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Oct. 8, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:59:44
THE TRUTH ABOUT MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE!
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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
5th of October 2025.
Ooh, we have a base five date, 051025.
All are divisible by five.
We have one, two, five, one, two, five.
All right.
So, excuse me.
So, happen to take your calls.
If you're on X, happy to take your questions.
If you are on locals, this is supporter only.
we can keep it.
I think the first part will probably go out as a whole, which is the information about marriage.
So I don't have any call requests yet, so I'll start with that.
And let's get to it.
I can take this one right down.
All right.
Let's see.
Yeah, I'll keep the glasses on.
No point doing the Mr. Magoo squint later on.
So you see, of course, a lot of the data floating around that says that half of marriages end in divorce.
And of course, people say, and I understand why, and it's not the worst argument in the world, they say, look, not only do half of marriages end in divorce, but not only, but not all the remaining marriages are super thrilling and happy and positive and buoyant.
And so it's really not worth it.
And it is a high-risk situation when you get the state, as has happened, you get the state involved in your marriage.
That is a big challenge.
One of the reasons why this has happened is, of course, we have this absolutely delightful problem, which is that human beings take like 20 years to grow.
I mean, I think it would be faster in a free society because you try and give kids more opportunities earlier.
I mean, again, you know, I've got this Dickensian history.
I got my first job when I was 10 years old.
But having the problem of it takes so long to grow human beings means that if a marriage doesn't work out, society is kind of messed up, like in very foundational ways.
Society has a massive, important, necessary investment, and because of the repercussions in the provision of resources to children.
And society really can't survive if resources aren't given to children.
It really doesn't work at all because children, I mean, they need food, they need a shelter, they need braces, healthcare, they need clothing, they need toys, all this kind of stuff, right?
So because of that, if a man is not providing for his children, society has a big problem on its head.
You're going to have to find a way to get resources to children one way or another.
It has to happen.
There's no opportunity or option or scenario in which society can skate away from unprovided for children without, you know, some fairly massive negative repercussions.
I'm going to adjust my chair height here so I can, because otherwise I'm going to get a fish bowling over like a turtle.
So that's just a basic fact.
Women have children.
And if those children are not provided for, society as a whole suffers.
Those children are hungry at school.
They can't learn.
They're irritable.
They're anxious.
They're often volatile and aggressive.
They might steal because they need resources.
And they might grow up to feel, as a lot of kids do, that there's no social contract because the society in which they grew up in, or the society they grew up in, did not help or protect them in any foundational way.
Now, they're going to have trouble blaming their own mother, let's just say, because generally kids stay with the mother.
They're going to have trouble blaming their own mother for obvious reasons of you need your parents' good regard and you also require the bond to remain with your caregiver for reasons of emotional survival and the anxiety level.
If you accept, let's say, that your mother is crazy and won't help you and is making terrible decisions and so on, and you still have another, I don't know, 10 to 15 years under her care custody and control.
Children's hearts, minds, souls, if we like, just can't handle that.
I mean, you can't.
You have to believe that your mother has positive values and reasonably good decision-making capacities.
Otherwise, like, you're just not even going to get out of bed.
Like, you just, I don't know what you would do as a kid, but we just, we pair, we bond, right?
Like ducklings walking after an orange balloon, we bond.
So that's the way it has to play with parents and mothers in particular.
So because children who aren't, who don't have a father around won't emotionally blame the mother, they then have to get mad at something because they're having a pretty negative experience.
So they get mad at what?
What do they get mad at?
Well, they generally get mad at society.
The mother, if she's immature, will often, of course, provide negative views of the father.
Oh, he was just a bastard and he hid his true nature and the mask came off and blah, blah, blah.
There's no way for me to know, which also instills sexual, romantic, and marriage paranoia in children.
So society has a big and terrible issue when a woman leaves a provider or the provider leaves the woman.
And this is why, of course, in the past, there was a charity, but not excessive charity, right?
So you want to have enough charity that people aren't going to fall into living in the street, but not so much charity that they can make a living out of making bad decisions, right?
It's a complicated, it's a real Aristotelian mean balancing act with regards to charity, which only private charities can achieve.
Government is a giant cudgel and does not provide a subtlety.
So when women get the vote, they vote for socialized healthcare.
They vote for old age pensions because otherwise they have to take care of their elderly.
And they vote for alimony child support and they vote to make divorce easier.
Because if divorce is easy and the man has to pay through his nose, what was it?
Robin Williams talking about his custody arrangement was like somebody pulling his wallet through his penis.
So women want to make divorce easier and they want to make the man have to pay as much as possible, not just because they want a divorce, but because it gives them much greater negotiating leverage within a marriage.
See, a woman has massive negotiating leverage before marriage because she can choose from if she's reasonably attractive.
I mean, if she's like, I don't know, above a two or a three.
If she's reasonably attractive, she's going to have six to 20 men who are interested in her.
They're not all lining up at the ring, but they're interested in her.
And that's just a fact of youthful female beauty and the mad hormones of the tsunami of male sexual desire and romantic desire.
Men don't just love sex.
We love to fall in love as well.
We love to be romantic as a whole.
I mean, there's a cynical statement.
I don't particularly believe in it, which says that men are in love, women are in business.
And there's a certain amount of truth to that.
I don't agree with the whole thing as too cynical, but there's sort of thread basic elements of that, that men need to pair bond more than women.
And because men provide so much of their labor, which could be applied to other things, right?
To their family.
Whereas a woman, of course, provides a massive amount of labor and the risk of childbirth, although the man had the risk of work-related injuries, particularly in the past.
But the woman's labor can't be transferred somewhere else.
The man's labor can be.
So the man needs a little bit more pair bonding.
And the woman, of course, needs to make sure that the man can provide for her and her children.
I mean, that's how we evolved.
Or the man is in love a little bit.
The woman is in business.
Again, it's not the whole deal, but it's a thread that runs through it.
So the woman has massive amounts of leverage before getting married.
She is in the position of it's a seller's market.
You know, when there's a huge demand for real estate, it's a seller's market, right?
The sellers are the ones who have the power.
I think that's the way it works.
Anyway, so women have all the power before getting married.
That's why women can demand roses, flowers, chocolates that men pay for dates, write poetry, jump through hoops, because women have all the power and leverage prior to getting married.
After getting married, the power and leverage shifts to the man to some degree.
Again, it's not absolute, and these are very general, broad approximations.
Get it?
But these are general approximations.
But the power shifts to the woman.
Sorry, from the woman to the man after marriage, because the woman is pregnant, the woman has children, and so all of the power that the woman had before getting married now shifts to the man after marriage.
And women don't like that.
They like that.
It doesn't matter if they've chosen well, like if they've got a good, loving provider and a good father and a good husband and thoughtful and caring and committed and all, then they're fine with that, right?
But if they've chosen unwisely, if they've got a bad husband, he doesn't really provide, maybe he drinks too much, maybe he's aggressive, whatever it is, right?
Then they don't like that because the leverage that women have means that they're much more responsible for who they marry.
Because if you get to choose, like, let's say you're assigned a job by the sort of communist dictatorship, you're assigned a job, then you're not really responsible for the job that you have.
If you're married off in some faraway village to some boy when you're 13 years old, then you didn't, as an arranged marriage, you didn't get a choice in who you marry.
And so we can have sympathy if it doesn't go well because you didn't choose it.
If you're in an occupation you really dislike and you're forced into that occupation by sort of central planning, North Korea or something, well, we can have sympathy for somebody who hates his job as a ditch digger or a dentist because he was assigned to be a ditch digger or a dentist and had no choice in the matter.
In the same way, we can really sympathize with a woman who's got a bad husband if she did not have a choice in marrying him.
However, in a situation, as has been the case in the West for hundreds and hundreds of years, probably close to, well, I mean, it's hard to think of outside of slavery oppositions to that.
So if a man has the choice between five, ten, twenty professions, jobs, and then he has the chance to try each job for six months or so.
And then he finally, after trying a bunch of jobs for six months, he figures on one job or career and then spends the rest of his life complaining about it.
Obviously, we'd have less sympathy.
I mean, just I would.
I'm sure you would too, because when somebody's had a choice and they had to test drive that, they got to test drive that choice, it's really kind of ridiculous to hear them complain about it afterwards.
You know, can you imagine me doing a show where like, oh man, I need a car and, you know, here's my budget and it's not as much as I'd like to spend.
But, you know, and I spend six months going to dealerships and secondhand car lots and so on.
And I test, I even get to test drive a car for six months and I finally buy my car and then saying for the rest of my life, this car sucks.
I'd rather be with any other car.
It would be harder to believe.
It would be less credible, right?
Because I had all that choice.
So because women have all of this choice, they are responsible for their marriages, right?
Now, men, of course, have choice as well.
But we're just talking about the female.
Women have more choice in the dating market than men do.
Women date who they want.
Men date who they can, in general.
Again, there's exceptions, but that's generally the case.
So being used to having this level of power and leverage prior to marriage, women find it quite disconcerting if they choose badly and want out of the marriage, particularly if they have children, right?
And some of this could be just, some of this could be unjust.
I mean, the just one is the man's violent or whatever it is.
And the unjust one is, I don't know, the woman is really materialistic and wants the man to work like crazy.
But when he works like crazy, she then complains that he's never home and she's emotionally unattended to and it just gets worse and worse.
She has an affair or something like that, even though the guy is trying to be considerate.
So again, divorces could be just or unjust, but women like to have the power and leverage after marriage that they had before marriage.
And that's why Q the government entering the marriage equation.
Because the government, of course, provides licenses and so on, right?
And government licensure actually came in under the Democrats because they wanted not for blacks not to be able to whites and vice versa.
So the government comes in and the purpose of the government for women in marriage is to give them the same leverage after marriage that they had before marriage.
In other words, the man never has any leverage at all.
The man has no leverage ahead of time with a reasonably attractive woman because there are five, ten other guys who will take his place.
And then he has no leverage after marriage because the government will give half of his stuff to the woman and he'll have to pay forever and amen and he might not get to see his kids and she can do false accusations all over the place.
And so the man never has any leverage.
And I get that, but security for women is emasculation for men.
Security for women is emasculation for men.
She has leverage, she has power and all of that.
And that makes divorce more likely, not less.
Because where the man has no leverage or authority, the man tends to feel emasculated, which women don't like.
So when you run to the government to give you the same leverage after marriage as you had before marriage, you end up emasculating your husband because you can threaten him with the government behind you.
And your brother's going to kill me and he's six feet 10.
And the man is crushed and humiliated and emasculated, has no authority.
His testosterone drops.
He gets depressed.
And, you know, we're men.
We like to have some leverage from time to time.
If we have no leverage, we feel like slaves.
And if we feel like slaves or that we have no choice or chance or leverage, if we feel like slaves, our testosterone drops.
And women, you end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What am I going to do if I end up not attracted to my husband?
Oh, I know.
I'll get the government to castrate him in the marriage.
Gee, as it turns out, I'm not attracted to a castrated guy.
You know, I mean, it's just one of these self-fulfilling prophecies.
Government programs always achieve the opposite of their stated goals.
And the stated goal to try and improve marriage by giving women more leverage, unfair leverage.
What that ends up doing, of course, it ends up promoting and provoking divorce because I remember this, you know, these ideas are not new to me.
I remember when I was in my 20s in the business world, I had a business relationship with a guy, and we were fairly close, I suppose.
