User:Leucosticte/Marriage questions

Questions
Here are some thought-provoking questions for you, Nathan: (1) Would you feel like a loser if you remained single for the rest of your life? (2) Are you seeking to keep someone else "lower" than yourself by persuading her to marry you? (3) Do you feel elevated in your own eyes and/or in the eyes of society by having a wife?

Response
I'll break my responses to those three questions up into three sections. By the way, below I'm pretty much equating "getting married" with having a lifelong committed relationship. A lot of my goals, such as having and nurturing kids, require a long-term relationship, since I'd prefer that it be a team effort by the biological parents that extends into the kids' adulthood. Also, there are a lot of benefits of long-term relationships, such as having a lifetime of shared memories to enjoy, which creates a deeper friendship. If you're going to be with someone for life, I don't see the downside of getting married.

(1) I guess it would depend on why I remained single for the rest of my life. Getting married was usually something that seemed temporarily or permanently out of reach for me, whether it was because of a lack of social skills, or because of religion (I used to belong to a cult), or because of being broke. I don't really remember feeling like a loser, as much as I felt frustrated or dismayed. Or sometimes I just felt optimistic that success was around the corner, and THEN I would find a girlfriend. I think the feeling of being a loser for not being able to attract a girl was more present back when I was a virginal middle schooler, because people made a bigger deal out of it.

At any rate, I can feel like a loser when I have a girlfriend or wife too, depending on whether I feel like I deserve them, or how much importance I put on that relationship in the big scheme of things, which can vary from time to time. One thing that's for sure is that I don't feel completely like a failure just because I'm single, and I don't feel completely like a success just because I'm in a relationship. Nor is my happiness or unhappiness completely decided by it. Actually, my feelings of failure or unhappiness from factors outside the relationship can adversely affect the relationship and my ability to enjoy it sometimes.

I tend to agree with Neil Strauss, "A man has two primary drives in early adulthood: one toward power, success, and accomplishment; the other toward love, companionship, and sex." Being a loser is something I think of as more related to a failure to satisfy that first drive. A failure in that area also can make it harder to satisfy the second drive.

(2) I don't really see marriage as necessarily keeping someone "lower." The mate market is very much like the labor market, or maybe the market for a business partner. The more expectations you have of what you want your partner to be able and willing to do in the relationship, the smaller your pool of available partners will be. If you take a job that requires an hour of work a week, and pays $100,000/year, are you still lower than your employer, because you have to take orders from him? Or are you the one who's higher up, because you're able to command such high pay for such little work? It's the same way in a relationship; the person may have some expectations, but what are you getting in return?

Both people are agreeing to give up some of their freedom in exchange for getting the other person to give up their freedom. If one of them gives up a lot more than the other person gave up, then there must have been some imbalance in their negotiating position, which is largely a function of supply and demand. Attractive women and rich men, for instance, tend to be in a more favorable negotiating position, when they're laying out their expectations. And I've never seen a situation in which people weren't laying out their expectations prior to marriage.

I guess it could happen that someone in an unfavorable negotiating position could agree to conditions of marriage that later they would prefer to be released from. E.g., someone might settle for the best person they can find, and agree to a bunch of conditions they'd prefer not to have to agree to in an ideal world, and then win the lottery the next day and regret their decision. Oh well! That's why the vows say "for richer, for poorer." In that sense, yeah, marriage sometimes locks people into a lower (or higher) position than they could be in if they were going to renegotiate from scratch or find someone new. It's one of the hazards of entering into any form of contract.

(3) I think there can be an increase in status from having a desirable partner, yes. People look favorably on having good taste and being able to attract such a person, as long as their thoughts don't turn to "Wow, she really blundered in choosing that guy. She could've done a lot better." But in some ways, other accomplishments are more important. The history books don't really take note of who had the prettiest wife. They look at the contributions people made. Of course, a wife can help a guy make those contributions by giving him moral support, assisting him in his work, etc.