The Marriage Life Cycle (It's only kinda about kids).
When I was a little kid, we lived for a while in this house on a hill. There was a huge parking area and a huge barn at the bottom, and mostly the driveway was grass and a little gravel. The hill was about 12 feet high, and not steep enough to be dangerous. It was a great place for little kids, and we would spend hours dragging our bikes and Big Wheels to the top and zooming down as fast as we could.
One day, we decided we wanted to fly like a plane. So we strapped a board to our red wagon and pulled it to the top. We still went fast, but we had no more chances of getting off the ground than the average pig. Being little kids, we had no idea how planes or aerodynamics worked. I think there are a lot of areas of adult life we could make better if we really understood it better. And I think we are really quick to make either-or demands and decisions when a little more subtlety is required. Let's go beyond strapping a board to our wagon and consider some adult thoughts for a moment if you please.
So I want to talk to you about a subject I have never heard anyone ever mention before; the Marriage Life Cycle. I think a macro view of what marriage should be and was really created to do could help create a dialogue that could be profitable for all involved. I want to walk you through this and see what we can discover. For this exercise we are going to ignore the lifestyles of the rich and famous because they probably don't apply to us and we need to see these issues from where we are.
So let's start right there with average, and assume that you are 25 or maybe 26 years old and you're just about to tie the knot. You probably finished college if you went or are starting a blue-collar career or maybe you're a medical student who is just getting into their really hard lifting part of becoming a doctor. Nevertheless, you and your new spouse are going to start out relatively close to the same place every new couple starts out; you are going to be pretty cash-strapped.
Not only that, but there's a good chance that while you are starting out you are going to have children. After all, every female in the world has the same condition of having a reproductive time bomb that usually blows up in their 30s and makes having kids a whole lot harder the longer you wait. And so over the first 5, 6, 7 years of your marriage you manage to produce some hopefully fairly normal brats.
And so the Marriage Life Cycle really has three parts to it. The first part is that introductory phase when you lay down the foundation of your family life. But that's followed by two more phases which are every bit as critical to your success as those first few years. For convenience sake were going to break the rest of your life into two 20 year halves. The first of these, from being about 30 years old to 50 years old is central to the quality of the rest of your entire life.
It is during this first 20 year period that you're not just raising your own children but making a career and economic decisions that are going to affect the entire family the entire rest of your lives. Because you and your spouse need not to just be making and spending money but gathering resources for the future. There are claims that the number one driver of divorce is money, but that's not really the gist of it. The real problem is you have to people who do not see the importance of gathering resources the same way or who cannot agree on the types and amounts of effort needed to gather resources for the future.
This is critical, because you are going to have some setbacks. There may be a broken arm, or a medical condition or you may lose everything in a flood or a fire (my family has basically managed all of the above, maybe more than once). There may be a serious car accident or any one of a million other things that can happen that will put you back to near square one when it comes to gathering your financial resources for your future.
This means that picking right when you choose a spouse is one of the most important things you will do in your entire life. Because if you're like most of us, negotiating this 20 year period and coming out of it with a solid nest egg is one of the most critical things you can do. The last thing you need, and I can say this from bitter and personal experience, is to undergo the crushing financial destruction of divorce. The average American couple, actually the average couple worldwide, simply cannot afford the ravages of divorce.
It takes both parties and basically plops them right back at square one financially only worse, because now you don't have a spouse to take any of the weight off of you when it comes to both child rearing and your financial situation. Let me put this in a way that you just might understand it a little better; do you know what the difference is between a woman whose husband does not help her with the laundry and a woman who is divorced? Nothing. She still has to do the laundry.
Now I'm not trying to make excuses for men here, just pointing out the only real difference between the two women is that the divorced woman has less pocket change for the laundromat. And that's no small thing. And I don't want you to get me wrong that I'm somehow saying you should not enjoy your life or you should not be happy. Far from it. All I'm suggesting is that you may want to adjust your outlook a little, and just maybe consider that you probably would be a little happier if you could look forward to going out for dinner once a week, and it may be a little more enjoyable if you managed to have someone spend that time with.
So now that I've impressed upon you about how important it is to not screw that first 20 year period up, I want to go on and talk to you about that second twenty-year period. Here, your roles are going to change and if you've been wise up to this point you'll have much more freedom and ability to pursue certain personal interests. But your work is not really done yet. It's true at this point that your children should be out in the world on their own starting their careers or attending college or starting a company or becoming the alcoholic they're eventually going to be.
