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Learn more at americanexpress.com/business-platinum. Amex Business Platinum. Built for business by American Express. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets. I am your host. And on today's podcast, I want to encourage you that if you want to marry, don't "wait until you can afford it." It is my observation that there are many young men and women who want to marry. And yet, when you ask them why they are not married, they quickly say, "Well, we're waiting until we can afford it." And in today's podcast, I want to challenge that concept head-on.

I want to talk about what specifically it means. I want to share with you some ideas and some arguments that I hope will impact you. And that if you found a great marriage candidate, I want to encourage you to move quickly to marriage and not wait until you can afford it.

Now, simultaneously, I am also going to talk about the impact of money on marriage and what our considerations should be. Because there are some people who probably should wait until they can afford it. And those people need to understand what is necessary in order for them to marry. But oftentimes in today's world, this excuse of, "Well, we're going to marry someday, but we're waiting until we can afford it," is something that is robbing young men and women of some of the most important years of their married life.

And in some cases, it's a death knell for someone's long-term ability to marry. Now, I understand that this particular topic, the topic of marriage, is a highly charged one in our changing culture, where the cultural mores of yore have changed. Our connection to traditionalism has changed. And we're not quite sure what the future holds, but pretty much it's anything goes.

And so I don't expect this to be an easy conversation, but I think it's an important one. At its core, the message that I want to convey to you today is simply this. You should get married if you, number one, want to marry, and number two, if you have found and successfully attracted the right marriage partner for you.

If that's the case, if you want to marry, and if you've been able to successfully find and attract the right marriage partner, then you should marry. And you should not let money stand in your way. And to the extent that money is an important thing for you to consider, you can solve your money troubles that are keeping you from marriage in just a few months, a handful of months.

And that's what I want to encourage you to do. Now, let's begin by clarifying what do I mean by those terms. First, if you say, "Well, I want to get married, but I'm waiting until we can afford to get married." I want to ask you specifically, what specifically are you needing to pay for?

What is the specific expense? And you should write down those specific numbers and then figure out how long it's going to be until you can actually accomplish that financial goal. What is actually necessary? And you should carefully consider, will the accomplishment of that financial goal, that specific number that I need to achieve, will that impact our marriage in a positive way?

I believe that it's more important for you to start with the non-financial questions. Let's begin with, do you want to marry? If you're not someone who wants to marry, then that is the reason you should not get married. Not that you can't afford it. You should consider, am I the kind of person who wants to marry?

Am I someone who knows what marriage means? Who understands the commitment of a lifelong man and wife relationship and all that that will entail? All of the good things, all of the blessings, all of the joys, all of the fun, all of the trials, all the difficulties, all the challenges that that will entail.

Am I going to be better off personally by marrying? Now, this is one of those metrics that we need to talk about the data, but also then filter the data through our own personal situation. First, in terms of life success metrics, I don't know of a single life success metric on which married people do not outperform unmarried people.

Married people live longer than unmarried people. Married people express greater happiness in sociological surveys, greater life satisfaction than unmarried people. Married people have better sex lives than unmarried people. Married people earn more money than unmarried people. Married people have more assets, substantially more assets than unmarried people do. I couldn't tell you a single measurable statistic on which unmarried people as a group outperform married people.

Now, clearly, that doesn't mean that there aren't individuals who are unmarried who may not outperform the opposite group. There are many people that I've known and interacted with who are single by choice. They are extremely happy with their life decision. They have no desire and no interest in marrying.

And marriage is not necessarily, for many people, not necessarily a causal thing or at least it's not an impediment. You can earn a lot of money as a single man just like you can earn a lot of money as a married man. On the whole, we know that married men earn substantially more than unmarried men.

But that doesn't mean that you can't, as a single individual, earn more money than some other married individual does. So we should understand that your choice in this is intensely a personal choice. It's something that you yourself have to consider. Now, the biggest impediment currently to a non-married person wanting to become a married person usually has to do with the risk of divorce.

And this is an important thing to consider. I'm not going to deal extensively with divorce in this particular podcast. A couple of reasons for that. First, divorce is not a huge risk to young people and to people who are waiting to marry until they can afford it. Divorce is a much more significant risk if you're older, richer.

That's where a lot more care, at least from a financial perspective, has to come in to the equation with regard to divorce. But it's also important that you understand that divorce is not random. Divorce is no more random than is a lightning strike. People go through life, young men and women go through life, and say, "Well, if divorce happens to me." Divorce is not random any more than lightning strikes are.

And I'm using intentionally a metaphor that people say, "Oh, lightning strikes are random." No, they're not random. There is an element of randomness to the striking of lightning. But on the whole, there are certain conditions that are necessary in order for lightning to strike. If where you are right now, it's a clear and beautiful day, and you walk outside and you can see that there are no storms around, and you can check with your local meteorologist and the meteorologist confirms there's no storms around and there's no storms on the horizon, there are no fronts coming through, we have no reason to expect storms, then you can safely and comfortably walk around outside and enjoy a 0% chance of lightning striking.

On the other hand, if you walk outside and you see that there are storm clouds all around, there's blackness in the sky, your hair is standing on end, you could feel the electrical charges in the air, then now we know that the risk of your being struck by lightning is much higher.

It's not a random occurrence, although there is still some randomness as to when there will actually be an electrical charge, but the risk of your getting struck by lightning is substantially higher. And we could continue to elevate that risk. For example, we could elevate the risk by your being outside in the storm instead of inside in a protected shelter.

We could elevate the risk of your being outside walking around where you're the tallest object in the field rather than your being inside a shelter where there's a lightning rod on the roof and a proper ground charge system or being in a car someplace where you're safe. We can deal with risk, and you can still be safe from the risk of divorce even if you're in a very charged environment.

But if you systematically ignore all of the clouds, all of the storm clouds that are in the sky, and all the proper precautions to protect yourself against a lightning strike, then now your personal risk of divorce is much higher. There is some element of unpredictability to divorce, just like there is an element of unpredictability to lightning.

You may have built a habit in your life of going out and walking around when lightning is striking all around, and you might navigate for your entire lifetime and lightning never strikes you. On the other hand, that may change, and today may be the day in which lightning strikes you, or what would be, I guess, a better application of this metaphor to the world of divorce.

It may be beautiful and clear and bright and sunny right now, but then conditions change, an unexpected front blows in tomorrow, and now all of a sudden you find yourself facing a very difficult situation. And this does happen to many men and women. They begin a relationship when, to use the metaphor, skies are clear, there is very little risk of divorce, and then my partner changes, and my partner changes, and ultimately I wind up divorced.

So you can't eliminate the risk of divorce any more than you can eliminate the risk of lightning. Your life circumstances, though you're always lightning cautious, may eventually cause you to be exposed to the risk of lightning in a seemingly random way. But recognize that divorce is not random. It doesn't happen randomly.

It's fairly predictable, and as such, you can protect yourself against it. Now, that's about as much as I want to go into divorce, with exception of a few financial comments at the end of the podcast. But I want to recognize that if you can successfully marry and become part of the married group and stay married for life, then there's a very high probability that you will experience all of those sociological and economic benefits to being married.

And so we should really consider this. Now, if you're someone who doesn't want to marry, then that should be your reason for abstaining from marriage, put simply. Marriage should never be forced upon any man or any woman. Marriage, in order to be valid, must be a voluntary decision that springs from desire.

I hope to give you a vision of some of the benefits of marriage, but at its core, it's always your choice, your prerogative to live your life the way that you want to. Why would someone not want to marry? I think there are probably a few key factors. Number one would be a desire for independence in life.

When you marry, you necessarily experience a reduction in your personal independence, the ability that you have to make your decisions independent of other people. None of us are truly independent. All of us are interdependent with our fellow citizens to some degree. But when you marry, you will experience a reduction of your own independence.

