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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ 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. Today we pick up a long-neglected series called How to Find an Excellent Wife.

This is part two of the series. Part one was released as episode 615 on January 8, 2019. Part one was entitled "The Preparation." Part two is entitled "The Decision." In essence, the decision of whether you should marry or remain unmarried. The basic concept of this series is I'm targeting it towards young men who are seeking to figure out how to find an excellent wife.

Because I'm convinced that this is one of the most important decisions that will shape your life and will certainly shape your finances. A couple of ways that this works. First, I think an excellent wife is far more valuable than money. I think if you talk to almost any happily married man who has an excellent wife and ask him how much money he would be happy to spend in order to save his wife's life, or how much he would pay to keep her, generally the answer is almost infinite.

There's almost no amount of money. I think that reflects the amount of value that many people would place on the value of their wife. Just trying to put this into a financial context. The other reason this is so important is because the decision to marry or not to marry will drive your entire life structure, and it will influence every component of your finances.

This is completely inescapable. The whole structure of your life, the whole structure of your businesses, the whole structure of your money, the whole structure of your investments, the whole structure of insurance products that you choose to have or don't choose to have will be influenced based upon your decision to marry or remain unmarried.

This is really inescapable. I think it's rightly so. If we want to drive right at the first principles of finance, which I try to do, then we need to talk about the decision to marry or to remain unmarried. I'm convinced that in finances, one of the major ailments of the modern age is we look to solutions that don't actually solve much of anything.

The vast majority of the personal finance advice that you read in a magazine or on a top 10 list of 10 financial tips and things like that is largely frippery. It's irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Let me give you just a simple example to try to drive this point home for you with regard to personal finance advice.

David Bach years ago made famous the term "the latte factor," and one of the good things that he did was he showed people how if you just simply avoid a latte a day, you can become wealthy. The problem is that's not the best place to start. I focus on trying to teach people to think first about the big structural costs of your life and how those structural costs are going to influence your finances.

The biggest cost is taxes. The next biggest cost is the house that you choose to live in and where that house is, the car that you drive. Those types of big decisions are the proverbial big rocks that make the big difference, and they're the structural costs that drive how your entire life is shaped.

If you can get your income earned in a low-tax manner, if you can practice tax-efficient investing, if you can have a very tax-efficient life, you can get very rich and drink all the lattes that your stomach can handle. If you just get the housing decisions right and the car decisions right and the debt decisions right, frankly, you can buy as many lattes, again, as your stomach will handle, and you can do very well.

But if the taxes are wrong and the house is wrong and the car is wrong, well, the lattes help a little bit, but it's a very slow, very painful way to make progress. So I try to focus on the big structural costs first. Now, notice, of course, it's not either/or.

I don't want to create a false dichotomy here. It's not like you can only get the taxes right and only get the house right, or you can save the money on the latte. If you don't spend the $5 a day, you'll still have more money at the end than if you do spend the $5 a day.

My point is taxes, house, et cetera, is much more powerful than the latte, and that should be where we start and then move on to the latte. But this applies at other levels of personal finance as well. For example, I try to help people think a lot about their career, how you earn your income, the type of job that you do, the type of business that you operate.

I think you should start with a lot of attention to your career and income plan before you bother with the stuff of financial planning. For example, I'm kind of semi-apart of what's called the FIRE movement, the Financial Independence Early Retirement Movement Online, kind of sort of on the periphery of it.

I'm not – my radical personal finance is not at the core of that, but certainly friendly to it. The big thing that I like to point out is that to me, planning for early retirement makes no sense unless that early retirement plan is preceded by careful and thoughtful career development.

It doesn't make any sense in the world to me to work at a job that you're poorly suited for for years while practicing extreme savings just so that you can quit and do something that you love. Why not just build a career from the beginning that's something that you'd be happy to do for the rest of your life?

And then on the foundation of that career, which you'd be happy to never retire from, then on that career, build your income to a massive degree, keep your expenses extremely low, become financially independent. If you want to quit, then you got the best of both worlds. But my contention is you probably won't quit if you get the career and income right.

So the point is that big structural things are antecedent to personal finance tips and then things like your career and income is antecedent to your retirement plan. And then there are all kinds of other things that are also even antecedent to a career and income plan or that go along with it.

And marriage and marriage decisions would be one of those things that are in many ways antecedent to anything else. I think that if you get the marriage decision right, almost everything else has a higher chance of falling in line. But if you get the marriage decision wrong, then almost everything else is brutally difficult.

On the right side, in terms of just simply importance, for example, me, if my personal life is very, very strong, if my family is thriving, if my wife is contented and my children are thriving, I could happily labor every day at a job that wasn't particularly suited for me or perhaps I'm not earning particularly much money.

And I could be satisfied because when you come home to a happy home that's filled with love, there's a joy there that can't be replaced by anything else. On the flip side, if my home life were a disaster, no matter how great my career is, no matter how much money I'm saving, there's a good chance that the stress would just override everything else.

So the marriage decision, getting it right, in many ways is more important than your career plan. It's more important than the personal finance plan, et cetera. And then in terms of the impact of it, if you have a peaceful, joy-filled marriage, then most of those big decisions, such as making career changes that are more suitable for you, such as financial changes, changing houses, cars, et cetera, those things can be fairly simple.

If your marriage, however, is not filled with peace, it's filled with strife and contention and difficulty and conflict, then it's very hard to make progress on those other things. So for that reason, I'm addressing this particular topic here in my personal finance podcast to try to help you to think carefully about how to find an excellent wife, because that decision alone will really drive almost everything else in your life.

