Interesting to read the different points of view.
I think most of the main arguments have been said already so I won't come back on that but let me tell you my story. Even if it doesn't make you change your mind on marriage, it will definitely entertain you for a while.
Once upon a time, ten years ago (almost to the day), I had just started an engineering university where classes were given in French, Spanish and English. A few months after having started the academic year, I decided that I needed to practice my Spanish and went to see one of my teachers to ask her if she knew people who would be happy to talk to me. Her response was basically: go online, there are a lot of chats and forums, you should be able to find what you want.
So I did just that. I found a Spanish chat and started to "talk" to a lot of people. Actuallly when I say talk here I mean trying to read what people were writing but it was going up so quickly in the small window that my poor Spanish skills were not enough to catch anything. So I prepared a single "catch phrase" that went something along the lines of: Hi, I am a French student and want to practice my Spanish, if you want to talk to me please PM me. And I just copied and pasted that again and again every 30 seconds or so. That's how I started talking with about 50 people.
Among those people was one girl. She was from Colombia, from a country I would not even have been able to locate on the map at that time. Nothing happened really, just a few chats where she was telling me that I was probably a liar pretending to be French when I was probably living in her city or country. Then after a few months, I figured out that it was almost like having a friend, discussing more or less every day about what was going on in our life and so on. My Spanish was improving with all these people I was talking to and I was starting to think that talking to people online was not such a bad idea as I initially thought I was.
Fast forward a few months, one night after my day at university, we were talking about how it is to live in Colombia (I had done some research in the meantime and discovered what the medias show of this country) and out of the blue she told me: if you really want to see how it is here, find your next intership close to my house and I will accomodate you. The idea sounded nice but SCARY. I was 20 and the only thing I knew about Colombia was what was broadcast by the media.
But then I decided to give it a try as I would still be able to reject the offer for an internship if I ever found one. So I emailed all the big-ish companies in the cities asking for a intership (I realized much later that such a thing didn't exist there) and none of them even answered. Then not knowing what else to do, I emailed all the universities of the city asking them if they had an internship service or a list of companies I could contact as it is usually done over here. None of them answered except one actually whose answer was more or less along the lines of: tell us what you can do, what you want to do, how much money you want and we will find you something.
Long story short, three months later, I had won all the bureaucracy battles and I got my visa for Colombia 5 days before my flight was due for take off.
I spent 6 months there the first time I went and this was the biggest eye opener of my entire life. In terms of relationships, in terms of ways of living, at pretty much all levels. Nothing at all was as I knew it... and I loved it for the very first second.
During those 6 months, I became obvious pretty quickly that my relationship with this girl was getting much deeper than the one between two friends and we decided to try and get her a visa so that she could come to France and see how it was and if she liked it as much as I liked Colombia. But how do you do that when you are a student with massive student loans and on her side a broke third country girl belonging to a broke family? (By the way one thing I discovered there is how it feels to wake up in the morning without having enough money to buy food for lunch, that teaches you a few lessons as well)
Again fast forward a few months, we tried getting money from everywhere we could, I launched a company there and made some, she worked in another company and made some, we got friends to help us etc... every way was a good way and finally just after I had to fly back to France for the last year of my studies, she applied for a visa and two weeks after it was denied. Lost the money of the application and all the documents and we didn't even know why. We assumed it was because for applying for a tourist visa you needed to have a certain amount of money blocked on a bank account (not specified how much) and we guessed that amount we had was not enough so we tried to get some more and re-applied a few months later, to have it denied again and loose again the money and documents.
Long story short once again, 18 months later and 5 visa requests denied (tourist, student, au-pair... we tried everything) there was no money left and no option.
In fact there was only one, namely: getting married. But for me it was a big no-no. I was only 23 and coming from an old catholic family, I had no idea how to manage this with my relatives. On her side, she was rather pushy on the fact that it was the last option and that we should go for it which I tended to explain by the fact that I was probably a good European catch for a south american girl (quite pretentious sorry) but then it became so much pressure that I just told her to back off. I asked her to give me one full month without even mentionning the topic and when this delay had passed, I would tell her what we would do.
