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I've never had a single person tell me it's easier to have a wife. In fact it's the one thing I hear most guys complain about at work.
Men will bitch about their wives, but these same men would be eating a take-out sandwich over the sink without them.
I don't know, sure, some wives certainly make some men miserable. Any man with children (except in very rare circumstances) will say it's easier to have a wife.
I was gonna say, if you have a kids a wife is essential (so is a husband, tbh). With more than 1-2 kids, you no longer have a "relationship," you now have a "small business" that requires more than one employee to smoothly operate.
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I don't think men will be eating a lot of take-out sandwiches if they are billionaires and can afford a private chef.
Depends on the quality of the take-out. In any case my illustration was an example of the usual man's lack of gumption when it comes to certain aspects of life. With a wife, certain aspects change, and I'd argue mostly for the better. Of course YMMV.
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Damn right. They'll be delivered.
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Sure we would, we'd just eat more of it.
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Cooking is simple. Just read the instructions, then do it. 2/3rds of recipes can't really be messed up in a truly bad way either.
I keep hearing about these guys I can't cook, but looking at my parents I'm pretty sure "can't cook" is just calculation. "If I never learn to cook she can't ask me to cook."
I started cooking for myself as soon as I lost access to subsidized meals. It wasn't difficult at all. Pretty much every single guy I've ever lived with could also cook. Not that big a sample, sure, and they were mostly engineers, but still..
I've become the primary cook for our family and have come to rather enjoy the process of putting together meals. But on the rare occasions I'm on my own for dinner, I cook maybe 10% of the time. It's mostly not worth the effort for one person, especially if you are not a fan of leftovers for days.
I would argue that it's not that big of a deal and that clearly if single men's preference is to eat simply or quickly then it's just not that important to them.
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Men can be great cooks. It’s just there’s a certain domestic… well, something when your woman is running a space.
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It's not that men can't cook, I can actually cook great (by standards of men my age, though my brother is actually much better). But I also don't take much care of myself and if there's no one I'm accountable to and for, I'll probably go for least effort solutions (fast food, or junk frozen meals).
Me too, and I even like to cook but during my last period of being apart from my wife, I maybe cooked for myself 40-50% of the time, tops. Other times I might have gotten preoccupied with
doomscrolling The Mottesomething or another or I might just not have had the time or bandwidth to actually cook. On those times I was either eating out or throwing frozen food in the Ninja to bake or air fry.More options
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I think I'd distinguish between being able to prepare a meal and being able to cook. I can prepare simple meals without a recipe and moderately more complicated ones with, but I would still describe myself as not being able to cook. I don't have the knowledge nor inclination to stray far from known recipes, and while I enjoy the results I very rarely enjoy the process. My wife on the other hand can take pretty much anything lying around in the kitchen and make an at least palatable meal out of it and almost never follows recipes even when it is her first time making a dish. She both has the knowledge and experience to make things up on the fly and enjoys the process nearly as much as the end result. I don't know exactly where the boundary between being able to cook and not being able to lies, but I'd put it somewhere between us.
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Cooking is simple (like going to the gym), but it's a hassle until you're just used to doing it. And for many I assume the calculation goes "I'm less assed eating a lazy meal/paying for takeout than I am instilling a habit to cook".
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I as well am master of the culinary arts. Still my wife is better, hands down.
I'm not suggesting men have to be this way. I'm suggesting often they simply don't care enough to bother.
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As a newly married man, my experience has definitely been that having a wife makes life easier. Pooling our social lives means that she picks up maybe 70% of the organising seeing friends, she organises most of the house stuff, she helps me draft tactful messages with her womanly social skills. Plus even if I'm working from home I'm guaranteed to spend at least some time socialising every day. 12/10 would wife again.
I understand the point but in relation to Jeff Bezos you are not explaining how having a wife is easier than having paid assistants do all of the things that need to be done.
I dunno dude, the idea of thinking of a wife as like some kind of utility calculation around chore maxxing or whatever seems like the kind of thing that deranges radical feminists. Our society is structured around you picking one person who is closer to you than anyone else, that swears to you a mutual pact of loyalty and confidence. They aren't like your butler who can quit at any moment and you're expected to congratulate them on getting a better offer. We've added some escape clause but the basic idea is still to death do us part. You pick them and then get to turn off the part of your brain worried about mate selection and the two of your focus on the more important things, the two of you against the world. You can't pay and assistant to have undying loyalty through sickness and in health. Maybe Bezos isn't getting that from his wife, I wouldn't know, but I'm providing that to one person and she's providing it to me.
