Dad's thought on marriage

Ok-Firefighter-2266 · 2020-09-29T16:28:54+00:00

I think your dad is correct and I also think this is why people shouldn’t get married young. I see too often people getting into relationships before they even really know themselves or what they want out of a relationship, then they get older and end up marrying the person they are with because they feel they’ve invested too much to leave. Marrying young works out for some but I honestly think those people just got lucky.

thesixthamethyst · 2020-09-29T19:24:19+00:00

I don't really see any logic to your dad's sentiment. When you're young, and especially before you have kids, it's very easy and cheap to part ways. When I got divorced from my first husband (he cheated, but we maintained civility during the process) we split the cost of an attorney (that I retained, we agreed ahead of time on how to split assets), and since there were no kids, it cost a couple hundred dollars and took 30 days. I've, happily, never seen him since.

I sometimes think about how different that would go if we'd had any real assets (we were so young the only valuable thing we had was a tiny little starter home), or children. It could've been costly, emotional, drawn out and dirty, and I wouldn't have had the luxury of parting ways permanently. I definitely think when it comes to an inevitable divorce, the younger and earlier, the better. And I don't think a couple that wants divorce wouldn't do it simply because they've been through a lot together. They usually stay together because of convenience, money, religion, or kids.

I think the "best time to marry" is very different for different people, depending on desires, upbringing, etc. However, I will say that I haven't seen great things out of couples that marry young, myself included. Most of my friends that have divorced are the ones that married pretty young. But I am in my early 30's so time may tell a different story yet.

2020-09-29T20:18:01+00:00

I think both approaches can work really well depending on the person!

I personally was very unsettled/restless in my early 20s. I wanted to see the world, explore ideas, and engage with all sorts of different people, so I spent those years as a period of pretty intense transformation. By 27 or so I was a completely different person to who I was at 22, and none of the men I was interested in when I was younger would have made me happy as an adult. Marrying young would have made me miserable. I met my husband at 27, and he'd come from a similar sort of path and come out of it on the same track as me. We came together as fully formed adults so it's a different kind of relationship where we've had to make compromises for one another, but it's worked out beautifully.

My brother on the other hand is a textbook case of what your dad recommends. He was very happy with who he was and where he was at in his early 20s, knew what he wanted, and ended up marrying young to one of his first girlfriends. They've grown into adults together and they have a great, harmonious friendship/marriage.

Throwaway230306 · 2020-09-29T14:21:32+00:00

Your dad's statement is not incorrect...but I'd add that regardless of youth, couples stay together because they can't afford not to (this is usually due to financial cost or the complicated logistics of post divorce life. Traditionally, social condemnation of divorce played a part in keeping couples together).

Couples stay together because their past binds them, true... but also because it gets harder to start your life over as you get older.

Source: my own parents' mostly unhappy marriage of 40 years.

They're from the former USSR. My mom didn't leave my dad early on because she wouldn't have had a place to live thanks to Soviet housing shortages. Then my parents immigrated, and my mom stayed because she didn't know English and qualified only for min wage jobs. (My dad knew English and found a decent job with his STEM degree.) Now my parents are in their 60s, they built up a nice life for themselves.

Occasionally they each talk about divorce but I don't think either has the emotional stamina to go through with it (sell the house, divide belongings, face old age alone, without even the support of a mediocre spouse).

bananab33 · 2020-09-29T21:42:53+00:00

I don't agree with your dad's sentiments, in modern America at least. Maybe in poorer countries!

Title	Dad's thought on marriage
Author	blushingoleander
Upvotes	17
Comments	5
Date	September 29, 2020 1:17 PM UTC (4 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/RedPillWives
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/RedPillWives/comments/j1z0ok/dads_thought_on_marriage/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/RedPillWives/dads-thought-on-marriage.322116 https://theredarchive.com/post/322116