Relationships, sexual or otherwise, are not subject to paperwork. The days of relationships, sex, or even reproduction being tied to marriage are long gone.
How can this logical fallacy pass through editorialising? As marriage becomes less popular, for the same number of couples, you will have fewer marriages but not more singles.
-Income tax brackets above about $200k
-SALT cap
-Mortgage interest deduction
-HSA contributions (if have children)
-Dependent care FSA contributions
It’s stupid because the combination of singles mixers, tinder, and community events make it very easy to find a partner (keeping them is another story) but nobody wants to try. I’m of the opinion that porn has sapped their will to find women, even though it’s very possible to have a healthy relationship with porn and men have indeed had healthy relationships with porn throughout recorded history.
In most cases it just means “not in a relationship” and doesn’t tell you about marital status. But if you’re in specifically asking about marriage, it can mean unwed (and I’m sure it gets even trickier for poly relationships).
If a flirty stranger approaches and asks “are you single”, you’d say no “no, I’m in a relationship”
If you’re filling out a form at the doctor office and it asks “marital status”, you’d put “single”.
I’m not dating someone young enough to be my daughter, so the pool of available women consists of divorcees, widows, long-term single and various flavors of married and dating. Divorced people and widows have strong incentives, as spousal support and survivors benefits for children are contingent on not being re-married.
Also, if you’re not planning to have children with a partner and have money that’s worth litigating over, (or property that was your late spouse that should go to a child) marriage complicates that.
A lot of young people worked in those offices. It was basically a rite of passage for them to move just outside of Seattle around the time they were getting married.
This was so widely understood that it factored into decisions about where to locate office buildings and influences remote and hybrid policy. If you wanted to attract and retain more experienced employees then being in-office only in the middle of the city was risky.
Tell me you haven't tried to date in a decade without telling me. Dating is more in the ditches than it has ever been.
I think some of this is a side-effect of many people planning to never have children.
When people get married and think about settling down and maybe having kids, they usually leave high cost of living cities. They want stability, something they can own or rent long term, and usually more space, especially if kids are coming.
Sometimes they move to the suburbs, sometimes across the country.
The only people who stay tend to be rich people who can actually afford to get some space and stability in the city. Even then many of those decide to leave anyway for other reasons, again especially if they want kids.
High cost city centers are basically an extension of college dorms at this point. They are where people go to start their careers or level up, not stay.
This is like saying “study shows that most people in a shopping mall are looking to buy something” then extrapolating some larger conclusion from that.
https://www.ggd.world/p/the-global-collapse-of-coupling-and
I wonder if the ultimate cost (in lives never born) of technologies like smartphones and Tinder will be. If a significant part of the entire youth cohort never learns to interact with the other sex in the real world, we might be looking at a pandemics of loneliness - and at subsequent global birth deficits in eight to nine figures.
Having all of your sex come from porn is like having all of your meals come from McDonald's. And that's a choice you can make. It's probably not the best choice, but a fair number of people do in fact make it.
Having children in an urban area is more expensive and the schools tend to be worse.
I don't think this is a uniquely Seattle phenomenon. It's pretty common to emigrate from the city center to the suburbs when planning to start a family or otherwise "settle down".
In most cases it's just simple economics.
You can construct your family in a lot of different ways. Having a lot of friends, some very close friends, and zero lovers is a perfectly valid one.
At least, it was becoming such. Legally, there is more and more push back against structures other than one male and one female, who are each other's sole and perpetual means of support.
If you want a personal anecdote - I'm partnered, not married, we don't plan to have kids or marry, and worry pretty much 0 about retirement or having enough funds to pass on to another generation. We're just enjoying our lives for however long that may be.
If coupling is reduced, it should become the norm for women to have and raise children alone, or at least without a male partner. This increases the burden on women, so at the same time the number of children they must support would have to decrease.
This could be achieved technologically, by filtering sperm to remove Y chromosome carrying gametes. As a result, the female/male ratio of newborns would dramatically increase. At the US TFR of 1.66, a 2:1 female to male ratio would be more than enough to maintain the population. Even higher ratios could be imagined, leading to an almost entirely female population.
