A quick google search says the male is primary or exclusive breadwinner in a majority of married couples. Ass-pull number: the monetary costs alone are probably ~50% higher living costs. (Not a factor of two higher, because the living costs of two people living together are much less than double the living costs of one person. Also I’m generally considering the no-kids case here; I don’t feel as confused about couples with kids.
But remember that you already conditioned on ‘married couples without kids’. My guess would be that in the subset of man-woman married couples without kids, the man being the exclusive breadwinner is a lot less common than in the set of all man-woman married couples. These properties seem like they’d be heavily anti-correlated.
In the subset of man-woman married couples without kids that get along, I wouldn’t be surprised if having a partner effectively works out to more money for both participants, because you’ve got two incomes, but less than 2x living expenses.
I was picturing an anxious attachment style as the typical female case (without kids). That’s unpleasant on a day-to-day basis to begin with, and I expect a lack of sex tends to make it a lot worse.
I am … not … picturing that as the typical case? Uh, I don’t know what to say here really. That’s just not an image that comes to mind for me when I picture ‘older hetero married couple’. Plausibly I don’t know enough normal people to have a good sense of what normal marriages are like.
Eyeballing Aella’s relationship survey data, a bit less than a third of respondents in 10-year relationships reported fighting multiple times a month or more. That was somewhat-but-not-dramatically less than I previously pictured. Frequent fighting is very prototypically the sort of thing I would expect to wipe out more-than-all of the value of a relationship, and I expect it to be disproportionately bad in relationships with little sex.
I think for many of those couples that fight multiple times a month, the alternative isn’t separating and finding other, happier relationships where there are never any fights. The typical case I picture there is that the relationship has some fights because both participants aren’t that great at communicating or understanding emotions, their own or other people’s. If they separated and found new relationships, they’d get into fights in those relationships as well.
It seems to me that lots of humans are just very prone to getting into fights. With their partners, their families, their roommates etc., to the point that they have accepted having lots of fights as a basic fact of life. I don’t think the correct takeaway from that is ‘Most humans would be happier if they avoided having close relationships with other humans.’
Less legibly… conventional wisdom sure sounds like most married men find their wife net-stressful and unpleasant to be around a substantial portion of the time, especially in the unpleasant part of the hormonal cycle, and especially especially if they’re not having much sex. For instance, there’s a classic joke about a store salesman upselling a guy a truck, after upselling him a boat, after upselling him a tackle box, after [...] and the punchline is “No, he wasn’t looking for a fishing rod. He came in looking for tampons, and I told him ‘dude, your weekend is shot, you should go fishing!’”.
Conventional wisdom also has it that married people often love each other so much they would literally die for their partner. I think ‘conventional wisdom’ is just a very big tent that has room for everything under the sun. If even 5-10% of married couples have bad relationships where the partners actively dislike each other, that’d be many millions of people in the English speaking population alone. To me, that seems like more than enough people to generate a subset of well-known conventional wisdoms talking about how awful long-term relationships are.
Case in point, I feel like I hear those particular conventional wisdoms less commonly these days in the Western world. My guess is this is because long-term heterosexual marriage is no longer culturally mandatory, so there’s less unhappy couples around generating conventional wisdoms about their plight.
So, next question for people who had useful responses (especially @Lucius Bushnaq and @yams): do you think the mysterious relationship stuff outweighs those kinds of costs easily in the typical case, or do you imagine the costs in the typical case are not all that high?
So, in summary, both I think? I feel like the ‘typical’ picture of a hetero marriage you sketch is more like my picture of an ‘unusually terrible’ marriage. You condition on a bad sexual relationship and no children and the woman doesn’t earn money and the man doesn’t even like her, romantically or platonically. That subset of marriages sure sounds like it’d have a high chance of the man just walking away, barring countervailing cultural pressures. But I don’t think most marriages where the sex isn’t great are like that.
This comment gave me the information I’m looking for, so I don’t want to keep dragging people through it. Please don’t feel obligated to reply further!
That said, I did quickly look up some data on this bit:
But remember that you already conditioned on ‘married couples without kids’. My guess would be that in the subset of man-woman married couples without kids, the man being the exclusive breadwinner is a lot less common than in the set of all man-woman married couples.
… so I figured I’d drop it in the thread.
When interpreting these numbers, bear in mind that many couples with no kids probably intend to have kids in the not-too-distant future, so the discrepancy shown between “no children” and 1+ children is probably somewhat smaller than the underlying discrepancy of interest (which pushes marginally more in favor of Lucius’ guess).
But remember that you already conditioned on ‘married couples without kids’. My guess would be that in the subset of man-woman married couples without kids, the man being the exclusive breadwinner is a lot less common than in the set of all man-woman married couples. These properties seem like they’d be heavily anti-correlated.
In the subset of man-woman married couples without kids that get along, I wouldn’t be surprised if having a partner effectively works out to more money for both participants, because you’ve got two incomes, but less than 2x living expenses.
I am … not … picturing that as the typical case? Uh, I don’t know what to say here really. That’s just not an image that comes to mind for me when I picture ‘older hetero married couple’. Plausibly I don’t know enough normal people to have a good sense of what normal marriages are like.
I think for many of those couples that fight multiple times a month, the alternative isn’t separating and finding other, happier relationships where there are never any fights. The typical case I picture there is that the relationship has some fights because both participants aren’t that great at communicating or understanding emotions, their own or other people’s. If they separated and found new relationships, they’d get into fights in those relationships as well.
It seems to me that lots of humans are just very prone to getting into fights. With their partners, their families, their roommates etc., to the point that they have accepted having lots of fights as a basic fact of life. I don’t think the correct takeaway from that is ‘Most humans would be happier if they avoided having close relationships with other humans.’
Conventional wisdom also has it that married people often love each other so much they would literally die for their partner. I think ‘conventional wisdom’ is just a very big tent that has room for everything under the sun. If even 5-10% of married couples have bad relationships where the partners actively dislike each other, that’d be many millions of people in the English speaking population alone. To me, that seems like more than enough people to generate a subset of well-known conventional wisdoms talking about how awful long-term relationships are.
Case in point, I feel like I hear those particular conventional wisdoms less commonly these days in the Western world. My guess is this is because long-term heterosexual marriage is no longer culturally mandatory, so there’s less unhappy couples around generating conventional wisdoms about their plight.
So, in summary, both I think? I feel like the ‘typical’ picture of a hetero marriage you sketch is more like my picture of an ‘unusually terrible’ marriage. You condition on a bad sexual relationship and no children and the woman doesn’t earn money and the man doesn’t even like her, romantically or platonically. That subset of marriages sure sounds like it’d have a high chance of the man just walking away, barring countervailing cultural pressures. But I don’t think most marriages where the sex isn’t great are like that.
This comment gave me the information I’m looking for, so I don’t want to keep dragging people through it. Please don’t feel obligated to reply further!
That said, I did quickly look up some data on this bit:
… so I figured I’d drop it in the thread.
When interpreting these numbers, bear in mind that many couples with no kids probably intend to have kids in the not-too-distant future, so the discrepancy shown between “no children” and 1+ children is probably somewhat smaller than the underlying discrepancy of interest (which pushes marginally more in favor of Lucius’ guess).
Big thank you for responding, this was very helpful.