We're not the believer in marriage.
We're the believer in strong marriages and those marriages that you work on.
Let's go with emotional because I feel that's a really strong one.
I see what you did there, emotion and you feel.
That's good.
Let's do that.
Nice.
Wow.
I think it's nutty that you would do that and all the reasons it gave for why, it's like, yeah, that's all the reasons why I would stay single.
So just stay single.
It's fine.
Like, no, you don't have to get married.
If you're gonna get married, do it and be a superpower with it.
Hello and welcome to Penned in Ink, a podcast where we discuss marriage and the power of long lasting love.
But is marriage worth it today?
Are you struggling with your relationship and questioning commitment?
Have you been in a long-term relationship that didn't live up to the hype?
Today, we are digging into the growing hesitation around commitment and marriage.
All right, Melissa, are you set to dive into this meaty topic of should you get married or not?
Should you commit?
Absolutely.
I am ready.
This is a good one.
Oh, we'll see if it's a good one.
I don't know.
Okay.
There are many reasons that you might consider marriage, but is marriage still worth it?
Our answer, for many, yes.
However, it's really important that you do it and build it in a positive way that can stand the test of time.
Because when done right, marriage is a shared framework for partnership.
You can build many awesome things together.
Don't do it right, not so much.
With that, how about you kick us off today?
What do you wanna talk about?
I think we should start with the doubts.
Do you doubt the power of marriage?
I think most people would respond that they've at least considered that.
That there are doubts.
It's not a no-brainer for everybody.
There are a lot of them.
A lot of them I hear in my practice, and a lot of them you just see out there.
One of them is fear of losing your independence.
I hear that a lot, either from somebody that just left home and has started college, and they're like, I don't want to get into a relationship.
I'm enjoying.
I'm finally out of my parents' home.
I like being alone.
And then there's other people that have lived alone for a really long time.
I've had 30-something say, I don't think I could get married because I'm kind of set in my ways.
I like to do X, Y, and Z, and getting married would get in the way of that.
You're describing Alexa, potentially.
Maybe.
No.
Our daughter, Alexa, will turn 26 shortly and enjoys massively living alone.
Yep.
And I think she's expressed concern a few different times of, wait a minute, if I have to live with someone else, how is that gonna go?
In my practice, I have walked through with people how to adjust to making a commitment with somebody, living with them.
It takes an adjustment, massive adjustment.
But yeah, it's not a no-brainer that you're going to mesh and be well living together.
So yeah, losing your independence.
And living together, losing your personal time is only one form of independence.
There's tons of other independence, decision-making, financial control, et cetera.
So yeah, so doubt of fear of losing your independence.
I hear all the time, well, it's just a piece of paper.
Why do I need?
It's just a piece of paper.
We're committed to each other.
We love each other.
We're staying together.
All right, so that's a modern doubt.
We'll tell you why you need a paper later, but I think that's a doubt I hear a lot.
What else do you hear?
Fear of divorce.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
The numbers, everybody's scared of the numbers, what's out there.
What is it?
You're better with the data on that.
Yeah, I'm not gonna quote the data on that because the data is all over the place on that.
There's this urban myth that half of marriages, 50% of marriages end in divorce.
And that was based on some research that was done many years ago.
And it leaves out all sorts of really important factors, such as when did you get married in life?
What decade of life was your marriage?
Were you married in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s?
Because divorce rates skyrocketed in the 70s.
They've been dropping in the 80s, 90s, 2000s.
The divorce rate right now is actually really low, but it's also potentially a factor that less people are getting married.
The other thing in there is that that's all marriages.
Well, what if you're a serial marrier?
What if you've been married four or five, six, seven times, which there's a lot of those?
Well, that spikes the rate.
That's the problem with stats on all these things.
At the time I last heard research on this, something in the neighborhood of 70% of women were still married to their first husband.
And that included those marriages that ended in death.
Spouse died.
That's a much different picture than 50%.
So the fear of divorce is real.
Yes, it has massive impact, especially if you have kids and everything, but the stats around it is a harder picture than what's been painted there.
