I have just a few questions….why should any man get married? What is in it for men to get married?
As soon as those questions are answered, you might find out why the trend in shacking up is happening.
There is a new article in The Atlantic that shows the steady decline in marriage. How can this be good for society? It isn’t. The data has shown that children raised in unmarried homes do far worse than those that don’t. It is just a fact that some people choose to ignore.
Women clearly gain all the benefits from marriage, but what do men have to gain? Today, a woman is so quick to live with a man, share the expenses, and have sex without the commitment of marriage. Why SHOULD any man get married?
If things go wrong, women clearly have the upper hand in divorce court, so I think it makes perfect sense for men to shack up and have a roommate. You can play house without having to actually play house for real.
Someone please answer this question..why should men get married? As soon as you come up with clear, convincing answers, you might see men ask more women to get married. I have my theories as to why it is best for men and women to be married, but I would love to hear from anyone else.
And by the way, I do think marriage is best for men and women who want to raise a family, although I suggest staying away from marriage at all costs unless you have a prenup and the no-fault laws are amended to so that those with children have to prove fault before they cash in.
An excerpt from the Atlantic piece:
Put more quirkily: In 1968, if you wanted to throw a dinner party for all your twentysomething friends who had moved out of their parents’ home, and you invited three girls who lived together, you would have to invite fourteen married couples to make the party proportionally representative of your generation’s living arrangements (okay, not a priority for most dinner parties, parties, but still.) Roommate was a synonym for spouse, basically.
What changed? More school and fewer spouses, for starters. The share of adults with a bachelor’s degree has nearly doubled since 1968, and most of the change is because of women who rallied into the workforce. As more women grabbed degrees, the average marriage age has steadily inched up into the upper 20s. Meanwhile, birth control, in particular normalization of “the pill,” nearly eliminated the odds of becoming pregnant, allowing women to invest with confidence in their work-life and delay marriage without worrying about an unwanted pregnancy derailing their careers. Meanwhile, for lower-income women, marriage rates have declined for more debatable reasons.
That’s a rough explanation for why fewer couples are getting married in their early 20s, which is itself a rough explanation for the growth of platonic roommates, but surely there’s more. Any other ideas?
Some of the comments I’ve read are interesting. One reader on the site wrote:
As far as a cause for this trend goes, it seems like Derek hits the big ones with women in the workplace and the pill. There are a few others that i’ve observed during the past 6-years of big-city living with three roommates:
1. Economic conditions for young people are terrible (student loans, poor job prospects, bleak future, etc.) and they cannot afford to form new households. While this only explains the prior five-years, it includes the entire Millennial generation.
2. Men and women both have idealized partners that do not exist, making it hard to pair up. Men want the “lady in the street, but a freak in the bed”, while women want a laundry list of contradictory characteristics in a man.
3. Many young people have lost faith in marriage due to the broken homes they were raised in.
4. Women always prefer to “marry up”, which is a major problem if they happen to be successful. For example, a young woman that is a medical doctor making $200K a year will find only about one man in 200 or so who is eligible for her to date. By contrast a male MD making $200K can date all 200 out of 200 women if he wishes, because there is no such constraint on men.
5. The definition of marriage changed from a “responsibility and duty to the family” to a “journey of personal fulfillment and happiness”. A spouse is no longer just a parent, partner, and lover, they have to be a mentor, therapist, activity partner, best friend, mind reader, and a whole host of other roles. Expectations are a little more sane for roommates.
W.F. Price wrote on the website The Spearhead wrote:
You might think young people have given up on the idea of marriage and family completely, but I think something else is at work here. The decline in marriage amongst the young isn’t something young people see as a permanent life situation. Most young people, even today, still hope that they will at some point get married. Just not yet.
So what are they waiting for?
Economic factors are very important, but I think there’s a strong sense that marriage is a very insecure situation if you’re young. Young men and women (men in particular), see it as something that could go wrong at any time. Because of feminist family law, there is no longer any security in marriage. Living with a roommate, parents or simply shacking up is the safer alternative.
However, for all the debate on the marriage gap, high illegitimacy and tanking marriage rate, the root causes are very rarely addressed. It’s partly a generation gap, as the traditional media has become a culturally alien institution dominated by people in late middle age who are unfamiliar with the reality for Americans under the age of 45 or so. But there’s a willful ignorance as well. Those who supported feminism, mass immigration and the destruction of the traditional household always held that they were improving society, and after having devoted their lives to these causes, they are unwilling to admit that they failed — miserably.
Your thoughts?
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