Transcription
Today, there are going to be 5,663 men who say those famous last words, "I do." They're going to enter into the institution of marriage thinking that they have discovered a lifelong partner. Little do they know that regardless of their age, they only stand about a 40% chance of getting to their 25th wedding anniversary. If they're under age 30, that chance drops to about one in five.
So, what is it that drives these men, despite all this information that's out there? I mean, if you're going to buy a new car, you're going to Google a little bit about the car, right? You're going to at least look into it. These guys obviously have never looked into marriage. They've never Googled the statistics. Although, I have to admit, some of them are very deceptive. So, what's causing these guys to do this? Well, I have narrowed it down to what I believe are the 10 primary reasons why guys get married. Let's talk about the 10 myths that society tells us that entices men into marriage. Let's talk about it.
In a recent survey of couples that had been married at least 10 years, 30% said that they felt their marriages were both happy and healthy. That's not a very high number. You know what I mean? And of course, I don't know how that survey was taken, if she was sitting right there or not, but uh 10 years, 30% not so good. Um, the number of couples who are having sex at least 12 times a year, 12 times, 12 times a year after 10 years of marriage drops down to like, like 40% or so. And I think that number is still even a bit high. So this institution of marriage is not something that uh benefits men in many respects. I think that most guys don't realize that the value of their commitment in this relationship, or this business deal if you want, um is far greater than what's being offered in return. It's like you're trading, you know, gold for copper here.
The other thing they need to recognize is that once that commitment is given, it's gone. Um, she has all the power. Then, and I did a whole video on that recently. What most men don't realize is that when they say, "I do," what they're really saying is, "I'm done." Because the power of the commitment that a man's making when he enters into marriage is an unequal exchange of values. In most cases, the dynamics of the sexual marketplace suggests that men trade their commitment or their, their um resources for opportunity, sexual opportunity. And obviously, um once that commitment is given, it kind of belongs to her now. Like you're no longer in charge of that commitment. She has power over it. And of course, with, you know, the legal stipulations and the way society is, all of the advantages now shift in her favor. So right from the get-go, as soon as those words are said, "I do," you might as well just say, "I'm done." It's like you're tapping out. But that's a whole another video. I've made it already. I'll link it at the end so you guys can watch it if you want.
So, the first reason why guys, uh, think that getting married is a good idea is they think that it's going to make their life easier. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is nothing easy about marriage. I guarantee you that. It is more difficult than the hardest class you have ever taken. The instructor, the teacher, the professor in this case is your wife. She does not grade on a curve. You are going to fail over and over and over and over again. Now, in the beginning, it won't be like that. You'll get like a three-year, maybe even a five-year um buffer zone, like a rest bit where you can kind of study and get, get uh boned up on some of the uh finer points of what it's like to live with a woman. But um it's not going to be any easier. Relationships in general are without question the most difficult, the most challenging, the most um growth-producing experiences that we have as human beings. And romantic relationships are by far the most difficult. So when you're getting into a marriage, you might be thinking that you've won the race. You might think that you've crossed the finish line. Well, let me just tell you the race is just beginning. The dating pool that you came out of and how difficult that was and all that stuff. You may be thinking, "Ah, thank God I don't have to worry about that anymore." No, you don't. But you do have a whole new set of things to worry about, and you're going to learn about them starting on day one. So, good luck with that.
The next big mistake that we make is we think that things are going to be less expensive. It's going to be cheaper because we got two incomes now. This has got to make things better, right? You would think, but unfortunately, your wife is not the same as a roommate who's paying half your rent or half the food bill or half the utility bill. No, she's not like that at all. She's a nester. So, she's been planning this out her entire life. If you remember when you were little, your sisters and your girlfriends when you were like a little kid, like a toddler, they were all playing house. They were getting ready for this big moment from the very beginning. They have been practicing and imagining and thinking about this their entire lives. What you did when you said "I do" is you opened up the treasure chest for them of all the things that they ever want to do. It's like their greatest fantasy come true in many cases. And now you're going to have to fund this fantasy. And this fantasy is going to start with redoing your whole house. All that cute furniture she said you had, it's going to be on the curb before you know it. Um, all those favorite movies that you used to like watching, those days are over. That idea of a man cave, yeah, it might be the master bathroom. No, it won't be the master bathroom. It'll be the powder room in the basement. You can put all the posters you want up there. It will be, you know, man cave. It's going to be your iPad in the bathroom in the basement. That's where you're going to get your, your where you're going to be able to watch movies that you like to watch. Yeah. Everything is about to change, and you're not going to be prepared for just how significant it's going to be.
