[Related to: Different Worlds]
My friend Andrew Rettek remarked to me a while back about the tremendous diversity in how people shower.
People may take anywhere between five minutes and forty minutes to shower. They may wash their hair daily, once a week, or not at all. They may wash their bodies thoroughly, only clean the parts that look dirty, only clean certain parts (such as the armpits or genitals), or just stand under the water. They may use a loofah, a sponge, or nothing. They may bring in a comb to comb out the conditioner. They may sing. They may zone out. They may jerk off. They may bathe instead, and bathing may involve reading a book or bath bombs or lighting candles and drinking a nice bottle of wine or bubble bath or none of those things at all. The one thing that is consistent is that everyone thinks the way they shower is the way normal people shower.
The reason for all this diversity, of course, is that after early childhood we don’t shower together (except in locker rooms or as a form of sexual foreplay, both of which are likely to be unusual) and we rarely discuss exactly how we shower. We can get a certain amount of information about typical showers (such as length) from living with people, but again most people don’t live with that many people, and the people they live with may be unusual. The rule follows: for things that are private and rarely discussed, there may be a good deal of unacknowledged diversity.
Sex is interesting because, while private, it is often discussed. People (including myself) have a certain tendency to deduce what sex is like for everyone from what sex is like for ourselves. As an example, consider pubic hair. There are innumerable thinkpieces about the pressure experienced by women to shave their pubic hair and the disgust of their male sexual partners if they are unshaven.
This has never been my experience. I have literally never had a man offer any opinion on my pubic hair whatsoever. If he did I would consider him to be an utter boor, I would never hook up with him again, and I would complain to my friends and expect all my friends to be sympathetic. My local norm is that, while of course one may have preferences about pubic hair grooming or genital size or coloring or some other traits, it is incredibly rude to voice any opinion about others’ genitals other than “happy to be here!” Maybe if you’re in a long-term committed relationship with someone you could bring up the topic politely, while remaining aware that their pubic hair grooming is their own business and you have no right to demand anything.
In the rare occasions where I’ve had the opportunity to find out men’s opinions on pubic hair, they have often been enthusiastic. For instance, when I cammed, my clients universally preferred a hairy pussy. (As my ex-girlfriend used to joke, “the first day you cam you shave your pussy, six months in you start googling ‘pubic hair thicker darker techniques.'”) And of the men I know who have mentioned their opinions on pubic hair, most have been something along the lines of “I say grow that shit like a jungle, give ’em something strong to hold onto, let it fly in the open wind” (although they do not generally agree that if it get too bushy you can trim).
Do I think the thinkpiece writers are wrong? Probably not! I suspect they’re accurately reporting what the dating pool is like for them and their friends, but for some reason it’s different. Perhaps men who hire camgirls are older and have more old-fashioned preferences, or hairy pussies are undersupplied in mainstream porn causing their aficionados to seek out handmade artisanal porn, or a hairy pussy makes the camgirl look normal and attainable and clients find this attractive. Many of my friends are queer; perhaps queers are different from heterosexuals, and this rubs off even on the straight men around them. Maybe I spend lots of time in sex-positive communities, and we’ve successfully created a norm of body positivity, which means that people feel it is rude to make negative comments on other people’s bodies. Maybe it’s something I haven’t thought of.
Another example: a few months back, I was reading an argument about polyamory in which a monogamous man said that he knew that poly men didn’t really have girlfriends, because their wives would shut down this whole poly thing the second they started spending $10,000 a year on their new girlfriend, as of course everyone does. My first reaction was to make fun of it: who spends $10,000 a year on a girlfriend? What the fuck are you buying her, a solid gold pony shoed with diamonds? I want someone to spend ten thousand dollars a year on me, that sounds great.
(Topher: “I think that probably involves a lot of nice dinners at fancy restaurants with expensive bottles of wine, and you have a phobia of alcohol.” Me: “they can buy me tea instead! you know how much really good pu’erh I could get for $800 a month?”)