Social engineering to reach this state is left as an exercise to the science fiction writer.
What big tech wants are people who are willing to give up everything for the dream of making money, and that's what they got.
Edit: Our life is pretty good in any case. I would never let my kid go outside and play unsupervised in Seattle even tho I myself did this as a kid in my home town (the safety I was mentioning).
For making healthcare decisions, durable power attorney and a medical proxy should be sufficient for unmarried couples. Not an attorney, talk to one if this is a need you have to validate your authority posture. The best time to have a plan is before you need it.
As for safety, for some reason those big tech employees keep voting for progressive politicians whose failed policies have ruined their cities. I guess voters are getting what they want?
This sounds like the inverse of the white, “every generation thinks they invented sex.” I say that because I doubt people have changed that much.
Some people have decided that they don't need a relationship to be happy. They've found other ways to cope. For some this may be sour grapes. But that's another coping mechanism in itself!
I'm not sure what Third Space / Place would be viable to find a life partner. The region is relatively sparse and spread out due to bodies of water, hilly topology. By car everything still seems far and the road network (as always for anywhere) strained to the limits of what people are barely willing to tolerate for commutes. Transit infrastructure is mostly commuter busses for 9-5 jobs in Seattle, maybe a bus or two to Bellevue. The single artery of slow (no express last I road) 1 rail line each way light rail still under construction at end points and offering not much real benefit for someone trying to connect between points without transfers. Transfers outside of Seattle a huge annoyance due to sparse schedules and routes that generally don't go where someone might desire.
Which is a long way of saying; there's a very real transaction cost in time, energy, and financial resources to get anywhere.
Any hobbies, any venues, anything I can think of other than places like a library (to be quite and alone) all have their own costs. They're for profit, not for hanging out (for low / no cost) nor meeting new people.
It's to the point where I'd take a SciFi grade benevolent AI nudging stuff together to solve these intractable issues and get the right people into the right places so that matches do happen without winning the lotto level odds.
2. It all comes back to housing density/supply. As you say, daycare costs are dominated by staffing ratios/wages - which are a function of cost of living. The surge of high income earners + housing supply deficit = pricing out daycare workers (and daycares).
That's at least vastly overstated, and probably just false. I'm an American living in a major urban center and I don't think I know anybody for whom the decision to get married was influenced by legal considerations to any significant degree.
I enjoyed my wedding. We invited family with the goal to celebrate together and we made sure our guests enjoyed it.
I have seen plenty of our wedding pictures hanging on walls (from them in it, not us).
I also can't tell you how interesting it feels that we share now the same last name.
I think it's a nice progression for a relationship.
What’s overwhelmingly changed in my lifetime (since 1980) is that young adult people would rather be alone with no children than take the risk on being unhappy or getting a divorce.
The single biggest change is that the average sentiment now in the “global-west” is “why should I risk my current lifestyle for the risk and pain of a family.”
That wasn’t previously really an option for most people - for a lot of structural reasons. A lot of it was structural repression and the fact that is gone is an unalloyed good.
However it does mean that the expectations for human communities and population growth that have undergirded humanity since the neolithic no longer apply.
We need to fundamentally rethink what humanity is working towards, at a global scale, if the gross population numbers had peaked for humanity.
I think your Americans-vs-Europeans argument is greatly exaggerated if not outright false.
I have been married for 15 years though and I’m 50 and my wife is 49
I guess I also wish they defined the boundaries of Seattle: do they mean the urban core, the city limits, King County, or the metropolitan region? I know relatively few married people who live in Seattle, but that's because it's too expensive to buy a house in Seattle's city limits. You either have to inherit a house, or have both people work in a high-paying industry for this to be affordable.
I also know more than a few couples who are in very long term, committed relationships, living in Seattle with no intention to get legally married. They are 'married' in the culturally meaningful sense, just not the legal one.
My point is it seems (to my inexpert reading) like their statistic is capturing very young people, who rent apartments in Seattle but aren't ready to get married, and older people who may have houses in Seattle, but are more likely to be divorced or widowed. But, they're mostly not talking about 30-60 year olds, who are more likely to be married, bu live outside Seattle and commute into it. Weird.
