Many men get lifes destroyed due to insane "child support" payments which are totaly out of bounds for what "child support" should be.
So if by "faster divorce" they mean that the "women can take everything from a guy faster", I'm not sure this is going to end well as far as men's incentives are to get married.
there is definitely room for more accountability of judges in those courts, and there is definitely room for pushing a model bill through the legislature
The primary flaw in US jurisdictions is that a spouse, well - let's back up. I want to try to balance this with ungendered neutral language, but the courts are gendered and that's the main incompatible flaw I want to address. The pervasive logic in our society and permeating in our court system is that the woman is
A) providing emotional and homemaking labor
B) it is uncompensated labor
C) it is the basis for the success of the man's labor
D) compensation for this in a divorce has an unlimited market value
these are convenient beliefs, that lack substantiation and reality
There are some jurisdictions that have laws that recognize this. Where ultimately there is a fixed - capped - value and time length, not based on any proportion of wealth or lifestyle. a uniform law like this across the US would make this more tenable and predictable. As US states are a total patchwork of conditions, assumptions, and even our most progressive heavily populated jurisdictions are backwards in this regard. Primarily because men don't feel comfortable being associated with this conversation.
Most people are far more likely to see family court than criminal court, and can end up in family court through no fault of their own, whereas you're much more able to avoid criminal court by not committing crimes. It's a huge encroachment of the state on personal life where protections such as the right to jury does not exist. The fact that this state encroachment has lead to disastrous outcomes should come as no surprise.
I'm not suggesting that it's an illegal encroachment, just that if such provisions are considered wise at the federal level then would it not be wise to apply the same provisions at the state level?
Man, did I see that in action. In a California divorce my ex's statements about "emotional labor" were admitted at face value, I had to spend over $400k demonstrating that she was actually just a layabout who physically abused the children. I initially had a rookie female judge who was openly hostile to men in court, who was later reassigned out of family court, but not before she had cost me an insane amount of money. Also I had to pay both sides' attorneys even though my spouse was in control of half the assets. Insanely bad system and I've been told that California's is one of the more neutral.
The flipside of this is that most judges and lawyers do not want to work family court, for various understandable reasons. My guess is that, much like Reddit mods, there's a subset of judges who are willing to tolerate family court bullshit in order to push their agenda, and they're the ones who wind up staying.
This is on top of the more general issues caused by gating access to justice behind a bunch of really expensive professionals with student loans to pay off, of course.
when they say California is more neutral, that just means the wife can be a sex worker who smokes weed and that won't automatically invalidate her character, claims, or cause child protective services to descend upon your lives. and its bad that other states would without more information, I just wouldn't take that to mean California is anything progressive with regards to men, which maybe makes your experience make more sense.
My ex-wife was able to avoid answering any question that would have made her look bad by breaking down crying and saying the proceedings were too stressful. Try that as a man and see where it gets you.
When people actually do the accounting and add up the expenses incurred by raising a child, the conclusion is invariably that child support payments are not enough and, if anything, should be higher.
The problem here is that divorce, by its nature, destroys a tremendous amount of wealth. Because there are a bunch of assets which can no longer be shared, the total amount of cash needed to raise a child goes way up after a divorce happens. This, not anti-male bias, is the reason why both parties feel screwed by child support: the men feel like they're getting bled dry (because they are) while the women feel like they're still not being made whole (because they're not).
It's a thorny problem but it's not made easier by griping about bias. When thinking about child support payments, take as your foundational axiom "divorce destroys a bunch of wealth and makes both parties poorer on average; there is probably no solution that doesn't make both people feel fucked over."
From this article “Female suicides decrease by 8% to 16%”.
Yet, from another study
“In the United States, the rate of suicide among persons who are divorced or separated is usually reported as about 2.4 times greater than the suicide rate for married persons. ”
And
“For every one divorced woman who dies by suicide, there are nine divorced men who do so.”
Seems like we are managing against the wrong metric.
So your argument is "suicide is good as long as (toxic) men do it"? Come on, please try to keep HN substantially more intellectually stimulating than reddit and its ilk.
It sounds like men should either not get married, or if they do, then endeavor quite seriously to keep their wives happy. Personally, I have to say I've never really "gotten it" so-to-speak - I really never felt a desire to get married and/or have children, so this is no great worry for me. But I do normally feel quite counter-cultural when I express it.
“If you are profiting from being unhappy you will find ways and reasons to be unhappy.”
I believe the idea expressed in ‘appetite comes with eating’ is that your desire to indulge in an activity is correlated (caused even) with that activity. IE skydivers will likely have a larger appetite or desire for skydiving than a layman.
In a larger context I believe cjbgkagh is arguing that women can retain an advantageous position in a marriage by pretending or presenting unhappiness because exiting a marital contract would be an especially poor outcome her partner.
It's more of a general phenomena that I believe commonly applies to this specific case. Often there is an assumption that a demand can be satiated once met, but quite often instead the demands simply increase.
There is a great joy in building a deep bond with a partner.
There are definitely difficulties, but no need to throw out the baby with bathwater, if done right a partner & children are one of the biggest joys & sources of meaning for life.
I can't seem to maintain an interest in such a bond, and I've long since stopped believing in meaning. As I said, I'm aware that that sort of talk is frowned upon. But given the number of men estranged from their children (the number of kids being raised by single mothers is, I understand, at an all-time high in the US), and the consistently high divorce rate (lower these days probably only because the marriage rate is also lower), I don't think that I'm actually particularly unique.
It sound you are looking for datapoint to easier accept your lack of meaning in life. You can also do the opposite and look at the happy partners & families to prove yourself wrong.
But I understand, however I hope you find it, in which way works for you, it does make life much richer.
For me family is one of them & buddhism another one.
If I can give advice, the easiest way to experience meaning is to serve & help others. Easiest is to do voluntary work in obvious helpful things like food serving etc. Something where you just enjoy & give and not think deeper about what the point of it all is.
I think there is quite a bit of nihilism in Western evolutionary materialism (all our feelings are just side effect of evolution). But that's a very limited view on reality. Not sure if that's also part of your experience, but I do see this cause similar feelings to smart & technical people around.