To be clear: while there might be some extraordinarily wealthy poly person who spends $10,000 a year on their girlfriends, in my experience of poly communities this is not true. Typical dates include “taking a long walk”, “getting a cup of coffee”, “watching a TV show on Netflix”, “being on Tumblr in the same room and showing each other cute cat gifs”, and “taking care of a small child together”. (Maybe that last one is just me.) If you get dinner, you can generally expect to split the bill, unless one person happens to be particularly poor or prone to forgetting their wallet, and the date is probably going to be at a $5 burrito place. In my experience, polyamory only starts getting pricey if you have to buy plane tickets to visit out-of-town partners or start letting all your partners stay in your house rent-free in the Bay Area.
But when I make fun of $10,000/year guy, I’m making the same error. I’ve generally only dated broke students, broke artists, and programmers, who while wealthy have a distinct tendency to drive old cars and refuse to wear any shirts not given to them for free. And even if I did go on a first date with someone who wanted to spend $10,000/year on me, I would wear sweatpants to the nice restaurant, not be able to find anything lacto vegetarian on the menu without custom-ordering some very depressing spaghetti with marinara sauce, and flinch away from the expensive wine as if it were a spider. At that point the question is just who rejects whom first.
Instead of assuming that the people I date are a random selection from the pool of All People Who Date Ever, I should assume that they’re a biased sample: they’re people I’m attracted to, who are attracted to me, and whom I even get a chance to meet and interact with at all. This is a pretty biased subset of humanity: no prizes for guessing why I don’t typically date monolingual Swahili speakers.
And I’m unlikely to notice the other subsets of humanity even exist. While I can observe the existence of truck drivers, hockey fans, and other people far different from me, sex and romance are private, and I only get indirect evidence and self-report of what other people’s sexual or romantic lives are like. It’s particularly easy to assume that what it’s like for me is what it’s like for everyone– just like it’s easy for me to assume that everyone else zones out in the shower.
Therefore, I think it’s a good practice to, when people make claims about dating or sex that seem ludicrous or bizarre to you, have as your first hypothesis that they are accurately describing some dating pool you are not in.
Dave Rolsky said:
I definitely zone out in the shower. I semi-regularly have a small crisis where I try to remember if I’ve already washed my hair in the last few minutes.
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werepat said:
me too.
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Michael Dickens said:
Pro tip: if your hair feels squeaky, that means you already washed it. This trick has saved me many a time.
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blacktrance said:
That’s why “change your dating pool” is underrated advice – if they don’t, even if they solve their specific problem they’ll still run into or have to step around the kinds of problems that their dating pool has.
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b_russel said:
My personal shower habits are diverse! Sometimes I take quick, well thought out showers, sometimes I take quick and horribly rushed showers, sometimes I zone out and take hour long showers, or sometimes I purposefully stand in really hot or really cold water for a long time. Sometimes I wash my genitals, sometimes I don’t. I might just wash my hair or just my body. I may or may not masturbate. These all kinda depend on other factors of my life. Do some people always shower the same exact way every time?
Also I definitely spend around $10k on my gf and I’m poly. I only have one gf though :p
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Aapje said:
You do monopoly?
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ozymandias said:
Not all poly people who happen to be only dating one person are doing mono/poly. Some people are busy or picky!
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Aapje said:
It was a pun. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
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Doug S. said:
If you’re sharing living expenses with a girlfriend who makes less money than you do, then it makes sense that you could be spending $10000 or more. Food, rent, and utilities add up over the course of a year.
Another way to spend $10,000 on a girlfriend: pay for her grandmother’s funeral. 😦
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ozymandias said:
Yeah, that’s true, my husband is probably spending at least $10,000 a year on me. (Would be cheaper than buying all the services I provide individually, though.)
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Walter said:
Very good smart post.