I don't know how much I care about this statistic.
Do you think a different city would have been better for him? I only visited Seattle once and I know this is a cliched thought but I do wonder if the weather and sprawl undermine people’s chances to make connections. Vs a more dense or at least sunny city.
I think this is one important reason that marriage is not as common, since the society is aligned towards that is should be possible to manage on your own if you absolutely need to.
I can't find a proper number but anecdotally I think maybe 50% of first time parents are married in Sweden.
And yes obviously this is paid by higher taxes, but seen an an investment to keep the demography (reasonably) sane.
I got engaged to my wife with the expectation of us getting married 6 months later. We pulled our marriage forward 6 months because I got laid off from my job and needed to get on her insurance. I had a contract literally the next week after getting laid off and could have paid for COBRA out of pocket. But it was her idea to go to the courthouse
Now, it’s because they want you to give up everything.
Man, you can make millions working for big tech. At some point you have to take responsibility for your own self.
Though very few of those cases we’re people who otherwise would not have gotten married, rather people who got a legal marriage very quickly to access health, benefits then took the normal amount of time for the ceremonial wedding
On the other hand, forcing people outside of the city to afford a family means more GDP from building roads, selling tyres, replacing cars, petrol sales, oil refining…
> Did 51% of the population want that?
No. But that doesn't matter. Unpopular laws are passed all the time.
> Which group wanted it and made it happen?
Such laws have support from both sides of the political parties (not really from the grand public). CAQ party sees broad government interventions as a form of 'traditionality' while PLQ party sees them as 'protection of XYZ'.
Raising children is a lot of work. It’s twice as much work without a partner, not to mention not having the extra income. (I don’t imagine men in a 2:1 society will be interested in paying much child support.)
The number of children in advanced societies (particularly in cities) has already plummeted. And I don’t think many women are going to want to sign up to be single mums.
As far as sperm selection goes… that’s already an option popular in China and India, along with sex selective abortions. The preference is for males, though, for various reasons. I am not convinced the end result of this is wholesome.
https://www.childcare.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Washingto...
https://population-europe.eu/research/policy-insights/why-ar...
And, yes, outside of Manhattan and young people essentially living like they did in college for a few years, car dependency is just what most people do.
I'd claim it did work for some time (from the 1970s to the 2000s) because it allowed the transition to a society where women did not have to choose between children and a career.
I am not sure what is the reason for lower birth rate now. Maybe that young people have gotten used to that you always have a choice.
In the UK the main effect of marriage is that it protects the lower earning partner if the relationship breaks down - most often (even now!) this is a woman who gives up work/takes a break from work to bring up kids. I come across a good many single mothers (mostly online because of an FB group I admin) who would have been MUCH better off financially if they had been married, and a lot who are a lot better off because they were married.
Historically the main reason for legal marriage was to protect women from being left with kids by feckless men who evaded responsibility. Its a bit less pressing now we have paternity tests (and contraceptives) but its still a problem, and whoever gives up career for childcare still loses out without marriage.
I do not know where you live, and these laws vary between countries, but in the UK marriage gives you a lot of important legal rights. Not marring disadvantages a lower earning partner (most often a woman who has taken time off a career to look after kids) if the relationship breaks down, it does not give you the same legal rights if one dies with regard to inheritance (no real rights if there is no will, far less right to contest a will, and the loss of a significant inheritance tax exemption even if there is), or being automatically next of kin (I think this has improved in practice), no automatic joint parental responsibility for children, etc.
Should be isn't is. PoA aren't trivially recognized in the way a marriage is. If you have to interact with more than a couple of services you ought to expect friction.
A local medical provider might not be familiar with a PoA but that can be worked out. However, bureaucracies like insurance providers can be staffed with people whose trainings never mentioned PoA but did extensively cover HIPAA compliance (and penalties).
