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> It's just a legal contract

In business, finance, housing, consumption we are expected to bide by a contract. Yet, somehow partnerships are exempt from this rule.

Could you imagine if startups were run this way? "Hey a legal contract is potentially life destroying for me. So just take me at my word and do this secret handshake. That should be good enough." We'd laugh them out of the room.

That's probably because partnerships are not an upfront contract and termination terms are negotiated post-hoc, which is completely unlike "business, finance, housing, consumption" contracts.

For some reason prenuptial agreements aren't that big of a thing, and I'm not even sure they would hold any water in Europe.

So when I enter a contract with a business, before signing, I know who owes what and what happens if someone fails to provide that. Also, we know what it means to fail to provide. Usually, "Meh, I'm just not happy anymore" isn't a part of that.

So I totally understand people (usually men) not wanting to enter a contract where they face a significant probability of being taken to the cleaners.

If my company fails to deliver a service to a client, or the product delivered is subpar, it's clear what the penalties are.

And those penalties are established upfront. If in the meantime my company goes from a thousand dollar startup to a multi-billion dollar enterprise, I don't suddenly owe an angry client half of what I own. I still owe them what we agreed beforehand, which may be an insignificant sum. Even if it's somehow thanks to them that we became a huge company.

It's my understanding that marriage doesn't work like that.

> We'd laugh them out of the room.

sells all my SPAC positions

Relationships often happen under circumstances where no sane person would sign a contract. My girlfriend and I currently both share an emotional risk. If one of us is unhappy in the relationship and leaves, the other suffers emotionally. That risk is roughly equal, though. The likelihood of harm and the magnitude of harm are equal, as is the likelihood of happiness and the magnitude thereof.

I am much better off than my girlfriend financially, though. Marriage introduces a financial element wherein I bear a substantial financial liability, in exchange for effectively no likelihood of financial gain. On the other hand, she bears no financial liability, and in fact gains a likelihood of financial gain. No sane person would sign a contract like that with a business. It would be like Amazon buying out a startup with a contract that says if the merger isn't successful, the startup gets to keep half of Amazon.

Another reason contracts aren't analogous is because marriage is an intensely emotional affair. There is no sane way, that I can think of, to make emotional restitution. What's the point of having a contract that's unenforceable because there is no reasonable restitution?

So you end up in a spot where for some people, the benefits of marriage are unenforceable (not that I'm saying they should be enforceable) but the liabilities are very much enforceable. I'm not aware of any common contracts in business, finance or housing that follow that kind of a paradigm.

And yet in the real world small businesses still frequently operate on handshake deals between people who have known each other for years. Most of the time it works out.

Nobody's even going to mention the effect of welfare here, either, which subsidizes single motherhood and each additional child out of wedlock? Or the effect that this has had especially on the families of minorities?

Thomas Sowell does.

Unfortunately, it doesn't fit with the narrative of more welfare, more taxes which allows both parties to increase government spending and gain even more power.

Welfare polices do not subsidize single motherhood as much as punish intact families where the man cannot find work. In that way it does create perverse incentives that are harmful to families it is meant to support.

Can you elaborate, I'm not familiar with this part

I know of the scenario where a man has to check in to jail when they cannot successfully pay the alimony or child support, which doesn't help their ability to do that. basically debtor's prisons.

are you referring to that?

What viable alternatives are there?

As a man, I simply refused to to marry. It's just a legal contract which is potentially life destroying for me.

In Australia you’d be defacto and thus more or less married.

In the U.S. too, people just don't seem to realize it.

No, only a handful of state have common law marriage. California is not one of them.

Canada however has common law marriage. No nuptials needed, assets are split and alimony is possible just from living together long enough.

Despite not having common law marriage, there are a number of factors that can cause asset splitting in California, since the '70s.

https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/family-law/family-law-ke...