Lol, I was raised Catholic; the serve others thing is quite a big part of the dogma, and I don't disagree with that necessarily (unlike quite a bit of the rest of that religion), but that doesn't mean that it works for everyone. Some people are just wired differently; the meaninglessness creeps in no matter the volunteer organization; the therapy, the drugs (licit or otherwise). It's an experience since young childhood and seems unlikely to change markedly. I'm actually quite happy that it's not something I'll ever have to subject a child to (and the probable hellscape that we're leaving them; glad I'll never have to have that conversation either). It certainly could be a post-facto rationalization on my part, but perhaps it's just the way I am and ever was. Honestly, accepting that has brought me peace as much as anything.
I think it's important to think about marriage separately from raising children. You can do the activities separately or together.
For me, my spouse is someone I can implicitly rely on and vice versa. We are a team working towards our shared purposes, but we are still individuals. We each have skills that make the others life easier. It's a lot easier to get a ride from a spouse than from a friend, and a spouse will be more available to help tend to sickness and injury. That sounds emotionless, but of course emotions and emotional support are important too.
For me, having a spouse where we have compatible ideas on children, money, climate, travel, and most things is like an easy button for life. Research and problem solving is easier with two people. Decision making can be harder though.
If you marry someone who doesn't have compatible ideas, there's going to be a lot more conflict and a lot more deep compromise, and that may not be as appealing. And, of course, people change, and exiting a long term commited relationship comes with trauma, so there's risk. Maybe none of this feels appealing to you, and that's fine. There's some social and legal pressure to marry for lots of reasons, but we live in a world full of social and legal pressures, and you should reject those pressures if they don't feel right to you.
Raising children is a whole other thing. I don't think people should be pressured into it, and it's best to be on the same page as a potential spouse before considering marriage, otherwise one spouse is likely to have to make a big compromise and that's not great. Personally, I find raising children to benefit from a team approach, but it's not required and a marriage is just one way to form a child raising team.
~20 years ago I met a wonderful older couple: she was an astronomer and programmer who was actively engaged with the Debian community, and I can't recall his profession, but he was clearly delighted to support her interests.
It was inspiring to see a couple who actively supported each other's hobbies and careers, who engaged with each others' professional communities.
I don’t think it’s suppose to sound like that. At least for me and the situations I have heard it, it’s a genuine expression that if you make your partner happy, it’ll also make your life (together) happy.
It works very well for me. We both appreciate each other and actively make an effort to make one another happy.
I don't think it needs to be "wife" other than to rhyme. Having a happy partner instead of an unhappy partner (regardless of gender) is certainly better (speaking from experience).
Honestly, the relationships are similar. They both require a lot of trust and companionship to be successful, you spend a lot of time with both people but in very different ways
Marriage has for most of its history been an arrangement for securing alliances and ensuring transfer of generational wealth. Since the sexual revolution [1] the pendulum has swung completely back the other way and attitudes toward marriage have focused almost exclusively on romance. The problem since then is that hormonally-driven romantic attachment is fleeting and unreliable, so security of relationships has dropped dramatically.
If people want to have a long-lasting and successful marriage they need to be clear-eyed and pragmatic about it. The fact that Hollywood makes a fortune selling romantic stories has not helped!
And now forced marriage is included in the category of modern day slavery. Marriage is work but it’s not a hostage negotiation situation. I see a lot of guys crushed by marriage, this idea that it pure benefits men is nonsense.
Same... Or that the husband is objectifying the wife as a thing that just needs to be kept happy, regardless of what the husband actually truly thinks. Inauthentic.
It always reminds me of that creepy old Lana Turner quote “A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.”
When you don't want to do something, but you also don't want to be blamed for not doing it, you can transfer the blame to someone who isn't there.
Boss wants to go out drinking after work which is his idea of 'team building' but you don't feel like it right now? "Well gee boss I'd love to come, but my wife's expecting me home by 7pm. Happy wife happy life, right?"
About 75% of the time when you hear people in the workplace saying "happy wife happy life" what they actually mean is "thanks for the offer but no thanks, and don't bother trying to cajole or peer-pressure me"
(Veterans at transferring blame will go even further, transferring blame to abstract concepts like 'market conditions' and 'company policy' )
> You’re socializing around your wife being abusive.
Not at all, for all they know you're living some 1950s lifestyle where your wife has dinner on the table just as you get home, and it'll be cold if you're late. Or if they prefer, they can imagine you're a progressive modern father, going home to change diapers and help with bedtime. Or they can imagine you're deeply in love, and eager not to disappoint your best friend in the whole world.
There really is nothing abusive about a man saying he likes his wife to be happy. Making an effort to make the other person happy and them making an effort to make you happy is the whole point of a relationship, isn't it?
I’m good at cheering people up and making them laugh. You can’t make people happy ESPECIALLY women. You’re just setting yourself up for failure. All you can do is support people and enable good decisions so that they can learn how to have a fulfilling life.
It may be true but not actionable. For example, some wives may be happy regardless of how much their partners bend over backwards to please them. Their partners are then more likely to have a happy life. Or, maybe your wife will be miserable no matter what you do. You're less likely to have a happy life. This is why I believe the most important step in vetting a spouse is to spend a long time with them first, the longer the better. How happy you both are isn't likely to change much after you get married.
What I'm getting at is that, by adulthood, those behaviors are not easily changed, at least beyond temporarily. People know they'll live longer if they quit smoking, but despite the enormous benefits, it tends not to happen. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I just think it's more realistic to go into a marriage with the expectation that the person you're marrying is not likely to change much.
This is logical thought. Relationships run on emotions. For most of history marriage's sole purpose is to create social security for women. That is really a problem, because once a service is provided, there is always a scope for improvement. If there is a crisis people are busy solving the crisis, in times of relative peace people think they should be optimising for a better deal. There is always a man better than you. Somebody is more healthy, wealthy and spends more on his wife, and you are continuously benchmarked against him.
Heck in most cases you might even be getting benchmarked against a fictional figure who exists only in her imaginations.
The more you do, more that fictional figure gets better than you, and you are expected jump over the bar she just raised. Sooner or later you will burnout and she will hate you for being weak compared to the hero that exists in her mind.
Here's a thought, maybe try not living under the thumb of a woman to derive your happiness.
Today my toddler asked for candy and my wife almost gave her a piece (it's 7:45am). I said no. When the wife rebuked, I said, "stop, you're going to make our daughter fat like you." Mad her piping mad but guess what?
Happiness comes from within and you know what makes me happy? Having a healthy family that makes good choices. The happiest wives are those that get gentlely pushed around from time to time.
So in short, stop being a push over and maybe your wife won't leave you for a man that does.
