Wednesday, February 8, 2017

The Advantages Of Marriage for Men

Once in a while you come across an article which makes you stop and think, like it happened to me when I read the one published by FoxNews trying to lure more men into marriage. Marriage rates are dropping across the USA and beyond, which is actually little surprise considering the fact that Western governments have done their best to reduce what used to be a bedrock of Western civilisation to "roommates with extra rights" relationship. What is surprising is that people keep marrying still, despite all the odds.

So the lady author points to a research project which says that married  "men enjoy more money, better sex, and better health when they are married" compared to those who stay single. How true are these claims? First, from my own observation, marriage, outside of religious communities, has pretty much become a middle and upper class phenomenon. They will have more money on average per definition.

According to the article, better health comes partly from "better eating", which is again, typical for people higher on the social ladder. Lower classes, unfortunately, care little for nutrition, whether married or not, are addicted to fast food and many women don't cook, outside of warming up microwave dinners once in a while. It used to be that a man would marry to have someone prepare his meals, nowadays the chance is big he'll do the cooking himself, married or single.

Considering sex, while the report claims that more married than single men are satisfied with their love life, 51% is still quite low. In more traditional cultures, women are taught never to deny their husbands unless there is a medical reason, but apparently, 49% of the wives of the respondents don't put out nearly enough. Of course, in the times before reliable birth control, separate bedrooms weren't considered something really shocking, but then the husband could visit ladies of easy virtue and nobody would bat an eye, either.

But it was the part about money which especially drew my attention. I'll quote it in full:

Married men earn more, save more, and generally have access to a second income.  The typical fifty-something married man has three times the assets of his unmarried peer, about $167,000 compared to $36,000 for never-married and $48,500 for divorced.

Three things come to mind. First, correlation isn't causation. Since marriage is more typical for the wealthier among us, it's only logical that their income is higher. Married men also often will work longer hours because they have to, not because they particularly like it. They are more likely to own a big house which counts as "assets", I guess. Second, it's quite cynical to focus on the lower incomes of divorced men, when they often lose so much financially in the event of divorce (including and particularly, "assets"), especially considering the fact, that, to quote the article: The report notes that a majority of first divorces are initiated by women (though I'd like to point out that the one who initiates divorce isn't necessarily the guilty party).

The best part is, of course, this: Married men...generally have access to a second income . I wonder if the lady who wrote it considers herself any sort of a conservative, as this is really the last nail in the coffin of traditional marriage in the West: men marrying so that they could get a cushy lifestyle provided by their wives.

The report gives advice to the husbands how to avoid divorce:

“Men who do their best to hold down a stable job, who don’t abuse drugs or alcohol, who are sexually faithful, who attend religious services regularly with their wives, and who make a regular effort to be emotionally engaged in their marriage are less likely to divorce.”

It used to be that women got advice from their mothers on how to hold your marriage together, now men are supposed to do it. The report doesn't give advice on what's a man to do if his wife commits adulteries against him, divorces him and gets half his stuff because all divorce is no-fault. Role reversal is practically complete with onus on the men to keep their wives, not vice versa. 
No wonder that marriage rates keep dropping.

Liberal egalitarian individualism promoted in the current Western society is detrimental to marriage and articles like this are just a Band-Aid, nothing more. You don't treat gangrene with Band-Aid. 

7 comments:

  1. Good post, Sanne. Now you should write about the REAL advantages of marriage for men. Or do they exist anymore? It used to be that when men got married, they got someone to make their meals and keep their home nice and tidy. Getting married might have been the only realistic way to have some sort of regular sex life. Women of ill repute can be expensive and give you nasty diseases. :)

    For women, it was very important to gain the social status you got when you married. It was not quite that important to men, but married men were valued more, concidered more mature than unmarried men. It is common plot in romantic historical novels that men must marry in order to gain some position: unmarried men are concidered too unstable for certain positions. (So of course the man in question marries the first damsel in distress he meets and after lots of tears they find out that they actually love each other.)

    When it comes to sex in modern marriage, I think many men are so unsatisfied with it because they just watch too much porn and have very unrealistic whimsies.

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  2. Housewife, yes, I do believe the advantages still exist, and one was even mentioned in the same report - companionship, someone to share your life and your dreams with. And if you choose for a traditional marriage, you can still enjoy all the traditional benefits of it, it's just that no-fault divorce makes things so darn difficult.

    There are two other important things, for a Christian, marriage is the only way to enjoy sex without committing a mortal sin and then there is an issue of honour. The reason upper classes still do marry is because they want to get legitimate children. They can keep saying that it really doesn't matter any more, but as my husband put it, we all know the difference STILL. As for porn, it's incredibly damaging to men and the relationships. On the other hand, there is a problem of wives denying their husbands and sometimes, vice versa.

    As I have mentioned in my post, in the times past many families wanted to restrict the number of children so separate bedrooms weren't unheard of, but the idea behind was that when your wife rejected you, you could get it discreetly somewhere else. Well until the 20th century, married men having affairs was not grounds for divorce. Nowadays, with reliable anti-conception, there isn't really much excuse for the wife to reject her husband, outside of manipulation and control.

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  3. Unless they are both very religious and believe any form of anti-conception is sin, that is. Though even the Catholic Church allows NFP. Also to make it clear, I'm talking here about systematic denials which last for weeks and months, not an occasional "headache."

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  4. I agree with you, I do not believe rejecting husbands either. :) And with your husband when it comes to legitimate children.

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  5. He actually meant that we all know the difference between being married and living together even though some people try to pretend it doesn't exist:) Being married for a woman is just automatically being a higher status and it offers more rights and more protection still.

    The point is, all these problems are so complex, you could write a book about them, so that one simply can't cover them in a single post. With easy divorce on the books, there is more intro-sexual competition in society and the wife's position is threatened much more by any affair her husband may begin, for instance.

    Then the problem of porn, as you mentioned. Hardcore porn does something to the brain, it's actually akin to shooting heroin. As a result the are young men unable to have normal sex with a woman.

    Then we have the problem of double income families where spouses and children seldom see each other, sexual revolution which makes sex with "decent girls" as opposed to prostitutes and widows in their 50s readily available, etc etc.

    And it's not all the fault of women, either, as some men try to claim. The changes in society were planned and introduced by nefarious forces and these forces are at work still.

    Take, for instance, the issue of married women working. The truth is, they didn't suddenly wake up in the 1960s and decided to burn their bras and rebel, there was (and is) a campaign to force married women into workforce by EU and international business groups, the same who also promote open borders and undermining working people's wages. In other words, globalists.

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  6. I am hoping things will turn around. As civil society breaks down, women will turn to marriage as a covering and a protection from the brutality. I think we are already seeing this happen to some extent.

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  7. Men and women are meant for each other by God and Nature and pair-bonding is a real thing. I, too, hope that marriage will make a come-back, yet there should be some enforcement mechanism in place. The first step is to abolish no-fault divorce, obviously.

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