And if you know that for you, your highest quality, your highest value is absolute independence, then that would be a good reason not to marry. You may have too many competing priorities. I think this is the most common reason that people don't marry and that they don't marry young.

I have so many things I want to do. Now, in a moment, I'll talk about why I think that marrying young is an ideal strategy for people who want to marry. But it is true that we all have competing priorities, and that's the natural circumstance. In addition, you may not just have found the right person.

In my experience, there are some people who are very strongly pro-marriage, but most of us go through life with our own priorities and, "Hey, I'd like to get married if I found the right person," or maybe not. There are some people who are adamantly opposed to marriage, and they're just never going to marry and they know that.

But on the whole, finding the right person seems to have a quite persuasive influence on many people. And so that's the second thing. Have I found the right partner? Have I found somebody who shares my vision of life, who shares my vision of marriage? Have I found somebody who shares my commitment to marriage?

Because in order for marriage to flourish and in order for you to feel confident in marriage, there's a necessarily high level of commitment to marriage that needs to come from you and from your marriage partner. In addition, have I found someone who's highly compatible with me on every dimension or at least on all of the dimensions that are most important to me?

Compatibility is enormously important. Have I found someone with whom I share a mutual attraction and a mutual appreciation? All of these are necessary. If you've found that, then move towards marriage. If you haven't found that but you want to marry, then focus on finding the right partner. Now, why would someone not have found the right partner?

As I see it, there are two reasons. Either you haven't looked hard enough for long enough in all of the right places where a high-quality potential partner is, or you haven't been able to attract the right person that you have been able to find. And we want to identify which of these things is the problem.

So either, I repeat, either you haven't looked hard enough for long enough in the right places where your ideal marriage partner is found, or you haven't been able to attract that person. Let's deal with attractiveness first. It is necessary for you to possess all of the qualities and characteristics that will be needed to attract your ideal spouse into your life.

You can't fool someone when you want to marry. And so you need to systematically develop those characteristics, those attributes, those skills that are necessary to attract someone. I'm not going to deal with that here. But if you're finding that I'm meeting lots of people and I'm not able to attract them, you need to fix that.

You need to become the kind of person who is attractive to your planned ideal candidate for a husband or for a wife. On the other hand, maybe you just haven't looked hard enough for long enough in all the right places. And if that's the case, then focus on keeping on for a consistent amount of time looking long and hard in the right places.

And those three elements are all important. You have to be looking in the right places where your ideal marriage candidate is likely to be found. You need to look diligently, not just give a cursory overview and click a few buttons and say, "Okay, I'm done." And you need to do this for long enough.

But if you are attractive yourself and you possess the basic characteristics that would be attractive to a potential spouse, and if you look long enough and hard enough in the right places, then eventually you will be able to find a wife or you will be able to find a husband.

There are hours of expansion that would need to be done on those subjects. Don't skip over them, but for the purpose of today's podcast, I want to focus on the financial dimensions. Let's assume that you have accomplished those two necessary steps. First, you want to marry and you've been able to find and attract a suitable marriage candidate.

What about the money? What do you need to do about the money in order to marry? Go back to the question I asked you at the beginning. Let's say that you say, "I'm waiting to marry until we can afford it." What specifically do you need to be able to afford?

Are you unemployed? If so, do you need a job? That's fine. Do you need a place to live? Do you have too much debt? Are you unable to attract someone because you're deeply indebted? Do you need money for a wedding ring? Do you need money for the wedding itself?

You want to understand specifically where you are and what is the specific obstacle. Then you want to question, "Is this really an obstacle? Is this an obstacle that is suitable for us to consider at this point in time?" Let's talk about why waiting is generally inadvisable if, again, you want to marry and you've been able to attract the right partner.

Is there anything that's better off by just waiting more time? First, I think we should acknowledge that there are many benefits to marrying young. It's very common that when you are young, you're going to not yet have a lot of money. But if you wait until you have a lot of money, you miss out on many of these benefits of marrying young.

I believe that everything is better for those who marry well, based upon those two preconditions, when they marry young. It's easier to marry when you are young, both in terms of finding a great partner as well as in terms of building a marriage. When you are young, you have the highest possible candidate pool of unmarried people for you to choose from.

When you are young, there will never ever in your life be more available men or women who are unmarried who potentially you could attract into a marriage relationship with you when you are young. Every single year that goes by, your potential size of the candidate pool decreases. It decreases due to death, obviously.

Some people die. It decreases, obviously, most importantly, due to marriage. If you take a cohort of 20-year-olds and track that same cohort of people at 30, you will find that there are many fewer 30-year-olds who are unmarried than there are who are 20. What's interesting from the perspective of our conversation is that the highest quality marriage candidates will most likely be married by the age of 30 as compared to the age of 20.

Why? The people who wanted to marry and who were able to find and attract a suitable spouse have now done that. The pool of available unmarried persons at 30 from our cohort is now smaller. It's likely to be more highly populated with people who don't want to marry and/or people who, for whatever reason, are not particularly attractive as a spouse.

Otherwise, by definition, they're more likely to have married when they were younger. As every year goes by, this pool of available candidates gets smaller and smaller and smaller. For someone who knows that he or she wants to marry, your best strategy is to be diligent about it as young as possible because you will have the highest number of candidates to be able to attract.

If you are able to attract those candidates, you can choose among the best possible fit for you. Mathematically, I see no counterargument to what I am describing. An attractive young man or woman can always attract the highest quality candidate, the easiest, when young. Is attractiveness something that can be cultivated?

My answer is absolutely yes. One of my responsibilities as a father for my children, and perhaps one of your responsibilities if you're a father or a mother, is to help your sons and daughters to develop the character and the skills and the attributes and the features that are necessary to be highly attractive to an attractive spouse.

We're not stupid. We understand what these things are. Attractiveness can be cultivated, and it should be cultivated. We know what the factors are that generally cause a man to be attractive to women and what cause a woman to be attractive to men. Those factors are not universal. There's clearly elements of personality, elements of individuality, elements of individual taste, but these factors are highly correlated and broadly applicable.

If you yourself desire to marry, you should focus on cultivating all of those factors that cause you to be a highly attractive marriage candidate. If you are coaching sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, friends, acquaintances, then you should coach them on developing those attractive qualities. Most people who are struggling to attract a spouse have never sat down and assessed their own personal level of attractiveness.

I know I never did, and I was more forward-thinking than a lot of people, more analytical. Today, if I were unmarried, I would do things very, very differently. I would sit down and take a very close look at my own level of attractiveness to the kind of woman that I would want to attract, and I would work very diligently to enhance my level of attractiveness.

Same thing I do with my wife, because this is not something that ends with marriage. I still want to focus on increasing my own personal level of attractiveness towards my wife so that with every decade that passes in our marriage, she's more and more attracted to me, and the same for her.

She should be and is focusing on saying, "How can I be more attractive to my husband?" and cultivating those qualities and attributes that I value as a husband in order to attract me every year that goes on. That's one of the ways that you ensure that your marriage endures for the long term.

But there's more than just attracting a candidate based upon the pool of unmarried people or some mathematical formula. Marriage is easier for the young because it's easier to integrate your life with another person when young. One of the great challenges for people who marry when they're older is they're set in their ways.

They've lived so long in an independent state that now when they have to become interdependent and work with another person and find some way to bring things together, it often is quite difficult for people who marry when they are older. But when you're young, it's easier for you to integrate with another person because you're less set in your ways.

There's probably a counter-argument that we should mention here that sometimes younger people are simply clueless. They're self-centered, egotistical. They don't understand how to treat other people with kindness, with consideration, with respect. But I would answer that and simply say that those are necessary conditions for any form of successful relationship.

And for you to consider being in a marriage relationship with someone, you should be very confident that this is a man or a woman who respects me, who values me, who treats me with kindness, with appreciation, with consideration, who is generous and who's flexible and who's willing to work with me.