> then endeavor quite seriously to keep their wives happy
Why not just find someone who is already content living their life single but enjoys the added social aspects of a relationship? That plus someone where those social aspects happen naturally without a lot of using the finite motivational energy.
Then there's no expectation or perceived responsibility to have a sort of dependency relationship, and the happy social reinforcing moments happen naturally.
>Why not just find someone who is already content living their life single but enjoys the added social aspects of a relationship?
The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive. Even happy and independent people have ups and downs, and can benefit from someone enthusiastically helping them promote their happiness.
It is a win win win for everyone involved.
The recipient of support is even happier, the supporter gets to enjoy the process of making the other happy, and then the supporter get the company of a very happy person.
Ideally this is bidirectional with each partner playing both roles.
It doesn't use finite motivational energy. It creates net positive energy.
>It sounds like men should either not get married, or if they do, then endeavor quite seriously to keep their wives happy.
I'm happily married, and in the sense of being counter-cultural would be in completely the other end of the spectrum (very conservative about family, intend on having 6-8 kids that I will cherish even when they're adults).
That said, I think you've hit the nail on the head about "happy wife, happy life".
It's important to basically dedicate your life to being in service to her, but on the flip side it's important for her to do the same.
This level of dedication is almost counter-cultural in a sense, because you're not putting yourself first, but it's absolutely worth it in the long run.
On a visceral level, you feel always loved, always important, always worthy.
You are apparently speaking from a Christian perspective. What do you do when after childbirth your spouse exits that reciprocal context and begins consuming you as a resource, but not before experimenting with narratives that maximize sympathy for her, which, as you can probably guess, make you the Disney villain.
That's great, but you should realize that not everyone is wired the same way, and that's fine - you'll have a hard time catching me criticizing anyone's choices here. All I can really offer is my own feelings and observations as someone who's been around the block a bit these days.
> intend on having 6-8 kids that I will cherish even when they're adults
There's a wonderful Mike Tyson quote that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. I assure you that it's quite a rare individual who gets married and has kids with the intent of despising their spouse and estranging themselves from their children. Sometimes it works out, and other times it doesn't.
Usually the idea of marriage comes from a romantic idea of building something together with a partner.
If you ignore the romance, and only consider the practicalities, there is no good reason to get married. It doesn't offer significant rights or benefits and mostly puts you at risk and restricts your option.
Me, I've been married, and I know I'll likely do it again. Not for personal gain, but because I'm a fool who believes in love.
I would be interested to compare this to homicide rates. Because I remember reading that when no fault divorce was allowed male lifespan increased.
I also think it's too early to really look at these rates. Of course many women would be happy they weren't destitute when they got married during a time when women couldn't have bank accounts. Of course men would feel put out when they were used to having everything handled by their wife and existed during a time where joint custody was not so common.
I'd like to see these studies again in 20 or so years when most people surveyed got married out of commitment instead of life necessity.
That's definitely true, in my grandmother family, it was was an open secret (or rather a mean and quite unfunny running joke) that her aunt managed to get out of her arranged marriage after ten years by "inadvertently" poisoning her abusive husband. I can only speculate that they had fertility issues since after 10 years they did not had any kids, and that could have been a reason why he became violent.
> I'd like to see these studies again in 20 or so years when most people surveyed got married out of commitment instead of life necessity.
We are already there, what kind of world are you imagining? The need for women to marry was removed 50-60 years ago in the west, there hasn't been a necessity to marry in a really long time, you might have some really old couples left from the time before that but it wouldn't affect statistics much.
I'm divorced. By the time you make the decision to leave your partner your life is in a bit a shambles. Something you thought would last together is about to end and if you have kids with your ex (I have 3) then you're about to enter into one of the most stressful and complicated parts of your life.
Of course the suicide right is going to be higher, but you shouldn't compare it against the part of the population who is happily married, you would have to compare it to the people who are desperately unhappy in their marriage and don't get divorced. At the end of my marriage I still dearly loved my wife, but hadn't been happy for years and I was wishing for death to give me a noble exit from a situation I couldn't see a way out of myself.
Guys take all the blame for divorce. I’ve know married women with kids that were monsters and everyone pitied them. There’s a strong, verging on psychotic, bias towards women in society and family court.
It’s true. I’ve talked a lot of guys off the edge of a cliff. You try to warn the new generation but they don’t listen, guys always got to learn the hard way.
It’s because for every one of those there’s a battered wife, and before the 1970s women had little ability to escape that kind of thing except at incredible cost.
People can be awful to each other. Gender doesn’t matter.
It depends a lot. Very little time in court (no fault divorce, informal agreement re money, and child just stayed with me) and the family courts here are secret so will not comment on that courts, but as for society it depends a lot.
My own experience is that no one who knows me at all well blames me. Some of my ex-wife's friends do - the ones who do not know me mostly. Why should I care what they think? My friends have been supportive, so have my (extended) family.
The only thing that annoys me is that she has been playing on racial stereotypes to gain sympathy. More that people are ignorant enough of other cultures to believe her uncritically than anything else.
I got divorced in the UK and my understanding was that it was not possible for the two parties to simply agree to have a divorce.
I had to sign a paper where I agreed I committed all sorts of "faults" just for the court to process the thing and make the divorce official. To me it doesn't matter -- the legal system of the UK is archaic regardless. A divorce is nothing more than a contract agreeing to share financial and child responsibilities.
They were quite uncooperative as well to get the paperwork necessary to register the divorce elsewhere in the EU, but that might have breen Brexit.
The law was changed from 2022 (I delayed starting my divorce proceedings by a few months to benefit from it) and we now have no-fault divorce. Essentially, all it needs is for one party to want to divorce and the a certain lapse of time after you married. The only grounds for opposing it are very narrows ones like jurisdiction.
The divorce case is separate from those over money and children which are also optional. You can just have informal agreements over both unless someone wants to go to court. That is why I spent very little time in court - in fact the divorce itself happened with need to attend hearings with the application made through the family court website.
Even before the change judges would try and find for an allegation of a fault (usually "unreasonable behaviour") and most lawyers advised clients not to contest divorces. One lawyer I consulted told me that in the previous 20 years he dealt with one contested divorce (contesting the end of the marriage that is, obviously going to court over child and financial arrangements is common).
Yeah I hear the legal system is draconic in the UK for men. Men’s mental health in general seems like a joke in England. British TV: “men are four times more likely to commit suicide but how can they help women defeat sexism???”
