Should You Get Married? - Orion Taraban

At what point should people get married? I mean, help me understand the question a little bit more. I guess, to rephrase, after what period of time in dating should people consider getting married? Okay, that makes a little bit more sense. The first question, it still has the assumption that people should get married, which I don't agree with. Like, I don't, I'm not, we should get rid of marriage, and marriage is this evil, bad institution. No, I'm not that way either, but to say that like, people should get married, and that's the inevitable, appropriate terminus of all relationships, and any relationship that doesn't end in marriage is somehow a failure, it's like, that's stupid and insane too. It's very clear that marriage isn't working for a lot of people. The issue is, we haven't come up with any kind of really compelling alternatives to marriage, and so it's like, we have this all or nothing mentality. It's either the relationship fits on this escalator, where it's like, you date, you move in, you get engaged, you get married, or it's nothing at all, or you're just having, you're just a player, you're lonely, or you're having these really short-term, disposable relationships, and I don't think that works for a lot of people, and I don't think this works for a lot of people either, and I do think we're in a stage where, when things are falling apart, we don't necessarily have to just build them back up the way they used to be, or throw them out altogether. We can keep certain things, and also begin to experiment and iterate with the idea that different types of relationships are gonna work for different people. That sounds great, let's do that. So, I'll respond to the first question like that, is we shouldn't assume that marriage should be the terminus of all relationships, nor should we believe that any relationship that doesn't end in that is somehow exploitative, weird, disrespectful, failure. I don't think that's true. Now, if both people do wanna get married, I would think, at the bare minimum, you'd wanna date for at least a year. That sounds reasonable. No one gets married to get divorced. People get married, they think they're gonna spend the rest of their lives together. People generally get married, what, 29 is the average, I think, in the U.S.? People are living to close to 80. That's 50 years. What's one year for 50? That's 2% of your time. It's like, that's a non-significant amount of time. What's the threshold, five? So, that would be two and a half years to vet a 50-year marriage. So, I think that people should really get along. There is no magic ring. The idea that once I give this ring, our problems will be solved, or she'll like me more, she won't leave, or he'll be loyal, those things aren't true. So, a ring should be, if it's given, it should be a recognition of a relationship that's already working, as opposed to a hope that this will transform the relationship for the better. Issue that a lot of guys face is losing attraction later on in a long-term relationship. To the woman, or the woman's losing attraction for him? The woman losing attraction to him. How can guys maintain attraction in a long-term relationship? Oh, there's lots of things that you can do. First of all, you have to continue on some level to do the things that attracted her to begin with. Otherwise, it's bait and switch, right? If you used to be this dangerous motorcycle-riding ne'er-do-well, and you sold the bike, and now you work as an accountant, it's probably gonna change how that woman feels about you, right? Now, people can change, and people can mature, and things that they did at their 20s they might not wanna do in their 50s, I get that. But we have to continue to show up in the ways that stimulated our attraction from the very beginning. And that could mean, for men, making sure that you take care of your fitness. Too many guys fall off with that. They're overweight, but they're still expecting their wives to look good. I think that's not a great double standard. And in particular, to constantly be striving and growing. One of the most sexy attributes to a woman and a man is ambition or drive. And this is true even if they have a lot of money. So I think that a man should always be working towards something. And when he starts to coast, or rest on his laurels, or become complacent, then the attraction begins to decrease. Maybe not immediately, or at least not perceptibly, but over time, it tends to go down. Other things that you can do to maintain attraction is to maintain some of the conditions that naturally existed when you were just dating. One thing in particular, it's very hard to maintain sexual frequency when you cohabitate. It's not marriage that tends to reduce the frequency of sex, it's cohabitation, regardless of whether you have the contract or not. I don't think that men and women were designed to spend as much time with each other as men and women do in 2024. I think that throughout most of history, the women were over here with the other women and the children, the men were over here with the other men. Maybe they'd come together for a meal in the evenings, but often the guy was out on a hunting party, or he was a traveling salesman, and he was on the road 200 days out of the year. The realms of men and women have never been as coincident as today. And I think that's had significant ramifications for our attraction with one another. There's a reason why people who grow up together don't become sexually attracted to each other. There's even a term for it. And the explanation is basically like, if