Alright, so as some people noted, there's something fishy going on here. Marriage is something that has real risks. What @Esquire and @GIlman were saying should be taken into consideration.
However, the odds of you experiencing those negatives has been exaggerated. First and foremost is a failure to understand how statistics work. Just because 50% of people get divorced (or, in reality, more like 43%), does not mean that every person has a 50/50 shot at getting divorced. Just like the statistic that "1/3 of black men have been to prison" does not mean that there is a 33% chance that the black son of two black Yale Law grads with a 3.9 GPA and 96th percentile SAT scores will end up in prison some time in their lives. Factors matter. All men (and women) are not equal.
So what are the factors known to affect divorce?
1. Age of the participants in the marriage. If you're both over 23, your odds of divorce go down, and it continues to fall as you get older.
2. Age differential between the participants. If you're close in age, the odds of divorce go down.
3. Educational attainments and divorce have a curvilinear relationship, meaning that your odds of divorce are lowest if you either have no higher education or lots of it. The rates seem highest for college dropouts (sorry, no graph this time).
4. Equal educational attainments. If you and your spouse have graduate degrees, the odds of divorce goes down again.
5. Race. as of the middle of last decade, whites are less likely to get divorced than blacks. Hispanics are less likely to get divorced than whites, and Asians, especially Asian women, are less likely to get divorced than all those groups. Remember again that this is likely a result of the conditions and values that are likely to surround each individual during childhood (wealth vs. poverty, strict nuclear family values vs. broken homes, etc.), so if you're black but from a rich, well educated family, the "average" is going to represent you very poorly.
6. Being a baller. A 1995 study found that the divorce rate for the highest income group is about 18% lower than the lowest income group. Contrary to the scaremongering in this thread, the more fastlane you are, the less likely your spouse is to leave:
7. History. If neither of you came from a broken home, your odds of getting a divorce are lower.
8. Finances and debt. If you don't fight about money (I hate self-reported metrics, but that's what we've got) and don't have debts (objective) your odds of divorce go way down.
9. Recidivism. Unbelievably, if you get divorced once, your odds of getting divorced again are higher than average. If you've never been divorced, odds go down. Estimates say that second marriages may be around 66% probability of getting divorced, third are up around 75%.
So what's all this mean? Well, if you're an 27 year old Korean with a master's degree and no debt who just got hitched to a 26 year old Korean medical doctor with no debt, and did not begin cohabiting before age 23, and both your parents are still together, and you're headed for the top income bracket (as all fastlaners should be), your odds of getting divorced are not 50%. They are, in fact, nowhere near that number. What are they actually? it can be hard to combine cross-factors and figure it out, but you can see how much just a single factor affects the rates, then guess what that would be compounded. 10% 5%? Less?
Then comes the hard part. You need to sit down seriously and ask yourself what you're doing here. The 50% divorce statistic is definitely inflated, as prior posters pointed out, but you know what isn't inflated? The failure rate of startups:
Ask @Vigilante, or if you haven't yet (for the love of God, why?) listen to his Mind Your Business Podcast: A divorce may take 50% of your stuff, but if your business crashes and burns (whether by fate or by the deceit of partners) you stand to lose everything. Yet most of us take this gamble, and lose, and get back up, and lose it again. I shared with some people at the meetup that I lost $4,000 in a period of about 24 hours when I was first starting out. And that's just a gentle rap on the knuckles compared to the absolutely savage a$$ beating people have suffered when their whole company went down in flames. Lots of us here are familiar with the feeling of surplussing yourself beyond requirement, I've taken out loans worth 50% more than my net worth before. If shit goes sideways, I have no recourse to repay it, I lose everything.
Some of you guys are too fearful.
When you see that the odds are 50% of success, if you say "I'll probably be in the half that fails, I should avoid that" you're banking on failure. That gets even worse if the actual odds of failure are 10-12% and you still say "Why bother? I'll probably still fail." Almost all of you talking with your mouths like you're trying to join the "1%," but your actions say that you're F*cking banking on being the bottom 50%, as you trip over yourselves in a frantic mob to figure out how to get your sign-up for Odesk approved after somebody waved in front of you the oh-so-tantalizing-prospect of ten dollars an hour, in what was supposed to be a last-resort move to save yourself from being broke. Are you kidding me? Did the masthead on this site change to the "Sidewalk Forum" while I wasn't looking?
I already shared this, but a couple of years ago I was reading an article in Wharton's alumni magazine with ten billionaire alumni. Seven of the ten had one common "success factor" that they named independently. Learning to code? Good education? Compounding interest?
No. Their spouse.
It stuck with me even as a teenager. I can remember closing that up, then going out to skateboard and just chewing on the thought over and over...
Wow.
It was their wife, not their Penn degrees (I was raised to think that your degree and educational institution was the be-all and end-all of your success) that they saw as crucial in the end.
You guys want to become billionaires, but you won't listen to what they have to say. You won't take risks. You see the danger and you bow out. Yeah, you can lose 50%. You can end up in prison. You can end up with $300K/yr in alimony and another $300K/yr in child support. For each of those seven billionaires whose wives were integral in their success, there might be a could-have-been-a-billionaire who lost big in a marriage. But if you want safe, what are you doing here? By picking up TMF and doing what it says, you stand a very small chance of making it big, but you stand a very big chance of loosing everything. Am I taking an imprudent risk by being married, and by not divorcing my wife now when my net worth is below $1M and we have no kids? You goddamn right I am. But I'm not an employee. I'm not the 99%. It's why I'm already expecting to retire THREE TIMES sooner than I would have if I'd stuck to my old path, and why I'm staying married. I'm an entrepreneur. I always bet on being the 1%. I always bet on being the anomaly. I always plan to be the fluke.