Hope that makes sense to you, and I hope you can take that concept and go from there. This show, this episode is not going to be anything kind of financial planning, any kind of numbers, not going to be any calculations. This show is philosophical, but the philosophy is powerful.

So give it a shot. If you don't like my philosophical shows, you don't like hearing my opinions, skip to another show where we deal with something more technical. Now, what do I mean by the decision? Well, specifically, I mean, should you plan to marry or should you plan to remain unmarried?

Now, I'm certainly aware of how few people actually think in this way. Very few people sit out and make a plan to marry or make a plan to remain unmarried. And my hope is that you will be one of the few, however, that do. And I hope that you'll do it independent of any particular marriage, potential marriage partner.

Because the best time to think these things through is when you are not filled with emotion. It's hard to think of a more difficult subject that's more filled with emotion than talking about marriage, than talking about love, than talking about romantic feelings, than talking about sexual attraction. These things are the strongest and most powerful of emotions.

And yet, generally, when emotions drive a decision, it's very easy to make a wrong decision. Emotions can be an incredibly valuable fuel for a good decision. But in general, they should never be the basis of a decision. And yet, many people's approach to marriage is basically, "Well, I'm happy now.

And if I meet the right person someday, I might consider getting married." It doesn't always work out for the worst, but it often doesn't work out for the best. And so I'm hoping that I can reach you, being a young man, prior to being in a situation where you're even considering anybody, and just talk with you in big picture terms about the decision to remain, to marry or to remain unmarried.

If we were to be in almost any other period of human history, this would be rather foolish of a conversation. Because the default throughout human history has always been that most people will marry. And if somebody doesn't marry, it was usually viewed as either a decision that they made, perhaps they took a vow of celibacy as part of a religious commitment, or perhaps they were unfortunate, they tried and it didn't work out, or nobody chose them, etc.

But the default decision throughout human history has generally been to marry. However, as I record this in the year 2019, although there is still a bias, generally speaking, in the US American and Western cultures with which I have the most personal experience, there is still a bias in the direction of most people marrying.

I'm not convinced that that bias is much weaker than it once was. And I'm not convinced that that bias will continue. There are some major, major risks that come in with marriage that more and more people are waking up and paying attention to. And there are increasing numbers of people who are choosing not to marry.

I don't fault them. And that's why I want to talk about this in this show. I think we should start, however, by recognizing simply how new this particular drift, this particular trend is. In many ways, of any historical knowledge that I personally have, of any cultural awareness that I have, I'm not aware of any historical period of time or any large culture that we could use as an analog for the relationship environment of today.

For the first time that I'm aware of in human history, large swathes of young men in the West face no guiding principles regarding family formation. This is very new. Throughout most cultures and at least most of human history, marriage has been culturally imposed on young men and young women.

And there have been different ways that this was understood. There are different types of marriage and there are different arguments that were promoted for it. For example, there are obvious practical arguments. Marriage led to the ability of having mutual support, somebody to be together with, to support you in your old age.

Marriage provided a way for procreation, to continue the species, and to provide a stable environment for child rearing. Marriage was often seen as providing stability in the culture, being a restraining force on the passions of young people. Marriage was sometimes used to provide advantages, marrying up in class, an ability to get ahead in the social structure.

Or think here of a prince marrying a foreign princess in order to secure a favorable political alliance. Marriage was seen as a way to provide consistent access to sex. There are many arguments that have been used and can be used to promote marriage. But the challenge is that almost all of those arguments in the modern world are largely fought against.

They're largely dismantled. They're largely seen as irrelevant. In the modern world, very few people look to marriage as a way of mutual support, as a way of supporting themselves. Most people look to the government as a way of supporting themselves. Very rarely do people think of marriage providing stability in the culture.

Rather, people say, "Well, if everyone's rich, then there'll be stability in the culture." Very rarely do people look to marriage as a means of having consistent access to sex. They just simply say, "Well, let's just have sex outside of marriage and not worry about all the problems of marriage." Increasingly, marriage isn't even looked to as something that's necessary or even desirable to provide a stable environment for child rearing.

In the United States, currently, about 40-41% of children are born to unmarried parents. Interestingly, I did the math one time. I was curious to see the percentage of babies that are aborted by their mothers and what percentage of those mothers are single mothers. I actually took the math on it, if you're interested.

I used all the CDC numbers. In the United States right now, there are just under about 4 million live births per year, about 3.8 million live births per year. Of those, about a million and a half or 40% of babies are born to unmarried mothers. Now, there's a massive racial difference in that birth rate of the percentage of children that are born to unmarried mothers.

The highest is among black people, where it's about 70% of children of black children are born to unmarried mothers, followed by about 68% in American Indian and Alaskan Indian, Alaskan Native populations. About 48% of Pacific Islanders, Hispanics right now, it's about 52% of children are born to unmarried mothers.

The lowest, too, is among white children, about 29%, 28% of children born to white mothers are born to an unmarried mother. The lowest is among the Asian population in the United States of America, about 12% of Asian children are born to unmarried mothers. But I went back and I took the annual number of abortions, which is about 900,000 per year in the United States.

About 86% of those abortions are abortions by an unmarried mother. I backed those numbers out. I pulled out the number of abortions that, in my opinion, shouldn't be labeled as abortion because they're not the intentional murdering of a human baby, but they're the proper – there's a medical situation where the mother is going to die and you deliver the baby early, but the baby dies.