Yeah.
What else?
You already said independence.
Oh, another one I hear a lot is, well, I'm not religious.
Why would I get married?
I think that's a comment.
The church, we've talked earlier, but in other previous episodes, if you're in a church, in a religion, there's a clear path of why you would get married.
Maybe not so much if you're not religious, although we would like to dispel that myth as well, but there's no doubt.
Any other doubts?
No, those are the ones that I hear most often.
Yeah, if you've got any of your own doubts we missed, toss them in the comments.
Okay, address them in future episodes.
Yeah, we'll dispel them in future episodes.
No, I'm just, that was a little aggressive.
Address, not dispel.
Come on now.
No, we'll dispel them.
All right, so I'm sure this comes as no surprise to anyone who's listened to our content, but we are true believers in the power of a strong marriage.
And there's always qualifiers on this.
We're not the believer in marriage.
We're the believer in strong marriages and those marriages that you work on and that you mutually build something that's long lasting and has benefits.
Now your instinct might be to push back on that and say, nope, sorry.
So we're gonna spend the next, I don't know, 15 minutes or so talking through reasons why marriage is beneficial.
And these reasons are gonna span all sorts of different areas.
They're gonna talk about social areas.
They're gonna talk about health areas.
They're gonna talk about finance areas.
They're gonna talk about various reasons why marriage, not cohabitation, living together, but why marriage specifically can bring some of these powers.
Let's jump into that.
Let's talk a little bit.
Where do you wanna start?
Emotional, social, financial?
What sounds good?
They're all good ones.
Let's go with emotional because I feel that's a really strong one.
I see what you did there.
Emotion and you feel.
That's good.
Let's do that.
Nice.
Wow.
It's a big one and ours.
I know if I've had a bad day, first person I'm going to is my spouse.
They make me feel better.
They can tell me, hey, it's gonna be fine or it wasn't that bad.
Or there is something to be said for having somebody that when times are tough that you can lean on.
Yeah, I agree.
And having that person for your day-to-day emotional outlet, but also having them for the big moments in life that are gonna come through and be those tragic moments or happy moments, celebratory moments or moments where you need grieving, like having that emotional support.
Now, this is one of those that you might be thinking to yourself, well, yeah, I can do that with just commitment.
Yeah, this one you probably can.
But that is a real benefit of marriage is you have that long-term sort of committed to each other formally.
But there's no law that says you can't get emotional support from a long-term partner.
So this one I agree with.
I'm just saying this one might not be the most tangible of the reasons we're gonna talk about because there are more tangible.
Well, you know why I started with emotional, right?
Because you're a feeler.
Well that, and I'm a counselor.
It's the one that I feel is, they're all important.
But it's one that I really- I'm not disagreeing.
I'm just talking to the audience saying, now, don't call us on this because I can do this in a committed relationship.
I know you can, but in marriage, it is a big, big piece.
How about the social aspect of being married?
Not all men have a big social circle.
It's not uncommon for a husband to have more social interactions if he's married.
For instance, hey, we should have a Christmas party.
I don't hear many men saying that to women, whereas I know that a woman would say that to a man.
It kind of keeps you in line.
Because you said it last week and I've been like, oh my gosh.
Maybe.
Yeah, there are benefits to men who probably are not as social as women are by general.
We're talking very big generals here.
There is that.
There's also, as part of that, it's not just other male friends, but it's couple friends, or it's just simply going out and doing date nights and being out there.
I think there are a lot of young men in particular who aren't social by nature.
And so just being forced to even just go out to restaurants rather than ordering in, or to go out and go to the movies versus watching Netflix.
I think those are all sorts of good social reasons.
Now, that kind of makes me think that, this is where the research gets really interesting.
There are health benefits of being married.
And we gotta be really careful about causal versus correlation.
In general, married men live longer than single men.
Now, there's lots of reasons why that probably is the case.
And it could be that when you're married, you are more socially active.
You're more engaged with people.
You're probably more physically active, be it if you're raising kids or not, or simply just have a partner who encourages you to be healthier, to eat better, to exercise, to whatever, right?