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livingthingdan said:
Showing is one of the things studied in the Shove’s *Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience*, which i highly recommend. If our sexual habits are all as diverse as our incomprehensibly alien bathing habits are revealed to be in that book, then… Prepare for the sexual equivalent of behaviour spanning the spectrum from daily boil-washing your bedclothes to sponge-baths. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1859736300/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_XUz2zb9JG4S2V
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tcheasdfjkl said:
If I somehow had a $200/week dating budget (which would be about $10k/year) I would absolutely put it to good use. I like fancy food and certain kinds of concerts, so if I indulged both these desires fully it would definitely add up, especially if I was paying for the other person. I’ve definitely had some pretty expensive dates and would do so more if I could easily afford it. (Also fancy restaurants totally have vegetarian food and sometimes interesting non-alcoholic drinks.)
Of course I also find ridiculous the notion that having a girlfriend *requires* spending a bunch of money on her. That’s… not what partners are for?
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caryatis said:
Yep, fancy restaurants anywhere in the country will have good vegetarian food. I guess Ozy has spent little time in fancy restaurants.
It’s normal to spend money on a significant other–for an established relationship, you probably share living expenses–for a new one, you naturally want to show off and share things you like. You don’t have to be a big spender by American standards to want to go to restaurants, the theatre, or travel together. My eyebrows would definitely raise if someone suggested “a walk” as a date. I walk every day, that is not fun or special.
(And that’s setting aside the obvious fact that people like to date those of a similar class, so proving your financial stability and taste is necessary for a lasting relationship.)
Of course, this doesnt’ mean it’s always a bad idea financially to date people–someone whose income is comparable to yours can contribute to living expenses, and two can live more cheaply than one. And increased spending on dates correlates to decreased spending on other hobbies. And I’m not sure that being poly is any more expensive. If $X is an average amount to spend on dating one person, are poly people spending X times number of partners, or X divided among the partners? Question for further research.
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ozymandias said:
This is true, I usually eat at $5 burrito places, but in the rare occasions where I have eaten at a more expensive place I have found that lacto vegetarian food requires some custom-ordering and often doesn’t taste very good. (Of course, if I am paying four times as much as I would for a meal somewhere else, I also have an expectation that it is four times as tasty, which is probably biasing my recollections.)
I go on walks all the time too, but it’s different if you’re walking with a friend, because you get a nice chance to talk and really get to know them. Going to movies or the theater isn’t really good, because you don’t get a chance to talk. Besides, if you walk through someplace like a park, there can be really pretty scenery. Conversely, I’d probably not want to stay with a partner who wanted to travel with me and go to the theater all the time, because it would rapidly exceed my going-on-dates budget.
I conclude that we have both been filtered out of each other’s dating pools. 🙂
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Nothing wrong with going on a walk if everyone is physically able to, but I think it is strictly superior to go to the movies and THEN go for a walk because movies are good for cuddling and also for providing a conversation topic during the walk! The only time I would have a date which is *just* a walk is as an active attempt to save money. I think I’ve only done this once (so apparently my dating pool is a bit different from Ozy’s despite being closely adjacent).
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ozymandias said:
Yeah, I think dinner-and-a-walk is more likely to be my standard. (Perhaps this is because my partners are aware of my great fondness for walks and infinite ability to maintain a conversation by myself.)
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Sophia Kovaleva said:
So far as I can tell, walks are the default kind of both romantic and friendly dates among middle-class millennials in Russia (i.e. people who actually do like to go to coffee shops rather frequently, and can easily afford to do so). So I think it’s a matter of culture rather than frugality.
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ozymandias said:
Oh, I would put it to great use too. Really nice tea, concerts, theater tickets, it would be great. (Unfortunately, being depressed is really expensive, so my money mostly goes to that instead.)
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Machine Interface said:
I noticed this when I realised that apparently for many people sex is a thing that really exists and is enjoyable, and not a fake hollywood thing that wastes time in movies for no reason.
