What Happens After You Get Married?

This post should more accurately be entitled “what can happen after you get married”, because many marriages stay happy for years.  This is merely what could  happen, and too frequently does.  It’s pitched to guys who have never been married or had close friends who are married.  It’s pitched to guys bc I have more experience with that angle.  It would be an interesting idea for some of our female blogger readers to write something on this subject that is pitched to what women might find after marriage.

Some wives stay looking great for many years.  This isn’t the norm.  Be prepared for your wife to pay less attention to her appearance than she did before the marriage.  This happens to an even greater extent after she has a baby.  This is understandable on several levels.   One, raising a small child requires a lot of time.  It’s difficult for most of us to carve out time and energy to work out even without small children. 

Also, there is just less incentive to keep looking great.  There’s an old episode of the Murphy Brown show in which Candice Bergen finds which White House official started having an affair by looking at who started gym memberships.  People, guys and girls, want to look their best when they are on the market or in a new relationship.  After the marriage, working out is done less often.  A Nordic Track is an expensive clothes rack.

Next, for those guys who were attracted to your girlfriend’s long, gorgeous hair, be warned that it may be one of the first things to go.  Girls know that long hair attracts guys.  But after they’re married they don’t really need the hair anymore.  So off it comes, if not right after the marriage, then usually soon after a baby comes.  And there’s nothing you can do about it.  If you try to talk her out of cutting it (if she even tells you of her plans before going to the salon), she’ll reply defensively, “Well, it’s MY hair.”

I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon.  If a woman gets her long hair cut off, her female friends will all applaud her for it.  In fact, I think the exact phrase her friends will use is: “It’s sooo cute.  And I’ll be it’s so easy to take care of.” (note: I’ll be Britney Spears’s recently shaved head is fairly easy to take care of; no worries about conditioners, stylists, frizz, hairspray, etc. ; just a Gillette razor and some shaving cream).

Women exert a lot of peer pressure on other women in regard to hair styles.  They will applaud the women who cut off their long hair and try to convince women with long hair to cut theirs off.  This mainly happens to women over a certain age.  It doesn’t appear to happen to women whose job is dependent on their looks, such as actresses or models.   One possible reason for this is that the women who cut their hair realize they don’t really need to be attractive anymore.

This are just a few of the areas which may well not be the same after marriage (or at least after the first few years honeymoon period).  In light of our recent comment from a guy who married a Russian woman, I’m curious as to whether these things are common with foreign wives.

Tomorrow I’ll write about the most vexing change guys find with their wives after marriage.

 

Young people want good-looking mates; their parents want them to have mates from the same social class

Three psychologists in The Netherlands just published the results of a study on how young people’s preferences differed from their parents’ preferences on finding mates.   The work, recently published in the Review of General Psychology, involved interviewing Dutch, American, and Kurdish young people and parents. 

Not surprisingly, the young people wanted attractive mates while their parents mainly wanted the kids to have mates from similar social classes and groups: 

… young people invariably considered the potential mate’s attractiveness the most important quality, whereas parents uniformly paid more attention to the suitors’ social background or group affiliation…

http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2008/may/15/checking-mates/?living

There’s no great surprise in these findings.  It has been thoroughly proven that people who are dating and picking partners, both male and female, almost always want good-looking partners.  For a review of the evidence for this proposition, see almost any of my posts on online dating and speed dating.

 

 

Toxic Wives

I came across an interesting article in England’s Daily Telegraph.  It’s about toxic wives.  Here are some of the interesting tidbits, but the link to the article is below.  As you’re reading keep in mind that the currency the author is writing about, the British pound, is worth about $2 US Dollars:

You may not know one personally, but you will certainly have read about them. They are, increasingly these days, the figures who emerge triumphant from the divorce courts. They are the ones who get to keep the house (no mortgage), the cars (usually more than one), the staff (approaching double figures) and, more often than not, half the husband’s fortune, regardless of what she has done to contribute towards it…

She is the woman who gives up work as soon as she marries, ostensibly to create a stable home environment for any children that might come along, but who then employs large numbers of staff to do all the domestic work she promised to undertake, leaving her with little to do all day except shop, lunch, luxuriate. Believe me, there is no shortage of the breed and I’ve been inundated with horror tales about them.