Whatever that relationship is.
Now, the flip side of that is, it might be that healthier men tend to marry more.
They tend to be more attractive partners.
So does being married cause you to live longer, or do you get married because you're healthier and have a predisposition?
So the science can't really answer that, but it is a fact that married men live longer.
It doesn't actually play the same for women.
Women's lifespans are about the same, married or single.
And I was reading a little bit about it.
It was talking about the stressors that a woman feels in marriage around child rearing, loss of career potentially, and some of the, I don't think we actually talked about it in our doubt section, but marriage being more of a patriarchal arrangement in a lot of cases, then those sort of negate the positives that come from the relationship side, the emotional side.
So that number doesn't hold up for women, but it does hold up for men, which I thought was interesting.
That is very interesting.
Long, long pause.
Yeah, I was, no, I was just thinking that you need us more than we need you, I don't know.
If we help you live longer.
Well, it depends if marriage actually causes you to live longer, or if it's just a statistical, because maybe if I'm a healthy man in general, I'm going to live long anyway.
And it's just, so maybe in this area, I don't know, but yeah, maybe so.
The stats would say it.
So that's where the pause was.
I was thinking that in case I whether to say it or not.
It's all right, you can say it, I don't mind.
What are the reasons why you would get, what are the tangible benefits of marriage?
I think we haven't gotten to the most tangible, which is the financial side, right?
And this is where there's lots of research on this.
And there's lots of reasons why it happens or why it doesn't happen.
And it goes way beyond finances, but marriage is an institute that's sanctioned by governments.
And governments put stuff into place to encourage certain behaviors in the population.
Most Western societies encourage marriage.
So to incentivize that, they give you real world reasons why you would do this.
Tax breaks, property ownership rights.
If you buy a house with someone you're married to, they have joint ownership of it, right?
If you buy a house with someone you're not married to, that's a very legal mess.
When you are married, you pay lower tax rates.
There's all sorts of things around that.
When you are married, you have access to hospital records and medical records and things like that.
Those are all government regulations that are set up to encourage marriage.
That's a very practical reason for it.
There's a financial piece that is the less formal, but it's equally powerful.
Just as I was talking about how married men live longer, married men make more money.
And- That's interesting.
They make more, somewhere in the range of 10 to 20, 25% more on average.
Now, again, this question is, is it causal or is it just a correlation?
Are they high earners and high potential men who are of quality, who are attractive, that they get married and make more money?
Or is there something about being married that is more employers want married men because they're more stable?
They have more reasons to stay employed, whereas a single person might have more flexibility to be unemployed for a little while.
They might not have that pressure.
We talked in an earlier episode where I went through a period of time where I was our sole earner.
I worked pretty damn hard for that company because I needed that job.
So is there a preference of employers for married men?
Legally, probably not, but in practicality, yeah, probably so.
Can't ask those questions, but you used to be able to.
So that is definitely one of those changing things.
So there's definitely a financial reasons.
I've been talking a lot on this one, but I'll give one more thing on this real quick, then I'll let you go.
Net worth of a married couple is miles ahead of single people.
Like you just, a man who's in a married marriage or a woman who's in a marriage, statistically will end up with way more wealth.
It's a force multiplier for wealth building.
And the reasons around that are potentially dual incomes.
It's also shared expenses.
And it's also, this I think is the biggest one.
It's very often combined finances with a shared vision that just leads you to more wealth.
That's a lot, I like the finance part.
Yeah, I like it as well.
And one of the things that you didn't mention that is very much applicable to me is the health insurance plans are more affordable.
I'm in private practice, so I own my own business.
I don't, I would have to go through the marketplace or do an individual plan, which I've talked to people and I've looked into it.
It is quite expensive.
I've always been on your plan because you're, and we save money there by me not having to go out on my own and get health insurance.
And that's something that I wouldn't have thought about, but that's another benefit of marriage as well.
Yeah, it's funny, we're making very, we started with the emotional reasons.
We started with the health reasons.