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Alex Mackenzie said:
FWIW, sex for me is a thing that really exists and is enjoyable, and Hollywood sex scenes usually feel fake and waste time in movies for no reason- this is actually since I started having sex and much less beforehand, so probably not because the sex is fake but because it feels very different from my personal experiences. (the one that’s easiest to describe is people not constantly talking and communicating about things, which is believable to me but there’s something vaguer connected to it, sex scenes having a vibe of “passion” rather than people seeming friendly?)
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rash92 said:
the only thing sex in mvies does for me is MAYBE make me think of having a wank later, but during the movie itself i want it to be over because it always seems pointless and boring.
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Walter said:
I can totally buy the bit about someone spending 10k a year on their partner. It isn’t even like gold digging or anything.
It is just that a relationship is one of the very few ways that middle class / rich First Worlders and poor / judgement proof First Worlds become part of one another’s lives…and to the first group the second group’s lives look like horror movies.
If someone you care about is living like a poor person, and you can do something about it…well, you probably do it. Brooklynn 99 has a great example of this, where Amy and Jake start going out. She is a put together grown up, he is a perpetual man-child, and everything about his life horrifies her.
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andrewflicker said:
Yeah- spending 10k on a girlfriend sounds totally reasonable to me. Say, $500 on holiday gifts (birthday, valentine’s, and christmas), $1500 on trips and hotel stays, and $150/week on “dates” (before I married my wife, I took her out to a few dinners over $300, and quite a few that came in around $75-$100, not to mention expensive bar crawls or cover fees or whatnot). And all of that is assuming the girlfriend is living separately and paying her own ordinary life expenses like rent/food/insurance/utilities/etc (so not a “sugar daddy” relationship, but still a very traditional “the man pays for all date expenses” relationship).
I estimate that my current marriage “costs” me something like $20-30k/year due to my wife making very little on her own, and the ordinary expenses of our mortgage, health bills, food, separate vehicles, plus paying for extra airline tickets on trips, or visiting both families at Christmas, etc.. (I don’t begrudge her it in the slightest, and this is only a financial accounting after all- discounting any unpaid labor!)
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Jason said:
$10k/year on a girlfriend doesn’t sound so shocking to me either. The cost of education and health are two big expenses that were just invisible to me in my 20’s.
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No one said:
10,000$+/year seems light here too.
When I’m on site talking to the other workers and happen to mention that a previous girlfriend ripped me off for about 12,000$, the most common response is “12,000$!? You got off easy!” followed by a chorus of
“Divorced last year, took half my company. About 300,000$ for me”
“Yep, 120,000$ here”
“85,000$ over here”
Etc.
The consultant on the last site was excited in telling me that he had just topped up a fund containing the entire future expected payout to his ex wife. So now after putting the last 130,000$ away, he can finally consider himself free from her and start over. He later mentioned that they were only married for 18 months. Gross.
Seems like every time Aapje mentions “Wealth transfer between genders” he gets pooh pooh’d by the audience as if he’s talking nonsense. I think a lot of women are completely oblivious to this sort of thing because it has essentially no chance of affecting them negatively, and because taking those transfers is completely normalized for them.
So yes, consider this another voice in chorus that costs of 10,000$ and up are much more typical than you’re giving credit.
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ozymandias said:
I think it is rather unlikely that one’s secondary partner will divorce one, given that polygamy continues to be illegal in the United States.
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No one said:
Completely true, through not refuting anything at all here. My partner and I weren’t married either. Not to mention the risk of support through a poly partner getting pregnant and unilaterally deciding to keep the baby. Further not to mention the Common Law Relationship standards, which can lead to partners being awarded support just by virtue of cohabiting for a few years.
So you’re correct that poly partners are unlikely to divorce, though this dodges the meat of the argument almost entirely.
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ozymandias said:
Canada also hasn’t legalized polygamy, so I’m pretty sure “I was married to someone else the entire time” is a protection against having to pay spousal support in a common-law relationship (which is already very rare, and “I am supporting my secondary while she cares for my child” is not exactly the central case of a secondary relationship anyone).
It is true that if you have PIV sex with someone they might decide to keep the child. Most men I know consider this risk manageably low, since they correctly use condoms every time, but if you are more risk-averse it is possible to have a very enjoyable sex life without PIV.
