$5k/year is cheaper than an IRL relationship.
20k on porn means you need to see a shrink asap.
Regardless if he was chatting wit the actual model or some guy pretending to be her, they still would have told him ANYTHING he wanted to hear as long as he was there to pay.
I've had some first-hand experience with people like him and trust me - there is usually a very good reason why people like him need to pay to get attention from "women". You can blame the porn/sex industry as much as you like but there is a type of man that will never be satisfied by a normal relationship.
There are also men who, due to the brutal realities of dating and the "relationship market," will likely never have access to a normal relationship. I'm not sure we can 100% blame the user here, either.
If you’ve been around long enough, unless you’re really lucky, you’ve had that experience before.
There are the ‘I must be a stay at home mom/dad because I can’t handle the stress’ type situations.
There are the ‘I need to buy x we can’t afford to be happy’ type situations.
There are the ‘we have kids now and he/she can’t leave, so I can do whatever I want’ type situations.
I had someone actively sabotage my job (in a very difficult to detect way) because they were worried I’d leave them if I was too ‘independent’, or got promoted.
And I’ve seen many other people have spouses do that to them too. Everything from dramatically increasing stress levels at home, to sabotaging sleep, or creating health issues until the spouse stopped ‘getting away’. All the way up to creating false accusations and trying to destroy them unless they got ‘under control’.
It doesn't have to be just partners - a friend recently told me about her husband's younger sister who would regularly spend beyond her means then rely on her brother / parents to bail her out of her debts.
That's also one of those impossible relationships where you feel obligated to help but the relationship has a real cost.
Luckily he figured out something was wrong before they went bankrupt on top of everything, but yikes. And at that point, divorce won’t solve his joint liability for the balance.
At least the younger sister can only guilt the family into trying to cover her butt financially, instead of - well whatever that was.
Even if no one if staying home, with the impact of a young kid, 150% is generous.
Because if the other party works as hard/long as they used to, expect resentment and turbulence.
Sure every one of these can be squeezed but living solo/without kids is definitely leaner but yes its a double hit of expenditure goes up and earnings go down
How would that problem be solved by ending the relationship? You'd then have to pay even more for seperate rent, cars, etc. Or are you talking about one partner spending excessively and dragging the other partner into this financial mess?
For this to be coming up, necessarily someone (or both) has to be overspending.
If both are low earners, and aggregate earnings are insufficient to cover the lowest set of available expenses, then someone (or both) need to be living in with their parents. Or they’re going to be homeless, or similar.
Often; it’s one or both parties overspending on unnecessary expenses. In which case, splitting up almost always changes the dynamics so at least one of the parties can stay solvent.
But there are infinite ways to screw this pooch, of course.
That's obviously an extreme example but when your expenditure is that high it necessitates being analytical about how you're spending your time and money.
Then if you already had that mindset, it's natural to see how it can extend into relationships (and friends and family).
Ultimately, relationships are about give and take and we can only give as much as we can give etc. But there's always some implicit assumption of parity and even if you don't care for perfect parity, it's worth doing the audit once in a while to assess whether you're happy being a net giver or a net taker or if you need a reset because relationships of all natures can and have been broken over money.
While it may be more expensive anyways, the payoff is a real person inerested in you, your life, and wanting to be with you.
To an extent, it's like comparing living a happy life and doing drugs, because after all both of them end up translating as "dopamine in the brain".