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Comment by davemp | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty interesting take on divorce.

I'd be hesitant to view marriage as a financial partnership though. To me, marriage is more of a life partnership where both parties are "all in". A lot of the benefits of having a "life partner" stem from having someone who unconditionally watches your back and keeps your needs in mind. You can't put a price on that type of a partnership by definition (you introduce a monetary condition).

I agree that someone with real wealth could hire folks to manage their assets, administrate, listen to their thoughts/concerns, provide intimacy, etc, at the cost of a fraction of their net worth well below 50%.

Maybe people worried about protecting their wealth should just hire out those roles instead of getting married. I wonder why they don't. :)

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> I'd be hesitant to view marriage as a financial partnership though.

Acknowledging the problems with the contract requires looking at the realities of the contract.

The reality of that contract is that it has financial components and financial consequences, which are assumed to scale linearly, when that’s not true. Someone “having your back” could just as arbitrarily be worth 10% of assets or a retainer or a monthly rate. The point being that starting at 50% and working down is just as arbitrary. I would say it would not actually scale infinitely, just as much as a key salaried employee does not have compensation that scales proportionately to the earnings of that corporation.

I absolutely do not care about how these comparisons make you feel as that is completely a product of conditioning. This is still a flawed contract, lets acknowledge that it is a flawed contract whether your line in the sand is “cant put a price on” or something else.

Agreed - You stated more elegantly what I came here to reply with.

I personally love the “idea” or concept of a marriage (the understanding and commitment of two humans to each other for pure love, devotion, or spiritual/religious reasons), but in practice, at least from what I’ve seen in the US, it’s very much about the legal aspects of the “marriage contract”, the financial and legal impacts, as well as to continue to promote the US agenda of the nuclear family unit.

> I absolutely do not care about how these comparisons make you feel as that is completely a product of conditioning. This is still a flawed contract, lets acknowledge that it is a flawed contract whether your line in the sand is “cant put a price on” or something else.

This goes in reverse as well. The only significant reason to get married is social conditioning/pressure. Like I implied above, you can just hire those roles out and not enter the contract. Marriage is absolutely about feelings or else no one would agree to it.

Marriage is not an employment contract, the comparison is fallacious. The conditions for breaking the contract are much more severe because you're not "supposed to" switch partners like you switch jobs.

If you don't believe in marriage more power to you, don't enter into one.

> Marriage is absolutely about feelings or else no one would agree to it. Marriage is not an employment contract, the comparison is fallacious.

The venn diagram overlaps. If you don't want it to overlap, fix the contract instead of invalidating everyone that dares to acknowledge it.

It's worth pointing out that not having a marriage license or registering your marriage with the government, doesn't mean you aren't in a marriage.[1] Divorce laws still apply in this case.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage

Here's an article arguing your transactional view of marriage is wrong that that you shouldn't apply economic models to marriage. Quote "You are not in a transaction with your spouse; you're in a relationship."

I don't expect it to change your view, but here it is for what it's worth:

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/spouses-pr...

I agree with everything in that article which is about not obsessing over dividing tasks equally.

It isn't about the shitty contract itself. You extrapolated it to be about something the article is not by seeing "marriage + transaction" as the similarity.

Divorce is a probability in a marriage, this article isn't about that.

Whether divorce is a 50% probability or a 10% probability (which it is miraculously now close to, for the new class of wealthy spouses marrying economic equals for the first time in history), these are still non-negligible odds. These are horrible odds of adversity in any other kind of agreement that “coincidentally but ah I want to ignore it” have explosive financial consequences.

The article is specifically about chores but in general discusses how you shouldn't apply economic models to relationships, you are correct I extrapolated it.

I'm not so interested in your complaints about divorce (though I don't think you have a good understanding of laws surrounding prenups and how they function in the American legal system and you should learn more ) but I mainly responded because I felt your attempt to apply the economic model of "utility" to a human relationship was a pretty bad idea.

Prenup doesn't affect alimony which is just as peculiar.

I can see how in a vacuum here that one would see my thoughts as bad, but they are reactions to other ideas which seem to have more consensus that are based on valuing specifically women’s unpaid labor in the home. There is a finite value to how much that contributed to an aspirational and successful man (or more generally spouse / breadwinner’s) success regarding earnings. Courts should have the marriage contract based on that maxim, as it is not linearly, and rely on couples to do separate business arrangements if they are so inclined to be business partners. Some couples do this and pride themselves in this. Lets decouple it from the marriage contract.

You are obviously very intelligent, but assigning value to the partner's contribution to a relationship, and seeing it in an economic lens, may be intelligent but is not necessarily wise.

lets make it (O)logn and move on. something in between Monaco's and linear

> Maybe people worried about protecting their wealth should just hire out those roles instead of getting married. I wonder why they don't. :)

A lot of people do. What point were you trying to make by assuming its not happening a lot?

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