Unholy Matrimony: What's Wrong With Marriage?

The dream that we've all been sold in industrialized civilization, and maybe just as human beings, is the idea that at some point in our lives, we're going to settle down, meet a girl, get married, have children, and live happily ever after.

However, this dream has turned into a nightmare for most people. I can make a very strong argument that somewhere in the ballpark of 60 to 80% of people who have ever been married have some level of regret that they made that decision. People are not living happily ever after. In fact, people are finding their lives have been completely blown up, destroyed by a system that is deeply flawed.

Today, I want to get into what has gone wrong with marriage, but more importantly, what we could do to make it right. And it's not as revolutionary as you might think. Revolutionizing marriage may come down to just making a few small alterations. And it may be that with these alterations, that marriage could become a viable option. This is life 2.0. Let's talk about it.

If you're like me, you were naive. You went into this thinking that you're going to meet the right girl, spend your life with her. One day, you'll be sitting on your front porch sipping lemonade, playing with the grandkids, reflecting on a life well-lived, remembering all the good times. This has not happened. This has not happened for most people. And it's not because human beings are broken. It's not because we don't know how to have healthy relationships. A big part of it has to do with the institution of marriage itself. It puts additional pressure on these relationships. That is increasingly part of the problem.

The problem with marriage is it's easier to get into than a Costco membership. And it has the staying power of a TikTok meme. It doesn't last, and it's way too easy. I think it's easier to get a marriage license in the United States than it is to get a driver's license. Now, with a driver's license, you are driving a 3,000lb vehicle around that could potentially hurt somebody. With a marriage, you're committing your life to another human being, potentially procreating and adding human beings to this, dedicating all of your financial assets to this person, and basically leaving yourself wide open for any kind of financial ruin that you could imagine. So, you would think that we would put at least as much time and energy into marriage licenses as we do into driver's licenses, but that is not the case.

Anybody with 50 bucks and a witness or two can get married. Doesn't require an awful lot of uh education or preparation. It just requires you've got a a willing participant and a couple of people to sign off to say that they were there when it happened, and they don't even need to be sober. So, I think that's where we start with this problem.

It's a hot day today. The boys are in the water. I didn't know this. I guess I kind of did. But did you know that in order to become a barber in the United States, you need 1,500 hours of education? I'm not kidding. 1,500 hours of education before you can be a hair stylist or a barber in the United States. Yeah, think about that for a moment. How much education does it require to get married? Zero. None. There are no classes required. There are no qualifications needed. Any idiot with an optimistic view of the world and a willing participant can enter into this institution. This is uh not well thought out. You know, I don't know why it is we've gotten to this place. How is it that we can be entering into these kinds of relationships so freely?

What most people don't realize is that marriage is like probate in a way. Once you're in, there is a legal contract already established that is going to determine how you're going to dissolve this relationship. It's not something that you can uh that most people choose ahead of time. It's something that is thrust upon them, and they don't realize that they've agreed to this contract. But this contract has more power over them than just about any other legal contract in our system. It can literally um seize assets from you. There's an asset forfeiture involved. You know, if you were running a business and you were to uh sign a contract with another company to, you know, work on a project or something like that, you would have a legal contract between the two of you that would clearly identify how this contract is going to be established, who's involved in it, what's expected from them, and if it does come to be dissolved at some point, how this contract would be dissolved. These are just standard um uh conventions in a legal contract. These are the kinds of things that occur naturally. But with marriage, all those things are there, and you don't realize it. And when you enter into the marriage, you have agreed to all those things by default. It's like not reading the user agreement on your software. You just click "OK." You know, they might be saying that you're giving up your firstborn. Marriage is just like that. It's the user agreement from hell. You have no idea what you're getting into yet. It will dictate the terms of your life. Uh, from this point forward, you are under an enormous amount of pressure to um keep this relationship going because if you don't, the terms of this contract come due, and you may not like the way they are resolved.