Yes, and no. Mostly the issue is (as in many other countries) a tendency to assume children should be brought up by women, together with inadequate systems to enforce access after divorce.
On the other hand I have come across many cases where the less affluent former spouse (especially one who did not work while married to look after the children) does not get a fair amount of child support and these are mostly women. Not a problem in my case as I was the one who was earning and the primary parent.
The biggest criticism I would make is not of the courts, but society and the police do not take domestic abuse of men seriously. They also do not take emotional abuse such as controlling behaviour seriously despite it now being a crime. This is pervasive - the Crown Prosecution Service classifies domestic abuse as "violence against women and girls" and then mentions in passing that men can be victims too (40% of violent abuse victims, in fact, but you would not know that from their manuals).
“Spousal abuse” is more than just hitting, it’s psychological and emotional stuff too. Male police officers, due to work related trauma, have high rates of spousal abuse. But even higher rates are found among lesbians. It’s made a lot of researchers rethink what’s going on.
Culture in the United States is aggressively uninterested in men’s mental health. It is always the last thing to consider and the first thing to drop. See also university admissions/graduation rates.
If you’re a man in the US: You. Are. On. Your. Own.
It’s always “Western society at large” in these conversations. These have for a long time only been social requirements of some women in order for some men to partner and reproduce. This is not “Western society” it is the cultural fabric, which itself is dominated by the social activity of women. It is a shadow matriarchy.
It's true across Africa. It's true across Asia (see: China, Japan for two very prominent examples). It's true in India. It's true across all of the Islamic world. It's commonly true in most of Europe (and absolutely true across Eastern Europe). Canada is quite similar to the US. It's true across Latin America. And it's true in the US.
When it's that comprehensive, spanning most of the human population across wildly different cultures, it's not society, it's biology. Society - cultures - are a production of that biology, reinforcing, not the other way around. It's not recent, it's ancient; it wasn't originated by humanity through society, nature organized humanity in a way that assisted survival.
I don’t know if this is really universally true. But I do expect there are large pockets of the population for which it is. For me I have a number of male and female friends that are emotionally supportive, my parents are good in this regard as well.
All social pressures have a cost and an optimal balance. Men tend toward a less bonded mating strategy, and divorce law seems to seek to punish that behavior (which, again, can be offset by prenups). A symptom of a social pressure that is out of balance might be disproportionate male suicide rate.
Better protections for men from the social consequences that some women architect purely out of spite would go a long way.
I’m often in awe that we can both propose equal rights and responsibilities and sympathetically treat forty-year-old adults as children in these situations, but only if they belong to one sex. The other sex gets disgust or at best pity.
I didn't get that impression. To me it's more about calling into question bringing up certain statistics when if you were to really make policy based on unbiased decision-making, then you'd have to ask uncomfortable questions just like the one you've asked.
For a period of time, I was in a situation where I would come into contact with people at their apartments. I saw so many unhappy--downright miserable--women who were recently divorced. I just never thought about it before but there it was in front of me so many times.
“Tried”, past tense? Why do you think we’re seeing such articles, and why is it so difficult and expensive to raise even just one kid in some of the richest countries in the West? Under a rational system the State would make at least 2.1 kids per woman (baseline replacement fertility) super easy and socially expected. Instead it’s making it extra hard by normalizing divorce, stripping support to those without means, and not funding childcare and education for the poor even though all three of those things lead to catastrophic social outcomes down the line. Maybe it’s not “bolsheviks”, but someone is still very much trying, deliberately and persistently.
Because of progressive/feminist legislative activism. Feminists have been advocating for no-fault divorce since at least the 1950s. The National Association of Women Lawyers were advocating for it during that decade [0].
> stripping support to those without means, and not funding childcare and education
Because single mothers and people on welfare have been derided as "welfare queens" and similar since the 1980s, when America elected Reagan and went all-in on free trade, deregulation, and defunding government services.
It isn't that specific one party or organization is attempting to reduce the birth rate.
> Under a rational system the State would [...]
In a democracy, the state isn't very rational. Whoever controls the government has different visions for what the interests of the state are.
I agree with your points. Where does that leave the Western societies, though? Maybe a change in the course should be contemplated? There are several particularly insidious factors at play here as well. Unlike after the war, single-income family is downright crazy in 2024 for most people, so both parents have to work. Childcare is shitty and completely unaffordable. It's also multiplicative by the number of kids. 3 kids? That'll be $4500 a month just for childcare where I live, thank you very much. Few "normal" people outside this site can afford such an outlay. With a family, one of the parents can at least stay home and rear the kids, with another maybe also having a part-time job. After divorce? Forget about it. And finally, this bomb is also wired with a hard biological clock - women tend to lose their fertility in their 40s.
Instead we just plug our ears and pretend these are not problems that have a long term bearing on society, somehow. Not a very adult position to take, IMO.
Funny, a gallop study just concluded, after polling people in the US from the early 2000's through 2023, that married people are happier- across race, age, gender, economic bracket and education level. Over time, this has ranged from well-being and happiness of those married over unmarried by 12-24 points difference.
That's not enough data to form any conclusions though, correlation is not causation. A lot of work has gone into trying to disambiguate "does marriage make people happy, or are happy people likelier to get (and stay) married?" but there is no clear answer yet.
Remember that if unhappy people are more likely to divorce or never marry, this has a double-whammy effect on the average happiness gap: the unmarried person pool gets unhappier because of the new person, and the "married person" pool gets happier on average because of a survivorship bias after the unhappy person was taken out. This happens even if marriage has no effect on happiness.
That's not the same estimand. Maybe happier people are more likely to get or stay married. Changes in laws are more likely to be exogenous to this.
At the same time the headline already simplifies the article, which focuses a lot on laws about division of property after divorce, and the article itself is dodging some of the negative consequences of easier divorce. See e.g.:
For those who won’t click through those are two decent studies showing there are significant negative impacts on children based on childhood exposure to unilateral divorce laws — ie at least one parent could have unilaterally divorced.
Is this a bit of a selection bias, though? Unhappy married people get divorced, so they no longer count in the married group. Similarly, happier people might be better able to find someone to marry them, therefore increasing the number of happily married people.
There’s no conflict between the facts that married people as a population are happier, and also that allowing people to leave marriages also makes them happier.
I'll be honest here, this article reeks of bias. If you actually pore through the studies, marriage (and by extension, divorce) is an extremely complicated social construct. There are plenty of studies that show the opposite: divorce rates significantly spike (especially after unilateral divorce laws are implemented)[1]. It's okay to have honest discussions about these kinds of charged topics and we need to be more mindful of nuances.