And those things should be--you should be confident that this is somebody with whom I can integrate, not somebody who's arrogant and egotistical and self-centered and the one who has to do all of the changing. That's not a good formula for a healthy relationship. From a financial perspective, marrying young resolves many of the financial issues of planning for divorce.

What I mean is due to the risk of divorce, it can become very difficult for a man or a woman who has already made it to take on the financial risk of losing it in divorce. My favorite metaphor for this is that when you marry when you're young, you are in essence getting shares in a startup company rather than down the road being offered a job.

Those are two very different things. When you marry when you are young and poor and then you make it and you make it as a couple, you build wealth, you build stability, you earn a high income, then that making it together means that even if you did divorce and lose half your wealth, almost certainly you're better off because you made it as a married couple.

Now, obviously, I hate to always argue this. I'm sure there are some toxic people who made it in spite of their wife or their husband. Certainly that exists. But don't marry those people again. It's not random. You need to develop the skill and the maturity to get rid of those kinds of toxic people.

But when my wife and I married, just as a personal example, neither of us had a lot of money. And so basically, we got shares in a startup. And she believed in me. I believed in her. And everything we've built, we've built together. And it's much easier for me to understand that because I married young.

I didn't marry her for her money. She didn't marry me for my money. What's much more difficult is when I do counseling for older people who have built independent wealth, who are wealthy, and now they're considering marrying someone who doesn't match their level of wealth, that's very difficult because then the prospect of marrying becomes quite risky.

And even if there are legal contracts such as prenuptial agreements, it doesn't entirely remove that risk. And it becomes much more difficult for a man and a woman to look at each other and say, "What do we bring to the table?" Whereas when you marry when you're young, just simply the support of a relationship can wind up being an enormously influential factor in a man or a woman's long-term success.

If we're going to encourage marrying when young, which is where, by the way, all of this question comes in about can I afford it, because if you were old and rich, you wouldn't be asking this question, we need to also, of course, deal with the question of how young is too young.

I myself am an advocate of marrying when young, but all of us acknowledge that there is such a thing as too young. I'm not going to put a number on that because none of us are living in societies in which genuinely we need to put a number on it.

The problem we face right now is not that people are trying to go out and marry people when they're far too young chronologically. The problem we face as a society right now is that there are many people who are legally able to marry, for whom it would be a good idea in terms of their chronological age, who are waiting unnecessarily.

And yet, is there an element in which someone may be too young? Yes. The first thing you need to look for is the immaturity of a person. Immaturity is not something that is determined exclusively by how many revolutions the earth has made around the sun. That's certainly an important factor, but it's not the exclusive factor.

Some men and some women can mature very quickly, even though their calendar age is less, but their life has caused them to mature quickly. Their parents have coached them into early maturity. They have a mature outlook on the world. On the other hand, some people can have experienced many birthdays and just be very immature and not ready for marriage.

So you definitely want to watch out for someone who is immature. For marriage to be successful, you have to marry somebody of high character. So inconstancy of character is a major red flag. And character often needs to be forged not only by instruction, but also by experience. And you want to be confident that the man or woman you're considering marrying is someone who's of high character.

In addition, you want to be very cautious and consider the level of vision that a man or woman has for his or her life. Lack of vision for life, lack of long-term vision, should be a major red flag that would cause someone not to want to marry. Young people, in some cases, are likely to have less of a vision for life.

And if someone doesn't have a vision for life, then you should steer away from that person until he or she establishes a vision. Because even as my next point, what can often happen is you may adapt your vision to someone else before you've settled on it with your own desire and then feel like, "Well, I was manipulated into this vision that you had for me, and what about my life?" And this is one of the common strains that I hear of dissatisfaction when people marry very young is that they say, "Well, I never had a chance to develop my own vision of life." And there's an element in which I think that is accurate and needs to be considered.

I think also prior to marrying, you should probably want someone that you're considering, as well as for yourself, you should probably want to go through some of the crises of early adulthood that are necessary in order to form your own life opinions. If people follow too closely a path that has been prescribed for them by their parents or their community, without consciously adopting it for themselves, then I think there's a danger that after a few years, they might wake up and realize, "Oh, I'm living a fake life, and I have to make changes now because, after all, this was never really what I wanted.

I married you because my parents wanted me to, or I married you because my church wanted me to." That can be extremely painful and have enormous consequences down the road. I think here of the Amish tradition of rumspringa, basically running around in Pennsylvania Dutch, I think that this concept has been improperly glamorized by TV shows and things like that.

It's not intended to be a time of going around and sowing your wild oats, but rather what it's intended to be is a time of considering, "Do I really want to make my parents' and my community's lifestyle my own?" Regardless of the age, whether it's at 16 in the Amish communities or some other age, that's necessary.

I went through that when I was 20. When I was 20 is when I was studying abroad, and I went through a crisis of faith. I had to examine all of my religious beliefs. Do I really believe what I believe, or am I believed because that's the way I was raised?

I had to consider, "How do I want to live? What's my vision?" That experience, I haven't really wavered since that happened, but I could also see that if I had made one pathway commitment prior to that happening and then it happened, that could be difficult. Ideally, it's good to go through some of those crises of early adulthood where you figure out, "What do I believe?

How do I want to live with my life?" If someone hasn't gone through that, I think you should be cautious about marrying. On that basis, ideally, people should marry when young if they desire to marry and if they've been able to attract a high-quality candidate. Does marriage and the pathway of marriage in 2024, does it still work?

There are a lot of people that I listen to very carefully who want to marry, who say it doesn't work. It just doesn't work anymore. There's men who are dissatisfied, women who are dissatisfied. Right now, we're living in a crisis of marriage, a crisis of relationship formation, a crisis of marriage formation.

It's a real problem. As every single generation in the United States has continued on, the rates of marriage have declined. This has devastating effects across society and across culture for many, many reasons. So, does it work? My answer is yes, it does. It does still work. The traditional pathway of marriage in the United States culture does still work if you can successfully initiate the relationship.

And as I said, that initiation of relationship is based upon the preconditions of wanting to marry, being able to find someone that you would desire to marry, and then being able to attract that person to marriage. In a less marriage-minded culture, there are many fewer marriages that happen due to circumstance than happened previously.

If you were to go back a century or a half-century, you would find it very common that a man or a woman who wanted to marry basically reached a certain age of life, a stage of life, looked around and said, "Here's a suitable person. I'm attracted to you, and let's do it." And the culture supported that marriage.

As the culture has withdrawn its support for marriage, its advocacy of marriage, its general support, that has become more difficult because men and women have more options. And so often, they have to go farther afield to find someone and to attract someone. So there are more challenges, and I'm not blind to those challenges, but on the whole, the traditional progression of marriage still works.

Step one, find someone you're interested in, and then attract them into a romantic dating relationship that is serious and headed for something in the future, headed for marriage. As a man, I would say that in general, there are some preconditions, but on the whole, you can tell in about a second or two whether you're attracted to somebody.

You can tell after a date or two whether you enjoy being with a woman. And then you need some time to understand a woman's values, how she builds her life, how she's built her psychology, her worldview, to make certain that there's a strong foundation. That's what takes the most time.

And then you can move towards marriage. And then as a man and a woman, find mutual compatibility, mutual interests, and a shared vision of life. Then you should take that relationship directly into the possibility of marriage. Discuss values and vision related to marriage. And if you can build a shared vision for life, then move towards marriage quickly.

This does require serious-mindedness, but on the whole, young men and young women who want to marry should be serious about it. Because if you just wait, if the months pass and the years pass, you're squandering and you're just, "Oh, I'm dating this person for six years," and you never get around to marrying, you're squandering the most valuable years of your marriage.

You're squandering it and you're wasting it and you're harming it. I think this is probably most common where men will lead a woman along, but I believe it's abusive, it's harmful for a man to lead a woman along. And for years and years and years, "Well, someday, you know, I might be interested in you." Someday you do that, but in the meantime, you're taking and robbing her of years of her life.