And one lunch, he just erupted into complaints about his wife and said, and he used a very memorable phrase, acid mitosis.
He said, I can't do anything because I'm not going to go through acid mitosis, which is everything gets cut in two.
He doesn't get to see his kids.
And the more he complained about his wife, the less happy he was to leave his children under her care, custody, and control.
And of course, the men know that the women can, the fathers know that the mothers can trash them if they separate and there's really no recourse.
There's parental alienation.
It's a real thing, very real thing.
So he said, like, I just have to buy, I have to bite my tongue.
I just have to bite my tongue.
I have to spend the rest of my life, or at least while the children are young, I just have to spend the rest of my life placating her.
Like, I get why men don't want that.
I really, I get why men don't want that at all.
So women vote for security.
The security emasculates the men.
The women then are not attracted to the men they married as a result of this.
And again, not every woman, but it's enough to swing the votes for sure, right?
And of course, if you have any questions or comments, I'm happy to hear them.
So marriage is looking like a worse and worse deal for men.
Why would you want to put yourself in a situation where you have no say, no leverage, no negotiating power, and you just have to put up with whatever your wife does.
And of course, one of the big issues is the dead bedroom.
You know, 10, 15, 20% of marriages, and, you know, some of them for health reasons, but I think this is more chronic.
And I've heard higher estimates, but let's go 10, 15, 20% of marriages, there's no sex, which is not a marriage.
Marriage is entirely designed for the regulation of sexuality.
Because that's the one thing you can't do outside the marriage without breaking the marriage vow.
You can have friendships outside of marriage, probably should, right?
You can go play tennis and squash with people outside of marriage.
You can go out for dinner with people.
You can go on vacation, even whether you can go out for a guy's night out, but you can't have sex.
I know marriage is an inverted pyramid for the regulation of sexuality among human beings.
Can you get married outside of the state?
No.
No, you can't.
I mean, I guess you can live together.
But in a lot of places, it's called common law marriage, wherein after a certain amount of time of living together, because that loophole was seen, right?
So when the government got involved in marriage, men said, okay, well, we just won't get married.
And then women complained about that too.
So then these laws were passed that give you sort of common law marriage equivalent to marriage.
So depending on your jurisdiction, I don't have heard a variety of two years, five years, whatever it is.
But after a certain amount of time, you're just considered married.
Like the state just marries you in its legality.
So it's a big challenge.
It's a big challenge.
And of course, the government says when there's any kind of kids involved and there's a split up, right?
Then the government says, okay, well, either we can force the man to pay for his children or the woman's going to go on welfare and then we as the state has to pay, have to pay.
So, of course, they would much rather the man pay than themselves pay, right?
Somebody says, you asked atheists for their reasons not to lie.
An extension of that is fidelity, since fidelity for atheists is a breach of a marriage contract, which is basically lying.
I couldn't come up with anything better than personal preference.
The only good reasons for not cheating I could come up with are a Christian, breaking my sacred vow to my wife before God.
Actually, it is breaking your sacred vow to God in the face of your wife.
Your vow is fundamentally to God.
Did you guys see the photos of the woman who was with Dan Bilzerian and then the woman who married a debate after their fun phase?
Yeah, I did.
I did.
I recently read an article, says someone that said, China has abolished alimony.
Do you think that will create better marriages or do you think it will make marriage too risky for women?
So alimony is based on the argument that a woman gives up her earning potential in order to raise a man's children.
And therefore, if there's a separation or a split, then the woman deserves an income because she sacrificed her income for the sake of the man's.
And is it Mackenzie Bezos?
I can't remember her name, but Jeff Bezos' wife is currently pouring billions of dollars into hyperlephry causes.
Vile.
So brutal.
So there's no such thing as more or less risky in general.
I mean, there's exceptions, but this idea that there's a sweet spot, more or less risky.
So if you say, well, it makes marriage too risky for women.
Right?
If I said you had to jump off a curb, that would be low risk, right?
And so you wouldn't pack a parachute.
If I said you had to jump out of a plane, you'd pack a parachute.
Right?
So the higher the risk, the more alleviation of that risk you go through.
So if you get rid of alimony, women will be more careful about who they marry and the risk level will go back down again.
So now I get it.
I mean, for the women who are married, if you get rid of alimony, then you return equality of negotiating rights.
I mean, nobody wants any one person to have an unfair domination in a negotiation, right?
That's bad as a whole, right?
So this is why sort of having more and more people in the country means that wages go down, which gives a lot of power to the people who are offering jobs.
So we don't want any artificial boosts to people's negotiating strength in any negotiation, because that's kind of unfair, right?
So we don't want this acid mitosis that my long ago business associate was talking about.
We don't want any of that.
But the reality is that there's nothing you can do to reduce the leverage that women have before marriage.
And of course, the fundamental leverage was that men have a very high sex drive compared to women.
And so men want to have sex.
And in the past, the only way they could get sex on a regular basis was to get married.
Because there was this phalanx, right?
This line, the line should hold, right, between women to not give up sex without the commitment of marriage.
Now women give up sex without marriage.
So men's sex drive has gone to places other than pure heterosexuality, we can say, right, because they can have a bunch of sex without worrying about kids.
And so that's, I think that's the reality.
And people, men don't want that.
So this is sort of MGTOM, men going their own way, walking away.
And I get that.
I get that.
But it's not an optimum solution to simply walk away.
There are options, there are choices, and this is what we're going to go over now.
So how to lower your risk of divorce.
So the lifetime risk of divorce for first marriages across the population is reported as around 40%, with second marriages rising to 60% and third marriages seeing 73%.
Always, always, always be suspicious of people who don't break down the data.
So an obvious example, of course, is saying your lifetime risk of lung cancer is X percent, right?
Without saying whether you smoke or not has a big effect on that, right?
That's just, it's making people jumpy and paranoid when you don't break down the data.
I mean, if you say, oh, America is a peculiarly violent place without breaking racial status by ethnicity, you're just kind of lying, right?
Not you, but so people are just kind of lying.
So it's a lifetime risk of divorce for first marriages is around 40%.
So then people think, no matter who I marry or how I get married or how I vet, it's always going to be 40%.
I mean, it's like looking at people who jump out of planes without parachutes die.
People who jump out of planes with parachutes don't die.
Putting those two numbers together, right, it's two guys, right?
One guy jumps out without a parachute, maybe suicidal.
Another guy jumps out with a parachute.
And then you say, well, you're 50% likely, if you jump out of a plane, to die, even if you have a parachute, because they're blending the two numbers together.
So, and of course, you know, people who want to destroy a culture, make people paranoid about marriage and so on, right?
So, now marriage confers many benefits, is essential for the health and well-being of children, also very important for the health and well-being of men.
Divorce is incredibly damaging, very costly for both parties.
It really does break people's hearts.
Important to understand how you can lower your risk of divorce as much as possible.
So, the risk reductions I'm going to talk about here, not necessarily independent, but the more risk mitigation strategies you engage in, the better your odds are of staying married.
So, the risks of divorce I'm going to talk about here are for first marriages unless noted otherwise.
And a way to look at this is to imagine being an insurance company and you're selling marriage insurance.
Now, if you get divorced, we'll pay the entire costs.
So, if you were in the business of selling marriage insurance, you wouldn't want to just put everyone's risk together, right?
I mean, if you've ever had insurance, I mean, one of the basic questions is, do you smoke, right?
Are you a male?
And, and, you know, your height, your weight.
I remember being insured in the business world.
They took blood.
They did me a full workup.
So what would you require from people in order to lower the insurance premiums for divorce or getting divorced?
Okay, so what is the lowest risk profile?
So the lowest risk par for divorce includes Asian ethnicity, college education, getting married after the age of 25, being religious, having a stable income, and having strong relational skills.
So these combined result in a significantly reduced lifetime risk of 10 to 20%.
Right.
So we've already reduced our risk by 25 to 50%.
That's important.
But it gets better.
Not only, but also, I will tell you this, right?
IQ and divorce are negatively correlated, or in other words, because I like to be positive at all times, IQ and marital stability are positively correlated.
This has been studied both through direct testing such as the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale and proxies such as the Armed Forces Qualification Test.
I know these, my wife gave hundreds of intelligence tests over the course of her career.
So in a Dutch study, quite different from a Dutch oven, do not confuse the two.
In a Dutch study of those born in 1958, they found that those with an average IQ and lower had a 28% risk of divorce in the first five years of marriage.
By contrast, those with a high IQ, between 115 to 130, one to two standard deviations above the norm, they had a 9% chance of getting divorced, which would make sense.
The more intelligent you are, the more you can have a theory of mind that includes someone else.
How would I feel if, right?
Whereas if you're less intelligent, you tend not to have that theory of mind, or maybe you even can't have that theory of mind that includes another person's feelings.
There's a sort of thought, a researcher who dealt with people in prison who were uniformly pretty low IQ and so on.
And he'd say, well, how did you think?
How did you how did you how do you think the guy you were beating felt?
I don't know.
Right?
How do you think his family felt after you beaten him up?
I don't know.
Like just can't process a theory of mind outside the South.
In U.S. data from a 31-year longitudinal study, someone with an IQ of 85 had a 40% higher risk of divorce compared to someone with an IQ of 115.
Now, of course, if you're listening to this, you're in the high IQ group.
Probably.
Most likely.
Certainly everyone alive here.
Mismatched IQ pairings haven't been studied directly, but studies have been done using educational attainment as a proxy.
Education is moderately correlated with IQ at 0.5 to 0.7, right?
So zero is no correlation.
One is a perfect correlation.
And education at 0.5 to 0.7 is pretty good.
Couples with matching education in a German study showed a 20% risk of divorce over 20 years.
When the husband has a higher educational attainment, two to six years, the risk goes down to about 14% over 20 years.
When the wife has a higher educational attainment, the risk goes up 26% over 20 years.
And it's funny because both my wife and I have graduate degrees.
Anyway.
So ethnicity and divorce.
Divorce risks vary with ethnicity and age, though the relative risks remain more or less the same.
From a 2019 study for men and women aged 25 to 34, the annualized risk of first divorce is thus.
Asian, men 1.38%, women 1.09%.
Hispanic, 2.01% for men, 2.08% for women.
White, 1.84% for men, 2.21% for women.
Black, 2.57% for men, 3.16% for women.
American Indian or Alaska Native, 4.22% for men, 4.16% for women.
Other multiracial, 2.93% for men, 3.18% for women.
And these, of course, are roughly correlated to the general IQ stuff we've talked about for years.
So what can you do to further reduce your risks?
So what can you change?
Now you can enhance your physical appearance to attract a mate, right?
The more choice you have, the better choice you're going to make.
But everything physical is going to fade over time.
You don't want to be fraudulent in this area anyway.
I mean, there's these crazy things where men get shin extensions and end up taller, and that's kind of fraudulent because a woman is attracted not to your height, but to hygienes.
Hygienes?
To height genes.
That's better.
They're attracted.
Oh, they think they're attracted to hygiene as well.
But women are not attracted to your height fundamentally.
They're attracted to the benefit that your height confers to their offspring.
So if you fake your height, you are faking your genes.
So what else can you do?
You can change your behavior and your habits.
You can work on your discipline, your conscientiousness, and your communication skills.
I mean, one of the great tragedies of modern education is people don't get any training or education on how to communicate.
Can you imagine courses on real-time relationships or positive negotiation skills that kids started learning from the age of six onwards?
It would be amazing.
That's why it doesn't happen, right?