you spend this much time with somebody, whether you're conscious of it or not, you treat them as if they're your sibling. They didn't have genetic testing throughout most of human history. So your sibling wasn't really who you were blood-related to, it was somebody that you grew up with. It was someone you spent that time with day in and day out. You no longer see that person as a sexual object. And that's good for genetic diversity because if we just sleep with what's around us, then we tend to be inbred and unhealthy. So we tend to lose attraction for what's close. So one thing that men can do to maintain attraction long-term is to not collapse that distance that existed when you were just dating each other. Maybe you don't even live together. I know that's a wild idea. People might think, well, what's wrong with your relationship that you don't live with each other? It's like, maybe that's for the best. I know a couple of very happy, apparently, relationships that they don't live together, and it works for both of them. So to get out of the house, to have some separation, to not be in constant contact with one another. If I know everything about your day, then what am I gonna talk about when I come home and we have dinner together? It's like you're already a known entity. That's boring. So there needs to be some uncertainty. There needs to be some known, some mystery, some space. It's like air to a fire. Space is to passion as air is to fire. Without that, it just becomes this smothering pile of ashes. Those are some things that you can do. Continue to work on yourself, take care of your fitness, and try to recreate as much as possible the conditions that led to the fun, attractive phase of your courtship. I think this often gets more difficult for guys when you take the relationship in the far long term and say they're married, they have kids, and there are a lot of responsibilities at home that they need to take care of. So how would you go about that, and what do you think, for example, in your experience, is a normal amount of time to be spending with your significant other? Kids do seem to be a game changer. I don't have kids of my own, so I'm not gonna be speaking in my personal experience on this one. According to the research that I have read, folks who seem to know more about this than I do, it's really important for the marriage to be the primary relationship in the house, that the relationship between the husband and the wife is the primary, most important dynamic, and I think a lot of marriages come into trouble because the children become the most important, and sometimes that even tends to triangulate one parent against the other. It's usually often the mother and a child on one side and the dad over here. I know some relationships where the dad's been sleeping on the couch, on his own couch, for months, and the mom is sleeping in the bed with the child, so it's like the child has now disrupted the dynamic between mother and father, husband and wife, and that's gonna cause long-term consequences, probably to the child more than anything, and to the marriage secondarily. So again, I don't remember this being the case when I was a kid, but so often today, I go to friends and family's house that they have young kids, and it's like the kids own the whole house. Like, I get how difficult it must be to be a parent, but if the living room looks like the playpen, the kitchen looks like the playpen, the playpen looks like the playpen, it's like the children are now the most important beings in that house, and that is like Twelfth Night. It's a disruption of the natural order of things, and I think modern parents have moved a little too far away against appropriate discipline. They want to be like friends with their, and buddies with their kids sometimes. They want their kids to like them, and to be a good parent, you can't always be liked. You have to sometimes be the bad guy. You have to sometimes do the thing that's gonna make the kid cry or hurt their feelings, because it's in their long-term best interests, and without that discipline, without those generational boundaries, without giving the marriage its primacy, the family becomes chaotic and disordered. The children might become, it's not that they become narcissistic, it's that they are narcissistic, and they're not disabused of their narcissism for longer periods of time, which causes difficulties for them, and the marriage tends to suffer, so I think that some of those things are addressable. Don't think that they're easy to do. Raising kids seems like a lot of work, but so I am a little bit of an armchair quarterback here, but it seems like some of those things might be in everyone's best interest to remember. What's the concept of frame in a relationship, and how should guys approach this? Frame is just like what you do in the relationship, like what's the structure? How often do we see each other? When we see each other, who goes to whom? What are we doing when we get together? What are the rules of the relationship? What is this relationship designed to accomplish? All those questions are related to frame. The person who controls the frame generally gets more of what he or she wants, and the person who controls the frame is the person with more power in the dynamic, and in most relationships I know, it's the woman who controls the frame. The woman is more powerful than the man, and that doesn't seem to be, I'm sure that works out for some people, but it doesn't seem to be working out for a lot of people, and that could also be part of why a lot of marriages and relationships are failing.