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As /u/illimitableman once said, marriage is an advanced version of the friend zone scam. I think there's no greater proof of this than the moment this long con starts to truly unfold: the wedding and the wedding night. It's very telling to see the disconnect between the stated reasons for a marriage and the way a woman starts to change after the wedding.

“We stayed up and watched Dumb and Dumber in the hotel room,” one spouse wrote on the community website. “He helped me out of my dress and we drank champagne, ate a Mars bar and watched music videos until we passed [out],” remembered another. “For the first time in my life I said, ‘Can we just cuddle tonight?’ I was too drunk,”

How pathetic and emasculating does that sound? The newly minted husband is immediately relegated to status of movie-watching cuddle bitch like some lovelorn middle-schooler, despite the fact that he more likely than not just bankrolled her expensive party and committed to a lifetime of provisioning. Get played.

When your wedding day takes a year to plan and stretches out over 20 exhilarating hours, there can be little left over for the wedding night. Today, this supposedly romantic occasion sees brides and grooms getting trashed with their guests, wolfing down leftovers and gleefully counting money envelopes in bed before sleeping the most epic sleep of their lives. In other words, not very much consummating at all ... Weddings are now expensive, multiday events. By the time the wedding day rolls around people are pretty well dead – they sleep.

More proof that women don't want a marriage, they want a wedding. A lavish, multiday event where her entire social circle validates the woman in her most immaculate and idealized form -- how can the day-to-day doldrums of an average marriage ever compare to that kind of emotional high?

Which brings us to another libido zapper: the open bar. “The men are just falling over drunk by the end of it,” Lemke said. “I have had calls from brides in tears because her husband is so drunk that he’s absolutely useless and belligerent and this is not how their wedding was supposed to go.”

They drink because they know they fucked up and it's beyond the point of no return. It's the beginning of the rest of their lives, and not in a good way.

Or does the new wedding night reflect the new realities of marriage: that it’s about two people who know each other very well becoming a team, not about anyone scoring a virgin?

A subtle reframe to skirt around an ugly hidden truth. Marriage is no longer a vehicle for raising healthy and stable nuclear families with assured paternity and integration within a wider social fabric. That's outdated and sexist thinking, obviously. Marriage is now the formation of a "team", a business partnership rife with tax breaks, cash, and prizes. Of course, women know and accept this reality. But men may have missed the memo, so we'll just tell them marriage is supposed to be a celebration of love, okay?

Tradition and romance have all but been stripped from the institution and what's left is a banal, unfair and soul-crushing business partnership with high chances of emotional, spiritual and financial bankruptcy. You're a chump if you gamble your freedom and independence on the paltry odds of a "red pill marriage". You can only have hand when you're willing to walk away without a sweat. And hand is king.