You now have a secondary role, not so much as a parent but is grandma or grandpa, and your willingness and ability to play that role has about two thirds of the weight it did when you were the parents. Because you have the ability to reinforce the habits of good behavior your children got from you and are giving their children now, and also by babysitting the grandchildren giving your grown children the time and energy they need to do other things like work on their own marriage.
And at that point you should have the wisdom to be able to share all these ideas even more widely and publicly in much the same way I'm doing right now on this blog. Now you may do that more personally through interaction with your grown children's friends or through other children who are friends with her grandchildren. But you can remain and even grow your importance when it comes to your family's future if you are strategic and smart about it.
It's just as crazy to get divorced at this point in your life as it was during the previous 20 years. First of all, your moral authority is gone, just toast, because nothing says serious like grandma and grandpa not really being down for it. The truth is, every single one of us has a bullshit detector, and every single one of us knows how to use it, yet sooner or later there is not a single person on this planet who doesn't try to polish some sort of turd. But instead of remaining central in importance to our families, granny and pappy divorce, and grandma moves into some funny smelling condo somewhere in the netherworld of the Bronx to spend the rest of her days loafing in various upscale bookstores, where she spends her time lying to herself and everyone she meets by claiming to be working on some ethereal novel that not a single letter of will ever see a sheet of paper.
This is not some great improvement in life; this makes you just another version of the crazy cat lady, you just happen to be one without the smell of cat piss on your couch. And yet somehow we're supposed to live in some sort of bizarre life modeled for us through a flood of weird and emotionally grotesque romantic comedies, that tell us we are supposed to spend the rest of our days being friends with a person who went so far out of their way to say they don't like us that they took us to court and moved out of our house. If that doesn't sound bizarre to you, you don't know America.
That ladies and gentlemen is the marriage life cycle, in three acts. First, you and your spouse establish your household. You then basically spend the next 20 years of your lives gathering as many resources as you can for the future of you and your children. And in the third part of the equation you spend your time desperately trying not to become an idiot and blowing everything you worked for all of your life. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the way you're supposed to work marriage out for the betterment not just of your home but also of your children's homes in the future.
The financial destruction caused by divorce is not borne by the divorcing couple alone. It is shared with all of society. Whereas for years you and your spouse may have been making mortgage payments on a middle-class home, that now needs to be sold and the two of you are likely to move into much more moderately priced rentals which would normally be occupied by lower-class couples like yourselves when you were first coming up financially. Your leased SUV will need to go back to the dealer and you will now compete with people who are not as financially along is what you were for a quality used car. Whereas you used to be a middle-class contributor to society you are not just a pain in the ass to society because one of you (85% of time the wife) is stupid enough to think to themselves "I don't think I should have to put up with all of this". As if there is some indication outside of the psychosis-inducing entertainment and educational systems that this otherworldly fantasy land you dream of actually exists. Let me clue you in cupcake; it does not exist anywhere outside the semi-empty spaces between your ears. Anywhere. Ever.
None of what I'm saying will make any of this grappling with marriage and it's value any easier. Life is boring, and it's hard, and most of it involves working a lot. Most of that work that you do will be difficult in one form or another. Your goal then, and your duty, not just to your household but to all the households around you is to accept these crosses that we all bear - that we all bear with humility and in good spirit. It means avoiding all of the crazy talk that our society throws at us and focusing on enjoying as much as we can the people and things that we intentionally chose to have around us. It may not be perfect or everything that you expected it to be but that does not mean you do not have the ability and responsibility to find many ways to enjoy it and have fun still and live the best life you can without burning down the family you all depend on because you have no self-control and cannot avoid a crappy attitude because the laundry is a never-ending task –
I may if used a few hard words and some harsh ideas on you today. But I think if you are wise I just may have given you a few tools in our little talk that may be able to help you in the future as you and your spouse travel along your own marriage life cycle. If nothing else I hope to have given you something to think about, and I will be happy with that.
One day, we decided we wanted to fly like a plane. So we strapped a board to our red wagon and pulled it to the top. We still went fast, but we had no more chances of getting off the ground than the average pig. Being little kids, we had no idea how planes or aerodynamics worked. I think there are a lot of areas of adult life we could make better if we really understood it better. And I think we are really quick to make either-or demands and decisions when a little more subtlety is required. Let's go beyond strapping a board to our wagon and consider some adult thoughts for a moment if you please.