It shouldn't be labeled as an abortion, but it is. It's basically the ethical abortions. I pulled out those, which is somewhere around 1%, depending on which particular statistic that you use. But I calculated it and that if we included all of the babies that we kill in the United States every year and use that as far as the unmarried mothers, we would have right now about a 50% unwed mother birthrate.

The interesting thing about this is that most people don't even think about that as being a problem. There's virtually no stigma at this point that's associated with illegitimate children. In fact, I've known friends of mine, male and female, who at this point in their lives are openly discussing the idea of simply having children biologically because they want them, even though they are unmarried and in many of the cases, even though they have no romantic partner.

They just simply want to procreate and they recognize that they may not be able to do so within marriage or within any kind of long-term committed romantic relationship. And so they're just simply going to planning to have children through some of the modern reproductive technologies or just by having a friend carry their baby, etc.

I don't mean to be flipping on that topic. It's still the number one thing that does drive people to marriage. They believe that marriage is good for children. And many parents who are in unhappy marriages stay together for the sake of children. There's a deep love and labor on the parts of parents for their children.

My point is simply to point out that that which I think is the strongest argument that has traditionally been in favor of marriage, even that argument is fading in the modern world. So what is the marriage culture in the West at this point in time? What is the marriage culture in the United States?

About the best that I can figure out from what is preached from the social elite and what is preached from the magazines and the advice books and all of the cultural centers of influence is basically this. If you love somebody, you can marry them for as long as it makes you happy to be married to them.

And while you're married to them, then you can decide what the rules of your marriage are in an individualized, customized, non-coercive way that's worked out simply between the two of you or the three or four or however many of you. And if you decide that you don't want to be married to them, then you can simply choose not to be.

And everyone can go on and find someone else to be happy with. That's about the best, honest thing that I can find. And so in short, as it's preached today in the U.S. American culture, marriage basically has no purpose. There's not really any understood purpose or value to marriage.

Marriage basically has no standards, no real function, no real rules, and no real benefits. Basically, you do you. You do what makes you happy is generally how it's approached. Now, here's the problem. What if you were a thoughtful young man trying to figure out what you should do? What if you're trying to just look at the evidence and consider what to do?

Well, to begin with, I think we should recognize that we are in uncharted territories culturally. Over the last 50 years in the United States, there has been an absolute revolution in sexual ethic, in marriage, in family formation, etc. And we are setting aside millennia of human wisdom from virtually all religious traditions, virtually all cultural traditions in favor of a previously untried, untested ethic that prizes and prioritizes human autonomy above all else and sets personal happiness as the ultimate goal of life.

So no matter where you come from in terms of your background, I think all of us really should be a bit cautious and exercise a little bit of humility in our opinions, recognizing that over the course of human history, we are in uncharted territories. So where do you go?

Well, I think we should take a good, serious look at marriage as it affects finances. And I've tried to point out already how marriage will determine the structure of your life. It will determine the structure of your household. It will determine the structure of your earnings. Everything will be impacted by marriage.

Now, the good news is there are lots of strong arguments that could be considered, especially in a financial context, as it relates to marriage. I've seen compelling arguments with very good data that married people live longer than unmarried people, that married people have better health than unmarried people, that married people earn more money than unmarried people, that married people accumulate more wealth than unmarried people, that married people feel more fulfillment in their lives, that they enjoy a more satisfying sexual life, more satisfying sexual relationships than unmarried people, have happier and more successful children than those who have children and are unmarried.

Those arguments are compelling and strong. The big problem with those arguments is for every positive argument, there is a reverse. And that reverse is most acutely felt if a marriage ends in disaster, as far too many marriages do. Because although it may be possible that married people in terms of population might live longer and have better health, what happens if a marriage doesn't last for life?

The other major problem with those arguments is I don't think any thinking person would really ever recommend marriage as a direct solution to any of those one individual problems. For example, if somebody comes to me and is asking, I don't know why they would, but if somebody is coming to me and asking for my medical advice to help them live a longer life, the first prescription and diagnosis that I would give would not be get married.

That would be a rather foolish thing. There's a whole body of research and medical opinion and medical diagnosis that would be consulted that would be the proper answer to that question. And I can't imagine a doctor saying to somebody get married. Now, it's not to say that a married person couldn't live longer.

For example, right now in the United States, there's an absolute epidemic of loneliness, especially among older Americans. And this trend is projected to increase that many older people are lonely and lonely people tend to die sooner. So you could make an argument that marriage might provide companionship. But even there, it's hard to recommend marriage as the number one way of providing companionship, certainly not the most direct or the least risky way of enjoying companionship.

So although married people might as a population live longer and have better health, who would recommend that if you want to live longer, better health, that you start by getting married? Or what about money? It might be true that married people as a population might earn more money and over time accumulate more wealth.

But if I were sitting down giving financial coaching to somebody, I would never start with a prescription that they marry as a way to solve their financial troubles. Just imagine that somebody comes into your office, they're deeply in debt, they're not earning any money, they have no money. And they say, well, Joshua, I'm looking for a way out.

How can I do this? And imagine that I said, well, I think you should get married. It would be foolish. A person is not ready to marry if they're not financially stable and they don't have a partner already in mind. But it's not a direct causative effect is my point.

You don't automatically earn more money because you get married. You don't go in and get the raise because you get married. You can harness as an unmarried person many of the things that a married person might experience by virtue of their family environment. You can harness those things individually.

And then the flip side of the case against marriage is there are so many dangers that can come in in every one of these areas. So we might say that married people perhaps live longer and have better health. But go talk to somebody who is going through a desperately rancorous divorce.

