a problem with single moms. Take out the financial incentives, and we’ll have a lot less of it.
The same thing goes with the divorced single moms. If mom can’t raise the kids on her own, why reward her for driving the father out of the kids’ lives?
Let’s look at the reproductive choices. Women say “Children should not be the punishment for sex”, and “my body, my choice”. The result is, women can:
1. use or not use several methods of birth control, lie about it, etc.
1.5 have sex with someone, OR artificial insemination.
2. get an abortion or not, ranging from ‘morning after’ to late term.
3. keep the baby or drop it off for adoption. dropping the baby off for adoption means no long term financial obligation.
4. if she keeps the baby, she has a choice to notify dad or not. she can change her mind later, and the state will happily go after whomever she claims as the dad. example - California will make a token effort to notify him of his court hearing, and if he never gets the summons, in 30 days he’s the presumed dad and he starts to accrue arrearages.
5. ask/shame/pressure the guy into marrying her.
6. divorce him when it’s convienient, and collect a subsidy for up to two decades, including health insurance
7. cheat on the husband without consequence - divorce means he’ll have to pay support, maintenance, AND lose everything he worked for. If HE cheats, same result, so little incentive for her not to cheat, high incentive for him not to cheat.
8. make ex-dad’s life a living hell, just for kicks, revenge, etc.
Men can:
1. abstain OR put up with 1-7 above, in hopes that the other person has an honorable character.
Women who are non-custodial parents who are assigned a support obligation do not pay as high a rate as men, and are less likely to be current on their obligation.
Women who are financially irresponsible in the marriage are likely to NOT be obligated to clean up the mess, it will be assigned to the husband to pay. IF it is split, she will likely default on the obligation, leaving it to the other party to pay, then attempt to sue her for defaulting. Result - for women, a court order to pay an obligation is worth less than the certified copy of the order. If the woman is awarded any joint property that has an associated liability, such as a car, there is zero impact if she refuses to pay on it. Less so if it is financed solely in the wage-earner’s name.
Separate property - dragging out a divorce will usually result in the primary wage earner (the man) paying all the bills for the stay-at-home, while (she) continues to run up debt and live expense free. He’ll have to live somewhere else, for a year or longer. While he’s busy trying to juggle work and the court’s temporary orders that all the bills must be paid, and his own legal councel, plus the cost of her legal councel, the non-working spouse has all day long to work on the case, plus has control of all of the documents, and a good many of his possessions. The consequence of destroying his property, posessions, documents: aside from a finger shaking by the judge, nothing. In my personal case, I had, literally, $15 a month beyond my support obilgations, and the mortgage payment on a house I was prevented from occupying. My personal possessions were sold off to pay for the divorce and the other party’s living expenses, then when it was over, I had to forfeit ALL of our ‘joint’ assets. As far as ‘joint’ property goes, a great deal of it is an additional bonus that goes with winning custody of the children, which makes any underhanded tactics in that regard financially rewarding.
Family law sucks for men. All of the responsibility, none of the rights and privilidges, and the winning game strategy is to villify the man. The man is expected to remain an honorable gentleman the whole time.
Criminal law - the biggest crippling stick in the divorce game is to make a charge of domestic violence. It is nearly impossible for a man to file a DV charge against his spouse, even with witnesses. However, the presumptions are that women never lie about this sort of thing, and ANYTHING men do is considered abuse. Police and social services have a high financial incentive to prosecute and harass men, separate them from their children, etc. The man loses additional time and money defending himself against a criminal charge. As extortion goes, there’s no better tactic to force someone into an unfavorable settlement.
So, since I constantly hear from women that men suck, we’re just a bunch of violent, lazy, alcoholic, video game playing perverts, who never do anything around the house, why should we engage in something that is certainly only going to enrich the legal system, and only result in everyone’s dissatisfaction, including any possible children?
Do us all a favor: When that guy kneels next to you, looks up at you with his eyes shinning and his heart in his hands, just say no.
Th point is, nobody sane wants to enter an endlessly litigated, adversarial situation that is, ostensibly, founded upon deep feelings of love an affection, and certainly not one where they are stripped of their ammunition by simply participating.
Wedded bliss, for men, has become a de-facto oxymoron.
It’s a chess game from “Care to have coffee with me” all the way to “I’ll fax you my attorney’s number. I’m taking the children to mother’s”.
There’s nothing in it for us, anymore.
