Transcription
I think that when men consider the consequences of voluntarily surrendering their freedom to an institution like marriage, they are thinking that their benefits outweigh the um, consequences, or the uh, the negatives. And I would argue that it's not the case in most, for most people. I'm sure there are some people out there who would argue the opposite, and I've actually gotten some comments from some guys that are really happily married. But that is the uh, the Unicorn; that's the one in a million. The um, vast majority of guys, after say 10 years of marriage—is usually a good amount of time—they realize that they have made a devil's bargain; that they have freely given up their autonomy in exchange for what they thought was going to be a partnership with a best friend who they could have sex with. And what they ended up with was a um, a manager/boss at home, uh, who who has got lots of psychological and emotional problems, who doesn't do anything the way you would do it, and that you feel beholden to because, as a man, we feel a sense of loyalty to our family and our wives, and we feel like it's our job to protect them and honor them in all those ways. Unfortunately, those sentiments are not reciprocated from your wife in many, many cases. They see you as part of the landscape, part of the furniture, and you can be replaced. So just know that is what you're getting yourself into.
Let's go down here, guys. Come here, Shelby. Shelby, this way. You know, even some of the most successful women who have great careers are really, really quick to pull the trigger on having kids because I think that secretly they all want to be stay-at-home moms. Not all, but a lot of them do. They want to be stay-at-home moms. And here's where the irony comes in. So they make a choice. Most men don't want to have babies. Let's let's be honest, guys. I mean, I didn't grow up playing with baby dolls. If I never had a child, children—I'm sorry to say this out loud—but if I didn't have a child in my life, I think I would still be okay. I'd be whole. I think I'd still get through day-to-day, um, but women, you know, it's something biological; they want it. They want children, uh, in a big way. When they do—I know some women don't—but for those women who want them, they really want them.
So here's what happens; this is where the um, the law gets involved. So you and your wife come to an agreement about having a child, and as a part of that agreement, one of you's got to stay home with this baby, or you're going to have to get daycare. And daycare is crazy expensive. I mean, it is crazy expensive, and there's all kinds of, you know, concerns about bringing illnesses into your household and what kind of people they're going to be exposed to. I mean, you you can just make yourself neurotic thinking about it. So one of you is going to stay home. Maybe you're going to have more than one kid. If you go two kids, my God, you're going to have to make a lot of money to cover daycare. So you, it makes a lot of sense economically to stay home, have someone stay home with the kids.
So now fast forward 20 years, and oh, lo and behold, she's not happy. The kids are grown and gone; they're off in college, and she's not happy. And as you know, it's your fault that she's not happy, because that's just the way that goes. So you find yourself in court, and you got a lawyer, and she's got a lawyer, and she's telling the judge why she's not happy, and um, you you've come to an agreement now. The judge is going to give her child support, probably because she's going to get the kids in most cases—wasn't my case, but in most cases—she's going to get the kids. So that's going to cost you about 500 bucks a kid, and if they're, you know, still young enough, and then um, she's going to get alimony. And this is what's really funny. So the alimony is to compensate her for the loss—Po—in the potential career she could have had if she had not been raising children.
Now let me go back to my first statement: you guys probably don't want kids. She wants the kids. You would probably rather just be a happy, loving couple, each making tons of money and taking lavish vacations and buying big houses and driving fancy cars. That's what you could have done. But if you have children, your whole lifestyle gets scaled back. So you're going to have a much more scaled-back lifestyle, um, it's going to cost you a ton of money to have children. Yeah, so having kids is very, very expensive. Then you got to feed them, clothe them, and then if they're smart enough, you get to send them to college. Have you seen what colleges cost? Oh my God, you could be easily be in the hole for um, half a million dollars, maybe a million dollars by the time your kids get old enough to go to school. Um, yeah, it's it's an expensive proposition. And going back to my earlier statement, right now it's all your money; you get to choose everything and how it's spent and how you live your life and what things you want to spend it on. You get married to a woman who wants to have children. Now there's a lot of wonderful things about it, and it could be great, and you could get a lot of, you know, Wonderful Life Experiences from it. I don't want to take that away completely, but from a financial perspective, it's going to cost you a fortune. And it's really a flip of a coin if, in 20 or 25 years, she decides that she's not happy and wants to wants to leave you, and then the court system gets involved, and they determined arbitrarily that she deserves to be compensated for having raised the children, even though it was her idea to begin with, and she didn't really want to work in the beginning anyway. So yeah, you get screwed twice on that one: lower lifestyle and then and half your money going forward.
I guess you can call it keeping up with the Joneses, but that's just for lack of a better term. Women are hyper-aware of what other people think, hyper-aware, and it means a lot to them. So, and I'm not just talking about like people you know, like your neighbors or your family or the people in your town or your community; it's like everybody, like anyone and everyone's opinion matters. And why does that affect you? Because you have to either spend money, time, or energy to adapt your lifestyle—since it's also her lifestyle—to whatever the latest greatest thing is, whatever that is. This sounds silly, but it has dramatic and impactful results. So on the side, you're decorating your yard and your house for every season of the year. On the uh, serious side, it can affect the way your children are raised, which can be really, really important, you know, um, if your neighbor's kid is going to the the fancy school, then guess what? That's going to be a problem if your kid's not going to the fancy school. So just prepare yourself for that. That also carries over to what car she drives and what clothes she wears and all of that stuff. So just be aware.