It's hard to think that that's helping their health or helping their longevity. We might say that, well, in general, married people earn more money and accumulate more wealth. Maybe that's true. But go talk to somebody who's just gone through the fight of their lifetime and find that person, that man especially, who is working five, six days a week.

And 50% of his income is going to pay child support and alimony. And he's not even allowed to see his children. It's one of the most brutal systems and one of the biggest dangers, especially for men. Even your freedom, even your freedom can be kissed goodbye in a difficult divorce.

One of the biggest risks for men is if in a divorce you are -- the court mandates that you make child support payments. If you fall behind on those child support payments, you face a massive, massive legal problem. There are multiple expressions of it. First, you very well may be incarcerated and held in contempt of court by failing to actually make those payments.

There are a number of different studies that have been done on this. I've seen results in some studies that sometimes as much as 10 or higher percent of the inmates in a state are there because they're held in contempt of civil court after falling behind on child support payments.

I've seen, especially in the South, and many of your rights that exist in other kinds of court systems completely go out the window if you're held in this particular situation where you're in prison because you missed child support payments. One of the worst things right now is not only could you be in prison, but even if you don't wind up in prison, your ability to travel can be revoked if you miss as little as $2,500 of child support payments to your ex-wife and to your children, $2,500.

Now, imagine in the modern world how easy it is to fall behind $2,500. But under current US law, if you fall behind more than $2,500 on child support payments, your passport and your travel privileges, privileges so-called, can be revoked. That's the law. And by the way, that $2,500 is not indexed for inflation.

It's a flat $2,500. And I'm not aware of any bills or such that would lead to it indexing. So this becomes a bigger and bigger danger. Just imagine your freedom being revoked over $2,500. Now you say, "Joshua, are you opposed to men supporting their children?" No. In fact, I'll be one of the most vigorous and vocal proponents of men supporting their children.

But here's the reality. Child support payments are not equivalent to supporting your children. Child support payments are an arbitrarily determined bill that is tacked on to you for a very long period of time. Alimony payments are not supporting your wife. Alimony payments is an arbitrarily determined bill that is tacked on to you in many cases for a lifetime.

It's nothing like the reality of a father and a mother who are married, live together, and are going through situations and supporting their children. Because those things can change. If I go into financial trouble, I don't have to just keep making my wife a monthly payment of the amount of money that she needs and demands from me.

We are going to tighten our shoes. We're going to tighten our whatever, the budget. Tighten the budget. If I am having trouble and I'm going through financial difficulty and I'm having trouble giving my children all the things that they have, I'm not a bad father because I have to pull them out of swim lessons and pull them out of private school and do those things.

That's what families go through. But just imagine having that bill imposed on you where in order to get anything changed, you have to go through an expensive court battle. If it ever does get changed, and so in general it doesn't happen. You just have a bill every month. It's a brutal system.

And so for every benefit that marriage provides, there's a corresponding incredible risk if it goes badly. It's one of the highest risk endeavors you can get into. In many ways, it's almost like using leverage for your investing activities. Leverage can give massive benefit to your investments if it all goes well, and it can wipe you out if it doesn't go well.

And I'm just getting started in terms of the risks. Now here's what's even worse about the lack of marriage culture in the modern era. The traditional concept behind marriage in the U.S. American culture, which came out of the Christian tradition, in many of the Western cultures, which again all came out of Christian tradition, was that marriage was either insoluble or only soluble under the worst of circumstances.

So, for example, one of the questions that I would recommend, any young man I know who is engaged or who is thinking about becoming engaged, the question at this point that I always ask him is very simple. I say this, "Under what circumstances will your wife divorce you?" Usually no one has ever asked him that question, but I ask it.

"Under what circumstances will your wife divorce you?" And then I sit back and listen. And the answer to that question is extremely revealing. Now what I always want to hear is "under no circumstances." I want someone to say, "Under no circumstances will my wife divorce me." Prior to my wife and my engagement, that was what we talked about.

We said, "Listen, if we're going to get married, we're in it for life. There are no circumstances that will ever lead to divorce." Now obviously I'm not so naive to say that it could never happen. People could change. People go crazy. All kinds of things happen under the pressures of life.

The person that you are at 25 is not the same person that you may be at 45. You may be hopefully much better. You may be much worse. All kinds of crazy stuff happens. But if you start with anything except absolute permanence of the marriage, it's very hard to see how you get better from there.

So I recommend that the answer is simply "none." Now, of course, I come from an Orthodox Christian background, and in Christianity, Jesus said that there's no place for divorce. What God joins together, let not man separate. So there's no basis for divorce in that situation, and I don't count--I encourage people start with being on the same page in terms of the Christian religious tradition and being committed to something.

But even if not, there's got to be a point to this. Now let's go back. Many people disagree with me. So many people in answer to that question would say, if I ask, "Under what circumstances would your wife divorce you?" then sometimes I'll get an answer something like, "Well, if I cheated on her, if I committed adultery on her." Well, I think that's reasonable.

That's not an unreasonable kind of statement. And traditionally, there are many communities, many religious traditions that would hold that a marriage can be terminated in case of something such as adultery or in case of something like spousal abandonment, these types of things. In the Christian religious tradition, these are debated as the so-called exceptions.

Is there an exception? Is there a permissible reason for divorce if somebody commits adultery, etc.? In other religious traditions, it's more codified. But basically, it comes down to something significant. Now here's what's important about that. If you are in a situation where you say, "Well, my wife would divorce me if I committed adultery on her," in that situation, basically, the results depend on your performance in this way.