Now we're just into the, like the real financial.
Nitty gritty?
Yeah, well, the legal reasons of why you would do that.
And it's interesting because a lot of people compartmentalize marriage and they think of it as either solely a romantic love sort of arrangement, or they think of it as, well, she's gonna get half my money if I marry her.
Why would I do that?
I think just the finance part, or they don't even think about the social or the health benefits of it.
And I think what we're trying to outline here is that there's benefits in many different areas of your life.
If you just look at one of those lanes, you're not gonna catch.
So I think it's kind of interesting, but we've gone to very like, I would say those are very dry sort of reasons why, why are you getting married?
Well, I'll save on my taxes.
Why are you getting married?
Save on my health insurance.
Those are just benefits of it.
They aren't reasons to get married.
Would I marry someone for their health insurance?
No.
Would I marry someone for their tax break?
No.
But it's nice to have a tax break and have health insurance breaks.
I just find it funny because- It is really funny.
I hadn't thought about it in that way.
And it's sort of like in a long-term marriage, you're never all of one thing.
You're never all in infatuation and love and romance, and you're never all in the practicals.
It's the holistic part of that.
And sometimes you're deeper in those.
So we'll have some conversations or some days where it's, or time periods where it's all just like mundane wills and trusts and doctor's access and finances.
But those things are like, they make us really stable and give us the ability to focus on those other things like travel and experiences and fun together.
Anyway, I thought that was funny.
I think there's a couple more reasons why I would advocate for marriage.
One is sort of in that social, but it's more than that.
It's that someone to grow old with.
And we talked about this.
I think we've mentioned this before.
I do question that if you're not married, are you truly all in?
Are you really there?
And I think marriage, especially in the religious sense, till death do us part is part of that.
And get back to the divorce rates and those sorts of things.
But if you truly are married and you're committed there, then you have someone to grow old with.
And grow old with can mean a lot of different things.
It can mean literally growing older with, right?
But it's all the things that come along with growing older.
It's the parents aging and having health issues.
You got someone to help you through there.
It's your own health or your own, you know, whatever changing and having someone to help you through those sorts of things.
Yeah, so I think that's one.
And that, as you were explaining, has a practical and an emotional piece to it.
Growing old with somebody doesn't feel lonely.
It doesn't, and then the practical piece of, oh, I need help with this.
I can't do this anymore.
I physically can't do this, but we can do it together.
So I really like there's the emotional piece and the practical piece.
And that's with a lot of these.
Same with the financial you were just talking about.
There's very practical reasons, but there's emotional pieces to that.
I don't worry about losing my job because you also have an income, so having that dueling.
So there's the practical and the emotional piece to a lot of these.
Yeah, that's a good point because, yeah, I was thinking the finance is more practical.
It's not.
There's also this, yeah, it gives you that.
And you mentioned, I think we talked about this before too, that you get freedom to try new things or to do different things or to take a risk that you might not if you're just sole income.
Yeah, so there's, yeah, interesting.
Well, this might be a hot topic about another reason why marriage, but I don't think it should be a hot topic at all.
Marriage is the optimal structure for having kids, right?
Having a married couple for a whole bunch of reasons helps you raise kids.
You got a built-in support network.
There's two of you doing it.
Raising a kid by yourself is super hard.
It doesn't mean you can't do it, but I think it's a lot easier with two.
Why else is that the optimal structure?
You're modeling what a healthy relationship looks like.
I'm trying to think if you could do that as, I guess you could as, if you're not married.
Depends how you define what a healthy relationship is, right?
I mean, you can have positive interactions and that, but a loving marriage between two people raising their kid, and this, we're talking very traditional here, and we're dancing around some, we're dancing around saying things that would be offensive, but I think that we need to stop dancing around things because I don't think it's offensive to just say that, in our opinion, a man and a woman married in a family unit is an optimal for it.
It doesn't mean the others don't work.
I just think it's optimal because you bring things to the family raising that I wouldn't be able to bring, and I bring things you wouldn't be able to bring.
Now, could you do it all by yourself?
Yes, of course.
