Talking points: marriage, relationships
With marriage rates seemingly at an all-time low, and most of the old reasons for marriage largely defunct, it’s a question many men are asking. It was something I wrestled with too. So…why bother with marriage? And why did I get married?
[00:00] – Statistics on marriage and some of the reasons we used to get married
[06:56] – Why I chose marriage
Transcript
What’s going on, Team?
Why are marriage rates in decline? There seems to be a disproportionate amount of people that are not only checking out from dating, but are just checking out from marriage altogether. There was some recent data that came out from the United States Congress, the Joint Economic Commission. Marriage is now between 6.5% and 6.9% marriages per thousand people. That is down significantly from the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early 2000s. What seems to be fascinating is that as we reach this all-time low within marriages, there seems to be a couple things driving this.
So I wanted to talk about why did we get married in the first place? Is marriage really even worth it? Why might you do it? So I’m gonna share a little bit about my personal story towards the end. But one of the things that I found fascinating is when I was doing research for this was that trends that are being set right now are showing that people are just opting out of dating and marriage altogether.
There’s men between 18 and 29, 66% of men in that age bracket are single, and of that age range, 50% of men say that they’re not even looking for a partner or a relationship. Then you have women, who projections are showing that by 2040, 45% of women between the age of 25 and 45 are going to be childless and single. So not in a marriage and without children. And that’s the highest that’ll ever have been, period. Not only that, and this is a different topic, and maybe I’ll talk about this in a different video, of those women who don’t have children post-menopause, the women who get out of the window that they can have children, 8 out of 10 of those women say that it was non-intentional, meaning that most of them wanted to have children, but the timing wasn’t right, or whatever the reason was that it just didn’t work out. So it’s not that they weren’t able to reproduce, it’s that it just never happened for them. There is a tremendous amount of grief coming up for a lot of women around this topic.
But let’s talk about marriage specifically. So as marriage rates decline, I think one of the things that is important to talk about is why did we get married in the first place? So I’m gonna bucket this into a couple [three] very clear and simple things. Then we’ll talk about some ideas around why this is happening.
First and foremost was economic reasons. Men and women got together, there were very clear roles – not saying that’s good or bad, but it’s just the way it was. The men would go out and work, the women would raise the children, and so there was an economic incentive for women to be with a man. There was this economic force of…okay, if I’m gonna have a child, it’s probably better to do that with somebody who can provide a certain lifestyle. Buy us a house. We can have a car or before that, a horse. But that was the structure. So for a very long time, for the most part, men went out into the workforce of the world. They tilled the farms, they built the buildings, they built the cities, the infrastructure, the pipes, the whole thing. And women were making sure that the family was being tended to at home. So there was this economic structure that was in place.
The second big one was religion. You were getting married for religious purposes, showcasing that your relationship was permitted by God and that you were following certain orthodoxies and certain ideologies, and you were abiding by certain rules that were laid out by your religion and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it was all underneath this religious umbrella.
Then lastly, it gave people a very clear sense of function or purpose or role. So as I was talking about before, for a lot of men, this was your function. You were the provider. You, for better or for worse, were expected to go out and work and make a living to make sure that your family [was] provided [for].
I think in some ways, we structured our family systems like that for a very long time because we’ve generally built our social structures to coincide with how we’ve evolved – with evolutionary processes. We’ve gone out, historically, men have gone out around the world and been the hunters. They’ve been the ones that have gone out, and if you were in North America a thousand years ago, braved not getting eaten by a grizzly bear or a cougar or whatever it was, and in other parts of the world it was going out to hunt for antelope and make sure that you weren’t gonna get eaten by a lion, or a jaguar, or something like that.
So our social structures have, generally speaking, coincided with our evolutionary structures. But we’ve reached this place where that’s not necessary anymore. The economic incentives have basically dissolved because 42% of American households have women outearning the men. The economic structure that was in place before, that’s gone. So a lot of women, they’re not marrying for security or financial incentive.
The religious piece is very quickly dissolving. There’s less people going to church than ever before. Something like 40% of Americans identify as spiritual, but not religious. So they’re not getting married for religious purposes.
The role in the function part has started to dissolve, as well. As women have become more fiercely financially independent, more men are hearing things like, I don’t need a man. I don’t need a man to provide for me. Those types of things. So where a man used to be…okay, my why I would get married as a man is…because I’m going to provide, I’m going to protect. My role in this relationship has a very specific purpose and function, and that can give me a sense of purpose in life. And there’s many benefits to that for a number of reasons, which I’m not gonna get into. There’s also obviously some constraints that we could talk about, but I think the biggest thing that I’ve come to is why would anybody get married now?