A hypothetical question for the women:
Suppose you’re in love with a man and the two of you are considering marriage. As you’re getting close to committing, he tells you that he’d like you to sign a pre-nuptial agreement. The agreement states:
1. If the marriage results in children, he will stay home to care for them or take a lesser career move to be more free to care for them.
2. You(the wife) will be primarily financially responsible for the support of the family — even if he’s working.
3. If the marriage ends in divorce, he will retain custody of the children. You may see them four days per month.
4. You will pay him (at least) 40% of your take home pay every month if the marriage results in divorce. This amount will be set as a dollar amount and will remain in effect regardless of any change in your personal financial circumstances.
Would you sign that, or would you judge that to be a bad deal? Because basically, ALL men in the Western world are signing that pre-nup when they get married.
“The truth of it is, the way everything’s arranged these days, we’re really NOT members of our own families. We’re sort of like second stringers. As men in today’s world we are really only members of our own families at the discretion of the children’s mother.”
Bing.
Touchdown.
So.. in short.. “Don’t you want a wife?”
Yes. That’d be wonderful.
And if you meet any women who vaguely understand what one is, PM me her number.
If I wanted to be a sperm donor so some chick’s ratbag mom, and the rest of HER clan, could make cooing noises at the fruit of her little jewel’s baby barn and treat me like a cross between an ATM and a mild interruption to her endless fascination with the word “gramma”, I’d fill out an appurtenant form.
Hint:
If you aren’t going to move in with your husband and be part of your new family, don’t take the ring.
We love ya, ladies, but we’re dirty sonsabitches if we’re going to exist to legitimise your need for ovarian fullfilment and cater to your preconcieved notions so you can play house with actual kids and actual money and then sue us for “mental anguish”, once you decide that you got what you came for.
*hug*
Take care.
I find that most of the generalizations directed at women stem from some one’s personal experience (either them, a friend, or a family member) of getting shafted in a divorce.
Most of the anger directed toward “selfish women” are really directed toward which ever particular woman that shafted them.
I am sorry for all the divorces out there and the examples of people behaving dishonorably. But the majority of women can’t be like this, or else, our species would fail.
It is my hope that there are enough happily married couples out there to serve as an example that marriage and everlasting love is an endeavor worth pursuing.
How would our species fail, if most of the aggressive and ugly changes in a marriage happen after children are born? If one looks at all these articles about women wondering where all the men have gone, several things come to light:
- They have come down with a bad case of baby-rabies, or are about to.
- They couch everything in terms of what they want. Never at all about what they offer a man except more responsibility. They don’t even mention the word ‘love’ in these articles.
- They honestly think that men will respond to the marriage call by shaming language and tactics. Yeah…that’ll work.
Wake up, women…The Clue Train made it’s final stop where all the men are standing, and they are climbing aboard in ever-greater numbers. We have every conceivable right to pursue happiness in our own fashion, without being responsible for yours.
And for the record, if all of these angry responses are the result of personal observation and experience, and if there are so many of them, that speaks to the notion that a large number of men have been screwed over by a large number of women.
Get over yourself.
Deal with it.
ns-
But I think it’s also a valuable insight that many of these aren’t really generalizations directed at women as much as they are observations about how our culture and society are now constructed.
To reiterate — men are not really part of their own families anymore — we’re members at the discretion of our children’s mother. If she’s a good, kind woman who’s committed to family come hell or high water, then that man may never gain an understanding of his place, and he’ll be happier for that.
But on the other hand, if she convinces herself for whatever reason that 4 days a month is enough for her children to see him, he really has no recourse. And look around you: there are plenty of what are considered “good women” who have created this arrangement in their families lives. I’ll bet I could name 20 right now, all who are typically thought of as fine people and a “great catch.”
“I find that most of the generalizations directed at women stem from some one’s personal experience”
Welcome to how it felt to listen to forty years of “all men are…”
By the way, we’re the same species. Homo sapien.
So what you’re saying is.. “I’M not like that!”
Okey doke. Then again, you’re not supposed to be.
“It is my hope that there are enough happily married couples out there to serve as an example that marriage and everlasting love is an endeavor worth pursuing.”
Everlasting love IS worth pursuing and working for. As far as the other half of that equation:
It’s also worth playing fairly to keep, on both sides, once you assure your significant other that you have, indeed, found it.
Unfortunately, the topic is the decline of marriage and most men will readily agree that misandric entitlement princesses have shooed eligible men away from anything that can be litigated, in droves. If enough men - all with no good reason to lie about it — all state the same circumstances, does it matter if it was just “whatever woman shafted them”?