So you can ask the right questions of someone you're thinking of marrying.
You can avoid pitfalls and you can logically and rationally and soulfully prepare for the biggest decision you're ever going to make in your life.
Who you marry is the biggest decision.
Okay.
Education, career, and finances.
So more education correlates with less divorce.
The lifetime divorce rate is broken out by educational attainment from U.S. 2019 census estimates.
Educational level.
Lifetime divorce rate, less than high school, 45.3%.
High school diploma, 38.8%.
Some college, no degree, 36.3%.
Associate's degree, 30.1%.
Bachelor's degree or higher, 25.9%.
So there's almost a 20-point spread, 20% spread between less than high school and bachelor's degree or higher.
Now, I would interpret this as a proxy for intelligence and reading.
One of the great things about reading is it puts you in the mind of someone else.
When I'm writing novels, I'm dipping into what people say and what they think, which is really important.
If you read, you're automatically inhabiting the mind of someone else.
It trains you, especially fiction, it trains you in empathy.
And so I wouldn't say specifically that the pieces of paper are absolutely required.
I would talk about intelligence, curiosity, and reading.
Reading is super important.
As you guys probably know, I met my wife right after my first novel got published, and she loves to read.
She just finished Anna Karenina, which we've had some great chats about.
Madame Bovary, I think, by Flaubert is next.
So yeah, she loves to read, and so do I, of course.
And we're pretty good at figuring out what other people are thinking.
The National Survey of Family Growth reports the following findings.
Whether a marriage survives 20 or more years is broken down between men and women from 2006 to 2010 data.
So this is not just, it says lifetime divorce rate and this is just 20-year divorce rate.
This is sort of data that supports the hypothesis.
Women with a high school or less have a 60% divorce rate over 20 years.
Women with a college degree have a 22%, right?
So almost a two-thirds reduction.
Men high school or less, 50%.
Men with a college degree, 35% risk of divorce.
If we just look at not lifetime or 20 years, but a five-year marriage survivability shows that not graduating high school leaves you a divorce risk of 29% after five years.
Having a college degree places you at 6%.
6%.
Now, over five years, it does increase over 20 years to higher, but that's important.
So there are several factors that contribute to better marriage longevity and why they're correlated with education.
Of course, education, I don't know.
Used to, that was the debt was what you were sold on.
Greater financial stability.
Delayed marriage increased maturity.
Improved communication and conflict resolution skills.
Fewer life strains, better coping resources, selection effects and socioeconomic status.
And a lot of times, not always, a lot of times, people who go through university often themselves come from university families where you have more intelligent parents who probably have better negotiation skills, and you've seen that modeled as you're growing up.
Choosing stable occupations.
Sorry, I just blacked out for a moment there.
Jobs that increase stress or risk-taking increase your risk of divorce.
Choosing stable occupations can reduce your risk of divorce by 10 to 20%.
And the divorce rates below include first and subsequent marriages.
So remember, we're talking about first marriages.
Now we're going to talk about first and subsequent marriages.
So high-risk jobs tend to cluster in service-oriented manual labor or high-stress fields with shift work, low wages, median is less than 40K, US or demanding environments.
So what are we talking about?
Well, hospitality and entertainment.
Working in bars, casinos, adult services involve late nights, alcohol service, customer interactions, and tipping-based income, leading to stress, irregular activities, potential for extramarital affairs.
And I mean, I remember this when I was a waiter.
You kind of live the opposite, right?
When other people are playing, you're working.
When other people are working, you're resting or playing or whatever, and just live this kind of opposite life.
Transportation and logistics is another high-risk job.
Working in airlines and logistics involve frequent absences, jet lag, isolation, and shift work, which strain relationships.
I once dated a purser and sleepers, nuts.
Healthcare support and shift-based care.
Working in nursing and as aides involve long hours, emotional burnout, and exposure to trauma.
Military and protective services working in military and law enforcement involve deployments, PTSD, relocations, and so on.
Manual and industrial labor, working in factories and maintenance involves physical tall and low job security.
This is somewhat of the hot crazy matrix.
I just remember like women named Tiffany with redheads, hairdressers.
So let's look at the category.
In hospitality and entertainment, bartenders, this is divorce rate, first and subsequent marriages.
Bartenders, 53%.
Casino managers, 53%.
Gaming services, 50%.
Exotic dancers and adult performers, 43 to 52%.
I guess technically, I would be an adult performer as long as we don't correlate adult with mature, mature.
All right.
Transportation and logistics.
Truck drivers have an elevated risk of divorce.
The specific percentage is not available.
Rolling machine setters and operators, these are machines that roll, not the operators, 31 to 38%.
Telemarketers and switchboard operators, 30 to 38%.
And if we go to healthcare, nursing, psychiatric home health aids, 27 to 28%.
Licensed practical nurses, 27%, and massage therapists, 29%.
If we look at military and protective services, military supervisors, ding, ding, we have a winner.
Between 30 to an eyebrow scorching, 80% risk of divorce.
Manual and industrial labor, metal furnace operators, 31%.
Hazardous materials removal, 30%.
Nod to Tony Soprano.
Machine feeders, 26%.
Now, if we look at low-risk occupations, they're typically professional, high-paying, the median is more than 80,000 a year, so twice, a little more than twice, with regular hours, intellectual demands, and stability.
Again, I know this doesn't necessarily reflect a jog market in the jog market, job market, COVID, post-COVID, pre-COVID, but this is more pre-COVID when things were more stable.
So engineering and technical fields, stable schedules, high-income problem-solving focus.
Medical and scientific professionals have high education, prestige, and stable compared to support roles.
Religious and community roles, values emphasize commitment, social support, analytical, financial roles, predictable work, high pay.
Agricultural and rural roles, rural juror, stable and family-oriented.
So if we look at engineering and technical fields, agricultural engineers' divorce rate is 1.8%.
1.8%.
Agricultural engineers.
I guess they shovel manure in their job, but not in their conversation styles.
Sorry, that was a reach.
Petroleum and mining engineers, well, of course, they come with their own built-in lubricants, so that's squishy and fun.
3.2%.
Engineers, general men, 0.7%.
Annual incidence of divorce.
Medical and scientific professional podiatrists, 6.8%.
Optometrists, 4%.
Well, they can see it counting.
Oh, no, I'll stop.
I won't stop, but I'll try.
Dentists, 7% to 10%.
Physicians, 7 to 10%.
Physical scientists are 7%.
Atmosphere space scientists, 7%.
Physical therapists and software developers, I'm not sure why they're massage code, massage muscle.
Low rates, exact percentage is not available, but it's classified as low.
The clergy has a 5.6 to 6% divorce rate.
Actuaries, 17%.
Hey, I'm just writing about this in my novel.
Female lawyers have a 0.9% divorce rate.
Agricultural and rural roles, farmers, 7.6%.
So jobs that increase stress or risk-taking increase your risk of divorce.
High-risk shift work, stock trading, very up and down, conferred a lower risk of divorce.
So you want to avoid the high-risk shift work and stock trading.
That confers a lower risk of divorce by 10 to 20%.
Having an income of at least $50,000 results in a 20% to 30% lower risk of divorce.
The income levels and divorce rates in the table below are aggregated from a couple of different studies from 2021 to 2024, but the trend is pretty clear.
As long as you earn at least 50,000, you've reduced your risk of divorce considerably.
Now, that's not a king's ransom these days.
125,000 or more sees an additional modest reduction in the risk of divorce.
After that, the risk reduction tends to level off.
So if your income level is less than 10,000, your rate of divorce is 45%.
Less than 25,000, you go down to 40%.
50,000 or more, you go to 30, 35%.
125,000 or more, you go from 25% to 30%.
200,000 or more, 30%.
Excuse me, 600,000 or more, 25%.
The median household income in the U.S. is $83.7,000.
That's the middle of the list when you sort them.
$50,000 comes in at the 31st percentile, meaning 31% of the population earns less than 50,000.
So that's good news for most of my listeners.
Having a net worth that's different from your income, a net worth of at least $40,000 results in a 15 to 25% lower risk of divorce.
Well, why do you have a higher net worth?
Because you've deferred gratification.
The poor are famously paycheck to paycheck, well, a lot of people these days, but you defer gratification, as education often is deferring income, deferring gratification, and not having a substance abuse problem and so on.
So you want to marry someone who's easily capable of deferring gratification.
I don't mean having an orgasm next week instead of this week.
I mean suffering in the here and now for a better future because they're less likely to sort of storm out and escalate and so on, right?
So this is the brackets of net worth, the annualized risk of divorce and the approximate proportion, excuse me, of the U.S. population in the bracket.
The annualized risk is how likely a marriage is to divorce in a given year.
So if you have a negative net worth, America, Canada, England, Japan, if you have a negative net worth, your annualized rate of divorce is 5.1%, but that's only 7% of the population.
If your net worth is 0 to 10,000, your annualized rate of divorce is 4.8 to 5.1%.
That's 4% of the population.
Again, we're dealing with just over single digits here.
If your net worth is 10 to 50K, 4% to 4.8% annualized rate of divorce, that's 18% of the population.
50 to 100K, 3.5 to 4%, 9% of the population.
100K to 200K, 3% to 3.5%, 11% of the population.
200 to 500,000, 2.5 to 3%, 20% of the population.
A lot, right?
I guess including houses, right?
So if you have half a million to a million worth of assets, your divorce rate is 2 to 2.5%, 15% of the population.
If you have more than a million dollars worth of assets, 1.8 to 2% risk of divorce, that's 16% of the population.
Now, of course, if you've got more than a million dollars worth of assets, you've probably been around for a while.
You've probably been married for decades, and therefore your risk of divorce is much lower.
I think in general, the only people who get divorced after a long time of being married tend to be those who only stuck together for the sake of the kids.
So the divorce rate flattens out once the household is over 300,000 in net worth.
So the higher net worth brackets are larger, so the 0.5% reduction indicates a more gradual decline.
So of course, building your net worth is especially important for a young couple.
You start out with little to nothing.
It's important to craft a plan to spend as little time at the low end of net worth as possible.
Spending five years in debt would give you a 23% risk of divorce, while getting to 50,000 in assets lowers your cumulative risk to 19%.
It's modest, but it's significant.
You don't need to be sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars to reduce your risk.
Premarital preparation.
That's right.
It's not just renting a tux.
An ounce of prevention, as the old saying goes, is worth a pound of cure.
For those not on the U.S. system, a gram of prevention is worth a kilogram of cure.
The ounce is not, the ratio is not the same, but the general idea is the same.
So again, as I said, who you get married to is the most important decision of your life.
Preparation is absolutely essential.
Being conscious and deliberate about who you marry can greatly reduce your risks of divorce.
Discuss money.
I'm just going to tell you a little piece of gossip about myself.
You may know this or not.
I'm absolutely fascinated by money.
Growing up poor, it's like, I'm always like, how did people pay the bills?
How do people pay the bills?
I'm absolutely fascinated by money.
And I try not to be nosy, but I'm just, I'm absolutely fascinated by money.
Like when somebody says, oh, so-and-so hasn't had a job for two years.
I'm like, how is that possible?
How do they live?
So discussing money before marriage can result in a 20 to 30% lower risk of divorce.
Neglecting or avoiding these discussions opens you to the risk of conflicts over money.
And conflicts over money are highly correlated with divorce.
And of course, conflicts over money is like a warm-up for the conflicts over assets and money during the process of divorce.
So these conflicts about money can arise independently from income, assets, and debt.