If you’re a man, because like 95% of you watching my channel and on the podcast, there’s more women that tune in for sure, but if you’re on YouTube, it’s 95% dudes. If you’re watching this or you’re listening to this and you’re a guy, you’re probably thinking like, why would I bother getting married? And I gotta tell you, I asked this question for myself for a very long time, I make good money, I’m tall, I’m attractive. I like traveling the world. I have a really good social circle within my male friend group. So there really wasn’t a lot of incentive.
I wasn’t getting married for economic purposes. I wasn’t getting married for a sense of purpose or function. I wasn’t getting married for religion. And so I grappled with this notion of why would I get married? What’s the purpose of doing that? Because really, I think one of the other things is that marriage, still to this day, from a judicial and legal system, is still predicated on this notion that men are the providers. You can very clearly look at the data and see that historically, within the last sort of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, but especially still today, where 42% of American households, women are outearning men, men get the short end of the stick when divorce happens.
And the big challenge is that something like 75% of divorces are initiated by women. You hear a lot of guys of like, why the hell would I get married? There’s no role or function for me. I’m not getting married for religion. I’m not getting married toprovide for my family. My wife is making good money, or my girlfriend’s making good money. Like, why would I go do that? Especially knowing that the chances are if this doesn’t work out, she’s going to be ending the marriage. She’s gonna be the love one leaving, and if we have kids or financial assets, I’m probably going to get the short end of the stick on that. I’m probably gonna get shafted in some way, shape, or form.
There’s of course, exceptions to the rules, but statistically, men are going to go through that divorce and they’re gonna have to pay more in alimony. They’re gonna have to pay more in child support. They’re gonna lose more of their financial assets. That’s just the way that our court system still operates.
So I thought about all of this data for a very long time, and I thought about why would I want to get married? Cause when I met my now-wife, and we’ve been married for four years, we just celebrated our four year anniversary. I thought about this for a while, and I really came to the place of I’m not getting married for any of those reasons. We’re gonna keep our financial assets separate, and we’re gonna have agreements around our finances, and my wealth, and her money. I got to the place where I decided that I wanted to get married because I saw it not as a religious thing or any of those things, but actually as matrimony, as a commitment to the relationship itself.
I think one of the things that I’ve noticed within our modern culture is that relationships are paper thin, and the excuses and the reasons that people have for bouncing out of a relationship is so high. I see all these stories online of all these “oh, I’m, I broke up with him because I want to go and live my best life and I just, I wanna be free and I want to express my most authentic self,” and [men] are like, I broke up with her because, she wanted too much from me and she was asking too much and da-da-da-da-da.”
So I think what I see is that when things get hard in relationships, which of course they’re going to get hard, the tendency of people is to peace out, is to not push through the challenge; and the beauty of a powerful relationship is that it’s going to help you. Carl Jung said that ” the fastest racehorse in the race of individuation is marriage,” aka relationship.
So the real, underlying principle that I came to around is that you are making a declaration not just to that other person, and not necessarily to yourself, but to the structure of relationship itself, to the relationship itself between you and this person. And you’re saying, “I’m going to commit to taking care of, protecting and providing for this third entity that exists between us, and that in doing so, I’m going to learn something fundamental about being human, about tending to this earth, about tending to this culture and society that we live in that’s so chaotic, and that so many people, as soon as things get challenging and hard, they peace out.”
Now, I’m not saying that you should get married and if abuse starts to happen that you stay in it, or if it’s super unhealthy that you stay in it, but I’m saying that you make a commitment to something that is bigger than the context of – “oh, we’re dating.” “Oh, we just live together. We’re in this relationship.” Maybe you don’t need to get married to do that. Maybe there’s a different way for you to go about it. But for me, matrimony was the recognition that I was making a commitment to something that was beyond just a relationship, that was beyond just living together; and dedicating myself as a man to this third body of the relationship and saying, “I’m going to commit to tending to this aspect of life.” When things get hard, I know I’ve also found a woman who’s going to do the same thing. You know that’s very important for her, that we’re both dedicated to almost like tending to a child – if you have a child together, you both parent it. When you get married, the whole purpose of it, again, if you strip away all of the religious and whatever, is to learn to take care of something else that’s bigger than you, and your relationship is bigger than you. And it’s bigger than just the other person, right?
So I think that’s the main reason why I got married, is that it was a dedication and a commitment. To provide for and to protect something that was bigger than me, that was bigger than my partner. And it was a declaration of something more meaningful than just where we’ve lived together for seven years.
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