You can choose not to commit adultery on your wife. That's your responsibility. You can choose that. So that's up to you. You can choose to not abandon your wife. That's up to you. There is never an excuse whatsoever for you to commit adultery on your wife or to abandon your wife.

You have to think ahead, and if you think that you might face sexual temptation, you have to think ahead and make a plan for how you can remain chaste and faithful to your wife in those circumstances. But at least men who commit adultery on their wives and are subsequently divorced, at least they bear the responsibility for that.

They bear the blame for that initiating cause. Here's the problem in the United States with marriage at this point in time. Almost nobody uses that kind of standard as a standard for permissible divorce. Rather, in the wake of the no-fault divorce revolution of the '80s in the United States of America, now people can divorce for just about any reason or no reason at all as it is officially codified in law.

So now if you marry a woman, the answer to "Under what circumstances will she divorce you?" can sometimes be, "Well, I guess if she doesn't love me anymore." Now I want you to think as a thinking man, why would you ever choose to have your life affected by something so ethereal, so ephemeral, so unprovable, something so subjective as, "Well, I guess I just don't love him anymore.

I guess I just don't have the tingles anymore." Why would you ever put yourself in a situation where on the mere basis of feelings or personal unhappiness, you could have your entire life ripped apart? And this is the great danger. And unfortunately, it's very hard to find a community in which you'll be safe because this concept of personal happiness being the driving ethic under which decisions are made has become the driving force in the advice that people get.

Pull out your social media feed. Pull out an Ask Abby advice column. Pull out almost anything you find in the popular culture. And go and find a question on relationships. And imagine your wife who's married to you writing and asking for advice, saying, "Well, I feel unhappy right now," or, "I just don't think he treats me very well," or anything like that and read the advice that she will get.

And the majority of it these days basically comes down to, "Well, honey, what's going to make you happy?" That is scandalously dangerous. It is stupid. It's a stupid approach to life to base such fundamental things on things so fleeting as feelings or love. "I fell out of love with him.

I fell out of love with her." It's absurd, and yet that's what's driving much of the modern world. And to my personal shame, don't expect much better from the broad swaths of Christianity. Don't expect much better from the vast majority of people who have a business card that says "Christian pastor." Oh, there might be some more churchy-sounding words associated with it, but I want you to go.

Go and ask if you're part of a church community or some kind of Christian community or religious community of your own religion. Go and ask and find out. Let's say that your wife is unhappy. Something's going on. You're broke maybe. Maybe you had a failed business. You're broke. You can't provide for all the things that you would like to provide.

And go and start polling and figuring out what advice she would get. And if you ever hear anything except, "You better go back and love your husband," you better be careful. Because life goes through mountaintop experiences and valley experiences. Life is tough. That's why the marriage vows are "for richer or for poorer, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do us part." That's why marriage vows are written that way, to provide a stability and a continuity of a marriage relationship.

But what generally seems to happen in most of the broader Western culture at this point is, if people take a marriage vow that says, "Till death do us part," they don't actually mean, "Till death do us part." They mean, "Until I fall out of love with him," or, "I fall out of love with her," or, "I just wasn't happy," or, "I just didn't have the tingles anymore." Now, forgive me if I sound sarcastic.

I'm trying to use a little bit of emotional verve to try to show how foolish this is. And yet this is what our society is structured on. And all you need to do is, if you think I'm being too strong, sit and talk with a man or a woman who has been abandoned by their spouse because they were depressed, or because they got the hots for somebody else, or some of these kinds of things.

It is brutal. And the impact goes far. And yet our whole society is seemingly structured on, "Well, you'll find someone else. It'll be okay." It's not. You won't. It's not okay. It doesn't get okay. And the best way in advance to avoid it is simply avoid the whole thing.

And this is especially dangerous if you are a man because our culture holds a higher standard for men without giving men any of the traditional rights and privileges that men should enjoy. This is one of the reasons why marriage is increasingly toxic for men. If you have additional power, rights, privilege, then you can bear additional responsibility.

But in our modern feminist world, any traditional power, rights, privilege that men once enjoyed has been completely stripped out by the law and the culture. And yet the additional responsibility is still foisted upon men. And it's wrong. So what do you do? Well, you have to avoid it. Now, you can opt out of the entire thing.

You can just simply say, "I'm not going to marry." I think that's a reasonable decision. I really do. I don't think it may be the best decision, but I think it's a reasonable decision. And/or you can go to what I think is better, is opt out of the popular culture and deal in some subculture that has a different standard of ethic than personal happiness.

You should still recognize that it's a dangerous game because you have no legal support. And support for marriage, for it to be strong, has to be personal, backed up by family, backed up by culture, and backed up by the law. So imagine for a moment you marry, you're going broke, your wife is unhappy, you have no money, she can't go anywhere, can't do anything, barely has enough food to eat, you're broke, just as one obvious example of something that can easily happen in many marriages.

So now just imagine if you have strong support. First, your wife, when she took a vow to you, said, "For richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part, and thus I'm all in." But then perhaps she's feeling frustrated, she's feeling angry, she's frustrated at you.

There's major problems. And then she goes to her mother and sits at her mother's table. Well, what you want is the fact that her mother says, "Why are you sitting here at my table? I'm not your husband." Maybe gives her a hug, gives her a cup of tea, but says, "Go back and love your husband." And then imagine she goes to her girlfriends, and she's hanging out with them, and they say, "Why are you here with us?

