If you have a compelling case for why my life would be better without marriage I’d love to hear it.
I shall call this the “loving, consensual model” of a relationship:
Preferring to be with someone if and only if they prefer to be with you,
and them preferring to be with you if and only if you prefer to be with them,
and you prefer to be with them, satisfying 2,
and they prefer to be with you, satisfying 1,
gives us a situation of cohabitation, which is sufficient for your stated needs.
Given that you should be indifferent between cohabitation and marriage, and marriage has non-zero costs, why would you prefer marriage?
The reason is insidious, cloaked in the positive connotations of marriage and love, but nevertheless incontrovertible.
You don’t prefer to be with someone if and only if they prefer to be with you.
You prefer to be with someone.
Of course, it’s illegal to directly enforce this preference. Unlawful imprisonment, and all that. So you’d go with the consensual model, but raise the costs of them preferring to be separate as much as legally possible. Like, say, requiring a contract that is costly and messy to break.
Yes, if I have various kinds of entanglement and dependence on someone, such as living together, sharing finances and expensive objects like a car, sharing large parts of our social lives, and possibly having children, I don’t want them to be able to leave at a moment’s notice. This doesn’t make be feel especially evil.
Really? I’d suggest you don’t want them to have a positive expected value on leaving at a moment’s notice rather than wanting them restricted, but in any case… the solution is to structure your entanglements and dependence in such a way that this opportunity is available to them if they desire it, not to try to force contracts and obligations onto them in order to restrict them.
Can you rephrase? I’m thinking things like “If we have a kid, we shouldn’t split up even if we’re a little unhappy” and “If I’ve quit my job to be a homemaker, don’t stop giving me money without warning”. Are you saying to avoid getting in such situations in the first place? Or are you saying not to marry jerks who will leave you and the kids in the dust?
“If we have a kid, we shouldn’t split up even if we’re a little unhappy”
Yes; the kid increases the cost of splitting up, so being a little unhappy doesn’t justify making the kid really unhappy. You don’t need a marriage for this, you just need to think about the situation for five minutes.
“If I’ve quit my job to be a homemaker, don’t stop giving me money without warning”.
Pay partially into an account that is available to the homemaker and not you; with a month’s head start the account will have enough to pay out to the homemaker for at least a month. This is equivalent to a month’s warning. It took me like fifteen seconds to think of this and it’s already better than the equivalent financial situation within a marriage.
There are just better ways of doing everything marriage needs to do, except installing a huge cost on leaving, so it seems duplicitous to prefer marriage to these other ways if you ostensibly only care aout the other things.
There are lots of situations where precommitting to doing something at some future time, and honoring that precommittment at that time regardless of whether I desire to do that thing at that time, leaves me better off than doing at every moment what I prefer to do at that moment.
“Marriage” as you’ve formulated it here—namely, a precommitment to remain “with” someone (whatever that actually means) even during periods of my life when I don’t actually desire to be “with” them at that moment—might be one of those situations.
It’s not clear to me that the connotations of “insidious” would apply to marriage in that scenario, nor that the implication that marriage is not loving and consensual would be justified in that scenario.
I am legally married because I need the legal and financial benefits that marriage provides in my country. However, in an ideal fantasy world, I wouldn’t need those benefits and I wouldn’t be legally married. But I would still be married! Just without government involvement. (BTW I have no interest in raising kids.)
It’s normal for people to hear “marriage” and think “legal marriage” but I hate that.
Um, I dunno. I’m just referring to that fact that I don’t have my own source of health insurance, so I need to be on his, but in an ideal world I would have my own.
I shall call this the “loving, consensual model” of a relationship:
Preferring to be with someone if and only if they prefer to be with you,
and them preferring to be with you if and only if you prefer to be with them,
and you prefer to be with them, satisfying 2,
and they prefer to be with you, satisfying 1,
gives us a situation of cohabitation, which is sufficient for your stated needs.
Given that you should be indifferent between cohabitation and marriage, and marriage has non-zero costs, why would you prefer marriage?
The reason is insidious, cloaked in the positive connotations of marriage and love, but nevertheless incontrovertible.
You don’t prefer to be with someone if and only if they prefer to be with you.
You prefer to be with someone.
Of course, it’s illegal to directly enforce this preference. Unlawful imprisonment, and all that. So you’d go with the consensual model, but raise the costs of them preferring to be separate as much as legally possible. Like, say, requiring a contract that is costly and messy to break.
Yes, if I have various kinds of entanglement and dependence on someone, such as living together, sharing finances and expensive objects like a car, sharing large parts of our social lives, and possibly having children, I don’t want them to be able to leave at a moment’s notice. This doesn’t make be feel especially evil.
Really? I’d suggest you don’t want them to have a positive expected value on leaving at a moment’s notice rather than wanting them restricted, but in any case… the solution is to structure your entanglements and dependence in such a way that this opportunity is available to them if they desire it, not to try to force contracts and obligations onto them in order to restrict them.
Can you rephrase? I’m thinking things like “If we have a kid, we shouldn’t split up even if we’re a little unhappy” and “If I’ve quit my job to be a homemaker, don’t stop giving me money without warning”. Are you saying to avoid getting in such situations in the first place? Or are you saying not to marry jerks who will leave you and the kids in the dust?
Yes; the kid increases the cost of splitting up, so being a little unhappy doesn’t justify making the kid really unhappy. You don’t need a marriage for this, you just need to think about the situation for five minutes.
Pay partially into an account that is available to the homemaker and not you; with a month’s head start the account will have enough to pay out to the homemaker for at least a month. This is equivalent to a month’s warning. It took me like fifteen seconds to think of this and it’s already better than the equivalent financial situation within a marriage.
There are just better ways of doing everything marriage needs to do, except installing a huge cost on leaving, so it seems duplicitous to prefer marriage to these other ways if you ostensibly only care aout the other things.
There are lots of situations where precommitting to doing something at some future time, and honoring that precommittment at that time regardless of whether I desire to do that thing at that time, leaves me better off than doing at every moment what I prefer to do at that moment.
“Marriage” as you’ve formulated it here—namely, a precommitment to remain “with” someone (whatever that actually means) even during periods of my life when I don’t actually desire to be “with” them at that moment—might be one of those situations.
It’s not clear to me that the connotations of “insidious” would apply to marriage in that scenario, nor that the implication that marriage is not loving and consensual would be justified in that scenario.
I am legally married because I need the legal and financial benefits that marriage provides in my country. However, in an ideal fantasy world, I wouldn’t need those benefits and I wouldn’t be legally married. But I would still be married! Just without government involvement. (BTW I have no interest in raising kids.)
It’s normal for people to hear “marriage” and think “legal marriage” but I hate that.
Can you clarify what you mean by “need,” here? In particular, does it mean something different than “benefit from”?
Um, I dunno. I’m just referring to that fact that I don’t have my own source of health insurance, so I need to be on his, but in an ideal world I would have my own.