I think I owe this to social media. I think social media creates a a real problem for women. I think that there needs to be some kind of an emotional test or a psychological test that people take before they're allowed to sign up for one of these apps, because it definitely brings out the crazy. All right, let's talk about moods; moodiness. This is, you know, a classic, and I think most men are aware that women are very moody. But when you live with a woman that's not your mother or your sister, you live with a woman that you're trying to have a partnership with, and that mood changes, it can be um, really impactful on your life. So we've all heard of stories about, you know, PMS and how that can be problematic in a relationship and how that can change their mood crazy. But I think a lot of times many women are unaware that this biological hormonal change is occurring. And so if it happens to occur and coincide at a time when you guys are not in perfect agreement on something, it magnifies the frustration, anger, and upset she has with you by—and I'm trying not to be hyperbolic—but somewhere in the ballpark between 10 and 100 times, and it can um, it can actually be one of the factors that leads to your split. So now if you're a 1% guy, like you're rich and good-looking, you probably know how to deal with this, but the rest of us do. What that means is that a woman married us knowing that we weren't ideal; we weren't the ideal choice for her. She really had someone else in mind, and she lets us know this subtly all the time. And that subtle reminder that you're not the right guy kind of does get under your skin. Now, you know, if you are, you know, a 10 out of 10, like you're rich and good-looking and you're smart and you're compassionate and you are just that perfect alpha male, then let's go this way, guys, then you're uh, you're not going to have that experience. But for the 99% of us who are not that, yeah, we're going to probably face that. Now, like I said, there are women who are not like that, so I'm just going to leave that caveat there. But when you are not that First Choice, the things you get to deal with are just the need to prove that you deserve the relationship you have have with a woman that you're with, which seems really, really weird.
So there are tons and tons of little things that just come up that are going to be different if you get into a committed relationship than they are when you're dating. So when you're dating, everything's kind of a negotiation. Say like you're going to go to a movie; you want to see movie A, she wants to see movie B, and you guys negotiate; maybe you see movie A this week and B next week, whatever. No problem; everything's cool; everyone's happy. When you're in a committed relationship, um, the truth is going to come out. Like, for example, you're going to find out that your wife really, really, really hates horror movies or really, really hates movies with violence and gore, and she just can't go to those anymore. Those are just off the table from now on; like she just can't do it; it's just emotionally upsetting to her. Whatever. Next thing you know, you're watching a lot of rom-coms. Yeah, and then your quality of life, even if it's a little thing, and you're thinking right now, John, you're really overstating this stuff; this is all kind of—no, after a while, it really just wears you out. It's like, please somebody just let me make a choice.
So I haven't even gotten into some of the the typical things that just go wrong with people in stressful situations, like alcoholism or drug addiction or just mental health issues that inevitably crop up, and you, as the husband, having to deal with that can be a huge, huge issue. Because when those things happen, you know, the financial burden increases significantly because you're going to lose one income if she's just making an income now. And emotionally and psychologically, it gets very, very tough. Or God forbid, you know, something should happen in your industry or in your career or whatever, and um, your job goes away, and you need to start over and do your own thing, or you just open a business, or you need to, you know, start over with your your Career Training. You may find that when the lifestyle is threatened that that lifestyle is more important to your wife than you are. So you consider that.
So I like having dogs; in fact, I have a house full of animals. So I've got three dogs, a stray cat that now lives with me, my daughter has um, a whole basement full of small animals: bunnies, she had chinchillas, I think we have a hedgehog down there, um, she's got three birds living down there, and yeah, they they make a mess, and yeah, our house probably doesn't smell ideal. In fact, one of the primary reasons my wife gave me for leaving was she didn't like the hair that the dogs left on the floor. And when my uh, a dog I had had for 17 years passed away, her initial thought was we're not getting any more animals, and my initial thought was he was here before before you were; like the dog thing that was a pre-existing condition; that's going to happen; that's going to stay. So maybe he's gone, but someone just like him is coming to take his place.
Speaking of dogs, so if you're single and you're living in your own place, you have control over everything. You got control of your furniture; you got control over the dishes; you got control over, you know, everything in your house. Well, when you get married, you're going to relinquish that control. You're going to find yourself as a um, tenant in your own house, and that means you will not have landlord authority to make significant changes to property, and you will have to pass it through the boss before you get anything done. U going back to finances, you know, I we were talking about them in relationship to children and how much money they cost. Having your own money and being able to make your own decisions and buy things that you want, like a car or a house or a vacation or whatever, you really do lose full authority over that. Everything really does need to be done in concert, and um, yeah, that's a lot to give up; that's a lot of freedom that you give up. So keep in mind that marriage was created about I think five or six, maybe 600 years ago, for the purposes of um, keeping families together, to so that single mothers weren't running around with lots of children that needed to be fed, and so we needed to have an authority to help keep men in the picture to feed everybody, and um, that was at a time when women were completely dependent on men; they had no rights at all; they couldn't work. So having a man involved really was important for defense, for safety, for security, for all of those things. Well, that's changed; we don't we don't need to be involved in this scenario anymore. Um, there are lots of ways, if you just think out of the box, that you can have a uh, long-term relationship with a woman and potentially even raise a family without getting married. I mean, you can create legal contracts to account for almost any situation where both parties agree what the provisions and the limitations are of that contract, and I would strongly recommend that you do that. I think the the need for marriage has has ended. I don't think we have a need for that in our Society anymore. I think that um, people are fully capable of coming to an agreement about how they want to live their lives as two responsible adults, and neither party is going to be disadvantaged; each party can get what they want from the relationship, and there's no need to get the state involved. At least that's my thought now. All right, you guys, I hope you've enjoyed the video; that's all I have for you today. Please remember to like and subscribe, subscribe, and you know, share the video with guys that you know that are considering a long-term relationship or marriage. Maybe you can save somebody's life. All right, stay healthy, stay single, and I'll see you in the next video.