I would suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should have some classes that are required, like as a prerequisite before you can get your license. Imagine that. Imagine if before you could agree to enter into a lifelong commitment and guarantee a certain percentage of your assets and make yourself subject to this asset forfeiture, that we had classes that were required before you could enter into marriage. This may not solve the problem, but it could certainly provide some relief. It could certainly provide people with insights. It may even prevent some bad marriages from happening.

The first class would have to be on finances because nothing says "I love you" like discovering that your cute little sweetie pie has $80,000 in credit card debt from her Beanie Baby phase, you know? So, no, you can't just run up enormous amounts of debt. In fact, having a complete debt disclosure long before marriage is a critical element in this. But learning how to deal with money and how to communicate about money is critically important in a relationship. And unless you have some kind of an established pattern or a method or a process to deal with money, money becomes an extraordinarily um thorny issue in marriage. In fact, at least half of the marriages that fail have finances as part of the underlying problem. So, getting the money right is a big part of the deal. And having a class on money just seems to make sense.

The second class would have to be on communication. And that's not just about telling someone to go screw themselves. No, it's being able to tell them to go screw themselves in a method that makes them sound like makes you sound like you're interested in what they have to say, that you're concerned about their opinion, that you are open to um criticism. You need to be able to listen clearly to the partner that you have. If without listening skills and communication skills, most relationships are doomed from the very beginning. And the truth of the matter is, they don't teach communication skills in high school. And in fact, they barely even get it in college. These days, most of the communication occurs by text message or by meme on social media. So, young people these days don't have any idea how to communicate. They don't know what to look for in visual cues, reading people's body language, understanding when tension is in the air. These are all subtleties that occur when you're around other people. And because we've become so technologically advanced recently, if that's what you want to call it, we no longer know what people look like and how they behave and how they act when things are bad or when things aren't going the way they want them to go. We don't know how to read people's emotions. So, finance and communication, they've got to be at the top of the game right away.

Intimacy is another one. Understanding the critical element of intimacy and what it means to different people and how important it is to a relationship is very, very important. Um, and not just sex, but all forms of intimacy. Um, sharing deep emotional um secrets, you know, experiences, um, belief systems, thoughts, all of these things. And that goes under communication to a certain degree as well. But understanding that these kinds of sharings are intimate behaviors. The way you touch each other, how frequently you touch each other, saying hello and goodbye, meaning a kiss when you give a kiss. These things are critically important to understanding the way your partner is feeling and what is happening in your relationship. And also maintaining that connection, understanding what it means to develop a connection and to maintain a connection.

Without these kinds of understandings and being at least aware that things things exist, it's no wonder that 50% of first-time marriages end in divorce and two-thirds of second-time marriages end in divorce. So, we're walking around telling people that they have this wonderful dream that they should pursue, and they should share their lives with another person, and yet we're not preparing them in any way, shape, or form to be successful at it. It is negligent. It is um is criminally negligent by our government to create this institution and allow people to enter into it knowing that it has such a high failure rate and that it destroys people's lives in such a profound way without giving them the opportunity, or not just the opportunity, the requirement that they are um uh at least aware of what they're getting into. Because too often times, people don't have a clue, and I guarantee you, 99% of the people who are getting married today have no clue about the contract they are entering into. So, just going through that contract for your individual state so that you understand what's in it, how it's going to affect you, and how um your relationship may be dissolved is also very important.

If romantic movies were realistic, at a certain point in the relationship, the two main characters, the man and the woman, would sit down with an attorney and create a prenuptial agreement. You say, "Wait a second, John. That's not very romantic." And I'd say, "Yeah, well, neither is losing half your pension just because your wife decided she wanted to go find herself. That's not very romantic either."

