Unlike women, men can find fulfillment as a perpetual bachelor. In this post we’ll look at the decision tree to determine if marriage is a good decision for you.
Is Marriage Necessary?
Getting married is not an obligation. You don’t have to get married if it doesn’t serve your purposes and you shouldn’t let yourself get pressured to do so by anyone, specially by close family.
Men seek freedom and find fulfillment in building, so a love life is not necessary for us. This is not the case with women, who seek love and find fulfillment in giving and receiving love. Without a fulfilling love life, they’ll wither over the years and turn into bitter spinsters who will try to recruit young girls into spinster bitterness as well (misery loves company).
Our mothers and grandmothers knew this, which is why they pressure their offspring to get married. But remember that at the end of the day, they’re 1) human -> so they try to get us out of harm’s way, and 2) female -> so they think their experience is the universal experience (they truly can’t understand men don’t need to get married). So don’t resent them if they keep applying pressure, just keep being friendly and vague with them.
Decision Tree
That being said, marriage does have its merits (yes, even in this day and age, in the west, for men) so we’ll explore if that’s the path for you or if you’ll be better off staying as a perpetual bachelor:
Do you want kids?
This is likely the biggest fork in the road.
If you don’t want kids then don’t get married. Marriage means binding your life with that of a woman’s to create a new one together. This means that both have 50% equity in any and all money you or her receive from that day onward. The day you get married is quite literally the first day of your new life.
The house you live in is now the marriage’s property, no matter who bought it. All salaries are the marriage’s property. All businesses are the marriage’s property.
You can see how this arrangement can be fatal for a man’s finances in case he’s the sole breadwinner and the marriage ends. 50% of assets gone forever.
Speaking with a cold head, if you are not planning on having kids, why would you involve the government in your relationship? You can get EVERYTHING women have to offer without risking half your assets. You can get sex from her, companionship, love, beautiful memories of sublime moments together, friendship, interesting conversations, gifts, and the list goes on and on. None of this requires being legally married, NONE.
No reason to take an unnecessary risk.
If on the other hand you want kids, then you probably should get married. This is because the moment you have kids, your priority should be their development, not your satisfaction.
In my opinion, all kids deserve to grow up in a stable, two-parent home. We all know how screwed people with absent mothers or fathers turn out to be in their adulthood unless they put in considerable time and effort into solving their traumas. Time and effort they could have put in developing their talents and finding fulfillment.
Having a life together is the ideal environment for a healthy development and simplifies things a lot: She and all your kids can get a visa if you have a visa, all of them get insurance if you have insurance, all of them can inherit your assets, she can legally do things in your name in case you’re not present or available.
You assume the risk of getting divorced in favor of them having a happy and healthy upbringing.
One thing I’ve been thinking about these last few days is that having kinds means you have people you can 100% trust in. This is incredibly useful, for example in Mexico you can’t build a LLC as a sole property, you need at least 2 people to sign. You can’t be at two places at the same time, but you can be in one and your son in another. You die, a younger more talented and well-nourished version of you gets to inherit the assets you built in life and take your whole family to the next socioeconomic class.
Fun note: You put your house as the LLC’s property and keep gifting your son equity every year so that after some years he’s the majority owner, no inheritance tax.
Are you wealthy?
If you want to have kids but are not wealthy, my advice is that you don’t get married until you are.
Remember when I told you the day you get married is the first day of your new life? Well there’s a loophole in that phrase: what about the time before that day?
Before you got married you were single, and if you got an asset as a single man (built, bought, inherited, doesn’t matter) it can be protected, as long as it stays as a separate part of your life.
You’ll need a prenup of course, but *GENERALLY SPEAKING* if you bought an apartment as a single man and it generates rental income that is put in a separate bank account, all of that is not marriage property. If you sell that apartment and then get two, then you fix them and sell those two at a higher price, more and more, you keep building wealth outside of your marriage property. Again, as long as you don’t mix it by sending money to your main account or pay main residence house bills from there.
This has an implicit conclusion: the more wealth you build as a single man the better because that’ll be the only capital you can use that is considered outside of marriage property. If you build a RE empire before getting married you’ll have that at your disposal (provided that you have a job or a main business that provides for your family), but if you just had a $5 bill and a used gum the day you got married that’s all the capital you have. Remember: any and all income you receive from your job or main business is marriage property, hence split in half in the event of divorce.
Most guys don’t think about these things so they marry broke and end up bending over to their SAHM wife when they get divorced.
Can you “love”?
I know this sounds super cheesy, but it’s important.
I recently read “The Art Of Loving” by Erich Fromm (it was a recommendation from Rivelino) and I really liked that it was aimed at the logic-oriented person. It has zero “love is the most beautiful feeling in the world” kind of phrases.
Instead it examines the problem of human existence and how disconnection from the world causes us pain as we grow older and drives a lot of human conducts. One of the key insights I got from it is that the cure to this pain is loving another person in a romantic way. Most people focus their efforts on being loved (getting a better job, a better car, a better house, nicer clothes, getting in shape, becoming interesting, all in an effort to attract a higher quality partner) but never on “loving” someone. Additionally it explains why it makes sense to believe in love, basically because as a species our incentives are aligned to do so.
If you want to get a sense of how important this book was, let me tell you that it helped me decide for good that I do want to get married one day.
In Erich Fromm’s words, “the deepest need of man is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness”.
At this point we have disqualified most people from being better off getting married, but this filter will be different since it argues most of those who are left *should* get married. The only ones who have gotten to this point and shouldn’t, would be those with a high degree of psychopathy or similar that truly can’t feel love.
New readers:
My first book, “The Game of Casual Dating” is a guide that will teach you how to go from getting 0 girls to meeting, dating and sleeping with girls you find attractive by building a solid foundation of social skills. No rehearsed lines, no deceiving, no sketchy tricks. Just pure skill and female psychology knowledge. You can buy it Here.
My second book, “The Art of Building Highly Addictive Relationships” is a guide that will teach you which girls are worth keeping around and how to build relationships with them in which they can’t get enough of you. You can buy it Here.
“Introvert Game” is a guide that will help you attain a deeper understanding of your personality as an introvert and figuring out how to seduce women by playing to your strengths rather than trying to swim upstream using guides designed for extroverts. You can buy it Here.
Photo Credits: Nikki Gibson