There is, for example, the TW who made around £30 million from only four years of marriage. Her husband couldn’t stand the way she was abusive to his staff, aggressive towards him and extravagantly indulgent with herself.

Then, there’s the ex-wife of a friend of mine, Belinda, who has been awarded several million pounds for a marriage that lasted less than three years and produced no children. The sum amounts to almost £5,000 for every day of marriage. No wonder her ex-husband, let’s call him Crispin, a City financier, is in despair. After reading the article he told me: ”Giving her £5 million for doing absolutely nothing except shop and lunch makes me question the sanity of our legal system.”

… Soon after their wedding, Belinda gave up work to care for the house. ”At first, I couldn’t understand why, because we had a cleaner who cleaned, a gardener who gardened and home cooking was provided by M&S,” says Crispin. ”Overnight she changed.

“Friends were no longer allowed to drop in like they used to - at least a week’s notice had to be given. Shoes had to be taken off at the front door. She became nagging, scolding, overbearing and shrewish. She made my life a misery. It pains me that this able-bodied, 40-year-old woman will be handsomely rewarded for the rest of her life - all at my expense. I feel as though I’m the victim of legally sanctioned burglary.”

Capturing a rich husband is seen as a legitimate career choice in itself. A 25-year-old banker friend told me that many girls don’t even bother getting a job after university - they stay on the party circuit until they’ve trapped their milch-cow.

”Just turn up at Mahiki, (the London nightclub frequented by Princes William and Harry) and you’ll find an army of potential TWs… they’re like a gang of seductive, pretty vampires who are sharpening their talons and teeth in a bid to catch a rich husband and then suck him dry of his hard-earned cash. It’s common knowledge now that one of the most lucrative careers a woman can have is to get married, have a child, and get divorced.”

…Believe me, there is a completely different species out there. They may look human, in an artificially manufactured way, but they don’t seem tohave any conscience or interest in anything other than the trivial minutiae of their own existence and, naturally, how to hitch themselves to an alpha-male…

HOW TO SPOT A TOXIC WIFE

1 Women who are secure in themselves and have a more developed emotional intelligence and personal depth do not feel the need to show off. Check whether or not she is festooned with ‘designer’ accessories. Listen carefully to what she says. How often does she name-drop?

2 On first acquaintance, she will want to find out if you’re rich or not. If you find yourself discussing your assets within the first 10 minutes you know her agenda. She is not going to waste time on you if you don’t have serious money.

3 She will flirt without first finding out if you’re married or involved with someone else. She has no scruples about stealing another woman’s man.

4 Even though she may have an impressive job, her main asset is sex. She will come on in a highly provocative manner, be wearing lots of make-up and revealing clothes. Potential toxic wives are extremely clever. Do not equate intelligence with emotional values and worth.

5 Often she will use the FSFM tactic (feel sorry for me). This will manifest itself on the second or third date. She wants to assess how generous you can be and will tell you how ”naïve” she is and how “misled” by some nasty people she owes money to. As a chivalrous male, you get out your chequebook.

6 You must find out how motivated she is. Ask her what her future goals, dreams and aspirations are.

7 Toxic gold-diggers tend to target older men. And your level of physical attractiveness makes no difference. Do you genuinely wildly arouse her or is this all an act?

8 She will choose the most expensive item on the menu or the most expensive drink.

9 Men, who have been recently widowed or divorced are great prey. You are at your most vulnerable.

10 Before you marry, go on holiday together or spend at least some time co-habiting. Remember, if you make a mistake you will pay for it for the rest of your life.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml?xml=/portal/2007/03/02/nosplit/fttoxic102.xml

Women divorces husband, gets money, then many years later is allowed to go back in and extract more money from ex-husband

Christian Schneider at Overlawyered reports a truly mind-boggling result from an English court.  A man’s wife left him 30 years ago and they were divorced in 1981.  He paid her a settlement then but she later lost the money.  She sues her ex-husband to get more money and wins:

British businessman Dennis North’s wife Jean left him 30 years ago after she began seeing another man. Their split became official in 1981, when they signed an agreement that granted Jean their house and income from rents on their various properties.

