A LOT of divorces happen because women don't actually want to BE married, they just want to GET married.
A LOT of divorces happen because women don't actually want to BE married, they just want to GET married.
Not saying that this is the only cause of divorce, or even the leading cause. I'm just saying that there are a lot of women out there who romanticise the wedding itself. Almost like the relationship, the wedding itself, is irrelevant.
Which totally misses the conceptual point of getting married in the first place. Some women just like the idea of having a big party, with all their friends and family, making them the center of attention for a day.
Which is FINE. If women want to have that happen, I feel like maybe we SHOULD make that a whole seperate other thing. Like a new holiday or maybe we combine the concept with their birthday.
It's just the concept we have now, the average wedding from the time the man thinks "I'm going to marry her" all the way through the first day they get back from their honeymoon......that entire process costs an average of $100,000. From the dress, to the ring, to the hall rental, to the wedding planner, to the catering, to the flight, and hotel, and rental car, and everything else that comes with the wedding, average cost is $100,000.
And the second you call anything a "wedding" anything, it skyrockets in price. Want a cake? Ok, sure, $30. Want a "wedding cake"? Yeah, $250.
You want a big poofy white dress? Hey is this a wedding dress? No. This is a wedding dress replica. It's being used to shoot a wedding scene in an independant movie. We're just buying the material. Yeah, ok. $70.
Oh, this dress is actually in a wedding? $2,000.
And I know this just seems like I'm just complaining about money. But it all ties together. Because if you ask most women what they dream about when they think about their dream wedding, they have this long list of things, and everything needs to be perfect, and the planning itself, the wedding party and appearance becomes an extention of themselves. If this is the womans first wedding, it really becomes a mirror of who they are are a person. This is why you should NEVER trust a guy with the wedding planning. At all. Unless you're willing to give up total control. Instead of your favorite flowers creating an arch that you walk under to get into the building? What if we instead had flame throwers that CONSTANTLY spewed flames which prevented you from getting in. And to stop the flames, you need to answer 3 riddles about the couple getting married. And if you get it wrong, a bunch of royal knights in platemail armor stab you with haberts until you get it right......or bleed out. And once you get inside the hall, all the hall vendors are cosplaying as classic pro wrestlers. Imagine coming in, and seeing Macho Man Randy Savage holding a plate of cheeses, and saying "OOOOH YEAH! TRY THE SWISS, IT'S AS GOOD AS MISS!!! ELIZABETH THAT IS! OR TRY THE CHEDDER! IT'LL KNOCK YOU OUT OF YOUR SWEATER!!! DIG IT!!!" Then he snaps into a slim jim.
See to me, that sounds awesome, and just as expensive as whatever the fuck would have been planned otherwise. But I also realize every woman who's in the current process of planning a wedding, read what I just wrote how I'd plan it, and they physically recoiled in cringe. And you're remembering that last week you asked your boyfriend what he wants at the wedding. And he said "whatever you want". And you tried to fight him about it, saying he needs to include his ideas.
No the fuck he doesn't. THESE are the ideas we create, and we know they aren't going to happen. Our ideas are not "good" from your perspective. Our ideas will cause fights. Because at the end of the day, you already know exactly what you want. You've been planning it since you were 5 years old, and you don't need any input from us. We're just going to screw it up. You just want to ask what we envision at the wedding, and you're under the delusional idea that we're going to say "White roses on every table, and all the groomsmen have green pockets on their suit vests." Or whatever the fuck is in your head. We're not going to say that. We've never in our lives had THAT vision. We know the wedding is going to look like how you want it to look. So we just say "Whatever you want to do, that's it." We stay out of it, because we don't want to start a fight over something we know we're going to lose anyways. That's a dumb fight. Telling a woman how to plan their wedding.
Well. I'm a dumb guy. Let me have a go.
The reason a decent percentage of these weddings end the relationships is because the money involved has no benefit to the couples long term happyness, and adds nothing to their lives. It's a big expensive party for the sake of a big expensive party. Nothing more.
And I hear you saying "But it's to celebrate the love between two people, and create a bond that will last a lifetime!"
No. Believe it or not, you can get married without all that stuff. The whole idea of a marriage, if you simplify it to it's core concept, is that you both have signed a paper informing the government that you are now a legalized couple within the country of residence that you got married. That's IT. You can both go down to the courthouse right now, fill out a form, sign it, and now you're married. I don't know what those forms cost, but I would assume about $100. And then you'd both go home to where you already live.
So you're saying "That sounds like a terrible wedding". And the issue here is, you're confusing the wedding PARTY with the idea of MARRIAGE.
So if you get proposed to, ask yourself this. Would you still marry this man if he insisted there were no party. No flowers. No big hall. No poofy white dress, no dancing, no family or friends, no big cake, no big vacation afterwards. Just you, him, city hall, a pen, and a form. Maybe a minister if the idea of religion is important to your marriage.
If you are in love with the person you're marrying, it might be disappointing, but it shouldn't be a deal breaker. If it's a deal breaker, you don't love the man. You love the idea of being the center of attention. And that, plus the huge amount of savings you're blowing, is the reason for the divorces. The party has ended. The party has brought you hard financial times, and you were never in love with the person to begin with. So now, they have nothing left to offer you.
Again, I'm not claiming this is the only reason, or even the leading reason for divorce. I'm just saying it's a significant percentage.
From the dress, to the ring, to the hall rental, to the wedding planner, to the catering, to the flight, and hotel, and rental car, and everything else that comes with the wedding, average cost is $100,000.
The high end weddings are wildly higher than this. The median wedding is way cheaper than $100K.