It's unfair, it's unjust. And it can happen the other way, but that, I think, is the more common thing, is that the man is not ready to settle down. And if the woman stands for it and goes along, then she's the one who is harmed. And it's not a good thing.

So, on the whole, if you can build a shared vision for life, move towards marriage quickly. You should take lots and lots of time deciding if you want to marry, and you should take lots of time to consider if a particular person, a marriage candidate, is a good fit for you.

But once you've made the decision to marry, then marry. There is no benefit that I can articulate to a long-protracted engagement. There may be difficult circumstances which necessitate it, but I don't think those things do anything good. I can make all kinds of arguments for waiting to marry. I can make all kinds of arguments for being very careful about who you marry.

But if you've decided, "I want to marry, and I want to marry this person," and you've committed to engagement, which is where the most common thing is. You talk about marriage together as a couple, even if you're not formally engaged, which has lost a lot of its clarity in our current culture.

In general, there's no benefit to a long-protracted engagement. Only harm that comes from it. Harm on multiple levels. So if we're going to-- Do I need to talk about that? About the harm? I'm going to just skip the harm question, just to say there's no benefit to a long engagement.

Take as much time as you yourself want and need to decide if you want to marry. Take as much time to consider another person. But if your relationship becomes romantic with that other person, and it becomes serious to the point where you could see yourself marrying, if you could see yourself and you talk about marriage, then do not unnecessarily prolong the engagement period because we can't afford to get married.

Let's move to the money. Generally speaking, there is nothing that you need lots of money for in the early stages of marriage. There's really not. You do need a commitment, and especially need a commitment of a husband to provide for his wife and his children. But you don't need a lot of money.

So let's go through the stages of relationships, the normal stages of relationships that are and should be followed, and talk about the impact of money. Number one, dating. You're attracting someone to you. You're trying to build a romantic relationship with someone. So you're dating. Do you need money to attract a spouse?

Well, if you're a man, the answer is yes. If you're a woman, the answer is no, generally speaking. Do you need money? So for men, do you need money to attract a woman? Yes. But I would argue that it's probably less than you think. In general, when young, which is who we're talking about, the person that's likely to be wondering, "Can I afford to marry?" Older people, a 45-year-old couple who says, "We're going to marry," they're not making this stupid excuse of, "We can't afford to marry." Obviously, they're more mature.

So I'm primarily focusing here in my conversation on, say, 20-somethings and early 30s, which is very common to say, "I want to marry, but I can't afford it." Yes, you need money to attract a woman, but it's probably less than you think. When young, a woman is likely filtering more for ambition and potential than for actuality.

Any intelligent young woman understands that a young man has not had enough time to be established. We have and should have far higher expectations on a 40-year-old man and his financial condition than we have and should have on a 20-year-old man and his financial condition. So what does a 20-year-old man do?

Well, a 20-year-old man focuses on building a financial plan so that he can ultimately have money, but the necessary foundation of that plan is to have ambition, to have dreams, to have a vision, to have ambition. And what I think an intelligent young woman is willing to do is willing to look for and consider a man who has ambition, goals, dreams, and vision.

That's what attracted my wife to me. I've surveyed my peer group of successfully married couples, and in general, that is a common element. And so do you need money? Yes, you need some money. The great thing about it is in general, you can get money pretty quickly. You get a job, and jobs give you plenty of money to attract a woman into a dating relationship with you.

Even a very simple starting job gives you enough money to take a woman out, to take her on dates, to attract her. And that ability to treat a woman as a-- treat her with honor and respect, to pay for her, even in today's "progressive" egalitarian culture, that's a necessary thing.

It's necessary for you as a man to demonstrate your financial capability. But it's not necessary that you earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. It's just necessary that you have some income and some money. On the whole, I hear a lot of complaining about men who say, "Well, I just can't attract her." And you watch the TikTok videos of the woman who says, "He took me to a cheesecake factory.

I can't believe he took me to a cheesecake factory. What a loser." Or, "If I talk to one more man, he takes me on a coffee date. What a loser." These are good screening mechanisms for you to screen undesirable women. An undesirable woman, a woman who will get upset at you about your not taking her to a cheesecake factory or taking her on a coffee date, that's someone who will abandon you when your business goes bankrupt, when you're 35 years old, and you have no money, which is likely to happen.

Most millionaires go through some very significant financial crises and very significant, in many cases, bankruptcy, being broke, some element of that. And so it's entirely expected that a man who ultimately becomes very wealthy is going to go through periods of intense financial need. That's expected. But what happens, you want a woman who has been filtered for character, not for prima donna status.

And so those kinds of things are a good filter to get rid of undesirable women who will be more damaging to you in the long run rather than an asset. You want a woman who will be with you in sickness and in health, in poverty and in wealth. You want a woman who's willing to do that.

And so those are good filtering mechanisms. But what's not a good filtering mechanism is for you to then assume that somehow I'm just going to not treat a woman as well as I can. There's an enormous difference between a man of limited income, of limited means, who demonstrates to a potential spouse that he cares for her, and he cares about her enjoyment of life, and he provides for her a great life and a great lifestyle, but he does it on a modest budget, versus somebody who just refuses to invest into her.

And on the whole, I think women generally, and especially what I would call high-quality women, will understand thoughtfulness and creativity even if the budget is limited. And again, I understand that it's common among the red pill folks and the black pill folks to say, "Well, this doesn't work anymore.

Women these days, blah, blah, blah." But recognize, first of all, that you don't need to worry about women these days so much. You need to find a woman. And if you're diligent about it, there are plenty of high-quality women. Even if--let's say that--let's just make up numbers. I'm purely making up numbers.

Let's say that 50 years ago--men and women will be inclusive here. Let's say that 50 years ago--let's do 80-20. 50 years ago, 80% of women were good women and 20% of women were bad women, or 80% of men were good men and 20% of men were bad men. And let's say today that the 80-20 rule has collapsed, and it's no longer 80-20, although certainly it is because everything in life is 80-20, but now it's 60%.

60% of men are good men and 40% are bad men, and 60% of women are good women and 40% are bad women. Let's say that happened. All you've got to do is find one man or one woman among 60% of the population. And if you're diligent about it, you will be able to do that.

If you want to, you'll be able to do that. So a woman who filters herself out by getting annoying about, "He took me to the cheesecake factory" or "took me on a coffee date" does you an enormous favor. What I would say is exercise creativity. If you're young, if you are broke, I would encourage you, cultivate an outdoor activity, hobby, something active that you really enjoy, that you would like to do, something that lends itself to conversation, and invite her to do that with you.

And then pack a really nice, thoughtful picnic lunch. And you can have a great date and a great experience, and it's different. Going to an expensive dinner is the most boring thing I can imagine. So stop being boring. Be interesting and provide people with interesting experiences. If I'm coaching young men, I coach them to be a curator of interesting experiences.

Because after all, interestedness is something that a smart woman is going to filter for. Nobody wants to live a boring life. And so if you were a woman, imagine yourself a woman, and you have the opportunity to be in a relationship with an interesting man, somebody who makes your life interesting and gives texture to your experience of life, that's going to be one element of a generally attractive thing.

So do you need money for dating? Yes, but you don't need much money. The most important thing to emphasize is to have and then to share your ambition, your vision, your zeal, your drive, your motivation. What about taking a relationship farther? Do you need money to get engaged? Well, maybe, maybe.

And what I mean is there's two elements to this. First element is, is this potential marriage candidate willing to say yes to a relationship with me? That's the big thing that occurs when it comes to engagement. The second aspect is, is there some particular financial element of engagement, such as the purchase of an engagement ring or the planning of some engagement experience?

Is that necessary? That's the minor thing, and it's not nearly as important as the first thing. So do you need money to be engaged? My answer is maybe. This one is much easier to say from a negative perspective. What you need to not have is a lot of debt.