Saying it was “just that woman” isn’t quite accurate with a 57% divorce rate and an entire generation of men who see marriage as the equivalent of pouring gas over everything they own and then taking up cigars.
We all say we want the same thing, and… great, but the figures state otherwise and when the system is no longer rigged against one of the available genders, we might get back into the game.
I wish you love. The everlasting sort. As far as marriage, I’d have to see your resumè and get some references, because you wish marriage on two people.
@ns: Yes, it IS my personal experience, but it is also the majority of my peers, my family, and my co-workers. More and more men are finding out that there is no reward in being a decent and honorable guy, especially when there’s a conflict.
I’m glad to hear that you’re in a successful partnership. They are very rare, these days, and yes, I think that you’re likely a rarity, yourself. We are raising generation after generation of women to think that men (fathers, especially) are useless and unnecessary, and that women have every right to expect some impossible fantasy marriage, showered with gifts and affection for simply existing and allowing their incompetent dufus to bask in their glow. The coaching from tv, women’s groups, etc., tells women that they need to run things, and if he doesn’t like it your way, tough, no compromises. From the sound of movies, tv, magazines, female politicians, feminist blogs, every man and husband out there is, at best, a useless pain in the ass, however the generalizations directed against men are far worse. We don’t typically write off every woman in America as a violent sexual deviant who can’t cook dinner without burning the house down.
Much like Kay Hymowitz’s take - it’s ok for women to refuse or delay marriage - they’re ‘finding themselves’, but men are perpetual adolescents, shirking their social responsibility. The double standard is extremely grating, but unfortunatly, very normal in today’s “Men Suck” culture. ANYTHING that men like must be labeled as misantrhopic, mysoginist, exploitive, juvenile, or perverted trash.
With “MEN SUCK” coming from every angle, 24×7, no rebuttal, no wonder young men are reacting with “what’s the use?”
For short term gain, it helps to be a jerk, starving artiost, strung out member of a rock band, or some other sort of emo, hip, edgy trainwreck. Being a nice guy just sucks. All of the jerks have dates, judging by the amount of time I hear women complaining about how the cute dude with the nose ring treats them.
From a male perspective, there is no long term gain, only a substantial amount of risk. I don’t know anyone who’s been married longer than 10 years. Anyone who is in the 5-10 year band is currently at the “please kill me now” state of desperation, with mounting bills and a spouse who’s willing to escallate any conflict as much as possible to make any normal petty disagreement a screaming match until she gets her way.
“The end justifies the means” is the operating phrase when it comes to our adversarial divorce system. I have seen too many cases of the non-working spouse delivering the ultimatum: “you can give it to me, or you can give it to the lawyers, or I’ll just destroy it now. Your choice.”
Child support (for men, anyway) is like the protection racket scene in “Goodfellas”. Lost your job? Awww, too bad, pay me. Oh, ha ha, yes, you can pay to retain an attorney, and we’ll have hearing after hearing for six months while you try to look for a new job, but we’re not lowering your payments in the meantime, so pay me. Car broke? Too bad, pay me. Got hurt or sick and have medical bills? Too bad, pay me. Got married again and have a new family that’s suffering? Too bad (you didn’t learn your lesson the first time), pay me. The only thing that matters is that child support payment. Your ex spends it all on the new, edgy punk boyfriend and drugs, instead of the kids? Too bad, pay me. You’re a victim of paternity fraud? Sorry, the kids are more important, pay me. Ex won’t let you see the kids? Too bad, pay me.
The attorney general will gleefully come after men (not women) for non-payment of child support. If she’s not letting him see the kids, he’ll have to retain an attorney and take her to court. The results will be mixed, he will likely NOT recover his legal costs, and I can tell you that the ex will retaliate by calling the police with a false charge at the next exchange, if she doesn’t make a tearful plea for protection during the hearing.
I think we need to start telling boys when it comes to sex ed that the biggest risk in their life is NOT herpes, aids, hepatitis, syphilis, ghonnorea, chlamydia, HPV, it is the Family Law court.
I think that we should be educating school age boys that they forfeit any future decision making once they have sex, plus all of the financial and legal consequences. Let them know that they’ll be paying higher taxes for all the social programs to support the single mom’s that the cool kids are knocking up, too.
You know what, ns?
Men aren’t angry.
Seriously.
We’re just sort of gaping at women in dull suprise that they’re still trying to tell us how things must be or we’re .
We’re not angry.
We’re not selling any notions.
We’re just.. not buying any.
That’s all… no animosity, no wild gesticulation and posturing indignities.