North went on to be a wildly successful businessman, while his ex-wife never worked. However, a judge has just ordered North to pay Jean a large lump-sum payment because she has “fallen on hard times” due to a number of money-losing investments:

Mr North, 70, has been ordered by a court to hand her another £202,000 (that’s $400,000 US dollars and about 257,000 Euros).

The order follows a series of big-money divorce cases which have swung the law against husbands and resulted in huge payments to ex-wives even after short childless marriages. The North case now threatens to make husbands pay large sums even decades after a split.

http://overlawyered.com/2007/06/large-payment-awarded-after-30-years-of-divorce/

It appears that English courts are now even more hostile to men than even US courts (to be fair, courts in the US vary from state to state; some are harsher toward men than others).

Not the way to keep your wife from getting half of your lottery winnings

Walter Olson at Overlawyered discusses a husband’s ineffective method of keeping his wife from finding out he won a share of a big lottery payoff:

Airline mechanic Arnim Ramdass, 52, allegedly “disconnected the phone line at home and forbade his stay-at-home wife, Donna Campbell, 48, to watch television, Campbell claims in a lawsuit. Eventually, however, she learned the truth: Ramdass, along with 16 other mechanics at Miami International Airport, had won a $19 million lottery jackpot.” (Martha Neil, “Wife Sues Husband for Share of Secret $600K Lottery Win”, ABA Journal, May 13).

Hat tip: http://overlawyered.com/tag/family-law/

The wife sued the husband for divorce soon after she discovered all this.

Tips about women

Tad Safran’s interesting discussion in The London Times of what he learned about women from interacting with his two-year-old niece (I removed some of the less interesting things):

As a single man in my mid-thirties, I’ve spent 20 years trying to understand women, with mixed results. It wasn’t until six months ago, however, that I was given a clear insight into how the female mind works.

…

1 Ignore them

1If I come into a room and bounce up to Lou-Lou like a clown, trying to amuse and entertain, she blanks me completely. It’s as if I don’t exist. If I walk straight past her, however, I guarantee she will call out my name and want to play with me.

2 Bribe them

Gifts work. Preferably something noisy or sparkly. With Lou-Lou, that means stuffed animals that sing or sequined hair grips. With grown women, I suppose that equates to, say, cars and jewellery.

3 Compliment them

I’ve mistakenly always held that compliments are like diamonds: valuable only for their scarcity. Flood the market and they lose all value. Not so. Lou-Lou poos in her nappy, everyone cheers – as if she just came up with a workable solution to world hunger – and she beams like a lighthouse. The same works with grown women, although, of course, only the general principle applies rather than the specific example given here. (I learnt this one the hard way.)

4 Listen to them

I’ve spent my life trying to preempt what women want. I needn’t have bothered. If I just pay attention, Lou-Lou will tell me exactly what she wants: eat, dance, doll, jump, run, sing, play, read. Then all I have to do is organise it. How much simpler my life would have been if I had listened and acted accordingly.

5 Apologise

It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter if you don’t even know what you’ve done. I might have slighted Lou-Lou by putting the wrong doll in the pram. What seems to you or me like a minor infraction is, to her, on a par with genocide. The best policy is to throw yourself on her mercy and beg forgiveness. But you must sound sincere. You don’t have to be sincere, just sound sincere. This is so elementary, yet how many men ignore this advice?

… 

7 Don’t tell them what to do

The best way to guarantee that she doesn’t do what I want is by telling her to do it. The clever thing is to make it seem like her idea – and make it seem fun. One of my proudest moments was convincing Lou-Lou that watching the rugby World Cup final would be more fun than playing in the sandpit.