So the thing that would cause someone to say no to you, to an engagement, is often debt. That's the financial thing. And this is where, unfortunately, many young men and many young women torpedo their chances of marriage or marriage at an early age inadvisedly, thoughtlessly, heedlessly. It hasn't been discussed about it.

Let's assume that I, as a man, let's assume that I'm a young man, and here is a wonderful, attractive, smart, intelligent, amazingly attractive woman, and I'm thinking about marrying her. But it just so happens that she comes with $100,000 of student loan debt, debt that is not bankruptable, not dischargeable.

It's much harder for me as a young man to want to commit to that woman than if she had $0 of student loan debt. And debt is the point at which the cost becomes big. This is the same thing that correlates with my earlier discussion of divorce. If you have a young, broke man, young, broke woman with dreams and visions, stars in their eyes for the future, then they come together and they build everything together.

But you're not starting from nothing. If you have heavy amounts of debt, you're starting from nothing. You're starting from less than zero. And now we've got to dig, dig, dig, dig, dig to get up here. And this enormous disparity that happens in life is the same kind of thing that happens if you have a man or woman who's very wealthy and considering marrying someone who doesn't have any money.

It's not that it can't work. It's that it's really hard to deal with the disparity going forward in the future. Same thing with – and it's not – I don't need to qualify. I'm trying very hard not to qualify anything I say. Specifically, I'm avoiding speaking in a politically correct way.

But you want to – so debt can be an enormous problem. So if you have debt, then get rid of it as quickly as possible. And that I think is one of those areas where there's a legitimate thing that causes people problems. You get a little bit anxious when this person that I'm considering marrying is heavily indebted.

Now there are exceptions to this. There are many wonderful men, wonderful women who are deeply indebted because they're heading for an enormous career. The most common one is medicine. The most common one is law. Things like that where it's not uncommon for a medical student to have a million dollars or a couple million dollars in the extreme specialties, enormous piles of student loan debt.

And yet that doesn't make the young medical student a bad candidate for marriage. Where I think this really hurts women is if a woman has a lot of medical debt, student loan debt, especially if she wants to be a mother and a wife and if the man that she's interested in wants her to be a mother and a wife.

Some of the most painful decisions that couples have to make come in when a young woman has large amounts of debt that were necessary to prepare her for her career as a high-powered something or other, and then she also wants to be a mother and a wife. Now the husband, in committing to her, has to commit not only to paying off his debt in many cases, but he has to commit not only to supporting her as a mother but also to pay off her student loans for degrees that in some cases she doesn't value anymore, is no longer going to use.

And so this is one of those areas where because wives become mothers, it's much more damaging to their marriage prospects for a woman to have large amounts of student loans. So try to avoid that. Avoid student loans outright. If they can't be avoided because of a highly targeted specialty, and really, although I have some strategies for how to become a physician without loans, how to become a lawyer without loans, there are strategies there, but they're very damaging for young people and they damage young people's marriage prospects considerably.

So do you need money to be engaged? Maybe. What you really need to not have is a lot of debt. Do you need money for all the other elements of engagement? Well, not so much for any specific cost, but rather in terms of somebody's willingness to buy into you.

So this is where things like rings, I'm going to skip over a conversation of dowry systems, but in general, especially for a woman to say yes to a man, he needs to be able to demonstrate to her that he is able to support her. And this is an element, a foundational element of where some of our symbols come from.

So what does a ring or an expensive ring symbolize? At its core, it symbolizes that this is a man who's able to provide for me. This is a man who is able to support me. Why is that such a big deal? Well, for a woman especially who is likely to get pregnant, likely to have babies, a man needs money in order to support his wife when she is pregnant.

A pregnant woman is extremely vulnerable. A woman with a baby is extremely vulnerable. Babies and children are very vulnerable. And for her to succeed and to flourish in a state of vulnerability, she needs to be surrounded by a security network that is looking out for her and is caring for her.

A pregnant woman is not able to work in the same way that a non-pregnant woman is, and a non-pregnant woman is not able to work in the same way that a man is. A pregnant woman or a woman with a baby can't just get up and go across the other side of the world to find a better job.

She has to think about the baby, and it's an enormous all-consuming influence on her life. And so if she can attract a husband who is able to support her, who is able to care for her financially, who is able to allow her to have a quiet and peaceful pregnancy, who is able to allow her to have intimate time with her baby when he's born and to be a focused mother, then that's an enormous win for her.

One of the things about our current sharing economy, sharing society, is that we can see into the heart of men and women in all manner of circumstances. The things that break my heart personally as a father is so many mothers who are expected to be both mothers and income earners who have to go and drop their child off at a daycare facility, and they're crying all the way there and they're crying all the way home.

It's devastating to me. And yet if a woman hasn't chosen a man who can provide her with a lifestyle that would allow her to be a full-time mother, then what other choice does she have? They can change. There's always ways to change, but it's understandable. If a woman commits herself to a man who is not financially productive, she may have great challenges.

Those challenges are really, really important. And in order for her to overcome them, she needs to choose the highest quality man that she can attract. She needs to choose really, really well. And if she chooses really, really well, she'll have a better life. I don't want to pat myself on the back.

That's not my goal. But I do want to simply say that as an example, my wife, when we married, she had a job. We knew that when we had a baby, she was no longer going to have a job. And that was the plan. It was always the plan.

I hope that she never needs another job. But basically, ever since she became pregnant with our first baby, in my mind, the money is my responsibility. And she has zero responsibility for the money. It's my job as a husband to provide her with all of the necessary conditions and things that she needs based upon our family income.

And it's my responsibility to provide her all of the nice things that we're able to have without sacrificing on other goals. And that's a very deep level of commitment for me. And so that level of commitment gives her the confidence and the safety to now be the mother of five children and to be totally focused on that.

And she doesn't have to worry about maintaining her career, maintaining her earning ability. That's my job. And it's my job to make sure that her life is really strong, that her life is good, that she's taken care of. I don't predict anything about the future, but it's not necessary.

It's never my plan that she has to go and she has to work. Now, a relationship where a man has that kind of commitment also requires some significant commitments from the woman. And many women are not willing to make those commitments. But it works really beautifully in my relationship with my wife and it works really beautifully in many relationships with husbands and wives.

Husbands and wives each offer to the other person something unique, something that the other person values. And normally in a marriage, a high-quality, ambitious man is not looking to a woman for money. That's not something that men value. Men don't value women based upon how much money they earn.

And the kind of men who would value that generally aren't attracted to women. Men value women based upon the other things that a woman can bring into that kind of man's life. On the flip side, women don't value men exclusively based upon the amount of money that they can earn.

But there is a right focus on making sure that if I'm going to commit myself to a man, that he is a man who's able to provide for me the kind of lifestyle that is suitable for me. And so as a man, you need enough money for a woman to commit to you in engagement.

You need enough money and enough income and enough potential for her to feel confident about that. Otherwise, especially when young, otherwise a young woman may pursue someone who can provide her with more financial security. And that would be an intelligent and wise choice for her because the money matters.

Now, do you need money for a ring? No, there's no correlation to the amount of money that you spend on a ring as compared to the duration of your marriage. Just like there's no correlation to the amount of money spent on a wedding to the duration of your marriage.

In fact, I've never seen data on this, but I'd place a $5 bet that if there is a correlation, it's the opposite. The more money spent on the wedding, the less the duration of the marriage. But I can't prove that. It's just a hunch from watching a lot of people get married and a lot of people get divorced.

If you're going to buy a wedding ring and you're young, go to Costco. Costco is the place to buy a wedding ring. Best deal, just go to Costco, buy a wedding ring. And recognize that it should be a relatively modest amount when you're young. It's not to say, of course, that you don't want – there's not a pride.

I found, when I proposed to my wife, an enormous masculine pride in giving her the nicest ring that I could. I wanted her to be able to show off her hand to her girlfriends. And I wanted to feel proud about the ring and the amount of money that I spent on it because it indicated my attractiveness as a husband to some degree.