Note there was an oral agreement, and that is a factor.

how would marriage be life destrying as opposed to living together without being married?

interestingly, i believe germany has something like a concept of a "living arrangement similar to a marriage" which is completely informal, it's not something you chose but it is defined by a court simply based on the reality of how you live together. the result of that is, to my understanding, that if you separate, one party can still sue the other for eg. splitting your assets, etc. as for child support, the relationship status should not even matter, regardless if you are married, or even live together. you are the father after all, so you are partly responsible for your children. if you earn, you pay.

in other words, you get the downsides of a relationship without the upsides of being married.

In the US, marriage is bound by laws created by an active divorce lobby. Divorce is a huge industry.

In my state, divorce, for a men, generally means paying roughly 1/3 of your income in child support, and splitting child-rearing expenses after that. To most people, that's financially devastating.

Before:

Mom earns $100k, $66k after taxes

Dad earns $100k, $66k after taxes

After, Mom gets $88k after taxes, dad gets $44k after taxes.

Uneven income, and Mom gets alimony too.

Mom signs kids up for a $24k/kid child care with 2 kids. Dad pays $24k and is left with $20k for his own living expenses. Mom is left with $62k. Many Moms do things like this punitively, because they hate Dad. Dad is living in poverty, and it's life-ending. Mom is using child support to buy fancy clothes for herself.

Does you partner have health insurance? Will she be able to make decisions for you, visit you in the hospital, or inherit your assets, if something were to happen to you? There are many legal benefits to marriage.

Are feminists forcing women into focusing on their careers or just giving them the option? AFAIK there are still plenty of women who are want to lean out and do the housewife thing. I mean “Real Housewives of X” is one of the most long running and popular tv franchises in the US.

> Are feminists forcing women into focusing on their careers or just giving them the option?

So the answer to this question is very complicated.

A husband complained that his wife wanted to be a stay-at-home mom: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/03/sudden-sahm-concern...

As you can guess, there were many reactions to this article. A woman argued that a working mom is a better option: https://twitter.com/JillFilipovic/status/1369685618863841280

Of course, there is other side of the coin. Some argued women should be given an option to be a staying-at-home mom: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1369865452642471938

What do women want? Some want to be a stay-at-home mom: https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2012/09/12/is-op...

A husband complained that his wife wanted to be a stay-at-home mom: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/03/sudden-sahm-concern...

Raising a child and building a home and life for a family is expensive. I know a lot of dudes who are stressed because they partner decided to become stay at home moms but also, “please buy a house”.

Anecdotally, I’ve also heard a few women balk at the idea of the husband being the stay at home parent. And I know a few dads who would love to be home more but can’t because they became the default breadwinner.

That’s not a partnership.

I don’t know who to attribute this to but you know what they say: “The only correction is an over correction“.

> Raising a child and building a home and life for a family is expensive.

This is an important point. I don't think feminism is trying to limit options but in practical terms if you have a mix of two income and one income households competition between them will drive up basic costs such housing so that running a one income household is significantly more expensive than back when most households were one income.

You can try address this via tax, as many European countries do. But then two income households feel unfairly penalised.

Most of the work under the label of feminism has been about creating options, there are many people that try to leverage the movement to be more exclusionary and say some options are wrong in favor of a mental corporate career. From my experience this has been women that go as far as to invalidate the decision making ability of other women that are not choosing a corporate career like that.

> is to not be career driven

I'm building ParttimeCareers (https://parttime.careers) to tackle this problem. I think part-time remote jobs can be reasonable accommodation for people who want to work and take care kids. Basically, you'll just need to work 4 or 5 hours per day or less if you spread it into weekends.

> Equal working opportunity for both genders are great, but feminism preached being career driven too much

I encounter more and more women that literally apologize to me as a disclaimer before they say they want children and to raise them in person most of the day, as their form of empowerment involves only corporate career aspirations and they also call this feminism. This is just in casual conversation.

Hilariously they are also apologizing excessively, which is not progressive at all but just so safe that it's a tougher habit to break.

Well how do you make the family more stable? Maybe by marrying and creating a legal contract that will encourage you not to do something stupid that will destroy your life and destabilize your family.

Sack up and make her an honest woman.