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""
>The prospect of onerous alimony, child support and other divorce compensation increases wives’ bargaining power when they have the option to divorce.
Using the government to screw your partner over as a negotiating tactic is a sick way to frame a divorce. It's this sick mentality that young men are warned about as they begin to seriously date.
> But here is some truth: a reinstatement of the fruitful XXXY family as a primary goal is needful.
Certainly so if economic velocity and growth are the metrics you're operationalizing "success" around. I do not believe that is the case for many, and I'd argue that it shouldn't be the case for the global population as it's not a trajectory that be sustained indefinitely without an ability to expand off of terrestrial Earth.
> the global population as it's not a trajectory that be sustained indefinitely
It's a bit wild to see Malthusianism alive and well in 2024. He couldn't predict the industrial revolution, and we likely can't predict whatever will come next, either.
Malthusianism is from the late 1700s. Another example would be Paul Ehrlich who wrote 'The Population Bomb' in the 1960s with the quote:
> The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.
Smart people make predictions about the future all the time. The problem is the future is hard to predict. The mere fact that birth rates in developed nations are falling below sustainment level calls into question any sort of extrapolation of when or if overpopulation will happen. That's not to say the Earth can support an infinite number of people because it can't; but that doesn't imply any specific trends we see right now will continue into the future.
I don't have to be in the business or habit of making laughably naive or galaxy-brain futurist predictions to acknowledge that habitable square-footage of land available to occupy is for all intents and purposes fixed. I'm not making any predictions, just noting that if we're growing above replacement rate indefinitely we will eventually run out of space barring eventual expansions off the planet. Even if every city on earth became as dense as Tokyo, even if we created all food production in sunless underground bunkers or skyscraper food farms, even if all nutrition becomes paste from compostable tubes, a society that inherently requires population growth indefinitely to function effectively has to get off-planet at some point.
This is especially true if you value (as I certainly do) the ongoing existence of land not just for farming and habitation but for the diverse ecologies of flora and fauna to continue to exist. I'm certainly more pessimistic than optimistic about how the rest of the natural world would fare in the next 150 years if we continue on as we have been.
But honestly, this to me is a sideshow: given our ability to produce efficiently and often autonomously, we shouldn't require a reliance on constant population growth to function effectively. Maybe that's where I'm being laughably naive.
Malthusians versus pro-natalists: whoever wins, we all lose (our civil liberties)!
I'm going to have to write two arguments here, because you're both wrong. The Earth is nowhere near carrying capacity, every advanced economy is looking at underpopulation. At the same time, however, forcing people to breed is inhumane and counterproductive.
The root cause here is economic inequality. A large part of environmental damage is caused by a handful of outsize polluters who manage to escape prosecution and liability. People don't have kids because they don't have economic opportunity, because it's been eaten up by perpetually enshittifying monopolies. Who are also those same outsize polluters.
Examples of outsize polluters include things like the fishing industry, responsible for one of the largest streams of plastic pollution into the oceans. The agricultural industry uses a majority of the American midwest and west's water, deliberately wasting it in order to retain the legal right to use it in the future, "just in case". And 30% of US greenhouse gas emissions is just industrial emissions.
Examples of fertility rates being tied to inequality include countries like South Korea. For the record, almost a quarter of all of South Korea's economic output is just Samsung. 60% of their GDP is chaebols[0]. The chaebols control the political system to a ludicrous degree[2]. They have such deep ties that the South Korean CIA will literally have people writing down the names of people involved in protests so they can add them to Samsung's hiring blacklists. Who the hell would want to have children in such a country?
Malthusianism fails as a political philosophy because it ignores the distribution of resources and treats reproduction as a scarce resource that needs to be limited (specifically to ourselves, and people like us, or people we like, etc). This makes it apt for coopting by exactly the kinds of people consuming Earth's limited resources to shift blame.
Likewise, pro-natalism wants to blame the victims of income inequality for not having lots of children. This is specifically because it's easier than actually breaking the power systems that are fueling the inequality.
[0] Korean for zaibatsu[1]
[1] Japanese for chaebol[0]
[2] Every South Korean president since the country democratized ends their term in a corruption scandal, followed by their successor pardoning them as a way to pay it forward to future corrupt politicians.
This is not my argument, just that a society that only effectively functions with continual population growth is ultimately a Ponzi scheme unless we begin living outside of the Earth's boundary. I'm not making a practical argument, more an argument that no species can grow indefinitely in a closed-loop system. I meant it more as cheeky remark than literal concern-trolling.
This allows no consideration of cultural evolution and is only true within a simple regime without consideration of environment interactions. Not representative of human life.
This is quite literally mathematically irrefutable, no matter how many levels of obfuscation one piles on. A society with a fertility ratio of 3 will eventually supplant one with fertility ratio of 1, it's only a matter of time. Much like climate change, however, this takes generations upon generations, so people like to pretend it's not the case, and shift the burden to their grand-grand-children. But mathematics does not care about one's beliefs - it exists irrespective of them. A societal group with sub-replacement fertility is dying out by definition. You can easily put together a spreadsheet, put in the death and birth rates and model this hundreds of years into the future. In fact you should probably consider doing so - it's rather eye opening.
People want to have their cake and eat it too, it seems.
When you enter into a marriage contract you are taking on risks in return for rewards. Trying to de-risk marriage for women will likely end up causing a whole bunch of other issues. Men should also be protected from marriage fraud and paternity fraud.
> Women have more to gain in divorce if laws are more favorable to wives. ... the reverse is also true when divorce laws are more favorable to husbands.
This does not seem a very modern way to view laws. Divorce is not some tribal war, and the law some tool to favor one tribe over an other.
There is a government role in reducing suicide rates and increasing employment. We have social support, mental health care, employment programs, and so on. Attaching those to divorce laws only works as a method to reduce responsibility and costs of the government.
A recent and rather good change in divorce laws here in Sweden was a requirement of couple therapy before family court will see a case. Invoking divorce laws and family courts should be the exception when people can't find a way to split on equitable terms.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadMany men get lifes destroyed due to insane "child support" payments which are totaly out of bounds for what "child support" should be.
So if by "faster divorce" they mean that the "women can take everything from a guy faster", I'm not sure this is going to end well as far as men's incentives are to get married.