Today, from a more mature perspective, it doesn't matter. It wouldn't have mattered at all. And while my earning ability has always been an important component of a healthy marriage, the specific amount of money spent on a ring is not so important. And so go to Costco, buy a nice ring, something that you like, and be done with it.

Don't go to the jewelry stores. Go to Costco. There's your advice from your financial advisor. Costco is a great place to get a – one of the best places in the world to get good quality jewelry at a reasonable price. If you can't only afford a few hundred-dollar ring, better for you to get married with a few hundred-dollar ring than to sit around and wait and wait and wait until the idea being that someday a few thousand – you can spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on a ring.

Remember, with regard to marriage, the clock is ticking. It never stops ticking. And so if you want to marry and if you found a good candidate, you're better off to marry when young, when the clock has ticked, yes, and build your life together than to wait for some arbitrary thing.

Start with a cheap ring and then make it a – every decade, you upgrade the ring. That's a great thing to do. Not necessary, but it's a great thing to do. Don't let, "Oh, I'm waiting to buy an engagement ring," be the key factor. If you're talking about marriage, if you think she's willing to marry you, then pursue that and just go with what you can afford at this point in time, but move quickly into marriage.

What about things like school? Do you need money to finish school in order to get married? This is a common one. I knew a lot of people when we were in college who wanted to get married, but we've got to finish school first, and that's what we're waiting for.

I don't see any reason why you need to finish school to get married. I think this is an area where caution is warranted, but you should be intentional. And I don't see why school or college normally conflicts directly with marriage. In many ways, it's – the reasons that people promote finishing college before getting married usually have to do with that theme that I talked about of being confident that a man or a woman is able to support – that a man is able to support his wife or that if the man disappeared, that the woman is able to support herself.

That's at the core of it. And if people are college-appropriate learners and college is an appropriate fit for them, then I encourage, yes, finish college. But I don't see any reason that finishing college is a necessary precondition to marriage. And if I reflect back on most of my friends who made the condition of finishing college before getting married, basically you have two choices.

If you're serious about marriage – so again, the normal track is I'm going to pursue college, that's fine. And if you don't want to get married, don't get married. If you wanted to get married, you have basically two options. You're at a point in life in which you want to get married, you're ready to get married.

Either you engage in sexual activity prior to marriage, which is harmful to everyone around, or you wait until college is done. Those are basically your two choices. And to me, with the long-term damaging effects of general promiscuity, with how those damage relationships and individuals in relationships, it's better to not forbid marriage than it is to forbid marriage for arbitrary guidelines like finishing college.

If there's a way that you can do both, sure, it's fine. But if I could go back and do it all over again myself, I would just as soon get married and finish college as a married man than the other way around. I don't see any fundamental connection. And everything about it will be easier when you can pool your finances and you can engage in lower cost of living together.

You can finish college. Even – there's a separate podcast that I'm not doing today about should we wait for money to have babies. At the end of the day, if you're going to have babies, you also should not wait to finish college. College is probably one of the better times to have babies than after college.

I'm going to not get sidetracked on the baby conversation. But not only do we have a crisis of marriage formation, but we also have a crisis of baby-making. And we are all living in cultures that are dying, some of them dying slowly, some of them dying quickly. We're not even replacing ourselves as a culture.

And it is going to be the biggest crisis of the next three decades that you and I are going to be talking about continually is the collapse, collapse of birth rates. There are many reasons for it. But one of the fundamental reasons that we have a collapse in birth rates is simply that the basic ideology that we have adopted, that we should wait to have babies until we're married, which we should.

I agree with that. And we should wait to be married until we make lots of money, until we finish college, which I don't agree with, which is why I'm creating this podcast. And we should wait to have babies until we're settled in our career and we're 30 years old and we have lots and lots of money and then have babies.

This is leading to most women not having as many babies as they want to have and us as a society not even being able to replace ourselves as a society, let alone grow, which is what we should be doing. And so we have to rethink our structure of society because the idea that we have young men and women who become sexual adults in their middle and late teen years and then they defer marriage until they're 27 and then they defer babies until they're 32.

This is all leading to multiple crises, stepped on crisis after crisis. Forgive just a minor diversion here, but it's important. Every single stage of this process, with the exception of very early marriage, is bad. And so what I mean is, let's deal with early marriage. In many cultures, it would be entirely normal, many historical cultures, it would be entirely normal that men and women in their late teens and early 20s would be fit for marriage relationships.

As best I can understand, although men and women reach sexual maturity or sexual adulthood in often early and mid teen years, that doesn't seem to be true in historical cultures that men and women necessarily married that young. There are always stories of 15-year-olds who marry and 14-year-olds who marry, but on the whole, it seems that late teens for girls and early 20s for men, even in historical cultures, agrarian cultures, that seems, as best I can tell, to be fairly normal, that men needed to be older than women for maturity to be able to provide and that women, though they, I guess, technically could marry younger, child marriage is not generally a good thing and it doesn't seem to be a popular thing in most cultures.

Some exceptions clearly the case. But in order for a man to be able to marry, he needs to be able to provide for his wife, to provide for his children. And what has happened is in the professionalization of society, we have extended the on-ramp to adulthood enormously. First, we extended it past the age of adolescence.

We created this thing called adolescence. If we went back a century or two, it was very common that a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old boy, what we would today call a boy, could do a man's work. My dad grew up on a ranch. His comment to me was that at 12 years old, not only was he expected to do a man's work, but he was capable of doing a man's work.

He was doing a man's work, earning a man's wage. And so if you lived in a culture in which a 12-year-old could do a man's work and could earn a man's wage, in a decade, a 12-year-old at the age of 18 or 20 or 22, a 12-year-old could accumulate enough money to establish a home for his family.

He could accumulate enough stability, mature enough that he could marry well at an early age. Well, we've taken that and we've added more education through high school. That was the first stage. And we took what was formerly a sixth-grade education that often somebody would receive, and we said, "You need to not receive six years of education.

You need to receive 12 years of education." And that was the story of the last century. So then it became normal that in order to start his life, a man would have to graduate from 12 years of education. And as our world became more and more professional, that was the case.

Now, if you went back 50 years, you would find that some of that education was practical. You had shop classes. You had cooking classes in high schools. You had home economics classes. And so there was some element of practical education to those 12 years. But then we dumped the practical education in favor of a higher level of scientific education.

And it no longer became sufficient for a man to be really good at arithmetic, but now you have to be really good at arithmetic and algebra and geometry and trigonometry and calculus. And our expectation is that you need to do calculus. And I'm not opposed to that. I think that's fine, but it's having many damaging effects that now all of education is academic in nature and it's not practical.

So then in the last 50 years, we basically abandoned the idea as a culture of high school being sufficient education for a man to go and get a job. And now we've added in college. So now we've gone from 12 years of school to 16 years of school. And then we put men and women both into that.

And we had the feminist revolution, which we told women that you have to be better than men. And the way to be better than men is to get more education than men and to work more than men and to earn more money than men. And so now women need 16 years of education or more, and that's the norm.

And so now in order to start life, you've got to be basically 22 or 23 years old. And then in that starting period of life, you're going to need a few years to fit yourself for a career, try a few different things, have instability, be able to generate decent levels of earnings, and it just gets pushed back and back and back.

And so we have now a huge component of women who—excuse me, men and women, a huge component of men and women who are in their 30s, and they're not really even established yet. And this has compressed that if relationships form at all, then they form and marriages start in late 20s, early 30s.

And if babies come at all, then babies come in late 30s, mid 30s. And we have basically about 8 to 10 years of fertility where a woman, a normal woman, can conceive and birth healthy babies. And unless she just has babies, babies, babies, there's not really much chance. There's not enough time given a handful of miscarriages, a handful of just raising children, the stress that a woman goes through when she has babies.

