army1987 comments on Open thread, 21-27 April 2014 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Metus 21 April 2014 10:54AM

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Comment author: fire_alarm 23 April 2014 03:44:49PM *  6 points [-]

How do I decide whether to get married?

  • My girlfriend of four years and I are both graduating college.
  • I haven't found employment yet, and she's returning home for work.
  • As near as I can tell, we're very compatible.

Pros

  • We are very fond of each other, get a lot of value out of each other's time.
  • We've been able to talk about the subject sanely.
  • Status
  • We agree on religion and politics.
  • Married guys make more on average, but the arrow of causality could point in either direction or come from something else.
  • Financial benefits

Cons

  • Negative Status associated with marrying young?
  • No jobs yet, no clear home or area to live in.
  • She sometimes gets mad at me for things I'm "just supposed to know" to do, not do, say, or not say. I'm not sure if she's right and I'm a jerk.

She has said that she doesn't want to marry me if she's just my female best friend that I sleep with. But I don't know how to evaluate what she's asking. There are a number of possibilities. Maybe I don't feel the requisite feelings and thus she wouldn't want to be married. Maybe I do have the feelings and I have no way to evaluate whether I do or not. Maybe I'm not ever going to feel some extra undetected thing X, ever, and so I should just go through the motions saying that I do, and our marriage prospects are entirely unchanged. Maybe this is just some signalling ritual we have to go through.

We both are concerned that I've not really had a relationship not with her, so there are no points of comparison for me to make.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 April 2014 08:18:34PM 0 points [-]

Married guys make more on average, but the arrow of causality could point in either direction or come from something else.

And married women make less, so even assuming the arrow of causality is entirely from marital status to income it's not clear to me what would happen to your combined income.

Comment author: 9eB1 27 April 2014 07:38:35PM 2 points [-]

Even if your combined income decreases, your combined consumption probably increases, because many goods are non-rivalrous in a marriage situation. See here for a discussion.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 May 2014 03:14:42AM 1 point [-]

your combined consumption probably increases,

I believe you meant decreases.

Comment author: gwern 03 May 2014 03:33:48AM 1 point [-]

I think he means increases. If your consumption decreases, then your standard of living is falling and that doesn't sound good at all.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 April 2014 07:35:27AM *  0 points [-]

Good point, but doesn't that also apply to unmarried cohabitation?

EDIT: BTW, the bottom of your post says “[...] marriage makes family income go up via the large male marriage premium minus the small female marriage penalty”, which answers my question upthread.

Comment author: Lumifer 28 April 2014 07:59:42PM 2 points [-]

but doesn't that also apply to unmarried cohabitation?

It also applies in interesting ways to communal living.

In fact, given the magnitude of the effect, the question becomes "Why would anyone ever live alone?". And the fact that a lot of people do this, by choice, leads into interesting directions...

Comment author: 9eB1 28 April 2014 07:22:21PM 0 points [-]

Yes it does, so it's not really an argument for the act of marriage itself, but on marriage-like behaviors.

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