I mean, we like to see you and all, but this is not the time for you to be here. You need to go and be with your husband." And then imagine she goes for counseling at the local church, and the counselor says, "Why are you here alone? I'm not your husband.

Go ask your husband." And then she goes to the divorce court and says, "I want to divorce my husband." And the divorce judge says, "On what grounds? What's the grounds?" She says, "Well, I'm unhappy." And the judge says, "Go home and love your husband." Now, the fact that that's anathema, the fact that that's even so hard to imagine the modern world should tell you where we are as a culture.

It hardly exists anymore. It certainly doesn't exist legally. It'd be a vanishingly rare large church organization that you could expect that to happen. It'd be a very unusual community environment for the girlfriends to give that advice. And it'd be a very unusual mother in the modern world to give that advice.

And yet that's the right advice. I'm trying to draw a stark picture for you of the danger that exists in marriage. To thoroughly disabuse you of any idea that it's easy, any idea that it's certain, and any idea that it is somehow just the automatic default. It's not. It shouldn't be.

It isn't. Because you know as well as I know, think about it, especially if you are interested in a certain person thinking about marriage, think about what will happen when your wife is unhappy, she's angry at you for some way that you've hurt her, some emotion that she's going through.

Just go through that list of people I said and see what advice she's going to get. Now, you might think at this point that I'm opposed to marriage. I'm not. Here's the key. I think that in order for marriage to work, you need to have two things very clearly established.

Number one, you need to have a very strong "why". Why are you marrying? Why should you marry? And you and your potential wife need to be united in that. And then number two, you need to be very careful about who you marry. Because the quality of your potential wife will make a huge difference in all of these circumstances.

The great thing about marriage, as compared to some other high-risk life endeavors, is you can in advance study the risk factors. You can in advance understand where the attacks are going to come from. You can in advance judge the character and the caliber of your potential marriage partner. And you can pretty much understand how they're going to react and how they're going to respond in most situations.

People, for the most part, are fairly predictable. If you understand how somebody thinks, you can probably understand what they will do. If you can see what somebody has done in the past, you can probably guess at what they'll do in the future. People generally don't change much. So don't expect your potential wife to change.

You need to be very clear on why you should marry and then on who you should marry. I'm convinced that if you can succeed in marrying an excellent wife, you can enjoy all of that broad range of benefits previously discussed and far more. And even if you never had money, you'd be thrilled to be with her.

But if you marry an awful wife, there's a good chance that you won't get any of those benefits and you'll get nothing but trouble. But it's not an accident. Marriage is not this magic eight ball that somehow everybody goes in, you shake the eight ball, and then whatever comes out, that's the answer.

No, it's predictable. It's behavior-driven. There are things that you can do that will draw your wife to you. There are things that you can do that will drive your wife away. There are things that she can do that will draw you to her. There are things that she can do that will drive you away.

Marriages don't fail by accident. Neither do they succeed by accident. So if you have the right philosophy and the right framework, then going forward, you can be positioned for success. So let me just give you a couple of suggestions. Why should you marry? In my opinion, there are two major reasons why you should marry that supersede all of the others.

There are many reasons, but there are two major reasons that supersede all of the others. The number one reason why you should marry is for sexual fulfillment. Marriage sanctifies sexual activity. The only moral place for sexual activity to occur is within the context of a one-man, one-woman, one-woman marriage relationship for life.

And this is a primary reason for marriage. This, of course, many would debate that with me, and of course I'm coming directly from a Christian perspective, but in the New Testament, one of the most clear teachings about marriage is that marriage is a place for sexual fulfillment, and it is a primary reason for marriage.

It's better to be married than to go around just filled with sexual lust and unable to satisfy that lust. Now, here's the major problem with this particular reason for marriage. It's very hard to even think of recommending marriage simply because of sexual fulfillment. It's a primary reason, but the problem is the more important thing is to develop the discipline, the self-discipline, and the skills of chastity.

Because if you marry just for sexual fulfillment, it doesn't last. Because even in marriage, you still have to exercise the skills of self-discipline and chastity. So marriage doesn't make everything better. It doesn't solve all the problems. It doesn't make everything better. A married man still has to be able to exercise self-control over their sexual desires.

You do that during--there are times in any normal marriage at which sexual activity is not possible with your wife. There are times at which you're away from your wife. And so marriage doesn't solve sexual problems, but it does give a guiding outlet, and it solves some, many sexual problems.

It gives an opportunity for sexual fulfillment, which is incredibly important. Now here's the problem. If you don't believe that sexual activity must be reserved for marriage, there's a very decent chance that you will never marry well. Because if you study the data that is collected on the number of sexual partners that a person has prior to marriage, for every number, for every n over 1, the chances of a successful marriage goes down.

The strongest marriages occur between two people who have a total number of sexual partners of zero prior to their marriage. And those people have the richest, most fulfilling sex lives of any person. Usually. There are exceptions. I've known a couple of men who had real challenges. Not everything could be solved by marriage, just speaking generally and broadly.

The challenge is if you don't do that, the chances--again, the chances of marrying successfully become very, very low. Very low. And it becomes more challenging because the baggage accumulates. That's probably enough on that. Baggage accumulates. So I think a primary reason for marriage is for sexual fulfillment. But it's not an appropriate exclusive reason.

So you have to develop self-discipline and chastity and virtue prior to marriage. And you have to exercise those things even after marriage. Now, this is perhaps the most incendiary of claims because in the modern world, people worship at the altar of sexual fulfillment. The number one ethic that is preached by the culture at large is sexual fulfillment.