In caring for my spouse, there were times that I needed all of the above: spousehood + PoA + verbal auth from spouse.
source: legal assistant, probate
source: 25yr as caregiver for disabled spouse (+PoA)
We do not have tax breaks for being married here in the UK. There is one tiny advantage if one person does not have a taxable income, but is pretty small.
On the other hand I also (as I said in other comments) know women (and it is still almost entirely women) who have not got a fair deal financial because they were not married, but gave up work to look after the kids/be a home maker. That is just as unfair.
I saw medical proxy mentioned above. I ran into those routinely but they were always supplied by the service provider. When they showed up it was good news; it meant I would have full discretion with that provider.
Cities tend to be vulnerable to this effect, which ruins them for long term family and wealth building (which are closely related things).
Cars are only incidentally about transportation. A car is a machine that offers leverage in property markets. That’s its primary function. They do move you around but if I could get around without one I’d prefer it that way.
The only antidote to this in cities is very liberal zoning and construction policy, and that’s hard to maintain because city residents love seeing their property values rise. Cities tend to become real estate cartels of property owners.
It’s easier to get another twenty miles of roads and infrastructure built in the exurbs than to fight political trench warfare against NIMBY urbanites. If you want to blame something for car dependence and sprawl, blame zoning and city planners not cars.
The issue is: without hope for the future there's not much the State can do to push people into having kids. We live in an age of hopelessness, I don't have my parents optimism from the 80s, I'm starting to approach 40 and every 5 years something happen to chip away on the little hope I still have.
In contrast, dating queer folk has been a joy. They accept me for who I am.
A major motivating factor is that marriage can create myriad ruinous financial entanglements and eliminate most possibilities for recourse. Especially in affluent places like Seattle, people are often entering these relationships with a mature financial and business life. The loss of independence under law, both technically and in practice, in regard to these affairs in marriage has produced countless examples of bad outcomes for people, often forcing them to start over from zero in their 30s or 40s. It doesn’t matter if you divorce later, the damage is already done. By not getting married, they retain independence in these matters recognized by law which shields them from the downside scenarios.
These cases are mostly about retaining the ability to continue to run their businesses, investments, etc as they wish both in marriage and after. States in the western US are notoriously much less accommodating of protecting the interests of individuals in marriage than in some other parts of the country (purportedly due to the strong influence of Spanish legal customs in that region of North America). The forced loss of agency is not compatible with many requirements of competently living a modern life.
I probably know more women who were ruined by this in marriage than men. It has nothing to do with staying home or quitting a career to raise kids.
Also, health insurance. Another thing Americans have yet to learn from Europe. In the states, sometimes you have to get married just to get health insurance. It’s kind of ridiculous.
Also, health insurance. Another thing Americans have yet to learn from Europe. In the states, sometimes you have to get married just to get health insurance. It’s kind of ridiculous.
This article addresses how the 2015 SCotUS decision affected marriage stats. The factors in play then changed how I thought about marriage.
My 'tribe' attached money and other benefits to marriage. This fundamentally reframed marriage in secular ways; it diminished religions' claims on it.
We Christians had been solidly in charge of marriage and for the previous 80 years divorced had steadily climbed. I felt we should own that; we should stop blaming societal factors - because we were also part of society.
Prior to the 2015 SC decision on marriage, I was a strong proponent of civil unions. I felt CUs were a path to decoupling marriage from secular benefits (tax breaks, spousal privilege). However, hard liners held sway and they were having none of it.
After 2015 I openly hoped that gay marriages gained a better track record than 'traditional marriages'. I felt there was a lot we Christians could do to be better spouses - in ways that both partners would want to stay married. I hoped gay couples would set examples for us. This was a simplistic fantasy on my part, pure immaturity.
ftr: I presently identify as Recovering Conservative. Where I have religious leanings, they run counter to the modern right. I sometimes use more nuanced pronouns.
One pertinent example is that Washington State's capital gains tax applies after $270k per single person, per married couple filing jointly OR split in half for married filing separately. Which could be a theoretical $18.9k/year difference in taxes.
The research to do this seems to be close to succeeding - see e.g. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11601-bone-stem-cells...