The primary flaw in US jurisdictions is that a spouse, well - let's back up. I want to try to balance this with ungendered neutral language, but the courts are gendered and that's the main incompatible flaw I want to address. The pervasive logic in our society and permeating in our court system is that the woman is
A) providing emotional and homemaking labor
B) it is uncompensated labor
C) it is the basis for the success of the man's labor
D) compensation for this in a divorce has an unlimited market value
these are convenient beliefs, that lack substantiation and reality
There are some jurisdictions that have laws that recognize this. Where ultimately there is a fixed - capped - value and time length, not based on any proportion of wealth or lifestyle. a uniform law like this across the US would make this more tenable and predictable. As US states are a total patchwork of conditions, assumptions, and even our most progressive heavily populated jurisdictions are backwards in this regard. Primarily because men don't feel comfortable being associated with this conversation.
The 6th amendment is for criminal trials and the 7th is not currently applied at the state level.
This is on top of the more general issues caused by gating access to justice behind a bunch of really expensive professionals with student loans to pay off, of course.
Dudes have been saying this for a long time but I've never seen any argument as to why that actually holds up to scrutiny.
The problem here is that divorce, by its nature, destroys a tremendous amount of wealth. Because there are a bunch of assets which can no longer be shared, the total amount of cash needed to raise a child goes way up after a divorce happens. This, not anti-male bias, is the reason why both parties feel screwed by child support: the men feel like they're getting bled dry (because they are) while the women feel like they're still not being made whole (because they're not).
It's a thorny problem but it's not made easier by griping about bias. When thinking about child support payments, take as your foundational axiom "divorce destroys a bunch of wealth and makes both parties poorer on average; there is probably no solution that doesn't make both people feel fucked over."
Why do you say that they're anti-men?
> Many men get lifes destroyed due to insane "child support" payments which are totaly out of bounds for what "child support" should be.
Why are they out of bounds? What would make a reasonable child support payment service?
Yet, from another study
“In the United States, the rate of suicide among persons who are divorced or separated is usually reported as about 2.4 times greater than the suicide rate for married persons. ”
And
“For every one divorced woman who dies by suicide, there are nine divorced men who do so.”
Seems like we are managing against the wrong metric.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/acquainted-the-night...
Sorry if this is a common expression.
I believe the idea expressed in ‘appetite comes with eating’ is that your desire to indulge in an activity is correlated (caused even) with that activity. IE skydivers will likely have a larger appetite or desire for skydiving than a layman.
In a larger context I believe cjbgkagh is arguing that women can retain an advantageous position in a marriage by pretending or presenting unhappiness because exiting a marital contract would be an especially poor outcome her partner.
There are definitely difficulties, but no need to throw out the baby with bathwater, if done right a partner & children are one of the biggest joys & sources of meaning for life.
But I understand, however I hope you find it, in which way works for you, it does make life much richer.
For me family is one of them & buddhism another one.
If I can give advice, the easiest way to experience meaning is to serve & help others. Easiest is to do voluntary work in obvious helpful things like food serving etc. Something where you just enjoy & give and not think deeper about what the point of it all is.
I think there is quite a bit of nihilism in Western evolutionary materialism (all our feelings are just side effect of evolution). But that's a very limited view on reality. Not sure if that's also part of your experience, but I do see this cause similar feelings to smart & technical people around.
For me, my spouse is someone I can implicitly rely on and vice versa. We are a team working towards our shared purposes, but we are still individuals. We each have skills that make the others life easier. It's a lot easier to get a ride from a spouse than from a friend, and a spouse will be more available to help tend to sickness and injury. That sounds emotionless, but of course emotions and emotional support are important too.
For me, having a spouse where we have compatible ideas on children, money, climate, travel, and most things is like an easy button for life. Research and problem solving is easier with two people. Decision making can be harder though.
If you marry someone who doesn't have compatible ideas, there's going to be a lot more conflict and a lot more deep compromise, and that may not be as appealing. And, of course, people change, and exiting a long term commited relationship comes with trauma, so there's risk. Maybe none of this feels appealing to you, and that's fine. There's some social and legal pressure to marry for lots of reasons, but we live in a world full of social and legal pressures, and you should reject those pressures if they don't feel right to you.
Raising children is a whole other thing. I don't think people should be pressured into it, and it's best to be on the same page as a potential spouse before considering marriage, otherwise one spouse is likely to have to make a big compromise and that's not great. Personally, I find raising children to benefit from a team approach, but it's not required and a marriage is just one way to form a child raising team.
It was inspiring to see a couple who actively supported each other's hobbies and careers, who engaged with each others' professional communities.
It works very well for me. We both appreciate each other and actively make an effort to make one another happy.
This matters in business too.
Finding good business partners is like dating
If people want to have a long-lasting and successful marriage they need to be clear-eyed and pragmatic about it. The fact that Hollywood makes a fortune selling romantic stories has not helped!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_revolution
When you don't want to do something, but you also don't want to be blamed for not doing it, you can transfer the blame to someone who isn't there.
Boss wants to go out drinking after work which is his idea of 'team building' but you don't feel like it right now? "Well gee boss I'd love to come, but my wife's expecting me home by 7pm. Happy wife happy life, right?"
About 75% of the time when you hear people in the workplace saying "happy wife happy life" what they actually mean is "thanks for the offer but no thanks, and don't bother trying to cajole or peer-pressure me"
(Veterans at transferring blame will go even further, transferring blame to abstract concepts like 'market conditions' and 'company policy' )
Not at all, for all they know you're living some 1950s lifestyle where your wife has dinner on the table just as you get home, and it'll be cold if you're late. Or if they prefer, they can imagine you're a progressive modern father, going home to change diapers and help with bedtime. Or they can imagine you're deeply in love, and eager not to disappoint your best friend in the whole world.
There really is nothing abusive about a man saying he likes his wife to be happy. Making an effort to make the other person happy and them making an effort to make you happy is the whole point of a relationship, isn't it?
Being a doormat to your partner is a great way to end up miserable.
You will have arguments and challenges. Those are good things and sometimes it needs to be said and worked out .
Marriage was always a partnership and a business in the past. Treat it as such anx you'll find it works way better.
It is true, but an incomplete instruction for life happiness . What more do you want from a platitude?
Good luck having a happy life with a miserable wife.
It seems crazy to me that you think people are incapable of doing things to add or detract from the happiness of others.
If I treat my wife with kindness and care in the morning, she will be much happier than if I hypothetically berated or beat her.
