Don't buy into the libfem nonsense about how marriage is "capitalist" or "oppressive." This narrative is pushed by men to avoid accountability, commitment, and real connection and is marketed as woke. It's total horseshit.

Why you shouldn't want to be a forever girlfriend:

  • Gender-based wage discrimination is very real. Even if you are more educated or talented than your male partner, you will probably make less money than him because the work world is cut out to favor men. Men are assumed to be more competent and successful simply because they are men -- men have to jump two feet to get the recognition women get jumping six, and women are often hazed and chased out of higher-paying, male-dominated fields. Not only that, but the collective trauma experienced by being a woman and repeatedly subjected to gaslighting, harassment, assault, and more can be debilitating, leading to higher rates of depression and other mental disorders that can interrupt your career. Women are also expected to take care of children and much more likely to give up income and career opportunities in order to start families.
    • If you partner up with a man and start pooling resources, marriage will protect your ability to leave the relationship should things go south. If you find yourself in a position where your male partner is the higher earner and you would have a problem making ends meet if you left, a contract stating that your earnings and belongings are divided 50/50 will help make that feasible.
  • Marriage is the most consistently recognized metric of commitment in our culture. Humans are collective, social creatures who exist in communities. The shorthand way to indicate to other people that someone is your life partner is to refer to them as your husband, wife, or spouse, which matters a great deal whether men admit it or not. This is increasingly true with the recently expanding use of "partner" and "SO" to simply mean "boyfriend" or "girlfriend." If a man doesn't want to marry you, it means he doesn't want to signal to other people when referring to you that you are his life partner. (And if a man doesn't want to date you, it means he doesn't want to signal to other people that you are associated with him at all.) He doesn't want your partnership to be seen by the rest of the world that way, which very well might mean that he sees your partnership as temporary, not permanent. Think about what that reflects on how he feels about you and how much he respects you. Do you want to be with someone who views you as a pit stop to eventually be thrown away like trash? Or do you want someone who can't picture themselves without you by their side for the entirety of their life's journey? You decide. You don't have to put up with the former if you don't want to.
  • Marriage has existed for millennia. It's neither a religious nor a capitalistic institution. Some of the cultural traditions are shrouded in capitalism, but it's not a necessity. The appeal to liberal values is a lazy cop-out. Marriage existed before capitalism and will continue to exist should capitalism ever fall. There are ways to get married which don't beef up the wallets of the wedding industry if this is a personal value of you and your male partner. A creative HVM will find a way to make it romantic, special, and ethical instead of trying to weasel his way out. But this is never the real reason for men avoiding marriage. The real reason usually is...
  • LVM routinely use commitment as leverage to abuse, gaslight, and get what they want with little to no effort. Future-faking, pump and dumping, forever girlfriend bullshit. It's an extremely common tactic and you need to make sure you're protected. A man who is trying to manipulate and use you will sniff out a need for male approval and will hold their acceptance of you over your head as a carrot on a stick so they can continue draining you and taking from you while offering nothing in return, just giving you barely enough scraps of affection to keep you hooked. Someone who is real and genuinely loves you will accept you as a given, without strings or qualifiers attached. Non-committal bullshit is modern misogyny. Marriage -- lifelong commitment -- is the most meaningful form of acceptance you can offer to an SO.
  • You deserve someone who is sure about you. You only need to pick one person to spend your life with. Just one, out of billions. So why not have it be someone who is sure? You deserve someone who is proud of you, who wants everyone to know you are together and that you're his life partner. You deserve someone who wants to make sure you are crystal clear on the fact that he loves you more than anything. If you're picking one person out of the tens of thousands you will encounter, it should be someone who is crazy about you.