Most men don’t want to do the work of marriage. /shrug
You’re supposed to be managing a household with a partner. Instead, it often becomes women who carry the load of housework, which is unpaid labor—try to hire a house cleaner for free to prove my point. 53% of men help with house chores. 93% of women help with house chores.
To your point, you’re more likely to get divorced if you spend more money on a wedding. And large weddings are typically a waste of money. But blaming women about divorce rates while men aren’t contributing to the work required to support a family is also a bad argument. Support is more than money.
I make 6x what my wife makes. It doesn’t mean I get to skip out on chores or even should skip out. In reality outside this stupid capitalistic hellscape, her time is just as valuable as mine because our lives are equally valuable. No one wants to feel alone in dealing with bullshit.
I never had a dream wedding fantasy. I never planned for a wedding. The first time I got married it was at a courthouse and the other person was for lack of a better term not being straight with me about basically their entire life so it ended badly. I have since remarried (backyard wedding style thing), and it didn't cost more than $1000 including food.
When you get right down to it, your statement and the rest of the arguments you make are predicated on the idea that all women are basically the same in this respect and the actual point you made is that marriage comes with expectations that neither party thinks about or communicates before hand.
It's just as easy to say that most marriages end because of bad communication, which is just as true.
While there is definitely a toxic wedding culture in this country and perhaps in other countries, I can tell you that there's lots of people who get married for a lot of wrong reasons and it's never just one thing. I pretty much guarantee that wanting a wedding might be a factor in why people get married, but it's not as big a factor as you make out for why they get divorced.
Instead of your favorite flowers creating an arch that you walk under to get into the building? What if we instead had flame throwers that CONSTANTLY spewed flames which prevented you from getting in. And to stop the flames, you need to answer 3 riddles about the couple getting married. And if you get it wrong, a bunch of royal knights in platemail armor stab you with haberts until you get it right......or bleed out. And once you get inside the hall, all the hall vendors are cosplaying as classic pro wrestlers. Imagine coming in, and seeing Macho Man Randy Savage holding a plate of cheeses, and saying "OOOOH YEAH! TRY THE SWISS, IT'S AS GOOD AS MISS!!! ELIZABETH THAT IS! OR TRY THE CHEDDER! IT'LL KNOCK YOU OUT OF YOUR SWEATER!!! DIG IT!!!" Then he snaps into a slim jim
Well fuck now I want another wedding, this time we're doing it right!
I just view the wedding and expectations as a filter. I almost married a girl like that, but we were terrible for each other and just two addicts of the hide the sausage game.
Now, I don't hold such aspirations against people that have them, but I am not interested in the types of persons that are so susceptible to American consumerism or gender dichotomy. There is a ton of misogyny in this paradigm and the whole economic model that goes along with this system is totally dead. Only the super rich have the whole trophy wife type dynamic that goes along with the extravagant wedding fantasy. Anyone that wants to start life with massive debt for a day of commercialism and DeBeers' validation of true love through a chunk of industrial cutting tool medium, is totally unattractive to me as a partner. The value is on the relationship. 100 years ago it was nothing more than a back yard event in your Sunday best and a community potluck with no extravagance beyond. That is all a wedding is meant to be.
At this point, ownership over another person is a primitive concept. I feel like marriage in the western sense is harmful. I would much rather engage with a partner that is always welcome and able to leave at any time, exactly the same as me. I want to always remember that I need to compel them to stay, and the inverse as well. Getting married is not some excuse to stop trying or building a relationship. I don't want that end game mentality. I also don't want to marry the judiciary and give them power over me unless it is to my advantage to do so.
This ignores the conditioning that women get. Stories that portray a good ending for women as marriage, finding your one and only. You place the blame on women, as if countless men haven't told them that was the only thing they should look forward to.
It was so bad, that I, an aroace agender person, thought that my role was to get married and have children. I thought that if I played into the role, I would finally feel like a woman, but I never did. I wouldn't even begin to understand how actual women would feel if their femininity was defined by this.
Granted, the expectations on women have changed to be a bit more liberating, but even things such as abortion being controversial shows that in the end, serving as a baby incubator is what people see women as being. The needs of the person is thus ignored over a potential child being born to serve this exploitative society.
The demographic of women who have been indoctrinated by this thinking are still the people who get married the most. It's obvious as to why. Realizing this is what causes these divorces. Realizing that they've been conditioned to stay in an unhappy relationship is what causes these divorces.
What you seem to be against is a combination of the effects of patriarchy and capitalism: the wedding industry. The patriarchy tells women that their wedding will be the happiest moment of their lives, the one thing they should be waiting for, while capitalism exploits that need for happiness in the wedding by promising that happiness can only be achieved with such expenses. The wedding industry then uses propaganda in order to reinforce this message.
The amount of controversy this post is inspiring is insane
Best I can do is a court house wedding followed by a bbq in the park.
Aint lemmy mostly men? How is this going to be unpopular haha
Upvoted because drag doesn't agree. This seems like a boring people problem. Women who've been groomed by society to think their worth as a person is based on one day, and men who've been groomed by society to think they should have no involvement in the romantic symbols.
It could all be solved if you and your partner were cool people who had their own original ideas about marriage instead of letting society tell them who to be. Drag's fiance is gonna wear a suit of armour to our wedding and drag will be in a beautiful black dress. And we're not gonna do it when we get married, we're gonna get married first, reach financial stability with plenty of disposable income, and then have a wedding. Fuck tradition, we're both invested in our relationship 110% and every part will be on our terms, both our terms, and nothing but our terms.
Sorry you're into people who don't think for themselves, bro.