Taking statistically imprudent risks is what I do for a living.
However, the odds of you experiencing those negatives has been exaggerated. First and foremost is a failure to understand how statistics work. Just because 50% of people get divorced (or, in reality, more like 43%), does not mean that every person has a 50/50 shot at getting divorced. Just like the statistic that "1/3 of black men have been to prison" does not mean that there is a 33% chance that the black son of two black Yale Law grads with a 3.9 GPA and 96th percentile SAT scores will end up in prison some time in their lives. Factors matter. All men (and women) are not equal.
So what are the factors known to affect divorce?
1. Age of the participants in the marriage. If you're both over 23, your odds of divorce go down, and it continues to fall as you get older.
2. Age differential between the participants. If you're close in age, the odds of divorce go down.
3. Educational attainments and divorce have a curvilinear relationship, meaning that your odds of divorce are lowest if you either have no higher education or lots of it. The rates seem highest for college dropouts (sorry, no graph this time).
4. Equal educational attainments. If you and your spouse have graduate degrees, the odds of divorce goes down again.
5. Race. as of the middle of last decade, whites are less likely to get divorced than blacks. Hispanics are less likely to get divorced than whites, and Asians, especially Asian women, are less likely to get divorced than all those groups. Remember again that this is likely a result of the conditions and values that are likely to surround each individual during childhood (wealth vs. poverty, strict nuclear family values vs. broken homes, etc.), so if you're black but from a rich, well educated family, the "average" is going to represent you very poorly.
6. Being a baller. A 1995 study found that the divorce rate for the highest income group is about 18% lower than the lowest income group. Contrary to the scaremongering in this thread, the more fastlane you are, the less likely your spouse is to leave:
7. History. If neither of you came from a broken home, your odds of getting a divorce are lower.
8. Finances and debt. If you don't fight about money (I hate self-reported metrics, but that's what we've got) and don't have debts (objective) your odds of divorce go way down.
9. Recidivism. Unbelievably, if you get divorced once, your odds of getting divorced again are higher than average. If you've never been divorced, odds go down. Estimates say that second marriages may be around 66% probability of getting divorced, third are up around 75%.
So what's all this mean? Well, if you're an 27 year old Korean with a master's degree and no debt who just got hitched to a 26 year old Korean medical doctor with no debt, and did not begin cohabiting before age 23, and both your parents are still together, and you're headed for the top income bracket (as all fastlaners should be), your odds of getting divorced are not 50%. They are, in fact, nowhere near that number. What are they actually? it can be hard to combine cross-factors and figure it out, but you can see how much just a single factor affects the rates, then guess what that would be compounded. 10% 5%? Less?
Then comes the hard part. You need to sit down seriously and ask yourself what you're doing here. The 50% divorce statistic is definitely inflated, as prior posters pointed out, but you know what isn't inflated? The failure rate of startups:
Ask @Vigilante, or if you haven't yet (for the love of God, why?) listen to his Mind Your Business Podcast: A divorce may take 50% of your stuff, but if your business crashes and burns (whether by fate or by the deceit of partners) you stand to lose everything. Yet most of us take this gamble, and lose, and get back up, and lose it again. I shared with some people at the meetup that I lost $4,000 in a period of about 24 hours when I was first starting out. And that's just a gentle rap on the knuckles compared to the absolutely savage a$$ beating people have suffered when their whole company went down in flames. Lots of us here are familiar with the feeling of surplussing yourself beyond requirement, I've taken out loans worth 50% more than my net worth before. If shit goes sideways, I have no recourse to repay it, I lose everything.
Some of you guys are too fearful.
When you see that the odds are 50% of success, if you say "I'll probably be in the half that fails, I should avoid that" you're banking on failure. That gets even worse if the actual odds of failure are 10-12% and you still say "Why bother? I'll probably still fail." Almost all of you talking with your mouths like you're trying to join the "1%," but your actions say that you're F*cking banking on being the bottom 50%, as you trip over yourselves in a frantic mob to figure out how to get your sign-up for Odesk approved after somebody waved in front of you the oh-so-tantalizing-prospect of ten dollars an hour, in what was supposed to be a last-resort move to save yourself from being broke. Are you kidding me? Did the masthead on this site change to the "Sidewalk Forum" while I wasn't looking?
I already shared this, but a couple of years ago I was reading an article in Wharton's alumni magazine with ten billionaire alumni. Seven of the ten had one common "success factor" that they named independently. Learning to code? Good education? Compounding interest?
No. Their spouse.
It stuck with me even as a teenager. I can remember closing that up, then going out to skateboard and just chewing on the thought over and over...
Wow.
It was their wife, not their Penn degrees (I was raised to think that your degree and educational institution was the be-all and end-all of your success) that they saw as crucial in the end.
You guys want to become billionaires, but you won't listen to what they have to say. You won't take risks. You see the danger and you bow out. Yeah, you can lose 50%. You can end up in prison. You can end up with $300K/yr in alimony and another $300K/yr in child support. For each of those seven billionaires whose wives were integral in their success, there might be a could-have-been-a-billionaire who lost big in a marriage. But if you want safe, what are you doing here? By picking up TMF and doing what it says, you stand a very small chance of making it big, but you stand a very big chance of loosing everything. Am I taking an imprudent risk by being married, and by not divorcing my wife now when my net worth is below $1M and we have no kids? You goddamn right I am. But I'm not an employee. I'm not the 99%. It's why I'm already expecting to retire THREE TIMES sooner than I would have if I'd stuck to my old path, and why I'm staying married. I'm an entrepreneur. I always bet on being the 1%. I always bet on being the anomaly. I always plan to be the fluke.
Taking statistically imprudent risks is what I do for a living.
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