From a legal standpoint, marriage is a body of law that changes a few of your tax, inheritance, insurance, and medical defaults, plus a few other things. I laid this out in a previous post, so rather than summarizing all of that again, here’s a link: https://archwinger.substack.com/p/maybe-theres-no-such-thing-as-marriage
There are a lot of legal, social, and religious trappings surrounding marriage, but the most important feature of marriage, hands down, no contest, 100,000%, is as follows:
Once you are married, you can get divorced.
That is, undeniably, without question, the most important part of marriage.
In fact, if you think about it, the possibility of divorce is the entire point of marriage.
I’m not saying that all marriages do or should end in divorce. After all, the ideal is that no marriage ends in divorce. The wistful thinking pie-in-the-sky utopian theory is that everybody is supposed to get married and divorce is never supposed to happen, except maybe for very extreme cases.
Divorce isn’t the point of marraige. The POSSIBILITY of divorce is the point.
Once you marry someone, you are arming that person with the ability to divorce you. Obviously, in the overwhelming majority of cases, we are arming the woman with this weapon, not the man, and that is the very intentional, specific goal of marriage, rooted in the most important biological difference between men and women: Women get pregnant.
Sexual intercourse is how babies are made. If you need some detailed explanations about that, let me know and I can write another essay, but if you make me do that, I’m going to make it really boring and go through all of the stages of meiosis. Because if you don’t understand how your gametes are made and what happens with yours and hers to create a baby, you don’t have any business giggling at diagrams that detail the fun part.
But if you haven’t learned about this, just trust me for now that sex is how babies are made and we can have the biology lesson later. Sex is also fun and feels good on physical, emotional, and even spiritual levels, plus people are instinctually driven to do it because we are biologically driven to procreate, continue the species, and propagate our genes into future generations. So humans of both sexes want to have sex pretty badly, for a variety of reasons, and while there are some things we can do to reduce the chances of pregnancy, the possibility that a baby may be created is there any time a man and a woman have sex.
This means that when a woman has sex with a man, she is taking a risk - even if precautions are taken so it’s just a small risk - that she will become pregnant.
And caring for babies is expensive, time-consuming, and significantly restricts your freedom to undertake social and professional activities.
This means that when a woman has a baby, she is taking a very big chance. She is significantly reducing her ability to support herself, in reliance on the hope that support will be provided to her from other sources. Most commonly, that other source is her husband.
Therefore, if a woman has one or more children with a man, she is placing herself at the risk of his wants and whims. If the man leaves, she will be stuck caring for the child(ren) on her own and will not have the ability to support herself financially due to the constraints childcare places on her life. This is an absolutely catastrophic outcome for a woman.
Marriage — or more accurately, divorce — is her protection against this possibility.
When a man marries a woman, he is arming her with the possibility of divorce. Then, if he leaves her in a position where she can’t support herself and her children, she can use a legal divorce proceeding to secure government-enforced support from him.
Essentially, marriage solves one of women’s problems. She wants children. Often very badly due to strong biological urges as well as the desire to advance socially. But if a woman gets pregnant, has kids, then her man leaves her with no money, and no way to make a living because she has small kids to care for? This is an absolutely unacceptable risk that would cause many women to choose not to have children. Marriage arms her with the possibility of divorce, which enables her to defend herself from this outcome by using the government to enforce support for her and her children from her ex-husband.
The marriage is just a ceremony. A fun party. It’s the possibility of divorce that allows her to risk having children.
The wistful thinking pie-in-the-sky utopian theory is that men also benefit from marriage. The theory goes that if a man doesn’t marry a woman, she won’t have sex with him, she won’t give him her companionship, and she won’t have his children. So if a man ever wants to have sex, companionship, and children, his only choice is to get married.
Women have kind of ruined that system. They had a lot of help doing so through a number of social changes. For example, most women have jobs now, health insurance through their jobs, and contraception through their health insurance. The odds of pregnancy when a woman is taking the birth control pill properly, plus when the men she has sex with properly use condoms, are very small. It is also legal in most places to terminate pregnancies that result from sexual encounters. So in modern times, women don’t feel very afraid of having sex outside of marriage.