We’re just sort of “Huh..” And yeah, that’s kind of sad.
That should read “or we’re (insert shameful notion here)”. It truncated while looking for an HTML statement. My apologies.
It is very sad indeed to find so many people so disillusioned with marriage to choose not to engage in it anymore. Even more sad is that those of use where marriage has ill served, applaud others who choose not to marry.
When it works, marriage is a wonderful, fulfilling, and satisfying experience.
What can each of us, as individuals do to change this? Each and every one of us has to accept personal responsibility for our part in creating this aversion to marriage - either through our actions or inaction. Instead of blaming each other, blaming the other sex, let’s look to what we can do to change the situation? The courts? The selfishness? The entitlements?
Please don’t say, “tell the women to stop being self serving b*tches.” Because that’s not what YOU can do. That’s what other people can do… and you can’t make other people do what they don’t want. But you can make yourself do anything.
Some of you would ask, what can *I* myself do, since I am so high holy announcing that we all take personal responsibility? I can make my marriage work. I can act honorably if I get divorced. I can learn from my mistakes if I get divorced and choose more wisely next time. I can teach my children to be honorable human beings in the face of adversity.
But then again, what we say we will do is sometimes different than what is actually done when faced with hardship. I guess venting has its uses.
But I do hope everyone here that has had it with marriage will give it, and themselves, another chance. I guess I am naive to think that since marriage has made me so happy, that wishing the same happiness for others is desirable.
Sorry to have offended.
You neither offended, nor are being “high holy”.
That’s sort of assumptive.
I agree with this: “and you can’t make other people do what they don’t want. But you can make yourself do anything.”
And, believe me, when the other half of this equation does the anything that they can do, and things change, we’ll know, but we feel absolutely unobligated to dash ourselves against the concrete wall presently in place, anymore.
ns -
There’s one gaping big hole in your call for personal responsibility: marriage requires responsibility from all parties involved. That means the man, the woman, and the state must act honestly and justly.
If I go into a marriage with a woman who represents herself as honest, only to find out that she considers me as a starter husband and takes me to a divorce court with an extremely anti-male bias, I’m hosed, doubly so if I went in trustingly without a prenuptual agreement.
The big problem here is not the men or women getting involved, it’s the vicious bias of family law courts. Until this is fixed, marriage will not be desirable to men, no matter how personally responsible they are.
I’ve got more thoughts here.
I figure I will drop my 2 cents in. As a young guy just 23, I have seen a few divorces. My uncle got divorced when my aunt went a bit nuts. Her life now is messed up. He is a farmer and had to agree to pay her 30,000 a year in alimony, so he wouldn’t lose half his land that he needs to make a living. Thank God his boys were old enough to have input and choose to stay with him. This is in Kansas by the way were 30,000 will leave you pretty comfortable.
I have a co-worker that saw a long time buddy get buried by his wife. The buddy’s wife’s mother had been divorced 6 times and was giving her daughter advice to get the most out of the divorce. She quit her job so to get more money from him as she wasn’t working. Then he took out a Temporary Restraining Order to kick him out of his own house and obtain de facto custody of the kids.
Marriage can be nice for a guy, but a divorce will DESTROY him. Especially if kids are involved. One man said it best. However many years you are in the marriage that is how long it will take to get back to the point you were at during the beginning of the marriage. Married for 5 years? It will take 5 more after divorce to get back to the starting point.
Marriage doesn’t offer much that a guy can’t get by cohabitating. Sex is easy to come by. You still have control over your life and things that gets taken away by marriage. If a girlfriend has taken away sex? Get a new girlfriend. Wife taken away sex? TOUGH! Girlfriend demanding you pay for everything and expensive stuff? Break up with her. Wife wanting more things? Either get divorced and lose half, listen to her constant nagging, or watch as she goes out and buys it anyway with your credit card.
Marriage pretty much means you ceding control over to a woman for most things in your life.
Marriage used to be how you got children. Not anymore… Now you can have them out of wedlock. You can still get married for kids, but she can take them away at any time, no real extra rights there. Just more hooks into you by the law.
And GOD the women today!!! Most are jaded, entitled, whores. And yes I mean whores. Most they seem to offer to a relationship is sex. They all have a laundry list of things they expect out of the man. Money, half the housework, a house, better paying job, ect. What do they offer back? Sex… How is that different than a whore? I don’t count kids among the things she brings, because she can take them away easily.
Sorry for the rant, it just ticks me off to see so many women always miles off the reason most men are afraid of marriage.