And I'm a saver, to be honest with you.
Prying money from my hands is like trying to pry a gun from Charlton Hesson's cold, dead hands.
And I've had people in my life who are spendthrifts.
It almost gives me hives.
Like there was a physical reaction to that.
What do you mean you just went and bought a drafting table?
You don't even draft.
Well, I'm going to learn.
It's like, oh, you're not.
I remember I knew someone when I was younger, bought a giant marble table, thought it was cool.
It had a long crack running along one side.
People were too nervous to sit on that side in case it broke and crushed their legs.
And it's just like, but why?
But why?
I always think of all of the stuff that people just throw out when they're old.
You know, I mean, it's wretched.
You know, all these, people take all these photos.
If they have kids, maybe it matters to the kids and all of that.
But especially people who are single, take all these photos.
And then what?
You die and they just get thrown in a landfill.
What was the point of all of that?
All your books that you've marked up, they're just going to get tossed down.
People don't want them if you've marked them up and put all that.
I mean, unless you're famous or whatever.
All this stuff.
I met someone years ago who took me into his basement to show me something.
And there was this giant cabinet, giant set of cabinets.
I'm like, what the hell are those?
And he's like, oh, I had this uncle.
He was a single man.
He traveled all over the world collecting butterflies.
And I'm like, you're kidding me.
What?
It's like there were hundreds of these drawers.
And he opened these drawers and there were these little butterflies.
And he's like, yeah, I try to control for humidity and all of that down here and try to keep the temperature constant.
And I'm trying to find some place to dump all of these things, but museums don't want to pay for the shipping because it's very expensive and complicated shipping.
So this guy went all over the world to collect these butterflies and they were literally rotting away in someone's basement and had become an albatross around people's necks.
So I try not to, I'm not, I had a roommate once who traveled with a spoon and a bowl and a change of underpants.
That's a little too minimal, but I am a big one for, I mean, you can see this.
I'm not even accumulating anything in the studio.
It's just me and this ghostly gray limbo background.
Anyway, so if you are a saver, you can't really be with a spender.
They will drive you nuts.
And you'll drive them nuts too.
Oh, we want to go out and have fun.
What's the point of money if we never spend it?
Blah, blah, blah.
It's like, so that's kind of important.
And it's the same thing too.
If, you know, in my household, like every year, we clean out.
Every year.
My wife and I are both on the same page as far as this.
I mean, I'm so cheap, I won't even gain weight, not only because food costs more, but then I'd have to buy more clothing, which I hate doing.
I mean, I'm a dude, right?
What do I want to do and buy clothing?
But, you know, apparently you have to have pants.
I mean, not for these shows, but you have to have pants as a whole.
So I drag my cross.
I bear it without complaint, like a saint, nobly.
Okay, I'm going to make myself throw up in my mouth a little, which might delay the distribution of data that we're working on here.
So, yeah, have these conversations.
Having suitable income and net worth is not enough.
The married couple needs to be aligned on money.
And I would also argue on whether you keep things just in case or you declutter.
Developing good communication skills.
Skin, wife, mental health professional.
She practiced psychology for decades.
Very good communicator.
So having good communication skills results in a 20 to 40% lower risk of divorce.
Good communication reduces conflict and boredom, and training improves marital satisfaction.
So what are we talking about?
So there's active listening, focusing on your spouse without interrupting and expressing your understanding afterwards.
I mean, you've heard this conversation a zillion times on my show when I have people who call in.
They'll ask me for a complicated, I mean, it just happened Friday.
It didn't happen Friday.
They'll come in and they ask for a complicated answer to a complicated question.
I'll start to explain.
And what was it?
The guy gave me like 30 seconds before interrupting, interrupting me.
And then I started again.
I said, hey, man, get all your stuff out.
Gave me two minutes, interrupted again.
And you can't have productive conversations with people who are interrupting you all the time.
Now, I don't want to sound defensive, man.
But when people say, well, Steph, you interrupt people.
And it's like, yeah, I absolutely will.
I absolutely will.
If I say two and two make four and somebody starts off their rebuttal with saying, well, you said the two and two make five, I have to interrupt them.
I'm not just going to let them talk because they've misstated something that's important.
If I ask for definitions and somebody goes on a ramble tangent without giving me definitions, I'm going to interrupt them because I don't want to be gaslit.
I don't want to be, I don't want to have just a ramble tangent that goes on somewhere.
And I'm just, I'm just not going to not going to do it.
So yeah, I will interrupt people.
If I ask someone a question and they don't answer it, but go off on some other issue, I will interrupt them because I don't mind if you don't want to answer my question.
That's fine.
I prefer it if you do answer my question, but you don't have to not.
You don't have to answer my question, but you can't ignore the question.
I'm not just going to be ignored.
Glenn Close style.
But it's rude to just ignore that somebody asked a question.
So yeah, there definitely are interruptions, but if somebody's addressing my issue and rebutting, I tend not to interrupt.
So active listening, focus on your spouse, don't interrupt.
Express your understanding afterwards.
Reflect back to them what they said.
So what I'm understanding is that you're saying this, that, and the other.
I got this, I mean, from Nathaniel Brandon that I started reading in my mid-teens.
Psychology of Self-Esteem is great.
Other books, not so much, but that one's a classic.
But when I was in the debating society, I was vice president of my debating society in university, flew all over Canada to do debates.
Came in sixth or seventh in my very first year out of all of Canada, like thousands and thousands of kids.
I knew I had a bit of a thing for that.
But you don't know which side of the debate you're going to be arguing.
It's be it resolved that, B-I-R-T, be it resolve that.
And you don't know which side of the debate you're going to be arguing.
So you have to be able to argue both sides of the debate.
That gives you really good understanding of what other people are trying to say.
Okay, so active listening, using I statements, providing the facts of your experience first rather than pushing your conclusions, right?
I'm upset, not you said this and you pissed me off.
You know, that's not good communication, right?
I am upset is true.
That you caused it is to be established.
Open and honest dialogue, sharing thoughts and concerns transparently but kindly, positive nonverbal cues, eye contact, nodding, open posture, constructive conflict resolution, finding a win-win resolution to the conflict.
And if you grew up in dysfunctional families, dysfunction is always win-lose.
That's statism, right?
Assertive communication, stating your needs while respecting your spouse's view.
I get to state my needs, which need to be respected.
You get to state your needs, which need to be respected.
It's good communication.
We language, right?
Emphasizing that you're on a team, that's doing this together.
We need to solve this problem.
Bad communication skills, criticism, attacking your partner's character rather than addressing behavior.
You're so selfish, you never listen, blah, blah, blah, right?
Defensiveness, responding to feedback with excuses or counter-attacks.
Stonewalling, withdrawal from the conversation via silent treatment or tuning out.
Contempt, showing disdain through sarcasm, eye rolling, or mockery.
Contempt is the biggest predictor of divorce.
Poor listening, interrupting, not paying attention.
You need to put your phone away or dismissing feelings.
Assuming intentions, jumping to conclusions about a situation.
You said that just to humiliate me.
You're just aiming to piss me off, that kind of stuff, right?
Passive-aggressive behavior.
As if.
Sarcasm, subtle digs, or other such indirect expressions of anger.
Also, of course, people who can't express anger generally will provoke anger in others.
Aggression, of course, yelling, blaming, dominating, name-calling.
Obviously, before I got married, we were like, we don't raise our voices, we don't intimidate, we don't yell, we don't call names, we don't, and we never have, right?
So, you know, when you're home, you spend the vast majority of your time in marriage communicating with your spouse and children.
Knowing how to communicate your feelings and thoughts, understanding how to negotiate for win-win scenarios is essential.
And I've got a whole book on this called Real-Time Relationships, which you should check out.
Freedomain.com slash books.
It's free.
Now, these skills can be learned.
They weren't modeled for me when I was growing up, either in my family, which was broken up when I was a baby, and certainly not around me, not among the friends that I had.
We didn't really, but you can learn these things.
So you've got to understand where you're tempted to intimidate to go to power, where you may have bad skills modeled for you.
If you had bad parents, denormalizing their bad example is especially important.
You cannot have good communication skills while continuing to praise parents who have bad communication skills.
Just won't work.
So taking the time to know your future spouse deeply is really, really important.
So you want to give yourself the space to learn about your future spouse deeply.
I mean, you've heard this probably dozens of times in call-in shows.
You know, I knew my spouse for three years before we got married.
I had no idea she had this relationship with money.
It's like, well, what are you all talking about?
You've got three years just talking about the weather and sports ball.
Vetting your future spouse with clear eyes, ensuring that lust does not cloud your judgment.
Lust is a wonderful and beautiful and healthy force of life, but it needs to be your servant, not your master.
It's like fire.
It's good if it's in the grate.
It's bad if it's in the bed.
So, especially if you're going to have children, you judge who you get married to as if your future children get the deciding vote.
So what does this mean?
Shared experiences in varied settings.
You need to kind of live life together.
Spend time in everyday situations around each other's families and friends, handling stressful situations, and have fun together.
You want to see the person for who they are and not solely what they initially present themselves to be.
One of the problems, of course, with long-distance relationships is you just get together to smash and go to restaurants and have fun and you don't deal with, you know, my aunt is ill and I've got to hit the dentist and I've got a headache.
And like, it's an unreal, it's like being on vacation forever.
It's kind of unreal life.
So have intentional conversations.
Don't just let the conversation flow wherever it wants to, but be in some control.
Discuss your personal histories, future aspirations, and core beliefs.
What do you believe about men?
What do you believe about women?
What do you believe about society?
What do you believe about virtue?
What do you believe about what is the relationship between in-laws and spouses?
What do you believe about grandparents and children?
How do you want to raise kids?
Do you want a homeschool?
What are your thoughts about disciplining kids and so on, right?
Observation of daily habits and responses.
Watch how this person handles emotions, how they treat others, how they manage money, how they respond to criticism.
Sorry, I just don't want to say he and she the whole time, so we go with the plural.
Premarital activities, counseling or workshops can be useful in guiding discussions about expectations, uncovering mismatches early on, and building skills for the future.
This, of course, is quite common in the church, or at least in the Catholic Church.
Here's some example questions.
Family and background.
What were family vacations or holidays like for you growing up?
And what do you want ours to look like?
Some people, of course, they go on these, you know, $5,000 to $10,000 Disney trips.
Other people are just happy to have a beach bonfire.
You can say, how prevalent is divorce or conflict in your family?
How has it shaped your views on relationships?
Do your parents have any history of anything like alcoholism or other forms of addiction or abuse themselves?
How do you think that might have affected you?
Who gets first loyalty in our family, spouse or children, and why?
If your mother says something and I say something else, where would your primary loyalties be?
Of course, we want it to be with reason and evidence in the long run, but where would your primary, if all other things being equal, how do you engage you plan to be with child rearing?
What discipline and style, if any, do you prefer?
Finances and lifestyle.
Hey, quick question.
Are you bringing any unpaid debts into our marriage?
And how do you handle financial crises?
Are you good with money?
Do you work well within a budget?
How important is saving or insurance to you?
How do you feel about tithing if you're in the church or charitable giving?
And what are your retirement plans?
What cultural decisions between us, sorry, what cultural differences between us might affect our daily life or decisions?
I mean, one of the things that's really important in a marriage is to get a sense of longevity, expectancy.
Because, you know, there's like, you know, live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse, right?
Holding, hope I die before I get old.