So, prenuptial agreements should be a requirement for every single marriage. I'm not talking about just rich people here. I'm not talking about celebrities who change their spouses every two weeks. I'm talking about every single human being. Because without a prenuptial agreement, you have no idea how this relationship will be dissolved, or it will it will refrain. It will um fall back to the state, and they will have their probate version of this. And of course, this laws, most of these laws were written back in the 1950s and '60s, and they have nothing to do with the reality that we live in today. So, entering into a relationship and then deciding how this relationship will be resolved while you're still in love makes more sense than anything I can think of. It's like buying a fire extinguisher. You don't buy a fire extinguisher because you're planning to burn down your house. You buy a fire extinguisher because you're not an idiot and you want to make sure that if something goes wrong, you've got the tools you need to help fix it and resolve the problem. Most people don't look at it that way. They think it's some kind of an insult, some kind of a problem that they're dealing with. And and that's not the case at all.

Women will sometimes think, "Well, you're planning to leave me. That's why you got the prenup." No, that has nothing to do with it. Prenups need to cover everything, starting with asset protection. If you brought a 1987 Honda Civic and a trophy case full of participation trophies, they're still yours. Like, they don't become community assets. They're yours. Your relationship ends, you take that with you. Um, debt. If you got uh $100,000 in student loan debt so that you're qualified to ask, "Would you like fries with that?" Well, that debt's still yours at the end of the relationship. You don't get to share your uh financial life with people. You share your life with people. Now, that means your emotional life, that means your um sharing each other's company, you're romantic with one another, you love one another. But the decisions that you made, the poor decisions that you made before entering into this relationship, they are still yours. They don't get erased. They don't get wiped clean. And I think that's what happens with a lot of women is they think that when they enter into a marriage with a man who's been more financially responsible, that they can just wipe their debt clean. And of course, we dumb men, we are more than happy to walk into that mess, aren't we? Yeah. As long as you keep sleeping with me, as long as you keep being nice to me, I'll take care of that. Yeah. She'll take care of you until you take care of that. And then you're done. You know, then she's out the door. Yeah.

There needs to be a ledger here, you know, like that's still your problem. No matter what, I cannot take that problem from you. Do you see what I mean? So, like, if you're 100K in the in the tank and you're coming into a relationship, well, you're still 100K in the tank. I'm not 100K in the tank. You are 100K in the tank. And you're going to have to pay off that $100,000, and you need to keep track of it. And that's not coming out of my money. That's coming out of your money. Like, these kinds of decisions need to be made upfront. Now, if you're the kind of guy that's all into it and you've got millions of dollars or you're happy to pay all of her debts, then that needs to be in contract form, too, you know, so that you're protecting. Maybe you're marrying some really rich girl. God bless you if you are. That needs to all be under contract. We need to understand exactly how these finances are working themselves out. Who's responsible for what? Who's bringing what into the relationship? Who's taking what out of the relationship? Who's adding to the financial life of the relationship as it occurs? As this occurs.

So if I'm making $200,000 a year and you're making $50,000 a year, I'm bringing in a lot more money than you. So when we split up, there's no way you're getting half my money. You see what I mean? Like you have only contributed 20%. I'm contributing the other 80%. You don't get 50%. Like that's not the way the math works. That should never be the way the math works. But that's the way the math works today. That is not cool. That's why people don't want to get married. That's why people, when they get into marriage, they realize this math and how it works, and they get freaked out. They don't want to, you know, they don't want to get a divorce, so they stay in these relationships that suck. They raise children that have been traumatized by bad relationships, by bad families. The whole thing is is a shitshow.

So, we need to um get these prenups in place. We need to resolve a lot of these things before they even happen. No-fault divorces need to go out the window. Saying, "I'm not happy," is not a good reason to get a divorce. If you're not happy as a grown human being, as a live grown-up, then um that's your problem. You know, if you feel like your relationship is not making you happy, then you need to put some more time and energy into your relationship. You made the decision to enter into this agreement, then you better put some time and energy into this agreement. Um, if you need help, then you need to seek out counseling. I think that before a divorce occurs, you need to be go you need to go through a required six-month class of marital counseling. Both people have to sit through it until you resolve whatever problems you have or that counselor determines that your relationship is inconsolable. It cannot be resolved. You have to there's only path forward for you guys is divorce. But just declaring one day that you're not happy anymore and walking out the door with half someone else's assets is not going to make marriage a stronger institution. It never will. It never has. It won't.

