WYDave - 12/7/2017 13:53

There's more and more single people all the time. You can find that out in various statistical databases all over the 'net.

Let me give you a reason why I now recommend to young men, why, if they don't want children, to think very, very carefully before getting married:

Out of my circle of friends from Silicon Valley which had about 20 couples, I think my wife & I and one other couple are the only married couples who were married 20+ years ago who are still married.

The rest of the engineers I knew who were married have been taken to the cleaners by their (now ex) wives. We're talking millions of dollars in every case of divorce.

Did these guys cheat? Nope. Did they abuse their wives? Hardly. Nope, it was just how the divorce courts are set up, and the realization by so many of these women that they could become millionaires on their own for only the investment of some legal fees and some contention in divorce court. After that, they were free to flit around the world, buy a house where ever they wanted to live, etc - all paid for by their ex-husband. In a couple of cases, I'm sure the wife got more than $25 mil - for what? For being married to a guy who worked like a sled dog and was smart enough to work like a sled dog at a company who would compensate him well for working like a sled dog. Neither of these wives provided any children.

For the reasons of the stats and the way divorce courts are so willing to hand over so much money to women who haven't done the hard work of making that money, I tell young men to think very, very carefully about ever getting married. Pre-nups won't save you. Lawyers argue against pre-nups all the time, and cause them to be overridden in court.

I use the following argument to wake them up:

"Let's say I told you that we were going to go skydiving today. Let's say it's a beautiful day, and someone else is going to pay for your skydiving lessons. Would you go?"

About 90% of the hands go up.

"OK, let's say that now your instructor has the power & the desire to take away your chute on the way down in about one-third of the cases. Just take your chute off you as you're falling back to earth. Now would you go?"

The response is immediate, profane and obvious. Of course not. As one kid said (quite accurately) "Even Russian roulette has better odds than that!"

"OK, so let's go back to talking about marriage. If I told you that about a third of all marriages end up in divorce, and that in those situations, two-thirds of those divorces are initiated by the woman (if we're talking about all women) and 89% of divorces where the woman has a 4-year degree or higher are initiated by the woman, and there is nothing you can do to stop the divorce from happening, and judges are perfectly happy to hand over up to half of your money to her... would you get married?"

Shocked silence. Most of them, talking to me later, had a "gut hunch" - but they didn't know the numbers and didn't know where to find the numbers. Most of them have one or more of: fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins who have been to divorce court and gotten cleaned out.  What they didn't know was how many other men had been.

The legal system is stacked against men, and men should know what they're getting into before they sign on the dotted line. Usually, once a man has been through divorce court once, he cannot ever afford to be there again.  For women - there are some who seem to make a vocation of getting married and then divorced. One gentleman I met recently found out that a woman he had been dating seemed to conveniently omit a little detail about herself - that she had been divorced four times. A mutual friend told this gentleman this little detail. This gent didn't dump her, but he said that there is no way he's ever going to marry her. "I'm not going to be Number 5, that's for certain."

It used to be that women said "there's no free milk without buying the cow," but nowadays, cows seem willing to provide free milk, free half-n-half, free whipping cream, free yogurt, free ice cream, free butter... you name it.

So... if you don't want calves, should you buy the cow?