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No one said:
This also dodges the point.
How about addressing the issue wherein a man is not married, but cohabitaties with one or both partners. Several years of this arrangement pass.
After breaking up, either one sues for support.
What is your defense?
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No one said:
Also, to nip “Well this happens infrequently” in the bud, the situation I’m describing is of a man that I know personally through the local poly community.
So in the spirit of this post, and “Different worlds” consider that this is a problem that, even if you can’t imagine it, does affect other people and is important enough to warrant serious concern. I wish one of us had something better to tell him than “Well man, I guess you’re just fucked. Good thing this happens so infrequently, right?”
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NN said:
No one: While the situation you describe is indeed ridiculous, it seems to be unique to Canada, at least in the Anglosphere, as far as I can tell. According to Wikipedia, in most other Anglospheric countries “common law marriages,” where they exist (they can’t be contracted in 42 US States, including California) require the couple to actually publicly represent themselves as married. Australia has a similar concept of “de facto relationship,” but it apparently doesn’t extend to property rights. So I think your disagreement with Ozy here might be more of a cross-cultural miscommunication.
Personally, speaking as an American who has never set foot in Canada, this is the first time that I’ve ever heard of the idea that one half of an unmarried couple could sue the other person for financial support after a breakup simply because they had lived together for a couple of years.
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NN said:
Correction: I did a bit more research and it looks like similar things can happen with Australian de facto relationships. But the concept still seems to be unknown in the US. As far as I can tell, all US States that recognize Common Law marriages require either filing an official document or publicly presenting yourselves as married and, again, 42 States don’t even have that.
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No one said:
@NN
“I think your disagreement with Ozy here might be more of a cross-cultural miscommunication.”
That would certainly be in the spirit of the original post.
I truly, genuinely appreciate you looking into the matter to see what the situation actually looks like, because as far as I can tell it continues to be this way mostly because people just don’t realize how messed up it is.
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Aapje said:
@NN
“Publicly presenting yourselves as married” can potentially be a very, very fuzzy standard that can be fairly easily be argued to apply to any relationship where the partners live together and sometimes act on each others behalf, which is pretty much any live-in relationship.
I think that many men and women assume that the courts will be reasonable. However, what is ‘reasonable’ is highly dependent on one’s worldview and I think that many progressive people severely underestimate how often more traditionalist judges make decisions that the progressive person considers absurd.
For example, a great many men seem quite shocked by the alimony decisions for their divorce or how much bias there is against men to get primary custody.
However, it does seem that common law marriage is very limited in the US (see Marvin vs Marvin), unlike in Canada. So No One may want to consider moving to the US, to be able to safely cohabitate with his girlfriend (I would then still suggest to take the precautions outlined below, given his low risk tolerance).
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No one said:
@Aapje
Moving to the US is a possible option, although it would entail a lot of immigration hassle and paramedics are paid much less in most states than they are here. Quebec would be a closer possibility that (as far as I know) doesn’t recognize common law marriage at all, and would only entail a several thousand km move far away from both our networks and learning a new language. So, hardly a trivial inconvenience, but it’s definitely an option. At least Montreal is a pretty great city to live in.
We could also just go through the dog and pony show of regularly scheduled breakups at the 2.5 year mark of living together, presuming that this legally resets the counter and further presuming that any sane woman would tolerate this rather than just finding a more pliable partner.
The other possibility is just to offshore all of my investment accounts and keep most of my net worth hidden within them. I can only imagine exactly how illegal and likely to backfire this would be, but it still might end up being cheaper than losing half in a settlement or uprooting and relocating.
I think all of these options are varying degrees of ridiculous, and it’s ridiculous that we even have to consider them.
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Aapje said:
I agree with Ozy that post-divorce alimony and child payments cannot be considered a cost of any relationship. However, they are indicative of the wealth transfers that happen in marriage/relationships, especially when there are kids, as alimony and child payments are how society forces part of the pre-divorce situation to continue.