Do you expect to have a long life or are you here to have we're not here for a long time, but a good time.
Longevity expectations are really important because it's going to dictate time preferences for people.
Are you going to say for your retirement?
Do you have a registered retirement saving plan?
Are you going to take care of your health on the idea that you want to be healthy into your 70s and 80s?
Or do you not really think about the future and just do fun stuff in the here and now?
Really, really important.
Values and beliefs.
Questions.
How did you come to follow your faith or beliefs?
And how committed are you to personal growth?
What potential problems do you anticipate in our marriage and how would you handle an unhappy marriage?
Where do you stand on issues like abortion, divorce, or family loyalty?
What does respect, value, esteem, and love look like in a marriage to you?
Is marriage about happiness or holiness for you and why?
Ah, I see.
This is important.
I mean, this is Kevin Zamuel's point.
Marriage is not about happiness.
Marriage is a duty that we have to each other and the next generation, the kids.
Are you a hedonist?
Or do you have principles you're willing to sacrifice happiness to?
Relationship communication.
What made you realize you wanted to spend your life with me and what attracts you most now?
What are the biggest problems in our relationship so far and how do we resolve them?
What is your love language?
And how do you show affection or handle anger?
How important is it for us to have godly community or shared spiritual practices?
What trait in me do you hope to change after marriage and why?
Look for positive indicators.
Honesty, vulnerability, and answers, consistency between words and actions, shared core values, healthy stress responses, and mutual sacrifice slash dedication.
Under stress, do people just complain and go, rubber bones?
Be on the lookout for red flags.
Evasiveness, inconsistencies in stories, controlling or abusive tendencies, substance issues, mismatched expectations, and poor treatment of others.
Plan for aging and life transitions.
This is in particular for older couples.
For older couples, aging and life transitions are going to come much sooner than for younger couples.
Since the risk of divorce starts rising at age 32, having frank discussions in these areas is important.
I think early 30s divorce also has a lot to do with whether you're going to have kids or not.
There's something that happens.
This is just a theory, right?
But I've seen it a whole, whole bunch of times.
Whether you take that seriously or not is up to you.
But after four or five years, if there aren't kids, your body just turns off attraction to the other person.
Just turns them off.
Just turns off.
Because your body is like, we're not having kids.
Is there infertility?
We've got to try it.
So I first noticed this when I was producing a play, my first play back in the day.
My stage manager was going through a five-year anniversary breakup.
So divorces that occur after the age of 50 is also called gray divorce.
So collaborative goal setting, review finances together, create retirement accounts and explore long-term care insurance.
Scenario-based preparation, so role play or consult professionals to address what-ifs, like health declines or caregiving for parents.
Do you have a will?
Do you have a living will?
Do you know what the person wants if they're incapacitated?
Document updates and outsourcing, regularly update wills, healthcare proxies, and beneficiary designations.
Lifestyle alignment, adjusting habits for healthy aging, like joint exercise or budgeting for travel to maintain shared purpose and reduce isolation or drift.
Make sure that you don't just become a functional couple that solves technical problems in the here and now, but that you stay merged in terms of your personalities.
Like I just went out yesterday for a lovely afternoon and evening with my wife.
We went to a town, we strolled around, we went on a hike, we had dinner together and we're just chatting the whole time and that's just lovely.
So kind of questions you might ask, retirement and finances.
How do you envision our retirement?
Do you see us traveling, downsizing or pursuing hobbies together?
Would we move to where the grandchildren are?
Whatever it is, right?
What are your financial goals for retirement?
How do we plan for risks like market downturns or unexpected expenses, right?
I mean, there are people, people prone to chronic irritation tend to be people who think that life just goes well as a whole.
Life goes well as a whole, and every deviation from things going well is an imposition designed to frustrate the person from the demonic universe, right?
So it's nice, you know, when you get older, you get to replace money concerns with health concerns.
Lovely.
All right.
Health and aging.
What are your expectations for health maintenance as we age, like regular checkups or lifestyle changes?
How do we plan for potential chronic illnesses?
Should we use insurance or family support or savings?
If one of us needed long-term care, how would we divide responsibilities to avoid burnout?
What does aging look together?
Well, sorry, what does aging together look like for you and how can we support each other's independence?
Caregiving.
How do we envision caregiving for aging parents or each other?
Should we outsource it or handle it ourselves?
If you're going to outsource it, you need a lot of additional money.
If you're not going to outsource it, then what's going to happen if a parent gets ill while the children are still relatively young and dependent?
Because that is going to tear women often into like a wishbone.
What boundaries would you set for caregiving to protect our relationship?
If caregiving becomes overwhelming, how would we seek help?
Services or family involvement or something like that.
How prepared are we for the emotional toll of caregiving, knowing it can lead to stress in marriage?
Got to talk about end-of-life stuff, man.
I know it's not sexy, but it's essential just to unpack how you think or feel about the world as a whole and life.
What are your wishes for end-of-life care, like medical interventions or funeral preferences?
Don't marry someone if you don't know whether they want to be buried or cremated.
How do we update documents like wills or healthcare proxies to reflect our plans?
What legacy do you want to leave in the world?
How does that fit with our shared life?
If we faced a terminal illness, how would we support each other without straining the marriage?
And another one that's important, I think, is this is sort of the boomer question.
You know, one of the things that's frustrating for a lot of people about the boomers is they spend like crazy when they're retired.
They go on their cruises and travel and this, that, and the other, and all these pictures and how cool it is.
And they're not leaving much, if anything, for their kids.
So that's another question.
You know, when we get older, hopefully we've got some assets.
Do you want to spend the assets on ourselves?
Do you want to spend less on ourselves and provide more to help our kids get started?
You know, these are important questions.
Premarital counseling, some kind of structured therapy, educational guidance sessions for engaged couples, or those seriously considering marriage, aimed at preparing them for a healthy long-term partnership.
It typically involves discussing key topics like communication, conflict resolution, finances, intimacy, family expectations, and shared values to build skills and also uncover potential issues or incompatibilities early.
Premarital counseling results in a 30 to 50% lower risk of divorce.
I'm just going to say that again.
Premarital counseling results in a 30 to 50 percent lower risk of divorce.
And we'll put all the sources in the show notes, of course.
Sorry, the source being my right armpit.
I think I used my left armpit for the last presentation.
So what kind of options are available for premarital counseling?
It's not couples counseling.
It's premarital counseling.
It's different.
The Gottman method, G-O-T-T-M-A-N, focuses on building friendships, managing conflicts, or building friendship between the couples, managing conflict, and creating shared meaning through research-based exercises.
It's evidence-based and often involves assessments, like checklists to identify strengths and growth areas.
Available inline, inline, sorry, available in person or online via certified therapists.
There's something called EFT.
Emotionally focused therapy emphasizes attachment and emotional bonds, helping couples understand and respond to each other's needs.
It's particularly useful for addressing insecurities or past traumas, typically offered by licensed therapists in individual sessions.
It says a lot of people who panic when they get close to others because they've been bitterly disappointed or the quote bond has been used to torture or torment them if they've had really bad parents.
Imargo relationship therapy, ERT, explores childhood influences on adult relationships and teaches dialogue techniques for empathy and validation.
It's dialogic and can be done in workshops or private sessions.
The prepare slash enrich program, structured assessment-based approach using inventories to evaluate relationship dynamics and followed by feedback sessions.
It's customizable, often used in religious or community settings.
Religious-based counseling, pre-canna for Catholics, led by clergy or faith leaders, focusing on spiritual compatibility, sacraments, and moral values.
It may include group retreats or classes, often free or low cost through churches.
Online or virtual counseling, platforms that none of these I'm recommending.
These are just I don't get any feedback from them.
I don't have any relationship with them.
Platforms like BetterHelp, one word, Talkspace, one word, or specialized programs offer flexible app-based sessions or self-paced modules with video calls, ideal for remote couples.
Group or workshop formats, multi-couple sessions or retreats for interactive learning on topics like finances and intimacy.
Individualized therapy, one-on-one with a licensed marriage and family therapist, customized to the couple's needs, often incorporating elements from methods like Gartman or EFT.
And if you're searching for licensed marriage and family therapists, LMFT is the acronym you might find helpful.
Coaching on non-therapeutic programs led by certified coaches focusing on practical skills rather than deep therapy.
It's shorter and more goal-oriented.
So how much time and money should you set aside for this?
Well, therapy is infinitely cheaper and easier than divorce.
I'm just going to throw infinitely in there, even though we're mortal, because functionally that's the way that it is.
So how much time and money are you going to set aside for this?
There's some variation depending on what type of intervention you're talking about.
It's probably less than you think.
So standard therapy and coaching, four to eight sessions, each 45 to 90 minutes for a total of three to 12 hours over one to three months.
Come on.
Three to 12 hours over one to three months.
That's like a season, a third to a season of the sopranos.
Religious programs, six to 12 hours over four to six months, including classes or retreats.
Online or self-paced, flexible, generally two to 10 hours total.
Workshops and retreats, intensive eight to 16 hours over a weekend.
That means taking your.
I mean, I've said this before, people put more energy and effort into figuring out what kind of computer they want to buy or what kind of car they want to buy and certainly what kind of house they want to buy and who they want to spend the rest of their life with and open their hearts, minds, seeds, and wallet to.
It's incredible.
What's the monetary investment?
Well, for in-person therapy, it's $75 to $250 per session.
So for four to eight sessions, $400 to $1,500.
Come on.
Religious community-based, often free or low-cost, $0 to $100 total through churches or nonprofits.
Online or virtual, $50 to $275 per session.
Or subscription-based, $50 to $100 a week for all platforms.
Full programs are between $100 and $500.
So just so you understand that, a divorce lawyer can be $500 to $1,000 per hour.
Per hour.
We're talking $200 to $800 per couple for a weekend event to massively lower your chance of divorce or you can pay that for one hour of a divorce lawyer's time.
It's insane, right?
I mean, the old rule of thumb that I was taught, if you got your assets, you're getting a divorce, 100%.
Then each couple gets 25%, and then the remaining 25 and 25% go to each couple's lawyer.
You should split your assets in two, right?
Husband, wife, two lawyers.
Everybody gets 25%, and it's all over, right?
So lifestyle choices, multiple marriages.
Obvious, blah, blah, blah.
It's worth reiterating, there's a significant risk of divorce is one or both partners having had a divorce in the past.
If you want to lower your risk of divorce, it's best not to have one in the first place.
If you've been divorced, you're not doomed, but you do have to do more work to prevent a repeat.
So maybe you can lower, again, you got to roll with these judo style, right?
You've been divorced.
I assume you were divorced because you didn't do this kind of vetting ahead of time.
So what you need to do is do more of it now.
Get involved in these pre-marital counseling sessions.
Age at marriage.
The age at which you get married matters.
The risk of divorce of first marriages follows a U-shaped curve.
Those who get married before the age of 18 risk divorce at 48% within 10 years, dropping to 25% by the age of 25.
The lowest rates of divorce occur for those from the mid-20s to mid-30s.
As you go further out from this age range, the risk increases.
The risk increases at a slower rate, but still a significant 5% per year after the age of 32.
Now, that's going to shallow out.
It's not every year, right?
Not like at 42, it's, you know, it's gone up 50%, but it does increase.
Now, why is that the case?
Well, I would assume, again, it's not like everyone who gets married young is dumb, but I assume it's somewhat of a proxy for the deferral of gratification through getting your education and that kind of stuff.