There's not enough time for, in many cases, her to replace herself or even grow her family. And so some of these factors are really important. So if we're going to change it, if we're going to lead to a system in which not only are you and I experiencing a joyful, satisfied life, and not only are our children able to build satisfied lives, but are we able to perform our most basic function of replacing ourselves as a generation, as a society, and doing it in a healthy way, not a terrible make babies and abandon them way, but in a really strong way of building strong families, we have to go back to the very beginning.

And we have to reimagine every stage of this. And we have to understand what was productive about cultures gone by, filter those things that those cultures did for what should be embraced and what should be discarded, and then reimagine new models that will be successful for the future. And so as a father of five, this is why I'm engaging in this podcast, is to try to articulate what are the things that we can do differently and what are the things that we need to do differently.

So how can we produce 13-year-old men and 13-year-old women who have been able to benefit from the good things of childhood without being infantilized excessively? How can we create a culture of 15-year-olds and 18-year-olds and 20-year-olds who are properly prepared for and fit for manhood and womanhood and marriage if that is appropriate for them?

How can we prepare them early instead of expecting them to be 30-year-old babies? How can we do that at an early stage? How can we reimagine the educational process so that our educational process doesn't hinder marriage formation, baby making, or family growth? And again, I'm referring to all these things in the healthiest way possible.

None of us want single dads and single moms. None of us want uncared for, unloved children. We all want the healthy things. But we have to do the hard work of rebuilding these systems so that they're more effective, so that they are simultaneously true to the world that we live in, meaning you're not going to go today and stake out a new claim and give 40 acres to your son and daughter-in-law so that they can have a subsistence farm when they're 18 years old.

That's not the world we live in. So we have to build new models that fit our children for the modern world but yet solve some of these fundamental problems. Forgive the diversion, but it's important to understand why this is necessary, why this is important. All around the world, there are cultures that will cease to exist in the coming 50 years, coming century, because they haven't figured out how to solve this problem.

And on the whole, really none of us have solved the problem. In an era of decreasing birth rates, none of us have successfully solved this problem. And so we have to be talking about raising these issues, discussing them. Do you need money to finish school? I've dealt with that.

Do you need a lot of money to have a wedding? This is, I think, the most common thing. Well, we're waiting to get married until we can afford it. Well, what are you waiting for? After all, you're living together, you're sharing utilities, you're sharing your rent, you're sort of sharing your money, both of you have jobs.

Well, we're waiting for a wedding. This is the dumbest objection that someone could give. And the reason is we need to understand where did you get the idea of what a wedding is. If you're under the age of, I don't know, 40, 45, I don't know, I'm making up a number.

But if you're under a certain age, you need to recognize that all of your ideology about weddings has been formed by Hollywood fantasy films. Hollywood fantasy films has told you what your wedding should look like. And it's all fake. Number one, Hollywood has unlimited budgets. Number two, the weddings that are filmed are fake, by fake people who themselves can't get married, can't stay married.

One of the most corrupt, horrific cultures on earth is the world of Hollywood actors and producers and directors. It's just an evil, evil industry on the whole. Obviously, there's some people who somehow come through it with their morality intact, but many fewer than we would like. And they have built in your mind a vision of what a wedding is.

And the reason this is so impactful, it's not that previous generations didn't have film. Of course not. Film itself was built into a society that understood weddings. What has happened is as Hollywood has grown as an industry, as a technology, as films have grown as a technology and an industry, simultaneously, people have stopped going to weddings, and the weddings that they've gone to have generally been weddings that have been built upon the Hollywood fantasy.

And what's interesting is that you can see this in your own life. Look back, if you can, on all of the weddings that you yourself have been to. Those weddings--and I want to be correct with my words here. Some people have been to a lot of weddings. Some people haven't been to a lot of weddings.

It's astonishing how few weddings people go to when they're younger. The point that I'm making is that the weddings that you've gone to have been far fewer weddings than previous generations attended, and they have been far more expensive than previous generations have attended. And the reason for that is because the marriage culture has declined.

When my parents were married, they were married in church, and they had a backyard reception at their parents' house. It's very simple. That was a normal way of getting married. If you read older books, older novels, you will find that a normal way of marrying was go to church or go to the courthouse, have a simple party.

That was the wedding. And you can still see this pictured in some older films, older Hollywood films, older Disney films. You can see that pictured, kind of a simplicity. The simplicity of wedding meant that weddings and marriage were accessible. You didn't need a lot, and the wedding was something that the community did for you.

Now, in the wake of the Hollywood revolution, of all the fake weddings that you've seen on screen, a wedding is something that is expected to be something that the couple does for others. And this came from a tradition of the elite. If I'm a megabagazillionaire, and I've got daddy big bucks, and I've got a princess daughter, of course I can throw a king's royal wedding for my princess daughter.

That's what royals did. But we've spent so much time watching videos and movies of royal weddings, imagining ourselves to be princes and princesses, that somehow we've imagined that I can do that. If you can do it, great, go for it. Spend money on your princess daughter. But if you are a non-princess daughter, and you want to marry, don't think that somehow you've got to find-- that you have to spend the money on yourself.

It's the dumbest idea ever. And so the expectation that newly married couples have to throw a big party for all their friends to celebrate the newlyweds' wedding is absurd. It's absolutely absurd, and it makes no logical sense when you think of it. So if your daddy is willing to spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a wedding, go for it, have a fancy wedding.

But if your daddy doesn't have that money, don't go into debt as a young couple. Don't spend all of your money as a young couple to throw a party for your friends. Rather, invite your friends to throw a party for you. A wedding can be wonderful, and it can be simple.

Now I'm not jumping up and down and being an out-of-touch boomer who says you shouldn't spend any money. I remember distinctly the emotions, the same emotions that I experienced as a young man around trying to buy a really fancy engagement ring for my wife, and the same emotions that-- I remember those same emotions around trying to throw a wedding.

And for me, as a young man, one of my big goals in having a wedding ceremony was twofold. The first goal was to organize a wedding that would cause my wife to be satisfied with the experience that she had of her wedding. I didn't want her to be dissatisfied.

I see it as my job as a husband to help my wife to fulfill her dreams and her visions. I didn't want to be a cheapskate and say, "Well, no, you can't have any-- we're going to have some kind of cheap wedding," or something like that. That wasn't the goal.

We wanted to plan something that was nice, that was elegant, that was classy, and that was appropriate, so we'd have a great set of pictures and be done with it. And I wanted her to feel that sense of satisfaction when she reflects on her wedding day. That was a primary goal.

Another goal, though, which was the one I'm ashamed of-- I'm not ashamed of the first goal, but the second goal-- was I was worried about how I would look in front of my friends. From a more mature perspective, that's the most absurd thing in the world. And yet, that's what I was worried about, is how will I look in front of my friends?

Will I throw a nice enough party for our friends to be impressed with me somehow? And I wish it weren't that way. Worrying about what other people think of me has been my Achilles heel, the thing that often affects me and holds me back in life. And ideally, it would be dead.

It's not dead, but I've done my best to kill that because it's a stupid way to go through life. Nobody cares. They don't even think about you. But at the time, I remember that emotion. And I want to encourage you, if you're a young man or a young woman who's thinking about marrying and wants to marry, and you're sitting back and saying, "I want to marry, but I just can't afford it "I don't have the money to throw a $50,000 wedding," be done with it.

It's stupid. It's a stupid tradition that is keeping people from being married. And the longer you are kept from being married, the worse everything is. If you want to marry and you found a good person to marry, get married. And use the money that you have. Use the money that you can afford to create the kind of wedding that is appropriate for you.

Go to the church. Go to the courthouse. Stand up and say, "We're marrying each other." And then invite your friends for potluck. Have a nice dinner at a restaurant. Do something unique and creative. If you have the money and you can rent a nice venue and do the whole party, great, go for it.

Recognize that your friends want to see you married. They don't want to come to a fancy wedding and see you in debt. And it's one of the dumbest things that our culture has accepted, that somehow a young couple should begin their life with tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt for this big fancy party.