When researchers perfect this technique for humans, which they almost certainly will eventually, there will be no need for men at all. Women will be able to obtain lab-grown sperm from other women, and use this for fertilization.
All of these female-originating sperms will be X-chromosomed, and so in the much longer term we will see the eradication of the Y chromosome - and all the problems that arise from it.
And Tacoma has a lot of great restaurants, bars, and entertainment itself too.
I'm guessing there are lots of similar choices around Seattle. Or were - it feels like people got wise in the pandemic and started to take advantage.
Based on genealogy I've done, this stat also applies to the late 19th, early 20th centuries.
It's also that parenting time is up 20 fold from a few generations ago. My parents spent a few hours a week parenting. My kids had 24/7 adulting.
It isn’t talked about much but I’ve seen a couple startups destroyed by this and it is a not uncommon source of dead equity in cap tables.
> Based on genealogy I've done, this stat also applies to the late 19th, early 20th centuries.
It was ~26 in 1890 reached a low of around 22 in the 1950s, and has been trending up since; its been consistently lower for women, though that gap has fluctuated over time and compressed recently to less than 2 years.
https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/ju...
> That wasn’t previously really an option for most people - for a lot of structural reasons.
I’d be interested to hear more about this if its no trouble. I’m in my twenties so not much knowledge of this stuff.
I suspect a more significant but harder to concretize cause is that certain social changes have lead to the majority of young people being unable to form healthy attachments and pair bond.
The causes ranging from a high percentage of kids growing up in single parent households and forming avoidant personality styles, social media leading to higher rates of narcissism, dating apps setting unrealistic standards and a perception that there’s always a better option etc
Which is kind of a silly age range to use for this purpose in Seattle, since Washington (unlike a number of other states) does not permit child (under 18) marriages and declares any marriage contracted by anyone under 18 void.
Jeez what did my chromies ever do to you?
Lawyer. Passport. Locksmith. Gun. (A Talk About Risk and Preparedness) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509164
(I hold POA and medical proxies for people who need someone they can trust to assert their medical decisions and wishes for them when they are unable to)
Obviously $100/month covers a tiny fraction of the total cost of running a childcare service in Sweden. I am curious how much does state pays to cover the rest.
It sounds crazy, but it only applies in one case: a home-based childcare where the license holder has less two-years of experience and all the children are under 2 years of age and none of them are walking independently. For more experienced primary licensees, and older children, the ratios are higher. [0]
For childcare centers, the ratios are also higher: [1]
For infants (under 1 year) the required ratio is 1:4 with a group size of up to 8, or 1:3 with a group size of 9
For toddlers (under 30 months) the required ratio is 1:7 with a group size of up to 14, or 1:5 with a group size of 15
For preschoolers (under 5 years) the arequired ratio is 1:10 with a group size of up to 20
For school age children the required ratio is 1:15 with a group size of up to 30.
[0] https://app.leg.wa.gov/wac/default.aspx?cite=110-300&full=tr...
[1] https://app.leg.wa.gov/wac/default.aspx?cite=110-300-0356
Unless you have more children, where you are allowed to leave the older child in daycare for a few days per week at that cost.
The economy behind this is rather obvious. It is better for the economy as a whole to leave children with professionals taking care of 4-6 children per teacher and let the (supposedly educated) mom work with what she is or will become specialized in.
Mentioning moms here, but the ambition is to have fathers stay as much home with the children as their mom, but this is comparing to e.g. USA.
And not mentioning the other reasons to want to raise your children full time, there are obvious and understandable reasons for that, and you are obviously free to do that and many do. But there are also good reasons for letting them meet other children in a well run daycare too.
What makes you feel uncomfortable with this? Is Seattle particularly dangerous, moreso than a few decades ago?
Yes, most of time that's going to seem excessive -- but it is not a cloud system with on-demand autoscaling, you have to set your capacity by peak demand, not average demand.
Marriage unlocks a wide range of legal and financial benefits: access to a spouse’s health insurance, favorable tax treatment (like joint filing and estate tax breaks), and legal protections such as hospital visitation rights, inheritance without a will, and immigration sponsorship. It also affects Social Security, parental rights, and eligibility for things like pensions and veterans’ benefits. I mean, if you get married, in the States stuff is just all worked out automatically.