Why people who are older, you're probably just more set in your ways.
And of course, for women, if you're going to get married in your 30s, your body count is probably, not always, right?
The body count is probably relatively high.
And of course, the higher the body count of the woman, the more likely she is to divorce her husband over time.
You just can't pair bond.
Men can survive promiscuity better than women.
It's just the way that we evolved because men had to be promiscuous.
If men got wiped out in some war, which is pretty common throughout human history, then there had to be a certain, you shouldn't just have straight monogamy.
All right.
So the marriages of young couples, they struggle with a lack of maturity and stability.
Right.
So if you get married at 18, a woman is still a couple of years away from brain maturity and the man is still half a decade away from brain maturity.
Now, this can mean you grow together, but can also mean that as your brains sort of harden into their final form, that there's less compatibility going forward.
Other contributing factors for the divorces of young couples, cohabitation, living together, it's greater among the young, and limited relationship experience.
Of course, a lot of times, as we know, women will want to get into early marriages or date earlier if they have a highly toxic and dysfunctional home life.
Because nature is just like, oh, okay, so everything's kind of crazy.
Let's just get out and have a whole bunch of kids because we're R-selected, not K-selected.
Sorry if you don't know what that means.
Look up Gene Wars, G-E-N-E-Wars at FDRpodcast.com.
Watch that stuff.
It's important.
So it could be just fleeing toxic family life, which means you have bad skills and unprocessed trauma.
So the challenges of older couples, those who get married older, have already demonstrated a lesser interest in getting married in the first place.
The overall pool of quality mates is reduced, and previous non-marriage relationships may bring significant beggage bagage.
Delaying marriage when you're young can reduce your risk of divorce significantly 50% when comparing before 18 to age 25, right?
That's relative, not absolute.
But don't wait too long.
The sweet smart is 28 to 32, after which the risk increases again.
Adopting healthy behaviors, aka avoiding destructive vices.
That's in casino, I think.
The movie.
Destructive vices such as smoking or drinking to excess increase the risk of divorce, even when both partners have similar vices.
When only one partner smokes, the risk of divorce increases by 76 to 95%, with the risk increasing further if the wife is the smoker.
When both partners smoke, the risk of divorce increases by 53% relative to non-smoking couples.
Again, proxy for the deferral of gratification, for maturity, for common sense, whatever, right?
Alcohol.
Oh, do I ever hate alcohol as a whole?
All right.
Each liter of alcohol consumed annually corresponds to a 20% increased chance of divorce.
The average American drinks 9.4 liters of alcohol per year, right?
So that's not beer, that's like alcohol alcohol, corresponding to 188% increased risk of divorce.
If husband and wife have different drinking habits, for example, one is a teetotaler or abstains while the other one drinks heavily, the risk of divorce is 60% more likely.
Marijuana.
Also hate, by the way.
One study found that marijuana use both by only one or both couples, sorry, both individuals, correlated with an increased risk of divorce.
When adjusted for alcohol and tobacco use, marijuana alone was not deemed a significant independent factor, but the correlation should be heeded.
Ah, yes, I wrote about this in my novel, The Future.
The old guy, the old terrible guy gives annoyingly good advice.
Distance yourself from your divorcing friends.
Hot potato man, cut off.
It's a gangrenous limb.
You got to be disciplined about this.
Keep divorcing couples out of your social circles.
There's this phenomenon known as divorce contagion, where married couples are friends with a couple going through divorce.
These couples who are friends with a couple going through divorce are more likely to get divorced themselves.
Having a divorced friend increases one's own divorce risk by 75%, with the effect strongest for mutual friendships.
If a friend of a friend divorces, the risk increases by 33%.
It's much less strong at three degrees of separation once you get to Kevin Bacon territory.
I'm sure it's virtually zero.
But wow.
Wow, that's wild.
So the study above, to conclude this, was conducted over 32 years with the check-ins every four years.
The baseline probability of divorce over a given four-year period was 9%.
A direct friend divorcing raised that to 16%.
Ouch.
While a friend of a friend divorcing raised it to 12%.
This can also apply to work colleagues and family relationships.
Watch out.
So it's not just in terms of marriage and divorce, but it's also just in terms of relationships as a whole.
So if you are pre-marriage, you're a boyfriend, girlfriend, that kind of stuff, then if you have friends going through a grueling breakup, it's going to increase your risk of breaking up.
It's not just about divorce.
Not just about divorce.
Avoiding controlling behaviors.
Now, controlling behaviors is a challenging phrase.
Having standards is not being controlling, right?
So this is the old debate in the whatever podcast and other places where the woman says, well, I just want to go to clubs.
I just want to go out clubbing.
And the man says, I don't want you going out clubbing.
And the woman says, you're being controlling.
It's like, well, I don't want you to be out half naked dancing around strangers where every man there wants to sleep with you and you could get roofied and like just that kind of stuff, right?
So having standards is perceived by narcissists as being controlling.
But of course, you shouldn't stay with somebody who doesn't listen to your good arguments, right?
If you have good arguments, I mean, you know, the counter example is, would you want your boyfriend going to a bachelor party where the women are naked or half naked and paid to give lap dances and so on to the men?
And she'd say, well, no, I don't want that.
It's like, well, that's the level of sexuality that women experience to some degree when they're at clubbing because the guys there are, you know, hot-bothered, horny, and want to sleep with them.
And you're kind of bumping and grinding up around each other.
I spent a lot of time in discos when I was a teenager.
Loved going to, I would say, good discos dance clubs.
I just couldn't get enough.
So, but we'll talk about controlling behaviors here.
Avoiding controlling behaviors decreases your risk of divorce by 10 to 20%.
So what do we mean by controlling behaviors?
Generally, aggressive behaviors that do not cross the line into overt physical abuse.
This is like isolating the partner from friends or family, monitoring activities, demanding to know whereabouts, checking phone social media, criticizing or belittling the partner, often publicly or disguised as humor, using jealousy or accusations of infidelity to justify restrictions, controlling finances, appearance or decisions, what to wear, what to spend, what to eat, giving the silent treatment, withholding affection, or using guilt or threats to manipulate, interfering with healthcare, employment, or education access.
So how is that different from just having standards?
Well, you have standards, which is you say, you know, there's this, again, whether it's true or not, there's this famous story that is a guy had a girlfriend and the girlfriend wanted to go to a party with unknown people in a really bad section of town.
And he said, don't go.
And she said, well, I want to go.
And he said, listen, you're free to go, but if you go, I'm breaking up with you.
Now, is that controlling?
No, that's not, because he's not controlling her behavior.
He's saying there are consequences.
If you don't listen to my good advice, and ladies, men understand men.
We understand what hound dogs, what grabby, what, you know, we've had to deal with male violence, male coercion, male bullying our whole lives.
Men grow up, boys grow up knowing that if you say the wrong thing or insult someone, you can get a fist to the face.
Right.
If a friend of mine, I kind of imagine this would happen.
If a friend of mine, I was just talking about this with friends of mine, but if a friend of mine went to a biker bar and called all of the bikers there, you know, F bundle of woodwood, and then he got beaten up, and then he complained about it.
I'd be like, yeah, the guys who beat you up are wrong, but that was stupid.
That was just stupid.
What do you expect?
What do you expect?
I mean, just poking a wasp nest at that point, right?
Say, wow, but they were wrong.
Yeah, technically they were wrong, but, you know, it's just a bad idea overall, right?
I mean, it's like if you go up to some tattooed, bruisy, thick-necked guy, you know, with a low forehead and the impulse control of your average Mexican jumping bean, and you go up and you call his wife a see you next Tuesday or a bitch or something, and then he pops you in the head.
It's like, yeah, he was wrong.
You got free speech, but that was just stupid, right?
So men understand male aggression and male volatility, and women generally don't because they're generally protected from these things by good men.
So this girlfriend of the guy went, he went.
She went to the sketchy party in the sketchy part of town and she ended up being sexually assaulted.
She called him at four in the morning.
He makes sure she got to safety and then he broke up with her.
And everybody was shocked and appalled and he's like, well, no, she's not going to listen to good advice.
He doesn't have any respect for the things that I know better than she does, which is men know how dangerous men are.
This is the, you know, this whole debate is going on across the West at the moment.
But men know how aggressive men are and how horny men are because we kind of live with that.
And so we try to give women good advice.
And if the woman doesn't listen to good advice, it's not controlling behavior to say, look, if you don't listen to good advice, I'm breaking up with you.
That's not con women, they may experience that as controlling, but that's just consequence, right?
It's not controlling that if your woman says, I want to go sleep with another man and you say, I don't want you to sleep with another man.
And if you do, I'm breaking up with you.
In fact, I'm probably breaking up with you just because you want to and are telling me about it rather than dealing with it yourself.
That's not controlling, right?
So we're talking about very aggressive stuff that interferes with the normal course of human life.
In the normal course of human life, you go to work and saying, well, you're just going to work to sleep with some guy and controlling and bullying and yelling at the person at work.
That's so in the normal course of life, the normal healthy course of life, interfering and using aggression to control the person.
And it is, of course, if you don't respect the person's values or they don't respect your values, don't be in a relationship.
But being in a relationship and trying to control the other person, that's not right.
So men and women manifest this sort of controlling stuff differently.
I mean, you'd expect that, right?
Men are more physically aggressive, exerting overt dominance, expressing jealousy and suspicion, even restricting independence.
Women employ emotional and verbal manipulation, the silent treatment, withholding sex and affection, nitpicking and nagging and so on, right?
Controlling behavior, I mean, studies vary a little bit, but it seems to be about equal between the sexes, like rape.
So identify and avoid those who would engage in this kind of aggression rather than believing you can fix it after the fact.
You can't.
If somebody doesn't listen to your good advice and does whatever they want, escalating, controlling behavior is probably based on lust.
Now, if you had parents who had these kinds of behaviors, if you don't work on yourself, you're prone to either engaging in these behaviors yourself or selecting someone who does, right?
We are programmed to replicate our parents' marriage.
We evolved in a situation where there was not much choice in the world.
The woman you were going to marry would be kind of like the mom you had, right?
Because that's the tribal thing.
You didn't have much choice as far as variation.
Now we have also this dating apps, tons of variation, races, cultures, religions, and choose whatever you want.
And so for men, we pattern ourselves after our fathers because our fathers, by definition, are the most sexually successful person because they created us, right?
So you are programmed to replicate your parents' marriage and it takes intervention to have something different.
So cohabitation has grown, of course, in social acceptance, but it has a negative effect on the success of the marriage.
A 1995 study followed couples for 10 years and reported that 33% of those unions dissolved.
A study in 1987 to 1988, which was followed up in 92 to 94, so it's five to seven years, saw that 39% of those couples had separated.
Another recent study showed that 54% of first-time cohabitating couples broke up within six years.
So what happens with the couples who cohabitate before marriage who do get married?
Well, the risk profile goes sort of something like this.
Living together before engagement is the worst.
Living together after engagement but before marriage is less worse.
Living together after marriage is the best because it signals to your body that a big event has occurred.
So one study followed 1,600 first-time marriages between 2010 and 2019.
34% of those marriages where the couples lived together before engagement got divorced.
The study grouped those who cohabit after engagement and marriage and their divorce rate was 23%.
There's another study, just over a thousand individuals married between 1996 and 2007.
This study only included still married couples.
In the study, the serious consideration of divorce occurred in 18.7% of those who cohabitated before engagement.
Those who cohabitated between engagement and marriage put divorce on the table in 12.3% of cases.