So I want to talk to you about a subject I have never heard anyone ever mention before; the Marriage Life Cycle. I think a macro view of what marriage should be and was really created to do could help create a dialogue that could be profitable for all involved. I want to walk you through this and see what we can discover. For this exercise we are going to ignore the lifestyles of the rich and famous because they probably don't apply to us and we need to see these issues from where we are.
So let's start right there with average, and assume that you are 25 or maybe 26 years old and you're just about to tie the knot. You probably finished college if you went or are starting a blue-collar career or maybe you're a medical student who is just getting into their really hard lifting part of becoming a doctor. Nevertheless, you and your new spouse are going to start out relatively close to the same place every new couple starts out; you are going to be pretty cash-strapped.
Not only that, but there's a good chance that while you are starting out you are going to have children. After all, every female in the world has the same condition of having a reproductive time bomb that usually blows up in their 30s and makes having kids a whole lot harder the longer you wait. And so over the first 5, 6, 7 years of your marriage you manage to produce some hopefully fairly normal brats.
And so the Marriage Life Cycle really has three parts to it. The first part is that introductory phase when you lay down the foundation of your family life. But that's followed by two more phases which are every bit as critical to your success as those first few years. For convenience sake were going to break the rest of your life into two 20 year halves. The first of these, from being about 30 years old to 50 years old is central to the quality of the rest of your entire life.
It is during this first 20 year period that you're not just raising your own children but making a career and economic decisions that are going to affect the entire family the entire rest of your lives. Because you and your spouse need not to just be making and spending money but gathering resources for the future. There are claims that the number one driver of divorce is money, but that's not really the gist of it. The real problem is you have to people who do not see the importance of gathering resources the same way or who cannot agree on the types and amounts of effort needed to gather resources for the future.
This is critical, because you are going to have some setbacks. There may be a broken arm, or a medical condition or you may lose everything in a flood or a fire (my family has basically managed all of the above, maybe more than once). There may be a serious car accident or any one of a million other things that can happen that will put you back to near square one when it comes to gathering your financial resources for your future.
This means that picking right when you choose a spouse is one of the most important things you will do in your entire life. Because if you're like most of us, negotiating this 20 year period and coming out of it with a solid nest egg is one of the most critical things you can do. The last thing you need, and I can say this from bitter and personal experience, is to undergo the crushing financial destruction of divorce. The average American couple, actually the average couple worldwide, simply cannot afford the ravages of divorce.
It takes both parties and basically plops them right back at square one financially only worse, because now you don't have a spouse to take any of the weight off of you when it comes to both child rearing and your financial situation. Let me put this in a way that you just might understand it a little better; do you know what the difference is between a woman whose husband does not help her with the laundry and a woman who is divorced? Nothing. She still has to do the laundry.
Now I'm not trying to make excuses for men here, just pointing out the only real difference between the two women is that the divorced woman has less pocket change for the laundromat. And that's no small thing. And I don't want you to get me wrong that I'm somehow saying you should not enjoy your life or you should not be happy. Far from it. All I'm suggesting is that you may want to adjust your outlook a little, and just maybe consider that you probably would be a little happier if you could look forward to going out for dinner once a week, and it may be a little more enjoyable if you managed to have someone spend that time with.
This is time you will never ever ever get back.
You must choose wisely, and whether you are a man or a woman you will pay a miserable price if you get this part of your life wrong, I promise you that. So don't get it wrong. You do what it takes to get your head screwed on straight when you are 16 and keep it that way until you can manage to pick a he or she that has the qualities you are looking for and a personality you can live with and you stick with that. That's how this is done, and it's the only way this is done, and I have watched that time and time and time again play out in the lives of dozens upon dozens of couples right in front of my eyes.So now that I've impressed upon you about how important it is to not screw that first 20 year period up, I want to go on and talk to you about that second twenty-year period. Here, your roles are going to change and if you've been wise up to this point you'll have much more freedom and ability to pursue certain personal interests. But your work is not really done yet. It's true at this point that your children should be out in the world on their own starting their careers or attending college or starting a company or becoming the alcoholic they're eventually going to be.