It is the highest god in the land. Whatever your sexual desire is, that must be requited. And with a very couple of exceptions, which are currently unthinkable for people, a very few things that are forbidden, our culture is one that worships at the altar of sexual desire. And yet it's a false god.

It doesn't work. It doesn't satisfy. Unfortunately, the process through that is often very painful. You go find the stories. You go talk to the people. The process through is deeply painful. But that's a primary reason. Primary reason for marriage number two is for the care and raising and training of children.

Marriage is profoundly important because it provides the perfect environment for the birthing, the conceiving, the birthing, the nurturing, the raising, and the training of children. And this is right. If you can come together with a wife and you can have a shared vision of what you desire to accomplish, the type of family that you intend to build, that you desire to nurture in this world, that can provide for you a powerful structuring force.

And the joy of going through that process with your wife, going through all the phases of life, can be deeply fulfilling and it will structure your life and you won't regret it. This will be especially powerful if you and your wife share a multi-generational vision of the impact that you desire to have in your family and in the world because of your family.

If you can consider your vision for your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, et cetera, that will give you a long-term goal that will pull you together with your wife. But if you just simply want to share that natural desire that most human beings share of continuing your family, of procreating, of continuing the species, then you'll find that marriage is the perfect environment for that.

If you want on every single metric to give your children privilege, to give your children advantages, just simply marry, stay married. And that in and of itself will drive almost everything else. The crazy thing about looking at many of the modern decisions and whatnot that people face, the crazy thing about the modern world is how simple so many of the solutions are and how they are commonly driven by what I'm talking about in this show.

I'll give you an example. I wrote a book on education, and the author profiled this study that was done on educational achievement. And I'm always fascinated by this because the standard answer to how to help children do better in school is to spend more money, more money, government money.

But what's funny, what's ironic, what's sad is that that's always the least effective thing. The number one driver that this particular study found in terms of determining the fraction of success, the level of success, know what it was in education? The number of family meals shared together by the family.

So if you want your children to be brilliant and to do well in school, you start by having breakfast, if possible lunch, but at least breakfast and dinner together as a family every day with no TV and no screens. And if you do that every single day, it compounds year after year after year after year, and it does incredible things in your children.

It's easy. It's simple. Very easy for married couples to establish that as the structure of their home. Almost impossible for a single mother, single father to build that same structure. Now, it doesn't mean that single mothers, single fathers can't make progress, but it's limiting. Can't do excellent work with their children, can't build deep relationships, can't pour themselves out for the children.

Of course they can, but the natural normal structure is easy. Even in terms of all the stuff that we're talking about, you look at the world around, and I challenge you, look at the world around, read the headlines that are dominated day in, day out by sex, sexual scandal, this person said this, this person said that, and I ask you, imagine for a moment that the majority of people in society simply married, and all sexual activity was reserved for their marriage.

Imagine what that does. You want a culture of consent? A marriage ceremony is a really good marker of consent. You want a culture of treatment and kindness, et cetera? Those things come in marriage anyway. To the point. The point is that with children, if you have with children as a fundamental intent and reason for your marriage, it provides a guiding structure.

Those are the two primary reasons for marriage. Now, there are many other reasons for marriage as well, many other things. I think it's great if you can marry your best friend. I did. I think companionship of marriage is so wonderful. I love having someone to travel with. I never enjoyed traveling alone.

I love traveling with my wife. There are just dozens and dozens and dozens of other benefits to marriage, but none of them is strong enough to build on. You need a philosophy that prioritizes marriage. I think those two things are the strongest things that you start with. Make sure everything else is optimized as well, if at all possible, and you build a strong marriage that can last the test of time.

Now, who should you marry? You must marry well. You absolutely must marry well. So, in that regard, we'll save that for another show. But you better be careful. Don't just marry the first person that comes along, the first person that's convenient. If you do what I recommended in Part 1, if you follow the preparation steps, there's a very decent chance that you as a man have at least a fighting chance to attract almost any woman who's available and who's in your sphere of contact.

I think there's a lot more that could be said, but I don't know how to do more in this particular context at this moment. There are other factors. I always ask--I try to talk to as many people as I can. I always ask them. I always ask people. And there are people from all cultures and from people who agree, disagree.

There does seem to be many people who are able to build successful marriages that last, even if they don't agree on these particular things. But the challenge with that, with starting in that perspective, is it seems very much to be a gamble. And for every--I've got a bunch of friends, for example, that have just always been--they never wanted children.

Okay, I understand. I ask them a lot about that, and many of them seem very happy with their decision, long marriages, 40 years, 30 years, et cetera. Those people seem to exist. The challenge is there are often--it's hard to predict that in advance. And there does seem to be just an element of compatibility that people have, but it's hard to judge that in advance.

It seems to be more hit and miss. And I personally, I don't like the risk of hit and miss. I think there needs to be something more solid. I want to just close out this show by making two comments on the financial benefits of marriage, two more comments on the financial benefits of marriage.

One of the things that I find ironic is how frequently people try to solve financial problems with financial products that are better solved by simply different life decisions. I already gave you the example of education. I can give you this example and just talk about it in terms of the neuroses of children, et cetera.

A child raised in a functional home by a mom and a dad who are there, who love them, and just normal, it would be perfect. But that child has so many advantages in life in every way. And so people will spend thousands and thousands of dollars trying to buy advantages for their children that could simply be fixed by simply just enjoying a good home life in a stable home.