Culturally, we have also normalized sex outside of marriage. Even sex outside of any kind of committed relationship. Even sex outside of dating where people just meet for some casual fun. Instead of shaming women for taking this risk, we shame the people who judge them for doing so.
We also have numerous financial safety nets in most first world countries. Women with children are able to obtain government-enforced support from the men they have children with, married or not, in most first world places. And if they are unable to do so, such as in cases where a father is unknown or unable to be located, or in cases where the father is financially poor and his support money is insufficient, they receive free money from their government at the expense of their fellow taxpayers. There are also all kinds of rules in many countries about employers not discriminating against single mothers and employers being required to make various flexible accommodations for women, within reason.
We’ve made the risks of sex small enough for women that they are now able to have sex - casual or serious - and even have children in some cases, with reduced consequences. Some men - at least the attractive ones - are also now able to have the sex and companionship that previously required marriage to obtain, without getting married.
Despite what the internet would make you believe, the average man is not a sexless loser. That’s just what the average man who whines about women on the internet is like. Out in the real world, the average guy has some dates, some sex, some relationships, and most guys who really want to usually end up married. Obviously, the average guy still struggles with women and dating. Women have a lot of options and the freedom to be picky, for a lot of modern-world reasons that would turn this post into a lengthy book to explore. Maybe we can do that later. But still, most average dudes still get some dates, some sex, some relationships, and even usually end up married eventually.
To be honest, most normal-ish guys want a wife and children. Men are biologically driven to procreate, and to seek companionship, just like women. Plus, these steps look good socially and come with some logistical benefits, like easier and more frequent access to sex and friendship, another set of hands to help out around the house that frees up a man to do different things in or out of the home, another income if she works, lower expenses due to a shared living space (in theory but often not in reality), and the opportunity to have children in a family setting.
Most normal guys do not want to grow old and never have children or a female companion. It’s okay to not conform to today’s standards of “normal guy” if that’s not what you want. But all choices are tradeoffs. Getting married and having kids is a risk and a tradeoff. The same is true of not getting married and having kids.
And as noted above, the risk and tradeoff of getting married is that you are handing your wife a loaded gun. You are arming her with the possibility of divorce. You are entering into a legal arrangement where she is probably, we hope, going to have sex with you, be a kind and loving companion to you, and do useful things in and/or out of the house that benefit you. But all of that is strictly voluntary, and she may start or stop doing any or all of those things at various times in her life and there isn’t much you can do about it but talk to her and hope she loves you enough to conform to what you want out of her.
And any time, for any reason or no reason at all, she can divorce you, which typically results in you being restricted to part-time access to your children, losing half of your accumulated wealth or more, often losing your home, and losing a portion of every future paycheck - all enforced by the government.
And there’s the rub. Divorce doesn’t just protect a woman from you leaving her with small children, no money, and no way to support herself due to the restrictions of childcare. Divorce allows a woman to leave you at any time.
The possibility of divorce doesn’t just protect a woman from the risks of having children.
It protects a woman from being stuck with you if her whims change and she wants out.
It ensures that any of her marital participation - sex, housework, childcare, income - is all optional. Voluntary. If she ever falls short, you can’t leave her — she’ll use divorce. But your marital duties are less voluntary. If you ever stop doing your own marital duties to her liking, she has the option to use divorce in that case as well.
Divorce is not a precise tool that protects a woman only from bad men. Divorce is a very flexible tool that gives a woman options so that being with an average man doesn’t have to be a permanent decision, and so that marriage doesn’t have to involve too many restrictive duties she doesn’t feel like doing.
Divorce doesn’t just protect a woman from a man leaving her destitute - it protects a woman from being in a marriage that isn’t going the way she likes in any way, shape or form, reasonable or not.
All choices are tradeoffs. The average man is not capable of (and usually doesn’t want) to be an eternal player chasing tail and trying to have hookups into his senior years, having no female companionship and no children. The average man typically doesn’t want children outside of a family setting. It’s okay to be a non-average man if that’s you, but that choice is a tradeoff, too.
But most women will not be a loving companion and have children out of wedlock with an average man, so the tradeoff for the average man is that to have the wholesome pie-in-the-sky family life, or at least a shot at it, he has to arm his woman with the possibility of divorce and hope she’s reasonable about it.
Choose wisely and act accordingly!