Those who lived together only after marriage seriously considered divorce in 10.2% of cases.
So even if you stay together, divorce is much more on your mind after marriage than if you lived together beforehand, right?
Seriously, considering divorce, the risk gets cut by almost half if you only live together after you get married.
So, what about the husband?
Got a little bit more to go.
I'd love to take your questions, but what about the husband as the sole or primary earner?
When husbands earn at least 60% of the household income, the risk of divorce is very low.
Exact numbers vary.
The overall risk of divorce has increased over time.
But when the man is earning the majority of the income, the risk of divorce is lowest.
When income is shared, six, seven, the risk of divorce goes up.
When the wife earns more than the husband, roughly 60% or more of the household income, the risk of divorce goes up even more.
We could theorize all day about why.
We would just be theorizing, but let's go on.
The Institute of Family Studies analyzed U.S. census data from 2018 to 2021.
They found that for couples married between 1960 and 1989, when the husband earned at least $38,000 more than his wife, the risk of being divorced in 2021 was 1.2%.
Right?
So that's 61 years at the outside, right?
1960 to 2021.
Couples where the wife earned more than her husband had a risk of 3.3%, and where the wife earned $38,000 more than her husband, the risk of divorce was 4.4%.
So that's almost a four-fold risk of increase when the wife earns more.
The risk for couples married between 1990 and 2018 were higher.
So that's interesting.
Of course, you'd say, oh, well, but the old school was that the men earned more.
So if they're going outside of the old school marriage stuff, but even when you look at couples married, not in 1960, but 1990, right?
30 years later, the risk for couples married between 1990 and 2018 were higher.
If the primary earner was the husband, the risk of divorce was 2.9%.
If the husband and wife earned about the same, it's 4.8%.
If the wife was the primary earner, their risk of divorce was 8.4%.
Brutal.
More than half of all U.S. marriages at present are dual earner marriages.
And the share of women who were the primary breadwinner has tripled over the past 50 years.
In 1972, this was only 5% of marriages.
By 2022, this was 16%, a little over triple.
Couples earning roughly the same increased from 11% in 1972 to 29% in 2022.
Who earns the money in the marriage translates into a more modest risk relish to some of the other categories.
But it is important to consider when you plan out your lives who will take that role.
What gives you the best chance of success in the long run?
And I won't wax.
I know I've been talking for a long time and I really appreciate everyone's attention, but this is really, really important stuff.
I can get you to understand that as a man in particular, the health, longevity, and quality of life benefits of marriage cannot be replicated in any other way.
Marriage is your best chance to live long, be healthy, be happy.
It's good for women too, but I'm talking to the men here because they're often more jumpy about marriage at the moment.
So I'm trying to give you a great benefit while reducing your risk of negative outcomes, right?
So this is, I mean, this is a really tragic thing, right?
So, and this is why I'm telling people, reduce your expectations.
I mean, you can either be happy with the money you make by making more money, or you can reduce your expectations or reduce your spend, right?
I mean, if it's like, well, in order to be happy, I have to have a nitro cold brew every day.
Well, that's what, five or six bucks a day, blah, blah, blah.
You know, how this is rather than invest it in something.
So just lower your expectations.
I made lunch when I worked.
I had a pretty good salary when I worked as a software executive, but I made lunch.
I just wanted to save the money.
When I was working on my novels, I took time off after my business career.
Well, I interrupted my business career to work on novels.
And if I worked in a coffee shop, I would get an Americano because it was the cheapest.
And I could also just ask them to add more hot water, add a bit of cream.
It got watery, but I could work for a couple of hours on two bucks back then.
I didn't order lattes, though.
I prefer lattes.
Americanos kind of suck.
So it's just important.
So the reason I'm saying this is, so let's say that you are, oh, we got to make money and we both got to work because we need this lifestyle, blah, blah, blah.
Well, but you're raising your chances of divorce.
So everything that you've worked for evaporates.
It's what I want to tell people.
Oh, my gosh, like trying to make sensible economic decisions means looking at the long run and knowing the costs and benefits.
I had a whole scene in my novel, The Present.
Again, it's free.
You should read it.
I had a whole scene where the husband is saying to the wife, look, I've run the numbers.
You working and our daycare costs and other, we've got to have two cars and a bigger house, and we've got to have two cars and you need more clothing, more dry cleaning, and the expenses and, you know, like your salary, the expenses of childcare, I've run it out.
You're working for like less than $2 an hour after we pay our taxes and we pay our childcare costs and other expenses.
You're working for like two bucks an hour.
And that's optimistic.
Sometimes it's less.
So you can say, well, you know, we need two people working because we want this four-bedroom house or we want this.
You know, I grew up in an apartment.
The problem wasn't the apartment.
In fact, the apartment was great because I could go out and there were always kids to play with.
So say, well, we've got to have this dual income because we need this money.
It's like, okay, but just understand that the money that you save with you both working goes into daycare or goes to divorce lawyers if you break up because both of you are working and you're stressed and tired and don't have time and can't have sex because you're too exhausted and blah, blah, blah.
And it just turns into this horrible mechanical Sisyphus grind up the rock, down the rock, up the rock, down the rock.
So, or the other thing that happens is you make some money by putting your kids in daycare.
Let's say your wife owns a lot, but then you just spend that money on remediating issues with your kids when they become teens because they're not bonded with their parents.
They're bonded with their peers and peers will encourage them to make bad decisions.
So whatever, you know, you just get more money when you're younger, but you get more stress and often more costs.
Psychologists and rehab or whatever it is, you get more costs or bad decisions or, God forbid, bailouts and legal costs and so on.
So just be aware.
Be aware.
Children, have children only with your spouse.
This is like such a modern thing to have to say, right?
So bringing children into a marriage where they're not biologically related to one of the spouses drastically increases the risk of divorce.
So the rates I'm about to talk about, they don't distinguish divorced parents from never married parents.
So previous marriages have an impact on the numbers.
I mean, second marriages already have a crazy high divorce rate, as noted earlier, 60%.
But when children are involved, the risk of divorce is even worse, according to one source, right?
This is Kevin Samuels.
Being a stepfather, I've been a stepfather.
It sucks for me.
When one partner has children from a previous marriage, the risk of divorce is 65%.
And both partners have children.
The divorce is 70%, right?
It goes from 60 to 70%, which is what, like 12% or something like that, right?
Step-family couples, where at least one partner already has children, have a lifetime divorce rate of 50 to 60%.
For women under 45, 20% of these marriages end within five years.
Now, the risk of abuse towards children from a non-biologically related person living in the household, usually a stepfather, could be a stepmother, 30 times higher.
I mean, it's brutal on kids.
So avoid having children outside of marriage.
You know, the old, the one, two, three, right?
The triple punch of getting into the lower middle class at least is getting a hold of job.
Finish high school, getting hold of a job for at least a year, don't have a kid outside of wedlock, you've got a 98% chance of getting into the middle class, right?
So having children having, I don't know why that having children before you get married can increase the risk of divorce.
Studies vary with a study reporting that an older cohort, which is marriages from 85 to 95, reported a divorce rate of 23% for couples who had children before getting married, as opposed to 14% risk for couples who did not cohabitate or have children before getting married.
A more recent cohort, which is marriages from 97 to 2010, reported no change in risk, but this is kind of confounded by the increase in cohabitation before marriage, which is shown not only to increase divorce, but 36% of those cohabitating parents separated without ever getting married.
A 2019 study that focused on low-income families found that parents who had children before getting married had a 19% divorce rate, as opposed to a 9.5% divorce rate for parents who had children after getting married, right?
So it's more than double.
No, it's exactly double.
Sorry, 9.5.
18 carry the 5.
It's 19%, double.
Have children.
This is the last bit.
Love to take question, comments.
The lifetime risk of divorce for couples who do not have children is 50 to 60%, while the risk for couples who have children is 30 to 40%.
Childless couples do report initial higher satisfaction, but the lack of children in the marriage means the stakes are simply lower.
And by the time you want kids, often it's too late.
And it's pretty horrible to have that kind of regret over time.
All right.
So maybe this part's going to go out to the gen pop.
Thank you, everyone.
If you find this information helpful, freemain.com slash donate.
Put this out at the public service.
And let us, if you have questions or comments, I know this is a lot of information to absorb, but if you have questions or comments, I'm happy to hear them.
And I will go and check your questions and see what I can answer that has been coming up.
Somebody says, I can totally relate to the physical reaction to hearing people's spendings.
My worst spending habit is occasionally ordering food.
That's not too bad.
It's not too bad.
Yeah, people are always trying to say that the higher IQ, oh, they're crazy and so on.
Like higher IQ is just generally, and it's sad, but it's just correlated with positive things as a whole.
All right.
Let's see here.
And of course, when you get dishonorable people as a whole, then you have to get rid of standards in your society.
So in Canada, again, this is my guess.
I'm no lawyer, but that's not my understanding.
There used to be a lot of effort put it into putting into finding out who was at fault in a car accident, right?
So who would be at fault?
And then I think that too many resources were being scammed and too many scans were happening.
They just switched to no fault.
And they switched to no fault divorce.
Up until the 1960s, in Canada, to get a divorce required an act of parliament, Henry VIII stuff, right?
And then it just became no fault because people wanted it, right?
Sorry, this bit.
All right.
Or RTR, real-time relationships in junior high.
Yeah, that can be great.
Faking your looks and value is a big problem in modern dating.
This is why I hate makeup.
Well, and makeup now plus filters, right?
I saw this video of a guy.
He's like, I'm never using Tinder again.
This woman hid her double chin, right?
So you had a big sort of turtleneck, right?
And then she showed up, just big double, just like, wasn't quite like a frog mating cry, but it wasn't the opposite of that either, right?
A red-headed nurse named Tiffany with tattoos.
I can fix her.
Yeah, yeah.
Somebody says, this is interesting because I've worked as an organist at churches, and the worst is the Catholic Church.
And it's ironic how they treat their employees across the board.
I've seen a professor at a seminary advocate for the musicians' jobs in a room full of 100 priests and said they need to offer a salary but can support a fa that can support a family and offer a better stability for those types of jobs.
The statistic of an unstable slash stressful job affecting marriage is definitely something that needs to be looked at.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, for sure.
So, yeah, $50,000 in 1955 was $600,000 now.
I think that's true.
But it wasn't from 1955, right?
50K in 2019 in America is a little over $64,000 now, for sure.
Didn't they have a law that forbade women from having credit cards until like 1975?
Well, in the past, a man was responsible for the debts his wife ran up.
Now, I mean, how long did men have credit cards before women did?
James, if you can look that up, that'd be great.
But it wasn't, it wasn't, it's like the voting thing.
Like, how long did men have universal suffrage before women got it?
It wasn't very long at all.
Somebody says, even Mary Curie was discriminated against based on gender, despite her groundbreaking scientific achievements.
Yeah, I don't buy that.
I don't believe that.
I really don't.
I really don't.
So for all of human history, right, for all of human history until like five minutes ago, you needed, let's say you needed a blacksmith, right?
To forge your weapons of war, horseshoes, farming implements, you need a blacksmith, right?
Now, let's say that the village can only afford one blacksmith.
And let's say a woman becomes a blacksmith.
Like you have two towns, right?
And they're at war, right?
One town, the man becomes a blacksmith, one town, a woman becomes a blacksmith.
Who's more likely to survive?
Well, the woman isn't going to have the physical strength or stamina that the man is going to have to be a blacksmith.