The actual size of the transfers is debatable, but most people seem to pretty much equalize living standards once the relationship is ‘serious’ and the default arrangement in the US is that all income during the marriage is shared, so the most accurate estimate of the wealth transfer for most married people may simply be the gap in income during the marriage (if we assume that prenups are are not that popular, except among the ultra-wealthy). Non-marriage relationships seem quite diverse and as the wealth transfers are mostly voluntary and probably change over time, making a good estimate presumably requires some scientific studies that specifically look into this.
PS. Note that there is a cultural element too, for example, in my country, 3 out of 4 employed women work part-time, more than any country. Older Dutch women work only marginally more than mothers with young children, so it’s not motherhood duties that cause this, but simply gender roles.
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No one said:
This is one of our infrequent disagreements then. Child support I’ll grant, to the extent that it is actually spent on the child, which is certainly not a given. Alimony and anything revolving around the fact that the woman ‘has become accustomed to a certain lifestyle’ I have trouble seeing as anything but mandated wealth transfer. If the cost of living for one’s expected lifestyle rises by virtue of a partner’s gifts, this is a bonus, and in the modern age where women are fully capable of working and earning their own living, it strikes me as absolute lunacy to argue that they should consider themselves now entitled to receive those gifts in perpetuity.
In my own personal situation this isn’t an issue yet, as I keep my lifestyle extremely small in order to save enough money to retire very, very early. In preparation of achieving that goal, I look at the pool of other men who are working in the same field as I am to see what pitfalls have kept them from being fabulously wealthy (Given that some are earning well over 300,000$ yearly, and many are flat broke at 50+). The single most consistent answer that all of them have is that they got married, and their former wife took them to the cleaners. I’m quite intent on avoiding this myself, but what is one to do?
I make much more than my girlfriend does. Of course she says she’d never dream of seeking support if things go south, but then, so did all the wives of these other workers. I’d love to be able to share my lifestyle with her, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do so without exposing myself to the obligation of having to do so permanently, even if we later break up. If not a ‘cost’ of the relationship, how do you classify this risk of future liability?
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Aapje said:
I don’t see where the disagreement is, actually. Where I concur with Ozy is that the kind of relationships where people are not living together, but just date, hang out and/or have sex are very unlikely to result in alimony payments and usually don’t end up with child payments (although I think that Ozy underestimates the risk of pregnancy when using condoms, which studies show is in the range of 10-15% for women in a relationship per year, which is not small).
However, I tried to steer the argument back to the question of the cost to men of relationships. I also tried to be maximally persuasive by making a fairly mild argument for a situation where the evidence is fairly solid, while still making an argument that many visitors to this blog may not agree with or have considered in this way.
Anyway, I agree with you that the law is a threat to your plans. Furthermore, the end of relationships frequently involves acrimony, which can result in vindictive behavior or rationalizations for unfair demands, even if this currently seems out of character in a state of relationship harmony.
My advice to you, given your concerns, would be to seek legal council and not trust these suggestions:
1. Don’t get married
2. Don’t have children
3. Draw up a Living Together Agreement, especially if it is explicitly recognized by your state.
4. Even if your girlfriend is not capable of earning much, demand that she keeps working for at least half a work week or so. That means that she can provably work, which tends to be a major consideration for courts.
5. Keep track of who owns what and which assets are shared.
Keep in mind that if you share so much that your girlfriend’s lifestyle is way beyond what she can uphold herself, it may be wise to incorporate a transition provision in the Living Together Agreement to prevent the courts from imposing alimony. Perhaps the cleanest way to do so would be to put a provision in the Living Together Agreement that your girlfriend is responsible for saving part of her salary which she can fall back on if you split up.
But again, don’t trust what I say on this and get legal council for your specific jurisdiction from a person who actually knows what (s)he is talking about. You earn enough money for this to be very worth your while.
