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Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

I used to think similarly to you, but now I realize that between my wife and I (4 graduate degrees between the two of us so maybe we are in a similar boat) what really matters is that we pattern our life on the concept of traditional marriage we inherited from the past generations rather than put a confused modern spin on it.

I think the point of this article is that marriage works surprisingly (to a modern expectation) well. If you take everything out of it, then maybe the benefits would get stripped as well.

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I don't really quibble with the idea that marriage (can) work well. What I have a problem with is the suggestion that somehow the so-called "elite" opinion that social relations like marriage should be more flexible

1. constitutes a denigration of the institution 2. actually materially causes the decline in marriage rates we see, especially among the economically exploited.

Poverty causes significant stress on couples which almost certainly explains the differences between the marriage rates of different classes in our society. I'm pretty sure that people having kids out of wedlock aren't doing it because they read about it in GOOP or whatever. In fact, further down this thread someone has posted a survey which suggests that people more likely to get divorced actually have a stronger belief in marriage than people less likely to. This suggests strongly that it isn't the opinions of the upper classes that actually cause divorces and points to other economic causes.

> Poverty causes significant stress on couples which almost certainly explains the differences between the marriage rates of different classes in our society.

Except this gap is new. In 1979, marriage rates in the top four income quintiles were quite similar: https://www.brookings.edu/research/middle-class-marriage-is-...

There have been major changes in the US economy since 1979.

That wouldn’t explain why you didn’t see any significant change in marriage rates across the top four income quantiles in 1979. It’s not like the gaps were insignificant back then: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-us&sxsrf=A...

1979 was the year before trickle down Reagan became president. It's been awhile.

I don't disagree that traditional marriage works. Despite all attempts to reject tradition, we've ended up living a pretty traditional married life. We wouldn't have ended up here if it wasn't a stable equilibrium. But I think the following are equally valid explanations for the results:

> Marriage is good, actually.

> Society treats unmarried women poorly, so much so that it damages their health.

It would be interesting to see if the results replicate with a sample of men.

> Society treats unmarried women poorly, so much so that it damages their health

I think we might live in different universes.

What my observations are right now is that many women are choosing to remain single because they are thriving just fine without a man in their lives.

Unmarried Men are turning into incels who are bitter, angry at the world and they are unquestionably socially damaged and ostracized.

Perhaps I'm struggling to see past my own perspective here though.

Of course it's the women who often have unrealistic standards and much less of a drive to find a mate, for basic evolutionary reasons found in the vast majority of sexually reproducing animals.

When we got married, we didn't tell anybody. We had already been living like we were married for years, so it was just a tax thing.

A year or so later, my wife decided she wanted to have a party and make a big deal about it--the primary driver for this decision was that she noticed that her female co-workers weren't treating her like a professional, and she suspected it was because they didn't see her as really married.

I didn't press the issue, we had a party, it was great. But apparently, women treat unmarried women differently in professional contexts.

Also, men do. Also, the IRS does. Also, parents do. Do nurses without a family end up working different hours? There are a lot of factors.

I'm just saying that it's really difficult to sort out whether being married helped these women because it's so great, or whether not being married harmed the other ones because they were treated poorly in ways we don't understand.

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