So, we need to change that. We need to create some kind of a process that makes it much more difficult to get into marriage and much more much more difficult to get out of marriage. That way, we're taking it much more seriously all along the path.

If there's infidelity, congratulations. You lose your access to the fine china and the network pass and the um Netflix password. You are going to pay a price for that. There has to be an infidelity clause in every single contract. If you are caught cheating, you're going to have a penalty involved in the dissolution of this marriage. So, there needs to be some incentives associated with remaining loyal to the relationship. If at some point you feel like you need to cheat, then you need to go to counseling. You need to gather things up, prioritize your relationship. This is where you started. You need to deal with this first. You can't move on to something new until you deal with what you got. You know, that's what too many people do. They think that they can monkey branch on to somebody else. And um unfortunately, that is what happens too frequently, where the marriage just becomes a launching pad to whatever new romantic relationship they can come up with. And this frequently happens with women, of course, today.

It's tougher to get out of a Planet Fitness membership than it is to get out of a marriage. At least with Planet Fitness, you've got to show up and make your case to the manager. You know, it's a pain in the ass, but at least you got to do something. With divorce, it's not even that tough. You can just go see a lawyer. They'll file all that stuff. You need to talk to your spouse again. That whole thing will be taken care of without anyone else knowing about it. The whole thing is resolved um cut and clean. You know, that's not the way things need to be done.

And going back to the no-fault divorce, here are some valid reasons for divorce. Of course, adultery is one that we can all agree upon. Any kind of criminal behavior like abuse or any of that stuff, you know, drug addiction, um, any kind of criminal behavior, obviously grounds for divorce. Abandonment, definitely grounds for divorce. Um, and I'm sure there's some other stuff in there, too. But "I'm not happy" is not grounds for divorce. "I'm not happy" is grounds for you getting a therapist. You know, you working on yourself. Maybe read a book. Maybe watch some standup comedy. I don't know. But you can't blame your spouse because you're unhappy. If you're unhappy with the way your relationship is going, guess what, pal? You're 50% of it, you know, and you need to put some more time and energy into it. And if she's unhappy with it, then she needs to put more time and energy into it.

There is uh no value in entering into a relationship with the idea that it's possible or easy for you to get a divorce. That's why I say you need to make it a lot tougher to get into and a lot tougher to get out of. People will give it a lot more consideration before they make that big decision to jump into the pool, you know. Um, divorce is devastating emotionally, psychologically, and financially. And it doesn't just affect the two people that are involved. It affects their children as well. And so, this is an enormous commitment, and it has long-lasting effects. And before someone enters into a relationship, they need to be aware of all the ramifications of their actions. And they need to be prepared psychologically and emotionally to make the kind of commitment that's necessary to stick with this relationship because it does require a lot of hard work. And I think a big part of the reason why most relationships fail is because people don't take it as seriously as they should. They don't realize how much hard work it takes. And they don't realize it takes so much hard work because they've had no um classes and no understanding, no uh education in it. And with a little bit of education, I think that it could go a long way.

In fact, we might even want to include some continuing education. We're like, every 5 years, you got to go sit down and do a a marriage continuing ed class. I mean, hell, as a personal trainer, I had to do continuing education every two years, like 40 or 50 hours, and I'm just a personal trainer, you know, that has very little ramifications, you know. But as a married couple, you should be forced to go into some kind of uh continuing ed with a counselor, with a group session, something like that, where you guys can have conversations about your marriage, you can talk to other couples, you can build a support group around yourselves because these are the kinds of things that will help marriages endure. And um when people are left to their own devices and they get unhappy with their lives because their jobs suck, because the weather sucks, because God knows what, their finances suck, whatever it may be, it's really easy to point your finger at that other person and say, "I think you suck." And more often than not, um, you both suck. Really, more often than not, you both have sucked at being married, and that's why your marriage is failing.