And it's crazy. It doesn't matter. It's all a facade and a mirage that has been built on Hollywood films. Again, I said earlier that if there's a correlation between the amount of money spent on a wedding and the duration of the marriage, it's a negative correlation. - When you walk in the doors at Tom Colicchio's Crab Steak, you won't just discover fresh, juicy steak, lobster, and award-winning wine.

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You don't need a lot of money to have a wedding. Use the money you have to have a wedding that's appropriate for you based upon your culture, your environment, et cetera. But recognize that the goal is to get married, and don't let financial things stand in the way of getting married.

Take as much time as you need to make a high-quality choice of spouse, but don't let money stand in the way of the wedding. What else do you need money for? Do you need money for a honeymoon? No, you don't. Take a week off from work, get in your car, drive an hour away to a friend's vacation cabin and celebrate your honeymoon.

It's fun to do fancy things. I had the fanciest honeymoon I could do. It's great. At the end of the day, you have a lifetime to do fancy things. You have a lifetime to throw fancy parties. You have a lifetime to do fancy vacations. Focus on the actual getting married and the actual enjoying your honeymoon, not on the fanciness of it all.

What do you need money for? You need money for caring for your spouse, building a household together, and having babies. On the whole, the good thing is that these things generally come slowly. And if you'll be flexible in your thinking, you can build a very happy home without much.

When my wife and I married, the first apartment we lived in was a studio apartment. And I'm trying to remember the dimensions. I think it was something like 450 square feet. It was amazing. It was a great experience. We loved it. It was less than 500 square feet, tiny little studio apartment.

We had one of the happiest... We lived there for a year before we bought a big house. We had one of the happiest first years I can imagine any newlywed couple having. What made it happy was that we were newlyweds and we were excited to be together, not excited about material things.

We loved it because we had everything we needed. We had a little bistro table that we ate our meals at. We had a bed that we slept in. We had a chairs that we sat in. We had a little kitchen and a bathroom. What else do you need? Today, everyone goes and lives in a van with 100 square feet and they won't live in an apartment.

It's kind of silly. I'm all for van living if you want to, but get a small apartment. The stages of life is what is exciting about passing forward. My wife and I were excited to get married because we'd known each other and kind of been together for a long time, but when we finally said yes and we decided to get engaged and be married, then we got to enjoy all of the benefits of that.

We didn't sleep together before we were married. We didn't try to move in together, and so all of the joy of being newlyweds was all wrapped up in that time, and it took away all of the annoyances about living in a small place and we were able to build our lives together.

Those are the joys and the emotions that you need. You don't need a lot of space. Now, we moved out of the apartment because we wanted to have babies, and I thought, well, certainly we need more than a, whatever, 493 square foot apartment to have babies, and probably you do.

But on the whole, now having had five babies, my answer is no, you actually don't. They're babies. They don't do much. You stick them in a box in the side of the room so they're safe, and that's about all you need. And of course, as a husband, I have always taken a great deal of joy in having the fancy, nicely decorated nursery and all the stuff that looks great in the pictures.

I enjoy that because my wife likes it. It makes me feel happy. But on the whole, I'd rather have the baby and put the baby in a box on the floor than have a dedicated nursery that's empty. So focus on the priority. I'm not advocating for cheapness. The goal is not to just spend no money on things that matter.

What I'm saying is what matters is getting married. What matters is having babies. What matters is not how much money you spend on those things. And if you get that clear in your mind, you'll make the right decisions step by step as you go through. Don't artificially impose obstacles where they're not necessary.

Be prudent. Money is important. My wife had her first baby. Her life was irrevocably changed. It was obviously an enormous impact on her career, on her earning ability. Women who have babies in our culture are uniquely vulnerable because it costs them. They earn less money. They have fewer promotions.

They don't get as much social security contributions. All the stuff matters. All of the stuff about the very feminist world we live in, the feminist complaints about how vulnerable women are, these are all true and accurate in general, that it is a cost. And this is why I myself, if men and women divorce, while I clearly oppose no-fault divorce, and that's one of the things that has made this whole marriage discussion very dangerous for people to get into, if my wife divorced me and took half my money and I paid child support and alimony, as far as I'm concerned, that's the right thing.

It's not my money. It's our money. We built it together. If she takes half of our money, she's just taking half of our money. That's exactly expected. I have a duty to support her. And if we have children, I have a duty to support my children. If I owe her alimony payments, that's a valid compensation for how she's invested into me because her investment into our marriage and into our family was right and good, and there's a financial component.

So these things that people rail against out of their upset with the abuses, on their core, these are right. These are appropriate. Now again, a lot of that became ethically troublesome when it came to no-fault divorce because that was where the fork in the road came, and since the implementation of no-fault divorce, you've seen the ethics of this collapse, and that's where we have the current marriage crisis and divorce crisis that we live in right now, which is causing people not to marry in the first place.

On the whole, though, what I'm trying to say is that money is important, and you do need to be having money. And as a husband, if you're a woman, you should be looking for a man who has a strong earning ability. Doesn't mean he's gonna earn millions of dollars a year.

Don't have unreasonable applications. But you should be working to secure a husband who has a strong earning ability because that is necessary and important for your long-term good. If you are a man, you should be working diligently to provide, to be able to be the strongest, most capable provider that you're capable of.

And I get so tired of the whining, especially from men. They sit around and whine about, "I can't get a job, "and everything's positioned against me." Guess what? Life ain't fair. It's never been fair. It never will be fair. It is absolutely true that the deck is stacked against you.

And guess what? You're a man. You are fully capable of overcoming these obstacles. You are fully capable of adapting to the bad economy and the discrimination you face. So what? Suck it up. Find a path forward that allows you to become strong and confident. Have high standards for the kind of woman that you would be willing to marry.

But if you want to marry, be diligent about it, and don't let the money stuff stand in your way. In conclusion, I've tried to balance these issues as they should be balanced. And what I mean is, it's equally wrong to say that money doesn't matter as it is to say that money is the only thing.

Life is not that way. It's one of the reasons why we need multi-hour podcasts to deal with these issues. You can't fit this into a soundbite. Life is not as simple and straightforward as we might wish, to where it's just easy to get it figured out. Money matters. It's a necessary factor of moving towards marriage because marriage is an intensely economic relationship.

But don't refrain from marriage over dumb money opinions. If you are a man and a wife, or a potential man and wife, who are capable of building a strong relationship together, focus on that. And if you're the kind of people who want to marry, move into it quickly. For people who've married well, excuse me again, the other condition, you're the kind of people who want to marry and you've found good marriage candidates.

I don't know in my own personal life and circles many people who are divorced. Most people I know are happily married. I know people who are divorced, of course. But what I'm saying is that in my circles, people are pretty serious about marriage. The great benefit that we have of living in 2024 is that the only people who get married are the people who want to be married.

Since there's no longer a culture that forces marriage or so strongly emphasizes marriage that unwilling people get married, the great thing is the people who get married want to get married. And I don't know anybody who would change that. You see this even with people who are divorced, that many of them go on to marry again.

So marriage as an institution is not dead. It's not undesirable for most people. On the contrary, it is a powerful enhancer for most people to give them better sociological outcomes, better economic outcomes, just better life outcomes on every dimension. Money is important. Take it into consideration. But don't arbitrarily delay marriage over foolish Hollywood concepts and Hollywood ideas.

We have to collectively develop and implement solutions that will help young men and women move quickly and easily-- not too quickly, not too easily-- but move quickly and easily and appropriately into marriage that will support young men and women as they birth children, as they raise children. And we have to do that and implement it into our current economic system.

In order to do that, there's something that all of us can do. There's something that young men and women can do. There's something that middle-aged men and women can do. There's something that older men and women can do. But we have to solve these problems if we want to see our culture continue.

Thank you for listening. I'll be back with you very soon.