Let's put it that way, I have had some difficult decisions to make in my life but to this day, this one is still the most challenging I have ever had to make. I litteraly spent three weeks hardly sleeping, trying for figure out what to do. It wasn't so much the question of whether or not I should get married but much more how I would handle the family topic.
At the end, I came up to the conclusion that I only had to options. Either I did it and it might not go well but at least I would have tried it or I didn't do it and I might have regretted it my whole life. So I decided to go for it.
Again in three months I had all the paperwork done (finished two days before taking off) and on the day, I took off alone to get married. I had only mentionned to my parents that I was going to get married and they didn't really accept it, to the day they still say that they discovered it when the city published the paperwork of the marriage project. Even my siblings didn't know about it. That was the only way I found to deal with the situation. I broke the news to my brothers and sisters three days before the wedding by email. They weren't really happy
Ok, so three years after first meeting her online, I got married and I spent the rest of the week queueing with my wife to get stamps on documents, translate those documents, go back to the 10 hour queue to get the translations stamped. I could even give you more funny detailed but that's already too long for one post
I flew back to France again, alone, dealt with my family who didn't really believed that I was married and one month later, she got her spouse visa and arrived. At this stage, she couldn't speak a word in French and my family didn't speak Spanish. The day I introduced them to each other was the most awkward moment of the whole story. Each party looking at the other in the eye without being able to say anything and me in the middle translating in both ways.
6 months later, she could speak French and started to train in book production (what she had studied in Colombia but her degrees weren't valid in France), she trained during one year and worked in parallel in a company producing books. And at the end of the year, her boss told her that she could have a job in the company but that she wasn't going to use any machine because "you are a woman". She laughed and quit on the spot.
Later that day when she got home, she started thinking about what to do. As we could live on my salary at that time and as in Colombia you work in what gives you money and not on what you want, I told her to chose something she really wanted to do. And she said she always wanted to be a beauty therapist. Don't ask me why, that is still something I don't fully get as I can't see how waxing people's hairs everyday is any kind of fun but anyway The only thing that was worrying me was that there is a lot of competition in this field so I told her ok but if you want to go in this industry you have to be the best.
So we looked for the best private school in France and we were lucky enough that the start of the training was only 5 months down the line so she took a job cleaning toilets and washing dishes at night in a restaurant and made enough money to pay for the training. This training was 2 hours away from home and she was commuting every day.
With the poor French she had at the time, she still managed to graduate from this training within the top 3 and then came the time to find a job.
Again, I told her to go for the best so we figured that the best Spas in our area was on the south west coast (so about 2 hours away from home again) and we took all the addresses and I drove her there one day, she dressed up and we decided to try the best of all first as there was no way she could be accepted there... well half an hour later, she came out and told me that the manager said: I like your balls so you have a job.
I know this seems to be a little bit off topic but stay with me, it will make sense at the end.
A few months later, she had an opportunity to go to Paris for an beauty exhibition and again I told her, if she wanted to be in the best places in the country, she had to go to the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris and try to get a job. She did that and half a day later, she called me saying that she had a job in one of the best salon of the best location in Paris...
Again fast forward, I had an opportunity to move to the UK for an interesting job (I didn't know anything about business at that time as it was long before I even read TMF so I was just working a job like everyone told me I had to do), we talked about it and decided to move abroad. Once again, if my English was poor at that time, her was nil. Not a word and again she started from scratch, learning on her own, then six months later finding a job waiting tables to practice and eventually landed a job in the best salon of the city we are living in.