Tons of women raise kids all by themselves.
I just don't think it's optimal.
And I think if you look at a lot of the research, when there's not fathers in the house, there's problems.
When there's not a mother in the house, there's problems.
I think it's just optimal.
Yeah, and another thing about that, when I work only with adults and they'll be telling me about issues they're having in their marriage or their long-term relationship, and I will ask, have you ever, how were your parents?
Or have you ever, and there is a large number of people that have never seen a healthy relationship and did not have that modeled for them, and so now it's affecting them.
This all comes back to, is it a healthy marriage or not?
And we're not at all advocating for staying in an unhealthy marriage.
I do that a lot too, which is the research shows that children in two happy households do better than children in one unhappy household.
And so it's not a reason to stay married if it's not a healthy relationship.
And all the other reasons we talked about for advocating for why marriage might be good for you as a single apply to why marriage is good for you if you're a child.
Your parents have a higher chance of being financially stable.
Two incomes, steady house, that's a better environment.
You're gonna have more emotional support, assuming that your parents are good people.
That's assuming that they're emotionally supportive.
Society is gonna reward that.
We like nuclear families.
That's for what the laws are set up for and medical access and all those things.
So all those benefits that help you as a single individual in a marriage help your kids if you're choosing to have kids.
Doesn't mean other structures don't work.
It's just optimal.
Correct.
Sensitive subject, potentially.
It is.
I'm sure we'll get some feedback on that one.
But I mean, maybe, but I mean, well, A, it's our views and B, it's our experience.
It is our experience.
I mean, I think you, to this point I said earlier, you bring a lot to raising our girls that I would not bring.
I would not do well at.
And they are better rounded people because no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn't have those abilities.
Doesn't mean they wouldn't be healthy and adjusted.
They just would be different people.
And I think they're more rounded because they have the differences.
All right, let's pivot a little bit.
This brings us to our reoccurring segment called Inked Moments.
This is where we share a memory from our past that is related to today's topic.
I'm not sure I wanna do this particular segment but we're gonna do it anyway.
I do, I do, let's start.
Well, listen, do you have a memory of a time when you were considering or questioning commitment or more specifically questioning commitment with me?
I know where this is going.
This is a funny story.
Funny today anyway, at the time, not so funny.
We were in college.
It was my second year, I believe.
And you belonged to a fraternity, did the fraternity life.
One night, there was a party on campus.
You had consumed quite a bit of alcohol and maybe would behave in ways that you wouldn't normally except other times that you had imbibed.
Consumed alcohol.
Yeah, I was pretty drunk, I'm sure.
You were.
Not uncommon in my days in college.
I found out a couple hours after this party had ended that you had made a pass at my roommate.
I can't defend myself.
You really can't, you couldn't at the time either.
It was one of those, I'm pretty sure I said, I looked at you.
I'm pretty sure I looked at you and said, I'm done.
No, no, you don't hit on my roommate.
That's not okay.
Is that like breaking bro code or something?
I shouldn't do that?
Is that inappropriate?
Right, if you really think about it, I wouldn't have been happy with you trying to hit on anybody because we were a couple at the time.
Bad form.
Very bad form.
But it made it kind of exponentially worse in my mind that it was my best friend.
And that was very upsetting.
In my defense, if I don't remember it, did it really happen?
Trust me, it happened.
And you know what, I know where that friend, yeah, I could probably dial her up.
I bet you she'd remember.
But who knows, maybe not.
I haven't talked to her in, oh gosh, I won't even say how long it's been.
So that made you question commitment?
There we go.
Why would that make you question commitment?
For a day.
We broke up at that time.
It was, we talked about it the next, I still was adamant that I was done.
We broke up and we were broke up for a while.
And yeah, I thought about that.
If Michael were to come back, would I take him back?
What, is he worth it?
Is it?
It was definitely a questioning of commitment during that time that we were apart.
Well, there you go.
There's today's inked moment.
More inked in someone's memory than mine.
Do you seriously not remember that?
I have no recollection of that at all.
Are you being a thousand percent truthful?