The best approach for a lot of this stuff is to ignore it because there's nothing you can do. Once you have crossed that threshold, once you have entered into this institution, you have basically committed yourself to a life of um compromise in almost, on almost everything. You better pick your battles. Pick the hills you're going to die on. You know, um those are going to be your, your boundaries, but you can't fight every single fight. You can't fight every single battle. So, you're just going to have to pick the ones that you are really meaningful for you. Um, but yeah, things are not going to get cheaper. It's not going to be more affordable to be married than it was to be single.
But she's my soulmate. H, you know, the whole concept of soulmates should be stricken from the English language. How many men have gone to their, their fate thinking that they had discovered their soulmate? First of all, that's a, it's a Hallmark/Disney movie um concept. The idea that you have discovered a soulmate um is very, very unlikely. And assuming that she really is your soulmate, it just means that she's going to challenge you on everything and make you grow in ways that you just don't want to. So, you better hope she's not your soulmate. Um, there is no such thing. There really is no such thing. You have projected upon this person some characteristics and attributes that she doesn't have because you want to rationalize your desire to get into this relationship and to be married. So, eliminate this concept of soulmate. This is just you projecting out onto her characteristics that do not exist in the real world. You will soon discover that these characteristics were just a figment of your imagination. And when you discover it, you're going to think, "Shit, what was I thinking? What a fool I am." Anyway, so if you're thinking that soulmate is the reason for getting married, that myth is a myth. It's complete. Do not buy into that. There are no such things as soulmates. Soulmates occur in your head, and you project them out onto other people and then you convince yourself that that's who you're meant for. Women do this all the time. This is their favorite thing to do. Don't do it. You're a man. Use your brain. Be rational. There's no such thing. Please don't get sucked into this.
All that stuff might be true for other people, but it's not true for us. We're different. I'm different. She's different. We're going to make it because we're smarter. We have um insights that nobody else has. We're special. Oh my god. This, my friend, is hubris. Hubris is the downfall of so many great men. It's almost a meme. How many great men have been destroyed by their own hubris? Going into a relationship, you should think humility, not hubris. You are not better than anybody. The likelihood that you are actually going to um differentiate yourself in some special way with this woman is very unlikely. The only chance that you have is if you go into this with the idea that this is going to be a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week full-time job and it's going to be your sole intention in life to make sure that this relationship works. And you're going to have to be on your best behavior, thinking all the time about how to navigate each and every one of the challenges that you will inevitably face. Deciding when you're going to need to install a boundary, in deciding what fights you're going to have, deciding um what things you're going to let slide, what things you can put up with. Because as soon as you start making these decisions, you're creating precedent that will go on for the rest of your marriage, maybe the rest of your life. It requires an enormous amount of energy. Um, this woman that you brought into your life is now going to be your project. You are going to have to um work with her to build a life that is um compatible with peace and harmony. And this is an extremely hard challenge. I would not recommend it for most guys. Um, you've got to really be at a very high level of intellectual awareness and spiritual peace in your heart in order to um achieve this because what's going to happen over time is it just gets harder. So after a few years, there are going to be some kids on the way. Once that starts happening, you're into a whole another level. Like level one is just getting married. Level two is when you start adding kids. Level three, you start adding debt like mortgages and cars and like that and then working out vacations. It just keeps getting harder and harder and harder. So yeah, you're not special. Humility, not hubris. That's the key.
I can finally be my true self now that I have found the love of my life. Oh, you. That is a myth of epic proportion. Just because you're married doesn't mean that you can suddenly just be your natural normal self. If she comes downstairs at midnight one night and finds you sitting in your underwear drinking beer, watching porn, she is not going to be you. She is not going to say, "Oh, bless his heart. He is just being his authentic true self." No. No, that's not going to happen. You cannot be your true self. In fact, the more authentic you are, the more likely it is that she's going to divorce you sooner rather than later. So, maybe you should be your authentic self. Yeah, women put up with you when you're dating. So long as you still have that um commitment in your pocket, yeah, she will overlook a lot of stuff. But now that she's got the commitment in her pocket, oh, there's a whole different set of rules going on now. Now you're being held to the same standard that she has in her head for whatever, you know, is important to her. There might be a snake. Hang on. So don't let that into your head. That idea that you can be your natural self around your wife is probably not something um that you're actually going to get away with. Because here's what happens. Here's how women wear you down is they complain. And they complain. It starts off with little complaints, and then they become bigger and bigger and bigger. Now, most men just want peace. That's our weakness. We just want peace. We just don't want to fight because when men fight, somebody dies frequently. Someone gets beaten up or someone dies. So, our inclination is to avoid fights at all costs. So, with a woman, she's going to start nagging. She's going to start picking. She's going to start pushing you to behave in ways that, that conform to her idea of the way her husband should behave. Every time you give in just a tiny little bit, she's gaining ground on you. Every little inch that you give, she's taking. You will eventually lose yourself. You will not be the person that you think you're going to be. You're going to find yourself not recognizing yourself. For most guys, after about five or 10 years, you're like, "Who the hell is that guy in the mirror? Why is he so fat? Why does he drink so much? Why is he so unhappy?" Yeah, that's the guy she's going to turn you into. And then she's not going to be happy with you either. Cuz once she starts making all these changes, she's thinking, "Ah, I don't like this guy. He's not the guy I married." That's what you'll hear at the divorce table. "You're just not the guy I married." Yeah. I promise you. I promise you that's what you'll hear.