Our current child custody laws make as about as much sense as a screen door on a submarine. Some judge is going to arbitrarily decide that the mother deserves to have more custody or is more important to the relationship of those children than the father. Who the hell has any evidence that that is true? And why have we defaulted to that? Both of these people made this child. Both of these people have equal responsibility for this child. Both of these people should have equal custody of this child. 50-50 custody should be the rule of the land nationwide, worldwide, worldwide, because children who grow up with fathers, without fathers, get into more trouble than children who grow up with fathers. Um, children who grow up with fathers are less likely to continue with their education or to go on and have um fruitful and and happy lives. Having a father in your life is a ticket to success. Not having a father in your life is a ticket to um more likely ticket to going to jail or poverty or having other problems in your life. Fathers are critically important. Now, I'm not saying that mothers aren't important as well, but fathers make an enormous difference. And there's tons and tons of psychology that shows that fathers are just as good parents as mothers. So, the preconceived idea that custody should go to mothers is outdated. It's um ineffective. It's bad thinking, and we need to stop it ASAP.

When it comes to who's paying child support, guess what? 50/50. Just like a restaurant bill, you know, except this restaurant bill goes on for 18 years and keeps asking for more money. But you're both responsible. You both have equal um equity in this situation, and you both have equal responsibility to pay for this child's um well-being. And if that's a hardship on you, you can't afford your 50%, then you better come up with another job. You better start driving Uber or something because um at the end of the day, you created this little person, and this little person's innocent, and it's your responsibility to make sure this little guy, little girl, whoever has everything they need to have a successful life. Just because you up your life doesn't mean you can up theirs. So, you've got to do your part.

As a society, we need to take the lawyers out of the equation to the degree that we can. Mediation needs to be the primary um way to resolve marriages. So, if you've got the prenup already set up, then going to a mediator should be pretty easy. They're just going to oversee the way the contract is initiated and and carried out, executed. Um, but if you don't have a prenup, you go to the mediator, they have you fill out some questionnaires. They have a standard way of dividing things up. It's 50/50 for the most part. You carry out your you carry out, she carries out hers, you get what you brought in, she gets what she brought in. End of deal. You know, anything you got shared, you guys decide how you're going to split it up, and that's it. Mediators can take care of this stuff for pennies on the dollar. The minute you go and start hiring lawyers, this thing starts blowing up into some kind of a huge financial um explosion, and it turns into an emotional battlefield where now each person is after the other one. It's like some kind of a um Hunger Games in a courtroom where your finances and your access to your children are what's at stake. This is not a way to resolve relationships. Having an adversarial um process for deciding who's going to get what is not what the court systems were devised for. The um using a mediator to resolve relationships makes way more sense than getting judges involved. I mean, I'm sorry, getting uh lawyers and judges involved.

Alimony needs to go out the door. Marriage cannot be about money. We cannot be rewarding the person who destroys the marriage. That doesn't make any sense at all. Be like, "The Price Is Right." Congratulations, Bob. You've won a lifetime supply of all the money you need to live a comfortable life without ever working again. And as an added bonus, you have destroyed your family. Congratulations. No, no, no, no. This is not the way things are supposed to go. If you're the person who files for divorce and you're the person who has um initiated this process, you should not benefit financially from this at all in any way, shape, or form. This should be as much a hardship on you as it is on the on your spouse, no matter what. Um, there should be no financial reward for filing for divorce. There should be no financial reward in the form of alimony at all. If you're an adult and you've entered into this relationship as an adult, which all of us should have. I mean, that's the way the law works. Then you're also, as an adult, responsible for your own upkeep. You need to be able to take care of yourself. And if you can't take care of yourself, then shame on you. You're an idiot. Okay? Um, you need to be keeping your skills up to date. You know, you never know when things are going to go south. You know, go get one of those hair cutting licenses. I hear it. It only requires 1,500 hours. You'll be fine.