Yeah, of course.
Wow.
Yeah, I don't remember that at all.
Wow.
Where was the party at?
Was it at the frat house or was it at?
No, it was on campus somewhere.
On campus parties, oh my gosh, no.
Yeah.
No.
Yeah.
I might've had a drinking problem.
That is one of the things I ask on an assessment.
Have you ever blacked out?
And if not, not remembering.
Yeah, well, I mean, I have a poor memory of past stuff in general.
Okay.
Throw alcohol on there and it probably is like gasoline on the fire in more ways than one.
Well then why do you think we broke up for those couple of months in college?
Well, I mean, I did not know it was a, I did not know it was tied to a single event.
I just assumed it was, I mean, we were going through a time where I was questioning, is this long-term marriage?
Like, am I gonna marry it or not?
So, I mean, I was 22 years old.
I mean, I was a fry guy.
I think we've already established that, you know.
Yeah.
Frontal cortex was still developing and trying to decide, do I wanna be in long-term relationship?
You might've only been 20.
Right, I mean, that's what I'm saying.
I was very young.
Yeah.
So all those, well, back to your earlier doubts, losing independence.
And it was like, those are real doubts.
Fear of divorce.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I, yes, I did not come from healthy marriages.
And so I had never seen a healthy marriage beyond your parents.
And so, yeah, fear of divorce probably was part of that.
But it was much more just, I was 20.
I don't know, you know, I mean.
Yeah. 20-year-old kids are stupid.
And if you're listening and you're a 20-year-old kid and you're considering commitment and everything, yeah, keep considering and make sure you make the right choice because you're stupid and you gotta sort of work through those things and try not to do things that hurt your partner, which obviously that was.
Yeah, I'm sure I had to do some work to get back from that as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I'd say that's a good inked moment, but I guess it's just an inked moment.
I'm gonna have to dig up something about you in future episodes.
Oh, it's there, right?
Who in a long-term relationship doesn't have something that they look back on and go, oof, that was not, I was not at my best.
Well, we established that.
I cannot say that that's not me because that was probably not at my best.
And I'm sure I have some as well.
But I was at my authentic self.
How's that for a 2000s or 2020 verbiage, authentic self?
Oh, wow.
All right.
Yeah, nice excuse.
I told you I was not gonna defend myself, but I think I did.
You think I did say it in my defense.
I don't remember it.
Before we get to our closing segment, we wanna dig into one more topic.
And this is the question of, is marriage the only way to successfully commit to someone and build something lasting?
Are there other structures that will work for you?
And I think our answer is no, marriage is not the only way to go.
For us, it's been amazing and it's worked really well, and we've worked really hard at it.
But there are other people that it's just not right for.
Let's talk about that a little bit.
Well, I can think of an example that I've seen at least twice, which is somebody has really bad health issues and are on Medicaid.
And when you get married, you potentially lose that.
And so they have totally committed to each other, but they don't have the legal document that shows that they're committed to each other.
That is such a cold-hearted assessment of the power of marriage.
I mean, you're right.
I mean, there are, and I know someone in our family who has chosen not to get married because she has health issues.
And yeah, I mean, I get that.
I didn't know you were gonna go to that one, but yeah.
Were you hoping I'd go to something more touchy-feely?
I mean, that would be in- I'm not always touchy-feely.
That would be on brand for you.
I did not think it would be so, yeah.
I mean, there are, just like the law is set up to help marriage, the law is also set up to discourage marriage in certain cases, and that is absolutely one where it discourages marriage.
So if you are someone who has major health issues and you are in one of those situations, yeah, that is a reason and you could still be committed to someone.
Don't abuse the system in those things because sometimes you actually can build much more by just simply getting married.
You don't have to stay in those government programs, but that's another whole side topic we should talk about.
And in the two, I'm thinking that it would not have benefited them at all because there was no hire.
I agree with, I totally agree.
I think the biggest reason I would say that commitment can work but is not optimal is you lose out on a lot of the things we were just talking about.