It's incredible. Even things like the neuroses, the things that people develop, all these crazy things and spend thousands and thousands of dollars on therapists and things like that. Different decisions, just living a moral life can eliminate many of those things. Not all, just many. And other things like retirement.

One of these days I'm going to do a show on planning on children for a retirement plan. The majority of people throughout human history have never had a retirement plan other than their children. Now we think that we're so intelligent in the modern world that we don't even need to think about that.

And the vast majority of retirement planners, planning that I used to do, the number one goal of many retiring couples is never be a burden on their children. First, I understand that. I don't want to be a burden on my children either. But what many couples, what many retirees are so naive is to think that somehow retirement is this golden oasis and the best thing is to never communicate with their children.

You look at the data, there seems to be a small subset of people who are happily retiring. Wealthy people who have active social lives, active hobbies, interests, etc. that keep them going. But many old people are dying of despair and loneliness. You're going to tell me that you would trade in, if you had to choose, you would trade in a productive life with your children and your grandchildren, being integrated in that community, maybe living with your children, enjoying your grandchildren for a million dollars in the bank?

If you would, I can't even imagine how you get there. You'd trade love for money? And yet for you to actually have that, to have grandchildren, great-grandchildren that love you, have warm family relationships that are not filled with tension, you're going to have to sacrifice and invest at an early age.

It takes a lot of work. So a lot of these things, people say, "Save for retirement." Well, that's fine. I do that. I teach that. I want people to do that. But there's also an element which you say, "Just invest in your children. Invest in being present with them, loving them, training them, encouraging them, preparing them, and you don't have to worry about retirement.

You won't be a burden to your children. You'll be a blessing to your children." The other thing is this. Here's what's so important. Marriage traditionally has been a source of stability, including financial stability in society. The only reason that I can see that our current U.S.-American society is kind of sort of working is because the government, Uncle Sugar, has been recruited to pay the bills.

And unfortunately, Uncle Sugar doesn't have the money. And so Uncle Sugar's going to die. Now, he's probably going to go through long sickness. He's going to have cancer. It's going to get increasingly terminal. People are going to pump him full of chemicals and drugs to try to keep Uncle Sugar going.

But Uncle Sugar will die. The modern welfare state will die. And yet it's the modern welfare state that is currently propping up society. You study single mothers. What are the vast numbers of single mothers going to do when they don't have the government programs that keep many of them afloat?

Subsidized rent payments, WIC payments, subsidized food, free health care, etc. It will collapse slowly, painfully, over a long number of decades. But the modern welfare state will collapse. And at that point in time, your tribe, your local community is what's going to make the difference. The best place to start with that is the structure of families.

I'm convinced of this. In the fullness of time, maybe in my lifetime, maybe not, but in the fullness of time, the things that last will be proven to be strong marriages, strong families. That will take people through. And those families will serve as pillars of community in their local area.

And those families will be about the only salvation that is available for the single people, for the single mothers, the single fathers, the widows, the orphans, etc. Because a family serves as a central anchor point in a community. It provides the right environment where all of the everyone else can be brought in.

So in the fullness, the only way that it's propped up right now, the only way that things can keep going is because of the welfare state, which is all built on borrowed money. That will collapse, probably in our lifetimes, maybe not. The question is, what will remain when that collapses?

My hope and my ambition is to be one of the solutions in that day. Part of that is through my work here. Part of that is just through being resilient. Part of that can be done through business. But a major central point of that is my family, my marriage, my family.

So as I close, I encourage you, you who I'm speaking to, young man, thinking about whether you want to marry or not, I encourage you to take a careful look at the facts. I encourage you to take a careful inventory of your own thoughts and philosophy. The vast majority of married couples never thought about it before they got married much.

Very few people ever sit down and have this compelling philosophy, etc. And most of the time throughout human history, that wasn't needed. It wasn't necessary because the culture provided it for you. The culture was always pushing you. Stronger in some cultures, weaker in others, but it was accepted. But today, that doesn't exist anymore.

This is doing something interesting with the divorce rate. The divorce rate in the United States of America is falling. Now, I don't think it's falling. The reason seems to be, at least one explanation of that data, seems to be, in my opinion, that the people who are marrying are the kind of people who are intentionally choosing marriage and they have a higher degree of commitment.

That's good. I fear for many others, but that's good. So the point is this. We live in a culture in which about the only orthodoxy that is present is that, well, if you love somebody, you can choose to marry them or not. And if that love grows cold, you can choose to not be married anymore.

I don't think that's a very healthy place for a society to be. But you will have to think. You will have to assess it. I hope you'll agree with me. Maybe you won't. But at least consider it. Because in today's world, if you're going to actually build and find an excellent wife, you're going to have to be a very unique person.

Because all the deck is stacked against you. And if you're going to sustain a marriage without the traditional legal support, cultural support, family support, religious support, you're going to have to be going against the tide. So do your research, and I hope that this helps you. I think, in summary, I think that marriage is a wonderful idea.

If you are committed for life, and if you can find a woman who is committed for life and able to stand against all those factors discussed, and if together you are equipped to weather the withering attacks on your marriage from the culture at large, and if you're committed to a multi-generational view of your family's impact on the world.

In that case, I think marriage can be a good idea. But if you're getting into it, just because it seems fun, all the cool kids are doing it, there are major problems ahead. Better for you to remain single than to be in that world. Choose carefully. Sweet Hop is an online marketplace curating the best in premium seating at stadiums, arenas, and amphitheaters nationwide.

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