Marriage is actually a great financial choice for most people. If marriage rates are dropping, I'd blame our culture — the financial incentives are clearly there.
Only if you manage to avoid the often catastrophic downside risks, which are very apparent and very frequent in many industries. It's quite straightforward and convenient (in that there is an entire industry in family law serving it) to completely destroy decades of earnings and often times decades of future earnings for one or both parties.
Have seen it happen, and literally half of the couples in the 'good part of town' where I used to live which was populated almost exclusively by well educated white collar professionals were either going through it/at some stage of it, or were in a clearly abusive situation that might even have benefited from doing it - as long as they didn't wait for the other party to really screw them over by pulling the trigger first and alleging abuse or whatever.
A friends neighbor had been on the receiving end (along with their daughter) of literally years of verbal and emotional abuse from the wife for no apparent reason. She would go after neighbors too, if they dared to exist in her presence.
Both of them were lawyers. Last time I was over there a month ago, after an hour of it, he just begged her to stop screaming in the most pitiful voice I've heard a man ever use. So she yelled at him more for being so pitiful.
It's hard to really understand how terrible a prior trusted loved one can be until you've been on the other end of it. It's easy to assume it's because the other party did something wrong to deserve it too - but that is not usually the case in my experience. It's often lack of emotional regulation/healthy outlets for stress or life problems, usually reinforced by denial from the abuser.
The abusee often can't figure out how to escape or feels held hostage, sometimes also by denial at their own problems or inability to cope that lead them to that state of insecurity.
While marriage (the legal process) can magnify the upside, it can also dramatically magnify the downsides too, and make it MUCH MUCH harder to escape a bad situation for everyone.
It's quite a shit sandwich. Always has been near as I can tell.
> Unluckily, you cannot insure yourself against the immense risk of alimony payments if a divorce should happen.
Of course you can. You can know thyself and know thy partner and have the maturity to understand what you're getting into, and the ability to commit despite that. EG: I know there's 0% chance that my wife and I will get divorced, not because marriage is so easy but because we're both people who are able to work through difficulties towards a common goal.
Men don't see it coming because they don't care. Quite frequently men are in bad relationships that don't affect them much but they generally don't walk away.
Women pull the trigger when they can't take it anymore.
This could be the reasoning of someone with survival bias though.
Unfortunately, life can be complicated, e.g. family member went through undiagnosed schizophrenia for many years, one can imagine how that upset the marriage assumptions prior to the mental health issues.
Sure. However, there are plenty of not so straightforward people too who are very well aware of loopholes in our law, society and human psyche and they are happy to exploit them.
What if you were drafted, served in a war overseas and came back with severe PTSD? For my parents generation that was a real thing that caused a lot of divorces.
Think of the tens of millions of families who last their dad in ww1 and ww2. Even that is echoing through time, because their missing influence probably impacted their Children’s success and so on.
You can mitigate most of this if you're wealthy already.
Basically, one of many things you can do - in any jurisdiction - is move all your assets to your private foundation and simply not pay yourself for the duration of the marriage, including what you personally make while in the marriage if anything. Non-profits can invest indiscriminately in anything so the money can keep growing and supporting almost anything you want.
During divorce proceedings you have pretty much nothing, except the history of earnings if any which indeed can be used to compute your alimony payments. But all your accumulation and assets are not in your name, so the alimony won't be consequential compared to the horror stories we've heard of ex-spouses having to check themselves into jail when they ran out of money to pay. Back to this plan, don't forget to load up on debt as a general lifestyle choice, way before the marriage has issues. Personally you should never have positive net worth, and there should also be a line of creditors such that anyone else has to get in line or fuck off.
Afterwards you can direct your foundation to pay you a hefty salary.
The purpose isn't to screw your spouse over, its to be judgement proof from all kinds of creditors (and maintain your standing in society as a philanthropist). That will include mitigating the folly of silly unlimited liability contracts such as marriage contracts. Simply put, the clauses could be better. Love, finances, much like a lawyer I don't really care about what emotional reasons people associate with marriage and those are always available whether you do 5 minutes of estate planning or not. In my perspective, removing the downsides allows for both spouses to focus on love or whatever they want to do together. Something more commonly associated with marriage, by at least one spouse.
"I donated everything to non-profits!"
You get to win through many life events here. A state judge will not be able to undermine the federal status of the non-profit. They do have discretion over the pre-nup agreement though. So if you have the money to make a ridiculously unsexy pre-nup agreement, you have the money to make a ridiculously sexy private foundation which gets to exist in subtlety.
If you are saving up for a downpayment on a house while your life is slipping away year after year and the whole goal is to leverage up with a spouse on a mortgage before you are an ineligible bachelor/ette, then this game has no applicability to you. There is nothing attractive about that game to me, at any earning level. Discussions about the top 10% or top 5% make no difference to me, because the circumstances are the same: wage workers that barely match the cost of living wherever they earn, slow accumulation, risks (health, employment, life events) that undercut growth simply because it takes too long. Better to just have, there is no profound message applicable because the message is that simple. There are almost too many advantages to just having.
Young people get pretty bombarded by divorce horror stories - especially from pop culture. Most divorces don't go to a court and a large number are resolved entirely internally and only seek professional help for the finalization of the agreement... but there are the attention grabbing headlines of someone being left with only the shirt on his back (and like 20 mil in options) on the far side of a really bad divorce.
I also think that culture does play a fair role. I was initially hesitant to marry (as a millennial) because a lot of my friends were being denied the ability to marry who they chose, so I wanted to stand with them and reject the institution. That, thankfully, has been resolved - but I can totally understand people who have mixed feelings on marriage.
There have always been divorce horror stories. The systemic reasons for declining marriage rates are mostly financial. The American middle class has seen declining incomes for the past generation or so, with rising student loan payments, unaffordable housing, expensive childcare etc. You have to be making a lot of income to seriously consider having children.
Whether it is mostly financial is still being debated. Even Norway (which has orders of magnitudes more in savings per capita) has low marriage rates.
Abstractly, marriage was a giant public act of consent due to the consequences of sex. Now, sex is decoupled from marriage, so the institution isn’t needed in secular culture.
Depends on the culture. For example, Rome was converted (>50%) to Christianity in about two centuries due to the impact of opening Jewish family customs to the Gentiles (read: everyone not a Jew by blood) and a reformulation of what it means to love.
I never married anyone and certainly I would never do it for financial/political reasons. It also never crossed my mind that marrying for love makes me a modern thinker :)