When she decided to go for being a beauty therapist, I promised her one day I would give her a salon of her own (remember I didn't know anything about fastlane at that time) but last year, I thought that it was time to do what I had said and give her her salon but now that I was a bit wiser in terms of business, I wanted to do something that could benefit me as well and create a scalable business. So I thought that we might be able to adapt some hypnosis techniques that used to be used for surgical operations before chemical anaesthetics were discovered and use them to reduce the pain of the painful beauty treatments like hair removal. So I trained as a clinical hypnotherapist and managed to get a few people to help me do what I wanted to do. In the meantime, I had launched a company to deliver mobile beauty services and we used some of those customers to test our technique. In a few months we were able to buy her a car, we doubled the turn over every month during the first 6 months, then we found a place, I spent all my nights and weekends refurbishing it and 5 weeks later, we were opening our first salon.
It took my wife three weeks to be fully booked 70 hours a week, then I hired another therapist to help her who she trained to her standards, three weeks later, they were both fully booked and we have now been opened for three months and I am looking for a third therapist and my accountant told me yesterday that I should start considering opening a second one to reduce the profit and pay less taxes.
So all this wall of words for what?
Marriage for me is not an event. It only is a step in a life long project and as any other project it has to be worked on every single day.
You have to choose wisely every single path you decide to go down whether it is who you decide to make your life partner, whether it is what industry you decide to go into. There is no difference, it is all down to how you make your decisions.
Do you think I would be where I am today without my wife? No, definitely not.
I would probably be richer in money yes but all the crap we had to go through to have the little things we have today have taught me much more than any money could ever pay for and my wife is my business motivation. I don't get up in the morning for me but because I chose to give her what she has never been able to have before and on the way, I am enjoying the trip. I took an idea and I am making it bigger and bigger every day and it works much more than any stupid business idea I had before when I was thinking of making me richer.
So please don't tell me that marriage is statistically bound to failure. It is not marriage which is bound to failure, it is the weakness of people personnality and the bad choices they make. Without marriage, I wouldn't be where I am today.
A life with a good life partner is like anything else, it is like the business project you are currently working on: you want it bad enough? They go get it... period!
I think most of the main arguments have been said already so I won't come back on that but let me tell you my story. Even if it doesn't make you change your mind on marriage, it will definitely entertain you for a while.
Once upon a time, ten years ago (almost to the day), I had just started an engineering university where classes were given in French, Spanish and English. A few months after having started the academic year, I decided that I needed to practice my Spanish and went to see one of my teachers to ask her if she knew people who would be happy to talk to me. Her response was basically: go online, there are a lot of chats and forums, you should be able to find what you want.
So I did just that. I found a Spanish chat and started to "talk" to a lot of people. Actuallly when I say talk here I mean trying to read what people were writing but it was going up so quickly in the small window that my poor Spanish skills were not enough to catch anything. So I prepared a single "catch phrase" that went something along the lines of: Hi, I am a French student and want to practice my Spanish, if you want to talk to me please PM me. And I just copied and pasted that again and again every 30 seconds or so. That's how I started talking with about 50 people.
Among those people was one girl. She was from Colombia, from a country I would not even have been able to locate on the map at that time. Nothing happened really, just a few chats where she was telling me that I was probably a liar pretending to be French when I was probably living in her city or country. Then after a few months, I figured out that it was almost like having a friend, discussing more or less every day about what was going on in our life and so on. My Spanish was improving with all these people I was talking to and I was starting to think that talking to people online was not such a bad idea as I initially thought I was.
Fast forward a few months, one night after my day at university, we were talking about how it is to live in Colombia (I had done some research in the meantime and discovered what the medias show of this country) and out of the blue she told me: if you really want to see how it is here, find your next intership close to my house and I will accomodate you. The idea sounded nice but SCARY. I was 20 and the only thing I knew about Colombia was what was broadcast by the media.
But then I decided to give it a try as I would still be able to reject the offer for an internship if I ever found one. So I emailed all the big-ish companies in the cities asking for a intership (I realized much later that such a thing didn't exist there) and none of them even answered. Then not knowing what else to do, I emailed all the universities of the city asking them if they had an internship service or a list of companies I could contact as it is usually done over here. None of them answered except one actually whose answer was more or less along the lines of: tell us what you can do, what you want to do, how much money you want and we will find you something.