…

9 Don’t argue

There’s simply no point. You will never win, and if you do win, it will be a hollow victory because of the mood she’ll be in for a long time afterwards. Quite frankly, who needs the aggro? This leads to my final and most important point:

10 Don’t make them cry

There is nothing more distressing than watching Lou-Lou’s enormous, innocent brown eyes overflow with tears, while her mouth becomes a gaping, drooling, mournful air-raid siren that pierces through to the core of my heart. I’m utterly defenceless when she cries. And there’s no known antidote. Food? Monkey impressions? A pony? Stabbing myself in the eye with a chopstick? I will agree to anything to stop her crying

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article3736523.ece

Anyone who has been in a relationship for more than a few weeks will realize the truth of a lot of this.  It reminds me of advice a long-time married guy gave to a guy on the eve of his wedding: learn how to apologize; you’ll be doing it for the rest of your life.

Note: to any female readers who are incensed by this post and want to post an angry reply, you’ll get more people reading your angry reply if you click on the link to the Times article above and post your reply there.

New Jersey Courts Make Ex-husband Continue to Pay Child Support Even When He Proved He Was Not the Father

The New Jersey Courts are hard at work stealing from people under color of law.   The state’s highest court has just upheld a lower court decision forcing a man to continue paying child support after he discovered that he was not the child’s father and that his ex-wife had deceived him into thinking that he, instead of the man she was having an affair with, was the father.

And, unfortunately, this is not an isolated case.  Courts around the country have abetted this sort of fraud committed by women.  And even when people in the legislature tries to change the law, they are rebuffed.  See my account several weeks ago about the fate of a bill in the Tennessee legislature to let men who had been paying child support go into court to prove they are not the fathers and stop paying in the future. 

The New Jersey Supreme Court has upheld a lower court decision against a father who claimed that he should not have to pay child support to his ex-wife after discovering that the child was not his own. It is only the latest in a string of such cases.

The case involves a 10-year-old girl and a divorced couple in Hunterdon County New Jersey. The father submitted evidence that paternity tests showed that his ex-wife had misled him and that she had conceived the child with another man. He wanted to compel the disclosure of the true father and to end his child support payments. Yet, in the lower court decision, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Stephen Rubin ruled that such changes would not be in the child’s best interest …

 

Hat tip: http://jonathanturley.org/2008/01/26/new-jersey-court-order-man-to-pay-child-support-even-if-he-is-not-true-father/

 

The people who set this child support apparat on the country often justify its injustices by parroting the line, “men have to support their children”.  But this incident, and many similar ones, prove this line is a lie.  The men in these incidents were proven not to have fathered these children.  The law is just a means to steal money from them and distribute it to the women who have defrauded them, often for years.

Reasons for Divorce

Bryan Caplan categorizes the reasons people get divorced.  This is an interesting piece for divorced people.  They can determine which category of reason they fit into.  It’s interesting for unhappily married people.  They can use it as a tool to analyze their marriage.  And it’s also a bit useful to single people.  They can use it to figure out whether they want to marry the person they’re dating. 

For those of you who aren’t married and aren’t dating anyone, take a look at the rest of this blog.  There’s plenty of material on dating. 

1. Initial mismatch. Some divorces arise because they were a bad idea from the start. If people only stay married for six months, they were probably incompatible all along.

2. Emergent mismatch - or in plain English, “We grew apart.” Some divorces arise because a marriage was a good idea for a while, but eventually ceased to be in the interests of either party.

3. Defection due to expected divergence in mate value. As evolutionary psychologists will tell you, female mate value peaks and starts to decline at a much earlier age than male mate value: It’s a lot easier for a 45-year-old man to remarry than a 45-year-old woman. This creates a big incentive for men to promise lifetime fidelity, then jump ship.

4. Defection due to unexpected non-culpable divergence in mate value. Remember the part of the contract that says “for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health”? When one partner experiences an unexpected rise in mate value (e.g. one becomes a successful novelist) or experiences an unexpected fall (e.g. develops a horrible disease), one of the parties has a temptation to back out - and some do.

