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a former wife of Paul McCartney complaining about being married to him:
Although stating that they had a good sex life, Mills started complaining about the marriage to friends, saying that McCartney was "a boring old fart", and wondering why he had no social life, as well as saying "He has no friends and it's driving me mad". She did not like living at the remote McCartney home in Peasmarsh: "The only thing he [McCartney] ever does is occasionally go to the pub with his roadie. We never have parties or do fun things".
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Mills
Original source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... apped.html
The lesson I would take from this is that many women seem to have a deeply-felt need to have an active social life, so guys need to make sure their girlfriends/wives are having their needs met, just like women need to make sure their boyfriends/husbands are having their needs met. And men and women may get pleasure from different things! So you can't just rely on your internal feelings of what's important.
Q: How should I think about marriage?
It probably depends on what you mean by "marriage".
After having observed a lot of long-term relationships and having read a bit about the topic, my impression is that modern US-government-regulated marriage can be thought of kind of like the way men's neckties are thought of: it's a tradition that has passed down through many generations, it has evolved quite a bit from the way it was in the past, it doesn't seem to be necessary for everyone, but it seems like it can be very impressive / beneficial when done well. Whether or not you feel pressure to do it seems to depend heavily on the social groups you're influenced by.
The thing that people need to have forefront in their mind is that US-government-regulated marriage is a legal contract. It's exactly like when Mark Zuckerberg was raising money from angel investors and venture capitalists. It seems foolish to me when people sign a legal agreement that is widely known to frequently lead to big problems without considering the terms of the agreement, but that is exactly what most people nowadays do. They do it when getting loans for school, when getting loans for their house and car, and they do it when they get married without thinking hard about the terms.
Q: Should I get married?
At the moment I suspect John T. Reed had it right when he wrote something to the effect of, "Being in a good marriage is better than being single. But being single is better than being in a bad marriage." So basically, if you can figure out how to get into a good marriage, go get married! But make sure you know what you're doing! I see a lot of people rushing into marriages, and from having seen bad marriages firsthand I feel anxious with worry for what they have in store. I think it's especially dangerous to get married when either partner is feeling pressure to do it, whether they're conscious of it or not.
Q: How can we reduce the divorce rate?
A: To reduce the divorce rate you need to understand why people get divorced.
- Figure out how to get people into the right living area and the right job ASAP so that they don't end up switching later in life and tearing apart their relationship with the switch.
- Force/encourage more dating so people are less likely to idealize what life apart from their spouse would be like.
- You can use peer pressure to have people stay married (religious groups do this pretty well). The downside is that people could end up very unhappy with no way to fix it.
- One thought that I've had (but I'm not sure what to think of) is: if it became a cultural norm for women to marry men who were ~10-20 years older than them, might that reduce the divorce rate? I'm not sure. It seems like an empirical question that would need to get tested to be determined one way or the other.
A: Another answer is, "Should we be trying to reduce the divorce rate?" Maybe the best solution would be to make marriages dissolve automatically after 10-20 years. That would give the parents enough time to raise the kids. It seems that a lot of marriages dissolve after the parents have finished raising their children.
the best books I've read so far on this topic are "Marriage: A History" by Stephanie Coontz and John T Reed's "Succeeding".
John T. Reed's "Succeeding"
http://www.johntreed.com/succeeding.html
John T Reed is a smart guy; he went to West Point, Ranger School, and Harvard Business School, and has written football strategy books used by NFL coaches, but I think he's smart mainly b/c of the way he talks about things. Reed says he's had a fantastic marriage, and he thinks the reason for this is the way that he met his wife: he had a special dating system that allowed him to date "hundreds" (according to him) of women before he met his wife. Because he knew what the "market" looked like, he knew exactly how his wife compared to the other women out there, and he knew what he was missing by getting married (so it may not have been as bothersome for him to be committed to one person as it would be for someone who idealizes the thought of being in a relationship with some other person).
Also, dating so many people made it more likely for him to find someone who matched up with him on several key areas; he says it's extremely important to match up with your spouse on:
1. spending decisions (Do you want to earn a lot of money? Do you want to own lots of luxury items?)
2. children (some people want to have lots of children, others don't want ANY children)
3. religion (do you want to go to church? do you want to raise your children within a particular religious tradition?)
4. alcohol / cigarette / drug use (do you like to go to bars? do you smoke and want to live with another smoker?)
5. other things I can't remember
Summary of Marriage: A History
http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History- ... 067003407X
The basic lesson of this book is that the idea of choosing your spouse based on "love" has only become widespread in the 20th century; before that, marriage was a pragmatic issue. Farmers chose their spouses based on how likely it was the spouse would die in childbirth, and how useful the spouse would be on the farm (eg they didn't want a weakling). Richer people often had their spouses chosen for them by their parents, and marriage was used as a way of creating or cementing bonds between two rich families.
I remember that after I finished reading this book I was convinced that every high school student should read it.
Misc stuff:
You need to imagine what could happen if your relationship with your partner turned sour:
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Controversial business idea:
Many people have gotten burned by getting into marriages that they should not have gotten into and not having their spouses sign prenuptial agreements. Since the divorce rate is so high for these types of marriages, it seems obvious to ask, "Why are these people not having their spouses sign prenuptial agreements?" I would imagine that the reason is that by the time the time comes around to raise the issue, the richer spouse will be under a great deal of psychological pressure to avoid raising the issue of a prenuptial agreement. One solution to this problem would be to have these rich people enter contracts before they've met their future spouse that would prohibit them from getting married without a prenuptial agreement.
I asked an experienced attorney (but a personal injury attorney, not a marriage attorney) if it would work to have a person enter a contract with some third party (like a company) that would prevent the person from marrying without a prenuptial agreement, and he said it wouldn't because the contract would lack consideration (where each party is exchanging something of value with the other). He said you'd also need to be careful to make sure that the parties couldn't agree to end (abrogate) the contract. He said he also had seen a situation in which a woman [his sister] pressured a well-off guy to get married, the guy tried to get her to sign a prenuptial agreement, and she blew off their relationship as a result.
A proposal for a potentially-better form of marriage
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