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No one said:
You’re right, and I think the disagreement is actually a lot smaller than I had originally taken it to be. I’ve never been one to minimize my arguments to be palatable to the current audience, but can absolutely appreciate the merits of doing so.
The best I can hope for at this point is to demonstrate to the readership here exactly what a bind a man is currently in when approaching marriage by asking for suggestions of how one can protect himself going in. Ideally, given the high levels of empathy in the audience here, they can think of this not in terms of this happening to some asshole on the internet, but what advice they would give to a cherished friend, brother, or son that they wouldn’t want to see hurt or exploited. Everybody (I would expect) has had experience with someone close to them coupling with someone they consider to be bad news. Are the readers here satisfied with the way the law would currently protect their loved ones if their partner decided to take all she could?
In my case, I believe that you’re correct, and at this point preemptively Lawyering Up is depressingly the best option. I trust that my girlfriend is genuine that she would never dream of trying to screw me over *right now*, but I believe that people as a whole are terrible at estimating how they will feel later. One thing that women as a group have entirely lost in the last several decades of obtaining additional rights and stronger protections is the ability to make binding commitments of their future behaviour. Thanks to the internet, it seems like men as a group are beginning to understand this dynamic and planning accordingly, which brings us to the current dilemma.
I cringe hard at the fact that the only defense Ozy can muster to avoid becoming someone’s obligate meal ticket is “I’m already someone else’s obligate meal ticket!”, and try to believe that this is simply a matter of being oblivious to ones privilege in the current situation, rather than naked self interest.
In Canada, it seems after a few minutes of googling that Living Together agreements are nonbinding, and our common law does state that partners cohabitating can be considered legal spouses for support purposes (In some provinces, including the one in which I live). In my personal situation we have essentially no shared expenses, and I’ve been very resistant to moving in together. The problem is that we’re moving to a new city, and I have a hookup on a very nice apartment, whereas she would otherwise be living in student ghetto conditions. Everything about the situation, besides the common law obligations, makes living together the better option for everybody, if purely for convenience.
I feel like we’ve lost something important if we don’t have the ability to say “Ok, I’m willing to share x with you” without also committing to be bound to share everything else as well, possibly permanently. It’s even dumber, because this particular woman has shown no signs of duplicity at all, but being indistinguishable from the other women who do treat their partners unfairly when they fall out of love, she suffers for their actions.
This system is broken.
And the craziest part to me is that so many people, in this case Ozy, don’t even notice the money being spent on them. And when it’s pointed out, can only muster “Well, it’s cheaper than the market rate of my services individually!”, which is so colossally entitled as to be the first thing in years that has made me feel ashamed to be associated with the sex trade. I think I need a drink.
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Forge the Sky said:
No One – the way you write about this makes me suspect you may be familiar with this already, but the commentariat at ‘The Rational Male’ blog talk about and advise upon this sort of situation quite frequently and in great detail. No magical solutions or anything, but you could consider posting there and seeing if anyone has a good idea.
I’ve found them to be helpful in the past.
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NN said:
Nitpick: if living standards are equalized and all income is shared, wouldn’t the wealth transfer then be half of the income gap between spouses?
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Aapje said:
@NN
It depends on whether the woman is pulled up to the man’s living standards or even beyond that vs averaging it out. Studies show that men increase their working hours after marriage and decrease it after divorce, strongly suggesting that the men are not simply spending half of the preexisting gap on their partner so their partner can add that half to add to their pre-marriage salary (but instead that men seek extra income to spend on providing). Also, women tend to decrease their working hours (I’m not sure if they also do this after marriage, but definitely when getting children), which strongly suggests that they are choosing to contribute less financially to the shared living standards, taking advantage of the provider (while probably contributing more non-financially to the living arrangement).
So I would say that the wealth transfer is surely more than half the gap, but you are correct that it may be less than the full gap.
According to the BLS, the average weekly earnings of married full-time working women and men are $731 and $981, which is a yearly salary of $39052 and $51012. So the gap is about $10k. So then based on this you’d already expect an average wealth transfer between $5k and $10k.