5. Punishment for clear-cut breach of contract. Adultery’s the obvious example, but I’m sure you can think of more.

6. Punishment for unexpected and culpable decline in mate value - or in plain English, “You let yourself go!” The marriage contract may not explicitly say that you can’t become a bum or morbidly obese or perpetually bitter. But you’ve heard about incomplete contracts, right? When one party falls far short of expected mate value due to deliberate action or inaction, divorce is not only likely, but easy for neutral outside observers to understand.

(Just to make a men’s rights aside, it strikes me that people are a lot more forgiving when a women divorces her husband for becoming a bum than when a man divorces his wife for gaining a hundred pounds. When I see a man whose wife has let herself go, I often think “Poor guy - how could she do this to him?!”)

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/03/the_root_causes.html

I’ll focus on number six: unexpected and culpable (blameworthy) decline in mate value.  It always amazes me when people get married, then completely let themselves go, or become consistently nasty to their spouses, etc., and are shocked when their spouse considers divorce.

When you get married you have a number of obligations.  I like Bryan’s examples: you should avoid being perpetually bitter and becoming morbidly obese.  And you should do your part to support the family.

He is spot on when he remarks that most people are more understanding when a wife divorces her husband for becoming a bum than they are when a husband divorces his wife for becoming hugely obese.  If you doubt this, gently raise the topic with your married friends.  Very gently. 

Lots of people will respond that the guy married his wife for better or worse.  But it seems that each spouse owes the other a fair degree of effort not to let themselves go.  And if they do let themselves go, they should bear quite a bit of the blame when their spouse files for divorce.

Why Most Married Women in NYC Don’t Work

I came across an interesting analysis entitled “Why Don’t Married Women in New York Work”.  New York City was the only city in the US in which most married women didn’t hold down jobs. 

If you’re a married woman living in the New York City area, there’s a better than 50 percent chance that you don’t work, according to a recent analysis of Census data by economists affiliated with the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

More specifically, only 49 percent of white high school-educated married women in their prime working ages were holding down jobs in the New York area as of the 2000 Census. To put that in perspective, there are roughly 2 million woman over 15-years-old who are married in the New York area.

The national average for this particular demographic is 67 percent. At the other end of the spectrum is Minneapolis where almost 80 percent of these married women are employed — that’s larger than the percentage of working men aged 25 and older in the U.S.

http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/odd-numbers/2008/05/08/why-dont-married-women-in-new-york-work

Hat tip: www.marginalrevolution.com

The fascinating question is why.  The author suggests several possibilities.  First, traffic congestion.  If you click on the link above to see the full article you will find a list of cities with the percentages of married women who work.  Almost all of them are cities with famously bad traffic.  The explanation would be it’s more time-consuming and stressful to face rush-hour traffic, so more married women decide not to work. 

This sounds plausible, but I’m not convinced.  I suspect there has to be more to the explanation than just bad traffic.  Another suggestion made is there are lots of well-off guys who live in NYC, so their wives can afford not to work.  That’s probably a good part of the explanation.  But I’m curious why there is no great correlation between income and non-working wives in all the other cities. 

Any thoughts?   

She Withholds Sex from her Husband as Punishment and Gives it as Reward

When I wrote my “BJ as Reward” post several days ago I had not seen the following article by Leslie Bennetts on MSNBC.  It’s very much in this same vein, only she uses both the stick and the carrot.  She withholds sex from her husband if she thinks he doesn’t do enough around the house and she gives him sex if she determines he has earned it by doing enough around the house.  If I made this stuff up many of you wouldn’t believe it, but here is the story, straight from the horses  mouth:

Maintaining some semblance of parity in your marriage requires you to deploy the same kinds of nasty tactics you swore you would never stoop to as a parent but nonetheless found yourself using the minute you actually had a kid. Bribery and punishment work; so do yelling and complaining. Threats are also effective, as long as everyone knows you mean business. With husbands, tender blandishments and nooky are particularly useful, as is the withholding of the aforementioned.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24206284/

Hat tip: Dr. Helen at http://www.drhelen.blogspot.com/

As I said in my previous post, this is like treat-training a dog, giving him treats as a reward when he does something you like.

And here is a picture of Leslie Bennetts, whose consent to have sex with her husband is considered the granting of a reward: