Marriage and the Power of Divorce

Lot of sexual tension in this thread. I can kinda fap to this now.

Izo said:

Lot of sexual tension in this thread. I can kinda fap to this now.

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Soygen tested, Izo approved

The only thing I know about dating someone with kids is if the kid is out of the house and living with his girlfriend DO NOT ask more than once if she is prepared to be a grandmother.

"What are you doing Step Hoss?"

i'll add some insight i've gained since my divorce (3 years now) as a mid 40s dad w/ 50/50 custody of 2 grade school boys

being a bit introverted, working remote in a tech industry in a tech savvy city, meeting ladies isn't easy. the ratio of guys to girls here is pretty evident. i don't have the patience to swipe for days at a time and find i don't have the energy to push out enough BS to take most dating app matches to meeting irl

i've had a few relationships go a few months. every girl i've meet has been 1-3 years older than me. 2 ghosted me after meeting. the rest i was able to eventually bang. all of them have had issues. anyone normal at this age is wifed up at this point. there's a reason behind everyone i meet being single, and if they don't know why their single, they have more issues than nromal.

those i've meet who don't have kids are more 'off' than the single moms. it ranges from bitter to naïve. when i 1st got divorced, not having kids was something i looked for. now i see it as a symptom of a bigger issue that i rather not deal with.

everyone i've meet save 1 has been in a bad to terrible financial position. one 46 year old was still paying off 2 degrees while working completely outside her field of study. most have credit card debt, rent an apt, several had roommates cause they couldn't afford rent alone. the girl i'm dating now is the 1st one who actually has no debt, 401k, etc.

everyone i've seen more than once was always pushing for the relationship to go faster than i wanted. they want to talk every day. see you every day you don't have the kids.

meet 1 single mom w/ an adult kid who was put on this planet for 1 thing, to suck dick. she's amazing at it. like, i've had talented ladies in the past, but this one is on another level. she's got a myriad of other issues so we hook up if our single lives align.

to summarize, dating in mid 40s tends to take more energy than it rewards.

I feel like dating is a bell curve of misery.

In your 20s you're young and excited. The future is bright. You haven't been jaded or damaged by bad/failed relationships.

In your 30s you start to become disenchanted with dating and discouraged that things aren't working out the way you thought they would.

By 40 you've peaked and now have a real contempt for dating. How did this happen to ME?!

Then by your mid 50s your expectations and disdain have waned, you've stopped caring so much about putting people you're around under a microscope and you're just happy to have some company.

It's math. It's gotta be right!

I think for most people it's probably just a series of compounding problems.

It's easy to get stuck in an unbreakable loop of confirmation bias and logical fallacies in regards to dating. Instead of using past experiences as building blocks you latch on to mannerisms you may have seen in a previous, failed relationship and extrapolate that into fooling yourself that you've been here before, you know this person entirely, it's time to end it. And at that point its just a matter of time as you keep looking for excuses as to why this person isn't good enough.

A good indicator of whether or not a person is "stuck" like this is if they start to say things like "Why should I settle?" to hand wave it away. it passes blame on to everyone else and "absolves" them of any flaws of their own. It's pretty arrogant if you think about it. Everyone else that they've ever met isn't good enough for them. That's how great they are. I've fallen into that trap myself.

For me, personally, my colossal fear of commitment comes from fear of financial ruin. I haven't really met many women I've felt comfortable committing to because I felt, thanks to our family law system, that if things went south and the relationship ended I would be sacrificing my own future stability because of where they were, financially, in their own life.

It's not really fair, and I don't want to focus on money... I don't actually care if they are my financial peer so to speak. But I can't NOT think about it because of the potential downside. And the older I get the worse it becomes as I build more and more financial stability of my own.

Marriage is kind of a young person's game. It gets very, very hard to make that commitment as time goes on and the thought process goes from "lets build a life together" to "don't steal the life I've already built for myself"

Have you thought about going gay, Khane ?

Khane said:

For me, personally, my colossal fear of commitment comes from fear of financial ruin. I haven't really met many women I've felt comfortable committing to because I felt, thanks to our family law system, that if things went south and the relationship ended I would be sacrificing my own future stability because of where they were, financially, in their own life.

It's not really fair, and I don't want to focus on money... I don't actually care if they are my financial peer so to speak. But I can't NOT think about it because of the potential downside. And the older I get the worse it becomes as I build more and more financial stability of my own.

Marriage is kind of a young person's game. It gets very, very hard to make that commitment as time goes on and the thought process goes from "lets build a life together" to "don't steal the life I've already built for myself"

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I can't solidarity this hard enough.

I've been with my current GF for just shy of 5 years. She teases me at LEAST once a week about marriage and has for the past 2 years or so. And while she tends to be about 9000x more authoritarian than I am, our views on most other things are pretty aligned. I just can't make that "leap" because of the aforementioned fear of financial ruin. Even though she makes only around 15k less/year, has a solid retirement account, isn't a golddigger/constantly wanting gucci shit, etc. Just can't do it.

I think for me it's knowing that I'm still in "control" of my financial future. By "committing", I'm giving that up for what benefit? A slight break on my taxes? Wooptie shit.

I doubt I'd ever get married without a pre-nup which can and often does cause all kinds of other emotional turmoil in a relationship.

But what still gives me pause, even with pre-nups, is from what I've read the "unforeseen circumstances" provisions can be interpreted in wide degrees. And major changes to financial situations during a marriage, as compared to the beginning of a marriage, can nullify them. It's my understanding that if, for instance, a woman with a lucrative career decided to stop working after having children, or lost her job and her desire to try to find new work, over the course of time that change in financial situation could be enough to nullify anti-alimony clauses in a pre-nup.

This probably seems like an unlikely scenario but going back to what I said before where people can get caught up in past experiences... I have had several successful, career women that I was dating who suddenly and very abruptly changed their minds about how they saw their own future unfolding. After we were together for a while and financial stability became apparent. It's jarring, confusing, and irritating for a woman you're dating who suggests she is career oriented and enjoys her job and "takes care of herself" to suddenly start saying "Oh well if we had kids I wouldn't want a stranger raising them, I'd want to be a housewife" simply because she found out I would be able to support that kind of lifestyle. It's one thing for them to be up front and honest about it, and entirely another for them to so drastically shift so suddenly to a completely differing opinion.

It makes me wary of... every woman. Unfairly but... hard to get past it.