Long story short, three months later, I had won all the bureaucracy battles and I got my visa for Colombia 5 days before my flight was due for take off.
I spent 6 months there the first time I went and this was the biggest eye opener of my entire life. In terms of relationships, in terms of ways of living, at pretty much all levels. Nothing at all was as I knew it... and I loved it for the very first second.
During those 6 months, I became obvious pretty quickly that my relationship with this girl was getting much deeper than the one between two friends and we decided to try and get her a visa so that she could come to France and see how it was and if she liked it as much as I liked Colombia. But how do you do that when you are a student with massive student loans and on her side a broke third country girl belonging to a broke family? (By the way one thing I discovered there is how it feels to wake up in the morning without having enough money to buy food for lunch, that teaches you a few lessons as well)
Again fast forward a few months, we tried getting money from everywhere we could, I launched a company there and made some, she worked in another company and made some, we got friends to help us etc... every way was a good way and finally just after I had to fly back to France for the last year of my studies, she applied for a visa and two weeks after it was denied. Lost the money of the application and all the documents and we didn't even know why. We assumed it was because for applying for a tourist visa you needed to have a certain amount of money blocked on a bank account (not specified how much) and we guessed that amount we had was not enough so we tried to get some more and re-applied a few months later, to have it denied again and loose again the money and documents.
Long story short once again, 18 months later and 5 visa requests denied (tourist, student, au-pair... we tried everything) there was no money left and no option.
In fact there was only one, namely: getting married. But for me it was a big no-no. I was only 23 and coming from an old catholic family, I had no idea how to manage this with my relatives. On her side, she was rather pushy on the fact that it was the last option and that we should go for it which I tended to explain by the fact that I was probably a good European catch for a south american girl (quite pretentious sorry) but then it became so much pressure that I just told her to back off. I asked her to give me one full month without even mentionning the topic and when this delay had passed, I would tell her what we would do.
Let's put it that way, I have had some difficult decisions to make in my life but to this day, this one is still the most challenging I have ever had to make. I litteraly spent three weeks hardly sleeping, trying for figure out what to do. It wasn't so much the question of whether or not I should get married but much more how I would handle the family topic.
At the end, I came up to the conclusion that I only had to options. Either I did it and it might not go well but at least I would have tried it or I didn't do it and I might have regretted it my whole life. So I decided to go for it.
Again in three months I had all the paperwork done (finished two days before taking off) and on the day, I took off alone to get married. I had only mentionned to my parents that I was going to get married and they didn't really accept it, to the day they still say that they discovered it when the city published the paperwork of the marriage project. Even my siblings didn't know about it. That was the only way I found to deal with the situation. I broke the news to my brothers and sisters three days before the wedding by email. They weren't really happy
Ok, so three years after first meeting her online, I got married and I spent the rest of the week queueing with my wife to get stamps on documents, translate those documents, go back to the 10 hour queue to get the translations stamped. I could even give you more funny detailed but that's already too long for one post
I flew back to France again, alone, dealt with my family who didn't really believed that I was married and one month later, she got her spouse visa and arrived. At this stage, she couldn't speak a word in French and my family didn't speak Spanish. The day I introduced them to each other was the most awkward moment of the whole story. Each party looking at the other in the eye without being able to say anything and me in the middle translating in both ways.
6 months later, she could speak French and started to train in book production (what she had studied in Colombia but her degrees weren't valid in France), she trained during one year and worked in parallel in a company producing books. And at the end of the year, her boss told her that she could have a job in the company but that she wasn't going to use any machine because "you are a woman". She laughed and quit on the spot.