As I like to say, “Men are not afraid of commitment. It’s just women don’t know what commitment is.” Men are willing to put up with a lot from a woman and ignore flaws in their wife. Many women are not. They instead will divorce when things get rough instead of working through it anymore. It is not till death do us part. Now it is till I feel bored or inconvenienced.
Well that’s it for me. Good luck to all of you out there to find one of the good caring people left.
In the course of feminist ideology, everything from radical lesbians proseletysing their “sisters” away from those darn, oppressive men - so they can score with them - to the idiotic notions expressed in vanity mags and television shows that parade an endless lists of codified complaints about the other gender, there has been a shithouse full of bad ideas postulated, argued and implemented in the name of “womynliess”, and other linguistically overwrought twaddle.
And some very useful and past-due ones, too.
But the preponderance of the billion dollar industries - that were once a simple set of requests and demands to give women equal footing in society - have, sadly, not served any single thing more than the people who profit from stapling the tatters of it’s fabric of intent to whatever they’re selling. It has led a lot of women to make decisions about their lifestyles (that’s marketing wanker talk for “brand allegience”) that they have demanded be implemented as litigable precepts and gender entitlements.
Men simply wish to remove themselves from the consequences of those decisions, and the fastest and most effective way is to remove ourselves of the miasma of biased social and legal constructs surrounding marriage.
“I don’t think it’s really that tough to be a man”
What a ignorant statement , made me completely disregard the rest of your post. It’s a sad reflection on the modern American woman that men would rather play video games , then engage in a meaningful intimate relationship with them.
Quoth ns:
Crieth the woman, “Be fair! Do not shirk!
Hold nothing against she who has not hurt you… yet.”
Men say “We’ve too long had the worst of that bet.
For there to be fairness, both sides have to work.”
The femini-Marxists long ago wrote the song
And, true to form, gave it their clichéd best
Captured as jokes: “If a man speaks in the forest,
And there is no woman to hear, is he wrong?”
“No fault” means “It’s always our fault”, don’t you see?
We’re tired of being the scum of the earth
We’re just walking wallets, and objects of mirth
You wouldn’t take what you want us to be.
You want to reverse this aversion? Do you
Ever think what a movement toward FAIRNESS might be?
When bad actors suffer and good ones are free
From the burden of hearing some liar say “Screw you”
And having to take it. Do you want to be fair?
Change the law so emotional vampires can’t skate
So false accusations are punished, and hate
Is no cause to punish one half of a pair.
At this point I’m all versified out, but I’ll give you a few possibilities for making the system fairer:
Serious penalties for false accusations of abuse, including perjury prosecution for the accuser and disbarment for any attorney suborning same. Civil penalties including compensatory and punitive damages to the accused, with the accuser’s attorney considered as a co-defendant (for insurance purposes). (Yes, I know that this is so common that the courts would be tied in knots over it. The point is to get rid of what is called “the nuclear option”.)
Completely sex-blind support payment schedules.
Enforcement of custody/visitation as strongly as support, with deviations investigated as cause for impeachment of judges.
Make child support deductible to the payer and taxable to the payee.
Limit child support to reasonable consideration for basic, incremental living expenses; e.g. a two-bedroom dwelling does not cost twice as much a one-bedroom, and a non-custodial parent’s financial obligations should not include money which would have normally gone toward gifts to the child, frills such as sports, and so forth.
You can start with that. Call us when you’re done.
Dammit, that was supposed to be a bullet list, but the system stripped my HTML (and HAS NO PREVIEW! C’mon, this was standard practice in the last century already).
Well, JJ, here is your second book.
A man gets married because that is what a man does.
EP,
That’s a good start, but may I suggest something simpler, like my comment about taking away the commercialism from divorce?
Also, either amend no-fault so that the filer loses all rights, or get rid of it.
I like your suggestion that judges be impeached, but perhaps we could take it further? A public flogging, particularly for the so-called examiners, if any hint of a mistake is uncovered. Likewise for the attorneys; additionally, since we want all children to have competent parents, such attorneys should lose custody of their children.
Don’t you think that’s fair?
If that’s supposed to be humor, I suggest you don’t quit your day job.
We have read about the failures of marriage, now let’s have a treatise on the success of shacking up and begetting bastards.
If I can’t sit down at a kitchen table with you, look you in the eye, and know who I am speaking to; I don’t want you for a friend, a president, a partner or a wife.
It’s pretty much that simple.
That being said: “It is a woman’s perogative to change her mind.”