But also the woman's going to have kids.
She's going to have kids.
Can't breastfeed while pounding your sword into a plowshare under fiery sparks and intense heat, right?
So one town gets a blacksmith because it's a man.
The other town doesn't get a blacksmith.
Not getting a blacksmith means you can't repair your farming equipment or make new farming equipment.
And that means that people are going to starve to death.
Or you're not going to have weapons of war, which means you're going to lose.
Can't repair weapons of war.
You can't repair hunting implements and so on.
So people are just going to starve to death or be taken over.
So it's not discrimination.
This is a basic fact of life.
All right.
So James says there wasn't a law prohibiting it.
It was common in banking practices to not issue credit cards to women.
They passed a law that prevented banks from not issuing cards, right?
Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
Real-time relationships is great.
I agree.
All right.
But I don't trust an average parish priest to offer marriage counseling.
Well, I get that, but let's say they're just going from a script and you're just sitting down in a formal setting to ask questions of your potential marriage partner.
What's wrong with that?
I mean, you could almost like you could just do it, just print them out and ask each other.
It's better to have an external person sometimes, but they're not necessarily giving a lot of marital advice.
I mean, that could happen, but I think what they're doing as a whole is they are just having you ask important questions for other people, right?
All rights.
There's a debate about that.
Um, uh-oh.
All right.
So I'm just going through these.
questions.
There's a debate about how good parish priests are.
It's like, well, it's certainly better than nothing.
And if you have concerns about parish priests, you can go to premarital licensed counselors or whatever it is.
I think it doesn't matter so much the skill level, but rather that you see the other person answering these questions or that you have somebody who's willing to go to these kinds of questions and issues to be vetted on these kinds of questions and issues.
It means that they're sort of sensible about this ahead of time.
Somebody says, I have a question about the correlation between education, education and lower divorce rates, I assume.
My understanding is women with higher education have an increased body count as well as get married older.
If this is true, how does this affect the status on education?
That I don't know.
It's a great question.
It's a great question.
All right.
James, I think, is scorching in here with essential information for us as a whole.
Let me just dig in your old headset.
And James, I've decided to allow you to speak because of my massive generosity as a co-worker.
All right.
What you got?
All righty.
So I did pose it to Grock, but the question about credit cards and when men got them.
So it says, men had access to credit cards starting in 1950 with the introduction of the Diner's Club card, widely considered the first modern credit card.
Women gained independent access to credit cards in 1975 when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act took effect, prohibiting discrimination based on sex or marital status.
So 25-year gap.
Well, I would not quite agree with that.
And again, feel free to run this through AI.
But the Dinus card was generally for executives.
And it was a business card, which part of the selling point was that it's easier to run your expense account if you have this kind of thing and you don't have to have cash.
So the Dinus card was primarily for business expenses for executives.
And again, you know, double check on this, but I mean, as a guy who had a, I had a corporate card when I was in business and I remember that the accountants were always chasing everyone around to put in your expenses, explain your expenses.
We can't catch your checks and all of that.
And so having a corporate business card was important because otherwise you're kind of subsidizing them and the time it takes to get your expenses processed and get your checks back.
But I think that the Diners card was sort of the madman scenario of waving it around for business expenses and wasn't exactly accepted in a wide variety of, I don't know, grocery stores or things like that.
Does that make any sense?
That totally makes sense.
And I didn't catch that because, you know, what do I?
I'm executive, you know?
But that totally makes sense.
Diner's Club card.
And just remembering like back in the 80s, I remember hearing about that kind of stuff.
And that makes sense.
But it wasn't that long after.
So you're totally right about that.
It was just for executives, primarily for dining in restaurants.
And only some restaurants would have, you know, actually accepted it.
Yeah, you wouldn't get it at McDonald's, right?
I mean, because the overhead of doing that kind of stuff.
So it's not so much who got the cards to some degree.
To me, it's also like who would accept the cards.
And I assume high-end hotels and restaurants and those catering in particular to business travel would accept those cards, but they wouldn't be the it and when we say credit cards now, just about everyone takes them.
There's a couple of convenience stores that are like, you know, cash or interact only, but most people will take these cards.
But I don't think that was the case in the 1950s.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it wasn't until 19, well, so American Express introduced something in 1958, which was mostly for travel.
And the general purpose cards, which actually got sent out to the average guy, you know, like middle class, maybe, maybe upper middle class doesn't, I don't have that detail here.
Was Bank of America in 1958?
They sent out 60,000 unsolicited cards to local residents in California.
So it was beyond the elite.
We could go further deeper into this.
Like, what was the acceptance of credit cards?
How could you actually use them?
Yada, yada, yada.
Because there were store-based credit cards for a long time, like the early 1900s.
So almost like gift cards that you would just pay off later, right?
Yeah, the JCPenney card or Macy's or something like that.
Department store charge plates.
I'm not sure exactly what that means.
Or oil company cards.
Right.
So, you know, the company store, right?
Something like that, I imagine.
Right.
So here I've got stores began accepting credit cards in the late 1950s to the 1960s.
So by the 1960s, the magnetic stripe on cards further accelerated adoption.
And so it was in the, let's say, mid to late 60s is when it started to become really widely more widely accepted.
Again, it still would not be the default method for a lot of people.
I mean, I remember when I was a kid, I was trying to explain this to my daughter the other day.
She was going to the bank.
And I was trying to explain to when I was a kid, in Canada, banks were open from like 10 to 3, four days a week or something.
Like, I remember when the first bank opened, eight, eight, it was on Fridays, was crazy.
And so if you needed money for the weekend, all the kids would march over to the bank and we would withdraw our meager dollars in order to have money for the weekend because no credit cards, no interact cards, no bank machines.
You just, it's cash or nothing.
And this was in the 80s, right?
And so, again, I mean, I was a kid, so it's not like they would offer me a credit card.
But if we sort of look at mid to late 60s, we're talking 10 or fewer years between widespread men getting them and women getting them as a whole.
And of course, the question is: women tend to be more comfortable with debt and tend to spend more money.
And what that means is that there was a higher risk to give credit cards to women than there was to men.
Again, women then got upset and ran to the government rather than becoming better at spending or whatever it is.
And of course, in general, I'm not sure when this changed, but men were responsible.
Let's see.
I'm just going to ask this.
In America, I should have this voice thing.
When did husbands stop?
I got a type of that seeing it because the phone is in the way.
When did husbands stop being responsible for their wives' debts?
Because I think that was the case for a lot of history.
Bodo-doo.
And so did, and if a man and woman is in, if men and women are in conflict, one of the ways that women used to be able to express their anger at men was to go out and run up the credit cards that men would be legally liable for.
So it would exacerbate marital conflict in pretty horrible ways.
And, of course, the likelihood of being paid back goes down considerably.
Like, I'm not paying your debt.
Well, you have to.
And, you know, so it could be quite a challenge from that standpoint.
Okay, let's just see here.
And I'm just asking about America because you could go all over the place, but of course, a lot of my listeners are based in the land of us.
All right.
It's funny, you know, this is how this is how funny it is.
Like you have this amazing, I think rock is fantastic, right?
And, and, but it's like, come on, man, it's taking 20 seconds.
I mean, how long did it take for us to find this kind of stuff in the past?
Scroll, scroll.
I mean, because I did all of this stuff as a whole.
Okay, so let's see here.
So, 1960s to 1970s, decline of unilateral liability via equality laws, end of common disclaimer, notices.
So, you know, yeah, in the 1960s, men were still responsible for their wives' deaths.
And again, it's not like all women would just go up and blow their husbands' future income and their kids.
But if there was conflict or if the woman was irresponsible, then that would be a huge, huge problem.
So, yeah, just this idea, well, it was 1950 for men and a quarter century later for women.
It's like, I mean, if you were a man who was regularly taking people out for, you know, steak dinners and champagne and lunches that at top-tier restaurants and had to travel, then yeah, for sure.
Because what happened was people didn't want to outlay their own money, right?
People didn't want to outlay their own money for corporate expenses.
I mean, I remember being once involved in a business that was kind of shaky.
I put out a lot of money for the business and it took me, I think, three or four months to get the money back.
And I put my own money out on this.
And that's a little dicey.
So companies were like, hey, man, don't worry about it.
Don't worry about it.
You know, we'll pay it.
We're responsible.
And it would also hit your credit rating, right?
If you ended up having to borrow to pay something off or whatever it is, right?
So for the companies to take it over, it was for the high-spending salespeople who were lead-handing and golfing and top-tier restaurants and hotels and so on.
So it was not the average.
Am I optimistic about Grakipedia?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Because Elon Musk is a stone genius, not just because he retweeted me, but it could be something else.
I don't know.
I don't know anything about him other than he retweeted me.
But yeah, he's a stone genius.
And Wikipedia, by design, is to me just about as susceptible to propagandistic programming as any system could possibly be.
And he will recognize that he's a genius at balancing incentives.
And he will hire, or if he doesn't, he will hire the people who he understands that's a huge issue.
So there will be a lot of checks and balances in Grakipedia that just aren't there in Wikipedia.
Because Wikipedia evolved before the evils of using public forums to lie about people and the value of that was known.
So I think that's it's going to be much, much better.
All right.
Sorry, James, is there anything else that you wanted to add?
Not so much.
I don't know if you said this when I was looking things up, but just to sort of say, you know, be really careful when you repeat stuff, you know, or when you confirm stuff.
Like, wasn't it illegal before 1975?
Like, be careful with that stuff, guys.
You know?
Yeah.
And again, this sort of Madame Curie, if she was discriminated against, it's like, well, no, the society could not afford female scientists and survival.
And so everything was set up for men.
And if everything is set up for men, so I'll sort of give you an example just briefly and we can close off here.
And again, I really do appreciate everyone's comments and questions.
But, you know, I'm pretty, I'm unusually smart.
So you can't have a system of education that's designed for people like us.
I mean, in general, right?
You can't have a system.
I mean, you could if it was private, but in terms of governments, you simply can't have a system of education that's designed for people like me with, you know, these kinds of abilities that I have.
It's just not going to work.
It's not going to work.
And so you can't design society for the wild outliers.
And society could not afford female doctors, female lawyers, females, they couldn't afford it.
Couldn't afford it.
No excess resources.
And any society that tried that would have failed foundationally as a society, which, you know, we're, I guess, going through that experiment right now.
So it wasn't sort of some hostility or hatred or that she was discriminated against.
It's like you just, you had only male washrooms.
The entire system was set up and designed for men, for male ways of learning, for high conflict, right?
High conflict, high confrontation, which women tend to enjoy less as a whole.
And so just everything was set up for men.
The dormitories, the washrooms, everything was set up for men.
The chairs were all set up for men.
Everything, podium height, was all set up for men.
And you just can't redesign that because you get a brilliant woman.
You just can't.
Any more than I would say, well, look, I'm a smart guy.
Therefore, all of education has to be reshaped for me.
It's like, well, no, I'm an outlier.
I'm way off on the bell curve, right?
So just saying it was just prejudice.
And it's like, no, no, try and think about things sort of critically.
What would you have done?
Because if a society could have flourished by giving women more opportunities, that society would have done so and would have succeeded wildly compared to other societies.
Evolutionary pressures.
If women are generally excluded throughout history from high stress, high demand occupations, the question is why?
And that's what you got to answer.
Thank you, everyone.
Freedomain.com slash donate.
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Have a wonderful, wonderful day.
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