In many other countries, marriage is not attached to these things.
Because stringing along some poor soul that looks for actual relationship and let her waste months to figure out this relationship was never going to happen sux.
Some countries do manage to keep daycare somewhat affordable through huge subsidies (as well as lower wages for the daycare workers). I'm not opposed to increasing subsidies but that has to be balanced against other priorities. Elder care facilities face the same basic economic issue.
Grandparent to take care of a kid an afternoon a week or so was a thing. Grandparent watching a kid every day whole day, not really.
My best friend moved down there a few years ago (a family member sold them their house under-market and the price was too good to pass up). We all made our jokes but I’ve been down a lot and I actually really like it. It’s not that much harder to get to than west Seattle
I'm worried a lot about the declining rates of marriage and family formation. I don't see a lot of good that can come from it.
I just wanted to call that out since many of the comments seem focused on diagnosing what it is about Seattle specifically to lead to this trend.
IMO, it is mostly a housing issue. It seems like most new construction goes towards apartment complexes where the units are all 1-2 bedrooms, or else they go to more "luxury" big houses. I personally would love a 5 bedroom apartment in a dense, walkable city, but good luck finding it.
So I'm currently in the suburbs with my kids, even though I hate the suburbs.
For women, at least, you could not be independent (legally at least). You needed a man to co-sign applications to open bank accounts/credit cards/etc. Fewer well paying jobs were available to you. All these were worse still if you were a member of a minority.
Really? That’s what you’ve got?
I’ve seen examples of this in Silicon Valley going back to the 1990s. A prenup is not reliable and loads of people don’t have one in any case. Unlike not getting married, there is significant social pressure against prenups. If you actually care the path of least resistance is to not get married. It is quite difficult to get a prenup against the possibility that someone will prove to be irresponsible or malicious in the future in a context they’ve never experienced thus far.
It also doesn’t address the case that if you start a company while married, your spouse effectively has full license to destroy it even if they were completely uninvolved up until the point where they decide to destroy it. I’ve seen it happen, lots of collateral damage for both employees and investors. People will do it out of spite. How do you write a prenup about a company that doesn’t exist yet and may never exist?
Anything that can happen legally generally happens in practice. Average people even in tech don’t hire a team of lawyers when they decide to get married.
If you’ve chosen to get your information from talk radio and TikTok as you seem to suggest, well, that’s a choice.
There is an interesting old article on Slate Star Codex touching this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolo...
Dowries vs. free, monogamy vs. polygamy, common law marriage vs. ceremony, wives being property vs. independent people, self-determined vs. marriages arranged by parents, and this biblical passage:
"Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him" (NIV, Matt 22:24)
And it's not like no country has implemented mandatory childcare payments outside wedlock.
I do not think this is the explains of the decline in marriage though. AFAIK marriage has declined across the west - other US states, and certainly in many European countries.
People marry expecting to cooperate so I find it hard to believe this is a common reason not to marry on any case. The idea behind community of property must have been that the expectation of a marriage is that it will endure for life and the spouses are committed to each others' best interests. That is how it is supposed to work!
I think (and everything points to it being the cause here in the UK) is that without the social pressure to marry in order to co-habit people think of marriage as just a ceremony (on which they spend ridiculous amounts) and a piece of paper. They do not realise the legal benefits of marriage. In fact, many people assume that if they co-habit long term and have kids the law must be fair enough to give them reasonable rights, and some even think we have common law marriage here. It leads to distressing results when relationships break down, or a partner dies (especially without a will, or when a will is contested).
Nobody was a swimsuit model, but I'm not either. I might be I've crossed the threshold where looks are less important than personality (looks are still important!).
Everyone I dated mentioned that their experience with the apps mostly sucked though.
Unfortunately, avoiding paper marriage is insufficient to avoid such intervention in the state of Washington (with its Committed Intimate Relationship doctrine) or states where a cohabitant may be legally entitled to "palimony".