In order to live a complete and fulfilling life, I need to be married. This is another myth that nothing could be further from the truth. I think this is society's way of brainwashing us into these commitments that are benefiting society, but they don't benefit you necessarily. You can have a lot of really powerful, fulfilling relationships. In fact, I would argue that being single and having, you know, over the your lifetime a handful of really close unmarried relationships where you have like four or five-year affairs where you're, you know, you're sleeping together all the time. You maybe even um, you know, sleep over at each other's houses, spend a lot of time together. There's a lot of value in the relationship that you can have with a woman. There really is. But so long as you have your commitment in your pocket, you're in control of it, you know, and you can give her small commitments. You can give her little pieces of it. You can say, "Yeah, we will be exclusive." You know, that's a commitment of sorts. And that's about as far as you should go. Um, once you go beyond that, and I say you move to the next level up and start cohabitating, um, well, now you're starting to, she's like the, the camel's nose in the tent, so to speak. You know, before you know it, you're going to have a whole camel in your tent, and your commitment is going to be in her pocket and not in yours. So, I strongly suggest that you, that you think of the idea or start uh pondering the idea of what it would be like to have a series of fulfilling relationships that change with you over the course of your life. So, the guy you are in your 20s is going to be attracted to certain kinds of girls and want to hang out with them. Not the same guy in the 30s. The guy in the 30s wants something different, and the guy in the 40s something different still, 50s and 60s our needs change throughout the course of our life. Trying to put that all on one woman is way too much. I mean, first of all, most relationships start to get stale after about five or six years. Good relationships maybe at year 10 they start to get stale. Um, having the opportunity to trade in one relationship and start a new relationship every 5 to 10 years is probably a much more fulfilling way to approach your life. And if you get to the end, like at age 65 or whatever, whoever you're hooked up with, then you say, "Okay, I'm just going to ride it out with her." But you haven't wasted 50 years tied to this woman, you know? And uh, and in your 60s, you're going to have a different approach to life. You're going to be thinking about different values. Sex won't be as important to you, you know, it'll just be different. So, yeah, you don't need marriage to have a fulfilling life. You can have a fulfilling life very easily without ever getting married. Trust me.
I need to be married in order to have a deep and meaningful relationship with a woman. That is complete BS. You can have really deep and meaningful relationships with women without ever getting married. In fact, most of the women that I had sex with, well, maybe not most, but a lot of them, um, I had pretty deep, meaningful relationships. Now, they didn't last very long, usually less than a year, but during that year, it was pretty deep and it was pretty meaningful, you know, at least to me it was. Um, so yeah, you can have a lot of really powerful relationships with people. The length of time and the depth of commitment, especially, and you don't want to invite, you know, the uh the court system into your, your marriage or into your relationship. You don't want, if you've ever had uh a group of friends, let's say you have, it's you and two, two buddies. Well, if that relationship lasts long enough, inevitably it's going to shift back and forth between you and one buddy against the other one or those two against you or something along those lines where you guys have disagreements and, and there's sort of this triad and it shifts back and forth. There's a power balance, and one of you is kind of in the middle. Well, when you invite the court system into your relationship, it's kind of like that. So, it's like you've got this third wheel now, you know? It's you, her, and the government. And the government has a say quietly behind the scenes making decisions without ever saying a word. It's just that you guys both have the um implicit knowledge that the government is there, that the court systems are there, and that's happening. Now, in many relationships, you got the court system on her side and you got religion on his side, which makes it even more interesting because now you got four of you in this relationship. The power imbalances just go crazy, you know, and of course, in the United States that we're secular, so the court system wins in the end, you know, it doesn't matter. A judge can overrule God in the United States.
I need to be married to have children. Actually, you don't. There are lots of ways to have children without getting married. You just need to start thinking about it, you know. Um, I've had sex with lots of women, and I haven't been married to all of them. Thank God they didn't all get pregnant, but they could have. They could have. There would have been children involved. Now, obviously, you don't want to just go screwing around and see what happens. Um, but having an arrangement with a woman is certainly something you can do. I mean, Elon Musk has been doing it. He's been passing out sperm like it's going out of style. He's just giving it to women everywhere. He's got children all over the place. So yeah, you can have children without getting married. Um, you just need to find the right opportunity. Um, even if you're cohabitating with a woman, you could still have children with her and not get married to her. Uh, you do need to check the laws in your state. You need to kind of be aware of what cohabitation means and whether there's common, common-law marriage, that sort of stuff. But um there are ways that you can have a traditional family relationship without inviting the court system into that relationship. Obviously, the courts are going to, you know, have some say about the children, but they don't need to have anything to say about your relationship. So long as you're with a woman who will put the needs of the children um ahead of, you know, her own pride, then you can have a healthy relationship. So that if your relationship splits up, you're still a family. There's still a father, a mother, and kids. There's still a way to move forward and maintain healthy relationships with kids in a relationship that splits up. People do it all the time. It's just a matter of having um a reasonable woman that you get into a relationship with, which I know that's a tall order, but it's possible. So, you don't need to um get married just for kids. There's lots of ways you can do that.
I'm going to give you these last two together because
They are complete BS, and these are myths created by people who have a have an agenda.
Um, first one is that married men are healthier and live longer than single men. That is absolutely not the case. That is just not the case. Now, maybe if you're including divorced men with single men, maybe in that situation, um, that could be true that men who remained married and did not get divorced, um, lived longer because obviously their relationships would have been happier, and um, divorced men obviously they're going through trauma of epic proportions, and they're going to, in many cases, turn to drugs and alcohol to get through it. So certainly I can see that. But guys who stay single their entire lives tend to be very, very happy. Debb, come back. Too, that's a good dog. All right, the second one is that married men accumulate more wealth than single men. That is BS, too. That is completely untrue.
Um, a smart single man who manages his money well and prioritizes achieving wealth in his lifetime will have a much easier time of accumulating wealth than a married man. Um, what happens to men when they get married is they're forced to grow up. They're forced to take responsibility. And that used to be the uh the case for making a man a man. My marriage made a man a man. If you are a mature man and you have a clear vision for your life and that vision involves accumulating wealth and you start that process relatively early in your life, you will achieve that. You will achieve it. The thing is, you're going to have to give up on being an idiot. You can't just hang out with your buds and drink all the time and uh waste all your money on stupid. You've got to actually be an adult man. Most young guys these days really struggle with that concept of what it means to be an adult man.
Um, and that's why they end up getting married because they are expecting this woman to make them into an adult. And in a way, she'll do that. She will absolutely do that. But you will regret it. You will realize at some point that you could have made this choice and done a much better job on your own without any of her help. You don't need a woman's input to be a man. You really don't. You really don't. So, don't put yourself in that position. If you are a young guy and you see a future for yourself that involves having a lot of options and having some freedom and that involves getting some wealth, then you do that. Don't wait for a woman to come along. Don't think that's part of the puzzle. That's not a piece that you're missing. No, that's an extraneous piece. That's like buying that Ferrari down the road one day. You don't need her now. Time will come when if you feel like you want to do it, you can do it. But at this point, I would focus on building out my life, my vision. Start putting in those foundational pieces so that you can achieve the life that you want for yourself.
Most guys get into a marriage thinking that they are getting a best friend that they can have sex with, someone who will have their back, someone who will be loyal, someone who will um be there for them, nurturing, loving them, you know, holding them up when they're down. Yeah, that's that's really not the case in many, many situations. In most situations, I would say, um, women in most cases have a very clear vision for what they want their lives to look like. And you are an accessory to that. You are not the focal point of their lives, especially once children come into it. You are just an accessory to that. You are now the father, the dad, whatever. Uh, it's a nice role. I loved it. It's a good role, but um, your relationship with your wife now becomes secondary to that or tertiary or even further down the line. Trust me, this is not something that um most guys envision before they say I do.
All right, you guys. That's all I got for you today. I certainly hope you've enjoyed the video. If you have, please like and subscribe. If you know someone who might benefit from this, please share the video with them. Uh, in the meantime, stay healthy and if you can, stay single.