You now have a secondary role, not so much as a parent but is grandma or grandpa, and your willingness and ability to play that role has about two thirds of the weight it did when you were the parents. Because you have the ability to reinforce the habits of good behavior your children got from you and are giving their children now, and also by babysitting the grandchildren giving your grown children the time and energy they need to do other things like work on their own marriage.
And at that point you should have the wisdom to be able to share all these ideas even more widely and publicly in much the same way I'm doing right now on this blog. Now you may do that more personally through interaction with your grown children's friends or through other children who are friends with her grandchildren. But you can remain and even grow your importance when it comes to your family's future if you are strategic and smart about it.
It's just as crazy to get divorced at this point in your life as it was during the previous 20 years. First of all, your moral authority is gone, just toast, because nothing says serious like grandma and grandpa not really being down for it. The truth is, every single one of us has a bullshit detector, and every single one of us knows how to use it, yet sooner or later there is not a single person on this planet who doesn't try to polish some sort of turd. But instead of remaining central in importance to our families, granny and pappy divorce, and grandma moves into some funny smelling condo somewhere in the netherworld of the Bronx to spend the rest of her days loafing in various upscale bookstores, where she spends her time lying to herself and everyone she meets by claiming to be working on some ethereal novel that not a single letter of will ever see a sheet of paper.
This is not some great improvement in life; this makes you just another version of the crazy cat lady, you just happen to be one without the smell of cat piss on your couch. And yet somehow we're supposed to live in some sort of bizarre life modeled for us through a flood of weird and emotionally grotesque romantic comedies, that tell us we are supposed to spend the rest of our days being friends with a person who went so far out of their way to say they don't like us that they took us to court and moved out of our house. If that doesn't sound bizarre to you, you don't know America.
That ladies and gentlemen is the marriage life cycle, in three acts. First, you and your spouse establish your household. You then basically spend the next 20 years of your lives gathering as many resources as you can for the future of you and your children. And in the third part of the equation you spend your time desperately trying not to become an idiot and blowing everything you worked for all of your life. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the way you're supposed to work marriage out for the betterment not just of your home but also of your children's homes in the future.
The financial destruction caused by divorce is not borne by the divorcing couple alone. It is shared with all of society. Whereas for years you and your spouse may have been making mortgage payments on a middle-class home, that now needs to be sold and the two of you are likely to move into much more moderately priced rentals which would normally be occupied by lower-class couples like yourselves when you were first coming up financially. Your leased SUV will need to go back to the dealer and you will now compete with people who are not as financially along is what you were for a quality used car. Whereas you used to be a middle-class contributor to society you are not just a pain in the ass to society because one of you (85% of time the wife) is stupid enough to think to themselves "I don't think I should have to put up with all of this". As if there is some indication outside of the psychosis-inducing entertainment and educational systems that this otherworldly fantasy land you dream of actually exists. Let me clue you in cupcake; it does not exist anywhere outside the semi-empty spaces between your ears. Anywhere. Ever.
None of what I'm saying will make any of this grappling with marriage and it's value any easier. Life is boring, and it's hard, and most of it involves working a lot. Most of that work that you do will be difficult in one form or another. Your goal then, and your duty, not just to your household but to all the households around you is to accept these crosses that we all bear - that we all bear with humility and in good spirit. It means avoiding all of the crazy talk that our society throws at us and focusing on enjoying as much as we can the people and things that we intentionally chose to have around us. It may not be perfect or everything that you expected it to be but that does not mean you do not have the ability and responsibility to find many ways to enjoy it and have fun still and live the best life you can without burning down the family you all depend on because you have no self-control and cannot avoid a crappy attitude because the laundry is a never-ending task –
just like it is for every other family on your block.
At every step of the journey, your spouse is invaluable, as a person you can love and lean on and work things out with and make much more progress faster than almost any single person can. The marriage life cycle gives you incredible advantages over the vast majority of single people, outside Elon Musk or a few really talented engineers who can write their own ticket. It's a shame we have completely torched the institution in our Western civilization. Our civilization was always designed to create a healthy balanced tension between competition and cooperation, and we are supposed to learn the healthy correct balance through our family ties first. That is the value of a good marriage - it is literally inestimable, especially for the future generations that will follow.I may if used a few hard words and some harsh ideas on you today. But I think if you are wise I just may have given you a few tools in our little talk that may be able to help you in the future as you and your spouse travel along your own marriage life cycle. If nothing else I hope to have given you something to think about, and I will be happy with that.
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