You lose out on the financial benefits, not just the legal financial benefits, but the tax benefits and stuff, but you lose out on the synergy of dual incomes and the reduced expenses and those sort of things.
So there's a tangible reason.
The another big reason is be super aware of the rights you don't have.
You don't have property rights.
You don't have, let's say you're living with someone long-term and they've bought a house and you're paying half the expenses.
Well, you're not buying half the house.
You're paying half the expenses.
There's a difference there.
You're paying into a house, but you're not gaining equity in a house.
That's the problem.
And it's like, yeah, just be very careful with that.
We do question the, are you really in it?
If you don't have the legal bindings, because it's harder to get out of a marriage than it is to get out of a relationship.
This episode has been very funny because it's been really touchy-feely stuff, but just really practical stuff.
It's very hard emotionally to get out of a marriage.
It's very hard emotionally to get out of a relationship, but it's super easy legally to get out of a relationship.
It's super hard to get out of a marriage legally.
Like, it's just, I mean, so it's the same reason, but it's, yeah, I don't know.
It's just, it's one of those episodes.
The other thing, and I think this is maybe, I don't know, maybe this is the most important to me of all the reasons why marriage is better for you.
When done right, and I feel like we really just have to keep qualifying that because so many relationships, not just marriage, so many relationships can be suboptimal, abusive, dysfunctional, whatever terms you want to use for it.
But when done right, the power of a shared vision, and when you put your monies together, your goals together, your ambitions together, you have a partner pulling you along.
And we shared a story in the last episode about some times of struggle, and it helps you through those times of struggle, but it also makes the times of celebration way better, right?
You want to talk about the growing trend of- Living apart together?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is a term I had not heard, and I came across, and anyway, go on.
Yeah, what is that?
It always cracks me up, that they give an acronym to everything.
So this is L-A-T, living apart together, and it's people that are in a committed relationship, either a marriage or a long-term relationship, but they don't- Often marriage.
Often marriage, okay, that don't share a home.
They have separate residences.
The stat I read is there's something like 3.8 million married couples that live apart in the U.S. I was shocked by that.
I'm like, what?
That is a huge number.
Anyway, go on.
Why would you do that?
I mean, besides being batshit crazy, why would you do that?
That's dropping a bomb.
I shouldn't do that.
You know, people that are worried about losing their independence.
I also read, probably in the same article that you read about this, they say sex lives could be better because it's an anticipatory thing, because you're not seeing everybody during the day, or you don't live with them, and so it's- I so want to cough and say, yes, that's it, but go on.
I do, I find- I shouldn't cough into the mic.
I find that fascinating.
I'm trying to think, what- Well, there's, of all the things around this trend, and it's not a huge trend, but it is a growing trend.
It caught our eyes.
Like, wow, okay, I had not thought of that.
We were thinking in two trends, married or committed and living together.
But this concept of being married, but not living together, sort of, A, blew my mind of why would you do this?
But there are some cases where it makes sense.
Let's say you have a job that's very regional, and let's say you've raised your family, and you've lived in an area for the whole time, and you don't want to relocate your family.
So you might, for a period of time, have co-residents.
There are some very edge cases where it probably makes legitimate sense, but it just struck me as a very odd relationship, for my view.
And again, these are our stories and our views.
And again, join us in the comments, and disagree or agree, it's fine.
I think it's just nutty that you would do that.
And all the reasons it gave for a while, it's like, yeah, that's all the reasons why I would stay single.
So just stay single, it's fine.
Like, no, you don't have to get married.
If you're gonna get married, do it and be a superpower with it.
Do it 100%.
This almost seems like you're not only partially doing it.
And what's the point of that?
Yeah, it's interesting.
Very.
Well, let's wrap it up.
Let's give you something practical.
We've been on our soapbox about why marriage is good and beneficial.
We always like to give you something tangible to take home with you on this.
Pen to Paper.
This episode, we've explored the power of commitment and how choosing marriage can help you build a long lasting love.
In this Pen to Paper segment, we're going to give you a practical challenge or reflection to help you write your own lasting marriage story.