However, these are only the figures for full-time workers. Relationships where both partners work full-time are those with the smallest income gap. Women more often don’t work and more often don’t work full-time. For example, the BLS says:
So that gives a 12% gap (19.5 – 7.1) where the entire salary comes from the man and which is not offset by families where only the woman is an earner. So that is presumably a gendered income gap of on average about $51012 (actually probably higher, since sole earning men likely have above average salaries). Then you also have the part-time vs full-time gap. So if you add that all up, the expected average wealth transfer is probably way higher than between $5k and $10k.
I could hunt down more figures and could give a combined number, but it’s late here and I’m tired and I think I made my point. $10k seems very plausible to me for the average married person, although those probably transfer more money than men transfer to girlfriends. On the other hand, men in the rationalist community probably earn considerably above average (many being programmers and other well paid members of society). So it’s quite possible that plenty of men in this community transfer over $10k a year to their girlfriends.
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NN said:
If those statistics include married couples with children, as I assume they do based on your description, then one should be wary of assuming that all of the excess male income is transferred to the wife. I’m sure that in some families the wealth of both the husband and the wife are effectively transferred to the children, even if the husband contributes more. Children could also be a confounder for the divorce statistics, since children growing up and leaving the house can be a trigger for divorce, as couples that stayed together for the sake of the kids no longer have that excuse.
But leaving all of that aside, has anyone done any studies like this on same-sex couples? I’m genuinely curious as to what patterns show up there.
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No one said:
@Forge the Sky
Hey, thanks for the heads up.
I’d never heard about the Rational Male blog before, so I’ll have to check it out. It looks a little more Redpilly at first glance than I usually go for, but I haven’t found any decent solutions anywhere else, so it might be worth a look.
I appreciate the info.
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Aapje said:
@NN
Sure, but we don’t expect the child to earn an income and the fully egalitarian outcome is when both partners spends an equal amount on the child. So if the woman does that less and the man more, then the man is effectively covering part of the expected payment by the woman, which I would consider a wealth transfer. However, for that part of the wealth transfer counting half of the income gap that reflects it, seems most valid.
I agree that your confounder may be a factor.
Men with a male partner seem to earn a bit less than men with a female partner, while the results for women with a female partner differs more between studies but they seem to earn more on average (see page 13 and 15*). If we assume that most of that gap is due to choices**, then this is consistent with those men being less forced into the provider role and those women to be more forced into the provider role. Presumably both lesbians and gays are considerably less likely to raise children than straights and thus don’t need as much money to raise children, which is consistent with gay men choosing to earn less, but less consistent with lesbians earning more. However, the earnings figures are consistent with lesbians and gays not being able to have a gendered division of labor in child care, of course (although they could actually follow the straight pattern by having one person provide more and the other care more, but the statistics wouldn’t show that).
* Note that I see substantial bias in this paper, consistent with the typical ‘activist science’ bias. For example, the use of the words ‘penalty’ and ‘premium,’ which implies that the cause of the earnings gaps are external to the surveyed individuals. This same assumption that gaps are external discrimination, rather than (partly) choices by the individual, is made elsewhere in the paper. However, the statistics shows that while gay men have more education than straight men, they work in lower paying professions and work fewer hours. Lesbians work in higher paying jobs compared to straight women and work more hours. So we see that just like for men vs women in general, choices explains part of the earnings gap. So I don’t condone the conclusions of the paper and merely refer to their tables because I’m too lazy to redo all that work.
** Like is the case for straights
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Forge the Sky said:
“It looks a little more Redpilly at first glance than I usually go for…”
It’ straight-up identifies as a red pill blog, if that’s a red flag for you. But while I think the blog author may sometimes take some good ideas and run off a cliff with them, the place (at least when I participated there) really lacked the toxicity and paranoia usually associated with red pill. There’s some angry dudes in the comments, but it’s a form of venting for guys who are often in shitty circumstances re: relationships, and a lot of cooler heads helping them out.
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