I think that is absolutely true. Hopefully by marriage, partners have some practice and success promoting each other's happiness.
Heck in most cases you might even be getting benchmarked against a fictional figure who exists only in her imaginations.
The more you do, more that fictional figure gets better than you, and you are expected jump over the bar she just raised. Sooner or later you will burnout and she will hate you for being weak compared to the hero that exists in her mind.
Today my toddler asked for candy and my wife almost gave her a piece (it's 7:45am). I said no. When the wife rebuked, I said, "stop, you're going to make our daughter fat like you." Mad her piping mad but guess what?
Happiness comes from within and you know what makes me happy? Having a healthy family that makes good choices. The happiest wives are those that get gentlely pushed around from time to time.
So in short, stop being a push over and maybe your wife won't leave you for a man that does.
Why not just find someone who is already content living their life single but enjoys the added social aspects of a relationship? That plus someone where those social aspects happen naturally without a lot of using the finite motivational energy.
Then there's no expectation or perceived responsibility to have a sort of dependency relationship, and the happy social reinforcing moments happen naturally.
The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive. Even happy and independent people have ups and downs, and can benefit from someone enthusiastically helping them promote their happiness.
It is a win win win for everyone involved.
The recipient of support is even happier, the supporter gets to enjoy the process of making the other happy, and then the supporter get the company of a very happy person.
Ideally this is bidirectional with each partner playing both roles.
It doesn't use finite motivational energy. It creates net positive energy.
I'm happily married, and in the sense of being counter-cultural would be in completely the other end of the spectrum (very conservative about family, intend on having 6-8 kids that I will cherish even when they're adults).
That said, I think you've hit the nail on the head about "happy wife, happy life".
It's important to basically dedicate your life to being in service to her, but on the flip side it's important for her to do the same.
This level of dedication is almost counter-cultural in a sense, because you're not putting yourself first, but it's absolutely worth it in the long run.
On a visceral level, you feel always loved, always important, always worthy.
> intend on having 6-8 kids that I will cherish even when they're adults
There's a wonderful Mike Tyson quote that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. I assure you that it's quite a rare individual who gets married and has kids with the intent of despising their spouse and estranging themselves from their children. Sometimes it works out, and other times it doesn't.
If you ignore the romance, and only consider the practicalities, there is no good reason to get married. It doesn't offer significant rights or benefits and mostly puts you at risk and restricts your option.
Me, I've been married, and I know I'll likely do it again. Not for personal gain, but because I'm a fool who believes in love.
I also think it's too early to really look at these rates. Of course many women would be happy they weren't destitute when they got married during a time when women couldn't have bank accounts. Of course men would feel put out when they were used to having everything handled by their wife and existed during a time where joint custody was not so common.
I'd like to see these studies again in 20 or so years when most people surveyed got married out of commitment instead of life necessity.
We are already there, what kind of world are you imagining? The need for women to marry was removed 50-60 years ago in the west, there hasn't been a necessity to marry in a really long time, you might have some really old couples left from the time before that but it wouldn't affect statistics much.
Of course the suicide right is going to be higher, but you shouldn't compare it against the part of the population who is happily married, you would have to compare it to the people who are desperately unhappy in their marriage and don't get divorced. At the end of my marriage I still dearly loved my wife, but hadn't been happy for years and I was wishing for death to give me a noble exit from a situation I couldn't see a way out of myself.
People can be awful to each other. Gender doesn’t matter.
It depends a lot. Very little time in court (no fault divorce, informal agreement re money, and child just stayed with me) and the family courts here are secret so will not comment on that courts, but as for society it depends a lot.
My own experience is that no one who knows me at all well blames me. Some of my ex-wife's friends do - the ones who do not know me mostly. Why should I care what they think? My friends have been supportive, so have my (extended) family.
The only thing that annoys me is that she has been playing on racial stereotypes to gain sympathy. More that people are ignorant enough of other cultures to believe her uncritically than anything else.
I had to sign a paper where I agreed I committed all sorts of "faults" just for the court to process the thing and make the divorce official. To me it doesn't matter -- the legal system of the UK is archaic regardless. A divorce is nothing more than a contract agreeing to share financial and child responsibilities.
They were quite uncooperative as well to get the paperwork necessary to register the divorce elsewhere in the EU, but that might have breen Brexit.
The law was changed from 2022 (I delayed starting my divorce proceedings by a few months to benefit from it) and we now have no-fault divorce. Essentially, all it needs is for one party to want to divorce and the a certain lapse of time after you married. The only grounds for opposing it are very narrows ones like jurisdiction.
The divorce case is separate from those over money and children which are also optional. You can just have informal agreements over both unless someone wants to go to court. That is why I spent very little time in court - in fact the divorce itself happened with need to attend hearings with the application made through the family court website.
Even before the change judges would try and find for an allegation of a fault (usually "unreasonable behaviour") and most lawyers advised clients not to contest divorces. One lawyer I consulted told me that in the previous 20 years he dealt with one contested divorce (contesting the end of the marriage that is, obviously going to court over child and financial arrangements is common).
On the other hand I have come across many cases where the less affluent former spouse (especially one who did not work while married to look after the children) does not get a fair amount of child support and these are mostly women. Not a problem in my case as I was the one who was earning and the primary parent.
The biggest criticism I would make is not of the courts, but society and the police do not take domestic abuse of men seriously. They also do not take emotional abuse such as controlling behaviour seriously despite it now being a crime. This is pervasive - the Crown Prosecution Service classifies domestic abuse as "violence against women and girls" and then mentions in passing that men can be victims too (40% of violent abuse victims, in fact, but you would not know that from their manuals).
If you’re a man in the US: You. Are. On. Your. Own.
Good thing they used that autonomy to build... everything.
It's true across Africa. It's true across Asia (see: China, Japan for two very prominent examples). It's true in India. It's true across all of the Islamic world. It's commonly true in most of Europe (and absolutely true across Eastern Europe). Canada is quite similar to the US. It's true across Latin America. And it's true in the US.
When it's that comprehensive, spanning most of the human population across wildly different cultures, it's not society, it's biology. Society - cultures - are a production of that biology, reinforcing, not the other way around. It's not recent, it's ancient; it wasn't originated by humanity through society, nature organized humanity in a way that assisted survival.
I’m often in awe that we can both propose equal rights and responsibilities and sympathetically treat forty-year-old adults as children in these situations, but only if they belong to one sex. The other sex gets disgust or at best pity.