No mention of the degree of import upon which matters she is given this freedom - with impunity as to the consequences.
No mention of scope, scale or gravity of the matter.
Just a blank check to retract her word at a whim.
Let’s apply this liberally:
“As your (friend / employer / employee / business partner / co-worker) I will, in the course of our interaction under the given mutual responsibililties which define our relationships and duties, promise t0 agree and adhere to the rules and obligations that present themselves and do my share. However, I may simply change my mind, at any time, for any reason or lack thereof, thusly leaving you high and dry and not only will I be free to do so without any concern for recompense for such actions on my part, it bloody well may cost you everything you own. Sign here.”
Any questions? Any answers? Anybody care for a mint?
I’m 26 y/o, male, fit, college-educated (aiming for a top-tier MBA soon), debt-free, 780+ credit scores, gainfully employed, and straight. I’ve never cheated on any of my past girlfriends, and I would always remember birthdays, anniversaries, etc.
I am, along with my close buddies, currently avoiding marriage like the plague.
Ladies, the marriage strike is a reality, and it is gaining serious traction amongst young male professionals. I have marriage avoiding friends who work in corporate finance, law, medicine, architecture, and other lucrative fields. We didn’t get to be so successful by being idiots, and we have woken up to the fact that marriage is one hell of a risky proposition.
We don’t worry about lonliness, as scoring pretty, younger girls has become way easier with the trappings of success.
One day, I’d love to find that special one and only, but I’m not going to bother with that kind of commitment until the divorce and custody laws in this country get a major overhaul.
And there you have it.
Best of luck, ladies. Have a great day. Don’t forget to get your parking validated.
Coffee and doughnuts in the lobby.
@Engineer-Poet
Your reply only contains what *other people* can do, including me, to make the marriage situation better. It doesn’t illustrate what you, yourself, can do to make the situation better. Maybe having other people fix marriage is the solution you prefer. That is fine if it is.
It is perfectly fair if you think what I intend to do to improve things is not good enough. And I accept that. Neither of us can make the other do things they are unwilling to do.
You may not agree that there is hope for marriage. You may not agree that marriage can ever be fulfilling and satisfying. You may even think I’m just deluded and am not *really* in a satisfying marriage myself.
Our world is whatever we believe it to be. And no one can force you to believe differently.
The purpose of my post was to just give a voice of hope. I wanted to let disillusioned people out there know that a truly satisfying and fulfilling marriage does exist and is worth seeking.
Thanks for listening, everyone.
ns:
“It is very sad indeed to find so many people so disillusioned with marriage to choose not to engage in it anymore. Even more sad is that those of use where marriage has ill served, applaud others who choose not to marry.
When it works, marriage is a wonderful, fulfilling, and satisfying experience.
What can each of us, as individuals do to change this? Each and every one of us has to accept personal responsibility for our part in creating this aversion to marriage - either through our actions or inaction. Instead of blaming each other, blaming the other sex, let’s look to what we can do to change the situation? The courts? The selfishness? The entitlements?
Please don’t say, “tell the women to stop being self serving b*tches.” Because that’s not what YOU can do. That’s what other people can do… and you can’t make other people do what they don’t want. But you can make yourself do anything.
Some of you would ask, what can *I* myself do, since I am so high holy announcing that we all take personal responsibility? I can make my marriage work. I can act honorably if I get divorced. I can learn from my mistakes if I get divorced and choose more wisely next time. I can teach my children to be honorable human beings in the face of adversity.
But then again, what we say we will do is sometimes different than what is actually done when faced with hardship. I guess venting has its uses.
But I do hope everyone here that has had it with marriage will give it, and themselves, another chance. I guess I am naive to think that since marriage has made me so happy, that wishing the same happiness for others is desirable.
Sorry to have offended.”
NS, I’m one of the people who’ve been through the marriage/divorce cycle. I’m not applauding people for avoiding marriage, I’m cautioning men that marriage is a bad investment of your time, and that any concept of fairness and equality before the law does not exist, but rather a gross double standard in expectations and accountability does. I’m warning men who may be considering marriage that they may be facing a disaster from which they may be unable to ever recover from, that the life that they’ve worked so hard for can be taken from them, simply because their partner is dissatisfied.
Google “grey divorce” and japanese “wet-leaves” for more examples.
I’m genuinely happy to hear that your marriage works. It’s probably what most men would be delighted to have, myself included. I’d *wish* the same for others, too. Unfortunately, with our divorce rate, it is not likely to happen, and the outcome is not in men’s control.