Later that day when she got home, she started thinking about what to do. As we could live on my salary at that time and as in Colombia you work in what gives you money and not on what you want, I told her to chose something she really wanted to do. And she said she always wanted to be a beauty therapist. Don't ask me why, that is still something I don't fully get as I can't see how waxing people's hairs everyday is any kind of fun but anyway
The only thing that was worrying me was that there is a lot of competition in this field so I told her ok but if you want to go in this industry you have to be the best.So we looked for the best private school in France and we were lucky enough that the start of the training was only 5 months down the line so she took a job cleaning toilets and washing dishes at night in a restaurant and made enough money to pay for the training. This training was 2 hours away from home and she was commuting every day.
With the poor French she had at the time, she still managed to graduate from this training within the top 3 and then came the time to find a job.
Again, I told her to go for the best so we figured that the best Spas in our area was on the south west coast (so about 2 hours away from home again) and we took all the addresses and I drove her there one day, she dressed up and we decided to try the best of all first as there was no way she could be accepted there... well half an hour later, she came out and told me that the manager said: I like your balls so you have a job.
I know this seems to be a little bit off topic but stay with me, it will make sense at the end.
A few months later, she had an opportunity to go to Paris for an beauty exhibition and again I told her, if she wanted to be in the best places in the country, she had to go to the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris and try to get a job. She did that and half a day later, she called me saying that she had a job in one of the best salon of the best location in Paris...
Again fast forward, I had an opportunity to move to the UK for an interesting job (I didn't know anything about business at that time as it was long before I even read TMF so I was just working a job like everyone told me I had to do), we talked about it and decided to move abroad. Once again, if my English was poor at that time, her was nil. Not a word and again she started from scratch, learning on her own, then six months later finding a job waiting tables to practice and eventually landed a job in the best salon of the city we are living in.
When she decided to go for being a beauty therapist, I promised her one day I would give her a salon of her own (remember I didn't know anything about fastlane at that time) but last year, I thought that it was time to do what I had said and give her her salon but now that I was a bit wiser in terms of business, I wanted to do something that could benefit me as well and create a scalable business. So I thought that we might be able to adapt some hypnosis techniques that used to be used for surgical operations before chemical anaesthetics were discovered and use them to reduce the pain of the painful beauty treatments like hair removal. So I trained as a clinical hypnotherapist and managed to get a few people to help me do what I wanted to do. In the meantime, I had launched a company to deliver mobile beauty services and we used some of those customers to test our technique. In a few months we were able to buy her a car, we doubled the turn over every month during the first 6 months, then we found a place, I spent all my nights and weekends refurbishing it and 5 weeks later, we were opening our first salon.
It took my wife three weeks to be fully booked 70 hours a week, then I hired another therapist to help her who she trained to her standards, three weeks later, they were both fully booked and we have now been opened for three months and I am looking for a third therapist and my accountant told me yesterday that I should start considering opening a second one to reduce the profit and pay less taxes.
So all this wall of words for what?
Marriage for me is not an event. It only is a step in a life long project and as any other project it has to be worked on every single day.
You have to choose wisely every single path you decide to go down whether it is who you decide to make your life partner, whether it is what industry you decide to go into. There is no difference, it is all down to how you make your decisions.
Do you think I would be where I am today without my wife? No, definitely not.
I would probably be richer in money yes but all the crap we had to go through to have the little things we have today have taught me much more than any money could ever pay for and my wife is my business motivation. I don't get up in the morning for me but because I chose to give her what she has never been able to have before and on the way, I am enjoying the trip. I took an idea and I am making it bigger and bigger every day and it works much more than any stupid business idea I had before when I was thinking of making me richer.
So please don't tell me that marriage is statistically bound to failure. It is not marriage which is bound to failure, it is the weakness of people personnality and the bad choices they make. Without marriage, I wouldn't be where I am today.
A life with a good life partner is like anything else, it is like the business project you are currently working on: you want it bad enough? They go get it... period!
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she is the goods. But I've already had a chat to my solicitor about a pre nup style agreement. As long as you are reasonable in your agreement it should be ok. Feels weird though. But I think the concept of never getting married or having a relationship to protect your finances is even weirder.