Turns out, there is more to marriage than mere ritual.
Because of progressive/feminist legislative activism. Feminists have been advocating for no-fault divorce since at least the 1950s. The National Association of Women Lawyers were advocating for it during that decade [0].
> stripping support to those without means, and not funding childcare and education
Because single mothers and people on welfare have been derided as "welfare queens" and similar since the 1980s, when America elected Reagan and went all-in on free trade, deregulation, and defunding government services.
It isn't that specific one party or organization is attempting to reduce the birth rate.
> Under a rational system the State would [...]
In a democracy, the state isn't very rational. Whoever controls the government has different visions for what the interests of the state are.
[0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26564622?seq=5
Instead we just plug our ears and pretend these are not problems that have a long term bearing on society, somehow. Not a very adult position to take, IMO.
Remember that if unhappy people are more likely to divorce or never marry, this has a double-whammy effect on the average happiness gap: the unmarried person pool gets unhappier because of the new person, and the "married person" pool gets happier on average because of a survivorship bias after the unhappy person was taken out. This happens even if marriage has no effect on happiness.
At the same time the headline already simplifies the article, which focuses a lot on laws about division of property after divorce, and the article itself is dodging some of the negative consequences of easier divorce. See e.g.:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/423155
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-012-0435-7
In addition, it’s obviously possible to be single, unhappy about it, but happier than you were in a bad marriage.
[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/706826
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Using the government to screw your partner over as a negotiating tactic is a sick way to frame a divorce. It's this sick mentality that young men are warned about as they begin to seriously date.
I'm not here to boss anyone around; nor do I dispute the tactical findings in the research cited.
However, diminishing the value of the family is an unequivocal strategic disaster, as advanced economies with cratered birthrates are showing.
My wife and I have barely clocked in at the replacement rate, so this is not me passing judgement on anyone.
But here is some truth: a reinstatement of the fruitful XXXY family as a primary goal is needful.
Or not. All I can do is point my two toward common sense and away from the follies of the day.
Certainly so if economic velocity and growth are the metrics you're operationalizing "success" around. I do not believe that is the case for many, and I'd argue that it shouldn't be the case for the global population as it's not a trajectory that be sustained indefinitely without an ability to expand off of terrestrial Earth.
It's a bit wild to see Malthusianism alive and well in 2024. He couldn't predict the industrial revolution, and we likely can't predict whatever will come next, either.
> The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.
Smart people make predictions about the future all the time. The problem is the future is hard to predict. The mere fact that birth rates in developed nations are falling below sustainment level calls into question any sort of extrapolation of when or if overpopulation will happen. That's not to say the Earth can support an infinite number of people because it can't; but that doesn't imply any specific trends we see right now will continue into the future.
This is especially true if you value (as I certainly do) the ongoing existence of land not just for farming and habitation but for the diverse ecologies of flora and fauna to continue to exist. I'm certainly more pessimistic than optimistic about how the rest of the natural world would fare in the next 150 years if we continue on as we have been.
But honestly, this to me is a sideshow: given our ability to produce efficiently and often autonomously, we shouldn't require a reliance on constant population growth to function effectively. Maybe that's where I'm being laughably naive.
The empirical evidence is overwhelmingly on your side.
This does not make childlessness a swift call.
Indeed, I would call parenthood (biological or adoptive) an important part of the human experience.
Or maybe I just personally wasn't going to grow up without a forcing function.
I'm going to have to write two arguments here, because you're both wrong. The Earth is nowhere near carrying capacity, every advanced economy is looking at underpopulation. At the same time, however, forcing people to breed is inhumane and counterproductive.
The root cause here is economic inequality. A large part of environmental damage is caused by a handful of outsize polluters who manage to escape prosecution and liability. People don't have kids because they don't have economic opportunity, because it's been eaten up by perpetually enshittifying monopolies. Who are also those same outsize polluters.
Examples of outsize polluters include things like the fishing industry, responsible for one of the largest streams of plastic pollution into the oceans. The agricultural industry uses a majority of the American midwest and west's water, deliberately wasting it in order to retain the legal right to use it in the future, "just in case". And 30% of US greenhouse gas emissions is just industrial emissions.
Examples of fertility rates being tied to inequality include countries like South Korea. For the record, almost a quarter of all of South Korea's economic output is just Samsung. 60% of their GDP is chaebols[0]. The chaebols control the political system to a ludicrous degree[2]. They have such deep ties that the South Korean CIA will literally have people writing down the names of people involved in protests so they can add them to Samsung's hiring blacklists. Who the hell would want to have children in such a country?
Malthusianism fails as a political philosophy because it ignores the distribution of resources and treats reproduction as a scarce resource that needs to be limited (specifically to ourselves, and people like us, or people we like, etc). This makes it apt for coopting by exactly the kinds of people consuming Earth's limited resources to shift blame.
Likewise, pro-natalism wants to blame the victims of income inequality for not having lots of children. This is specifically because it's easier than actually breaking the power systems that are fueling the inequality.
[0] Korean for zaibatsu[1]
[1] Japanese for chaebol[0]
[2] Every South Korean president since the country democratized ends their term in a corruption scandal, followed by their successor pardoning them as a way to pay it forward to future corrupt politicians.
This is not my argument, just that a society that only effectively functions with continual population growth is ultimately a Ponzi scheme unless we begin living outside of the Earth's boundary. I'm not making a practical argument, more an argument that no species can grow indefinitely in a closed-loop system. I meant it more as cheeky remark than literal concern-trolling.
Quite to the contrary, tinkering about at that level seems to trigger societal apoptosis, per the demographics.
Consider that the reason you have so few children is the same reason that fewer people are making stable families: difficult economic pressures.
I agree that this is below the sustainment rate, but we have at least replaced ourselves.
But you are quite correct, and my usage was loosey-goosey in this context.
Why not three, or four, adults? Two seems like an arbitrary definition, and larger families can share responsibility more evenly.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/11/06/marriag...
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/09/14/public-...
This does not seem a very modern way to view laws. Divorce is not some tribal war, and the law some tool to favor one tribe over an other.
There is a government role in reducing suicide rates and increasing employment. We have social support, mental health care, employment programs, and so on. Attaching those to divorce laws only works as a method to reduce responsibility and costs of the government.
A recent and rather good change in divorce laws here in Sweden was a requirement of couple therapy before family court will see a case. Invoking divorce laws and family courts should be the exception when people can't find a way to split on equitable terms.