When you make marriage harder to get into and harder to get out of, you're not going to get fewer marriages. You're going to get fewer bad marriages. When you make it impossible to profit from divorce, you're going to have people investing in success. They will no longer be interested in driving a marriage off a cliff. They will understand that there's no benefit in them doing that, and they will be much more interested in making sure that the marriage works.

When couples have to discuss things like their finances, communication skills, and compatibility upfront before they enter into a relationship, they can opt out before they start ruining each other's credit scores. They can make a better decision and find someone else if that's what they decide, but they'll at least have an idea of what they're getting into and what they're going to need from their partner. They're going to start looking at finding a partner completely differently. It's not going to be about who's the cutest. That's going to be about who can actually hold up their end of the bargain. That's what's going to be the major measure me measuring stick. You know, whether you can um fill out a bathing suit or you can fill out a suit or you can make six or seven figures is going to be less important than whether or not you're someone I can trust in a relationship because now we're really 50/50 all the way through. It's not about me benefiting from your success prior to meeting me. It's more about um me wanting to maintain this relationship because I benefit from it completely. I benefit from the finances. I benefit from the relationship. I benefit from having children. I benefit from the lifestyle. It's a benefit to me to stay in this relationship. If I divorce this guy just because I'm not happy, that's going to be on you. You will going to pay the financial price of that. You're going to have to absorb the cost emotionally, psychologically, and financially. There will be no reward for you at the end of this. This is going to be a decision that you're going to make very, very seriously. And I think it's going to push a lot of women to change their mind about what divorce means to them. And they're going to be a lot more committed to these relationships and trying to find ways to make them work.

When you require people to take driver's education and take a test before they get a driver's license, you don't get fewer drivers, you get better drivers, you get fewer accidents. If we require people to spend a little time and energy considering their options and understanding what they're getting into and how to navigate relationships, not just the emotional part of it, but the um financial part of it and the communication part of it, and get an understanding for how complex these things can be, you're not going to get fewer marriages, you're going to get better marriages, stronger marriages, you're going to get fewer divorces.

My proposal is really quite simple. Let's take all the incentives out of ruining a marriage and put all the incentives into maintaining relationships. Let's educate people before they get into these situations. Let's counsel them along the way so they can resolve their differences without involving lawyers. And if a relationship does happen to fail, let's make it as smooth and and um seamless as possible. Let's have the entire dissolution of the relationship arranged long before it ever happens with a prenuptual agreement. There is no reason for these relationships, these marriages to blow up into these financial disasters that do nothing but feed the legal system and destroy families. There needs to be a better method.

And so long as the relationships that we have are dependent on these government contracts, these government institutions to uh oversee them, they're going to be a shell. When was the last time a government institution performed so well that you thought, "I want to bet my life on that"? When was the last time that happened? You thought, "You know something, this DMV is really, really cool. I think that I'm going to make my entire life dependent on the efficiency of the DMV." No, no, no. You would never do that. Why would you do that with marriage? It's an institution run by the government, overseen by lawyers who have an incentive to make it a show, and judges who were all lawyers at some point in the past. So, they they're all in on it. They're all in on it. They all benefit from it. It's the uh the the divorce financial institution, and it transfers enormous amounts of cash from men to women generally and takes children away from their fathers. That's basically what we have now. And this needs to stop. It needs to stop now.

All right, you guys. That's all I got for you today. I hope you've enjoyed this video. If you have, please like and subscribe. If you know someone who might enjoy it, please share it with them. Until next time, stay healthy, and if you can, stay single.