Comment by geremiiah
12 hours ago
Enjoyable read. I've long since been wondering whether the low birth rates have something to do with the insecurity that surrounds modern day marriages. If you're a woman you don't want to invest in children, only to be divorced and left to raise the child of your now No.1 enemy. If you're a man, the insecurity is around whether the child is yours and also whether your wife will later divorce you and your child be taken away from you (sure visitation rights, but pratically the child grows up in the household of another man, if she remarries).
It’s all economic, pride and ego. Once you hit a certain amount of income, the marginal cost of children seems too much. It’s not a big deal when you have nothing.
Maintaining a middle/upper middle class lifestyle for your kids is expensive. Few people can afford daycare, 5x college tuitions, etc. Extended families tend to be spread out and social networks aren’t what they once were.
Dudes online blather about paternity, divorce, etc. all nonsense and all irrelevant. Bad marriages and divorce are not new, although religious and conservative people try to imply that. The entire movement for prohibition in the early 20th century was driven by absent fathers who would drink their wages away and let the children starve in some hovel.
The only thing that’s “new” is women have the ability to choose birth control.
The paternity issue should be easy to overcome with modern technology. There's really no reason the state shouldn't require a paternity test to ensure the accuracy of the state issued birth certificate.
Some states go the other way - if you (as the father, maybe the mother but that's pretty easy to verify I hear) sign the birth certificate you are the father (Maury) for all legal purposes even if you're not - wether knowingly or not.
Yes, most states see it that way. But you could still make them the legal father through adoption (like with step parents) without providing inaccurate information on the birth certificate.
isn't that fraud?
75% of divorces are initiated by women in the US. If college educated that number jumps to 90%. Divorce as an mechanism, is almost entirely used by women.
The question, of course, is whether that means women want divorce more, or men fear divorce more.
Women absolutely want the divorce more once they come to conclusion some aspect of relationship is over (typically the emotion part but simply spending less time together or feeling most of the burden of raising kids is enough).
Most guys can suck up now-loveless marriage trivially if kids are fine (after kids come, this is pretty standard path for marriages), heck we can still enjoy sex greatly in such situation. Most women, not so much. I know it sounds sexist, trust me I would be very happy if this wasnt true but when I look/ask/listen around it is.
As an cca older guy at certain age the patterns start emerging left and right, and my own marriage can see some of it, just like most other marriages around us.
Some make it, some don't. When it fails its mostly mixture of personality resilience of both sides rather than some objective measure of (lack of) quality of relationship. Its easy to judge but please be kind to those who are going/went through, they may have been a better partner than ie you and still it wasnt enough to sustain it.
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Anecdotally, men are a lot more content with marriage. Women want a lot more. The whole “healthy relationship” ecosystem in contemporary times is almost entirely women driven.
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The divorce mechanism is the legal end of the partnership. It's not an indication of who initiated the termination of the partnership itself.
Do you have evidence to back up the implict claim that those two are not strongly correlated?
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This does not surprise me, as the courts are flagrantly biased toward women in these matters. Almost without exception, they come out ahead in every measurable metric.
"as the courts are flagrantly biased toward women in these matters"
As in most matters. There are many studies about lesser sentences for women vs men who commit the same crimes.
This is not always exactly true if you dig into the details - for example, something like 20% of fathers get custody - but it's something like 90% of fathers who try to get custody get some.
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From divorces among family & friends - yes, those concerns exist. But they are also worst-case scenarios, and there are many "friendlier" divorces. Or divorces after the kids grow up - where none of the paternity, left-to-raise, and visitation issues really apply.
Vs. even if marriages were magically 100% secure - the costs of having kids in most modern societies have skyrocketed over the past half-ish century or so.
My view - for which I have no proofs, it's just intuition - is that people are too egotistic and self centered and too hedonistic to want to have children.