How to Make Marriage Better

Posted by Jew from Jersey
12 January 2022

In the not too distant future, only homosexuals will bother to get married. If you tell someone you know: “I’m getting married,” their natural, instinctive, gut response will be: “Oh, I didn’t even realize you were gay.” The reason for this is that gay marriage is free of all those problematic issues that stem from biological differences between the genders, in particular motherhood, disparities in physical strength, and relative ease of promiscuity.

Gay men make particularly stable couples precisely because of the lack of motherhood. Butch lesbians may occasionally suffer the fate of straight men when their femme wives get pregnant and suddenly discover they’re “bi” and get feelings for the baby’s biological father. The courts are likely to side with the child’s biological parents and the butch “mom” may not even get visitation rights.

Heterosexual marriages are additionally unstable because violence against women is always taken seriously in a way that violence against men is not. This is largely because men are so much stronger physically than women, but also because all human beings are hardwired to protect women and not men. There are laws in most states requiring that a man spend a night in jail at the mere allegation of violence against his wife. There is no law in any state requiring a woman to spend any jail time for a similar allegation of violence against her husband. There is similarly no such law for gay couples.

In matters of infidelity, too, heterosexual couples are inherently less stable. People who are married to each other tend to possess comparable levels of attractiveness. This is known as “assortative mating.” The problem is that for any given attraction level, a woman can always obtain more sexual attention than a man. This makes it much easier for a woman to cheat on her husband than vice versa, even when they are perfectly matched for attractiveness. With gay couples, this should not be a problem since both spouses will find it equally easy or hard to cheat. This should lead to a sort of “mutually assured destruction” dynamic. For a heterosexual marriage to be stable, the husband must be a lot more attractive than the wife.

But all is not necessarily lost. Heterosexual marriages can still have something of a chance, but they require social and legal frameworks to help them out. At the very least, they require greater understanding as to the roles of husbands and wives than unschooled individuals are capable of figuring out on the fly. So, here are three suggestions that individuals, couples, societies, and legal systems can think of incorporating if they are interested in fostering more successful heterosexual marriages:

1. No big weddings. Small, cheap, intimate. A few relatives. No bridesmaids, no best man, no walking down the aisle. No rehearsals. No band. Save your money for a down payment on a house or something like that. I’d even say no ring. Certainly, nothing of more than token value. It’s just a symbol, for crying out loud. If you want to throw a huge expensive party to celebrate your marriage and invite everyone you know, do it for your 50th wedding anniversary. It’ll mean something then.

2. The husband controls the finances. This doesn’t mean the husband necessarily owns everything, merely that he controls it. This can be done at the personal level, no legal document is required. The groom must make clear to his bride-to-be that he will make the decisions regarding all marital assets, including money from her job. With the exception of tax-advantaged retirement accounts, most marital property and financial accounts will be jointly owned. The husband may choose for strategic reasons to have some put in one name or the other, but he must have access to all of it. The important thing is that he is the decider. He does not need to hold his wife to an allowance or take away her credit cards. Presumably, he married someone he trusts. But he is treasurer and CFO of the marriage. This is not a service he is providing her, the decisions are his. If he tells her to shop at one store instead of another, if he tells her to use one credit instead of another, it is understood he must have his reasons. He can solicit input from her, he can talk it over with her, he can give his reasons, but it must be understood that in the end it is his decision. He must inform her of his decisions, but he need not justify himself. Presumably, she too married someone she trusts. And this is what she needs to be able to trust him with. If she feels she cannot, then this is not the man she should marry.

   Once married, if she spends money in an amount larger than what they both understand to be reasonable, he must be prepared to call her out on it just as he would call her out for any other kind of inappropriate behavior. If he discovers that she has spent money in secret or has received money and concealed it, this must be regarded as lying on her part.

   The value in all of this is that she should understand from the beginning that she is now living under his financial control. And the value for him is that he should understand from the beginning that he is ultimately responsible for everything.

3. Infidelity means you lose everything, immediately, forever. This applies to both the husband and the wife. No no-fault. No fifty-fifty. No shared custody. The faithful partner keeps it all. You lose everything, including what you owned before the marriage and including savings from your job. No car. No dog. No photo album. Your clothes and personal effects go to goodwill. With the exception of tax-advantaged retirement accounts, you leave with nothing but the clothes you’re wearing. Minimal visitation rights.

   This will require some kind of third party arbitration. No one will voluntarily admit to infidelity when the stakes are this high. They hardly ever admit to it even when the stakes are low. The third party will also have to make sure the couple really and truly separate. The temptation to “reconcile” is often irresistible.

   Even where fifty-fifty no-fault divorce continues to be an option in all other scenarios, this kind of winner-take-all nuclear option should be mandatory in the case of infidelity.

There are many other helpful suggestions that could be made, but I think these three, if they could be enforced, would set the framework that would make most of everything else fall into place.