Today's challenge is to weigh the long-term benefits of marriage.
We say that, what do we mean by weighing the benefits of marriage?
How do we do that?
It's more than just thinking about it.
We think about a lot of things in a given day.
You've got to write things down.
There has to be, I believe, some formal process.
Write down, you know, why would you get married?
What is important to you?
What are your goals?
And how would you reach them through marriage?
Yeah, we're big believers in goals and visions.
And this is the woo side of things, which is speaking things into existence.
We've encouraged our daughters all through their youth and now in their young adulthood of have a picture for where you want to go.
Have a vision for what you want to do.
Don't obsess over your vision, but have a clear vision for where you want to go.
So in this reflection, we're challenging you to write out your goals.
Where do you want to be?
Do you want to own a house?
If that's on your vision board, for the love of everything, please do not buy a house with someone you're not married to.
Terrible idea.
You don't own the house outright.
When you get divorced, there's a clear process of how you separate property.
If you're just in a relationship, there are no processes.
There are no protections.
Please, for the love of everything, do not do that.
I feel strongly about that one.
I- Really, you don't say?
No, man, I've seen people do it and it's just a train wreck.
Don't do that.
So if your vision is to buy a house with someone, consider marriage, right?
But what are some other areas, goals?
One, to have a child.
If you want to be a parent, it is healthier and, dare I say, easier to do it with someone.
Strongly consider marriage in that case.
If you have goals that are financial and ambition, having a solid partner, map out your vision.
What are some visions that might not align to marriage?
Let's say you want to be a traveling nurse and you want to spend time traveling the globe and you want to do that solo or you want to back, like, great, awesome.
Marriage is not for you.
So the reflection part of the Pen to Paper is to take the time to picture what you want out of your life and evaluate it across the benefits of being married.
The financial benefits, the legal benefits, the emotional, the societal, the financial, all the other benefits that we just explored.
Yeah.
Sound good?
Yeah.
All right.
It's a good one.
Just in case it wasn't clear, we advocate for a strong, powerful marriage.
We think it brings benefits to young men, young women, old men, old women.
I was just gonna say that.
Men and women of every age.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, and we didn't even get into, and let's be clear on why I don't get into these topics.
We don't get into topics of non-traditional marriage because I don't have experience in it.
So I'm not saying that gay marriage is not beneficial and positive.
I'm not gonna talk about those because I don't have lived experience on those.
So I'm just bringing the perspective of, and I say traditional man and woman in this case, not atraditional marriage.
Traditional marriage I think has another term around it.
But if you listen to this episode, many of those legal structures, many of those health access structures, many of those social support, all those apply across other forms of marriage.
Yeah, so I just wanted to kind of say that out there because we speak what we know and I don't want to speak to areas that I don't know.
So I can't talk to those relationships.
That makes a lot of sense.
I'm glad you clarified.
I hadn't thought to do that.
There you go.
Anything else you wanna talk about in advocating for marriage today?
All right, so I think that's probably the episode that'll be our hardest sell of straight on why you should get married.
Next episode, we're gonna dig into an area we love.
This'll be our first episode on it.
And we're gonna probably have many more episodes on this, but we're gonna dig into the financial side.
Obviously we talked some of the benefits today, but we're really gonna talk about the relational benefits of finance, to share funds, to not share funds, to share accounts, goals, et cetera.
We'll start digging into some of those topics.
And we're pretty passionate about this area.
So it'll probably be multiple episodes that will revisit this.
We're not gonna cover it all in one episode.
It'd be a day long episode.
We'll save that for our seminar.
We'll write down the road.
There we go.
This is like fun.
All right, anything else you wanna cover?
No, we've, yes, we've really covered marriage and why we think it's the way to go.
Okay, that wraps up today's exploration of commitment in a modern relationship.
Thank you for joining us today.
We invite you to connect with us, share a comment, ask a question.
Let us know your thoughts on commitment in a modern relationship.
And if you like this content, give us a like, leave a positive review, and remember to subscribe to get notified of future episodes.
Thanks all.
Have a good one.