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Half the men in Seattle are never-married singles, census data shows

(www.seattletimes.com)
118 points blondie9x | 2 comments | 13 Apr 25 14:36 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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jandrewrogers ◴[13 Apr 25 15:15 UTC] No.43673380[source]▶
Anecdotally, among the people I know in Seattle, many people who have happily been in the same relationship for decades are not married. People are not avoiding long-term relationships, they are avoiding the baggage and fairly rigid assumptions that comes with state intervention in their relationships. There is zero social pressure to be “officially” married so people have no reason to do it for the sake of social conformity. Both men and women are subscribing to this.

I think some of this is a side-effect of many people planning to never have children.

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1. garciasn ◴[13 Apr 25 15:29 UTC] No.43673492[source]▶
As someone who was married and is now divorced, I can absolutely see the draw. I don’t think of it as “state intervention in relationships,” as I’m not a libertarian, but aside from tax breaks, which mean absolutely nothing when I have to pay for my ex-wife to live carefree for the rest of her life simply because we were married and she was lazy, doesn’t offset the 19 years of tax offsets she squandered.
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2. graemep ◴[13 Apr 25 16:53 UTC] No.43674130[source]▶
I can understand that. My ex wife is currently after money from me after years of refusing to work (even when we really needed the money) - and I did more than half the work in looking after our kids too. Just to explain, divorce, child arrangements, and divorce finance are separate cases here.

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.