That's not what is being done by me to any greater extent than it was being done by the person I replied to.
I'm not interested in your selective disagreement with me. Marriage in this thread was leveraged in two contexts, a material function one, i.e. you wife can do things like organizing, doing housework etc, and an emotional function, i.e. you love them, they are your soulmate etc.
My point was that Bezos, on account of being a billionaire, does not need a wife for material function. So leveraging the utilitarian functions of marriage in support of an argument that marriage is beneficial to Bezos is asinine. I'd even argue that such a thing would be stupid. He probably has more than one giant house. Do we expect the wife to clean all of that? Of course not. Same for organizing big social gatherings. Hell, why even bother to cook when you can have a learned chef cook for you? It just doesn't make any sense.
For the emotional function, you don't need marriage to love a person or spend your life with them.
As for your definition of marriage, I'd argue that the only coherent view of marriage is when two persons want to start a family together. Marriage is a contract, Both a legal and not, between two people who a binding themselves for the ultimate task procreating. It can be because two people feel a very special connection and want to be with one another forever and start a family. It can also be because two people who don't really know one another all that much were pushed together because of necessity, and everything in between. Marriage is important and sacred all the same as a starting point for procreation.
To contrast this with your view, you can pay an assistant to functionally have undying loyalty through sickness and health, and you can marry a person who doesn't have that. I'm sure you have an enviable marriage, but I'm not sure if you leveraging that is conducive to a coherent argument.
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You would also need a butler to supervise the assistants - managing staff is a job in itself.
Having a wife is a job in itself - my coworker every day.
I guarantee you your coworker goes home to his wife and bitches about you/his job all night long.
You have a coworker who is just a bitchy wuss of a person. You can identify this by all the bitching he does. You should exclude his bitchy opinions from your mental map of the opinions of capable people.
In fact, you should do this with more people that you meet, even online. Bitchy whiners should be ignored. If they can express a solution, even a crazy solution, that’s different, but if all they do is whine, ignore them.
Anyways, to countersignal your coworker, my wife and I have our ups and downs for sure, but she is not a “job in herself.” She’s the best part of the day, for which, through the struggles, I remain grateful.
You and your fellow 'wife guys' need to focus on what the argument is rather than circling the wagons around your own marriages.
If the argument you’re making is “less than 100% of marriages are worthwhile,” I think that’s completely uncontroversial. If the argument is “100% of marriages are not worthwhile,” then I think that’s wrong.
It sounds to me like you’re intending to say the first, but the way you put it at first — “I've never had a single person tell me it's easier to have a wife” — implies you mean the second. People are bringing up their own marriages to argue against the second, while you’re defending the first. I think an unintentional motte and bailey has been set up, just because of a lack of clarity in the discussion.
But the big difference in views I think I see is that the “wife guys” are arguing for marriage through the concept of companionate love: “she’s the best part of my day, she makes my life meaningful,” etc. You’re talking about it in terms of economic and sexual utility: “I could have sex with any woman, and get assistants to do things around the house I don’t want to do.” If that’s what the utility of a marriage consists of then of course Bezos doesn’t need it! But if marriage includes an intimate relationship of growth in and with the other person, then it’s no wonder at all why Bezos would throw such a lavish wedding if he believes he’s found someone he can have that with. He can be right or wrong about the particular woman he made that choice with (like he apparently did with the first one), but it’s not straightforwardly stupid.
People are bringing up their own marriages to insist that this kind of companionate love is possible in the long term, even if all or even most marriages don’t live up to it. They’re protecting the concept of a pair-bond.
I wrote in reply to a comment. The intentionality of my reply exists within the scope of the comment being replied to. But I'll try to broach the topic you bring up to demonstrate what I'm talking about.
Here is something which was alleged in the comment I replied to:
As I tried to imply in my first comment, you obviously don't need a wife to plan dinner parties for you when you are a billionaire. You can just have a 'life assistant' or whatever.
This is not what I'm talking about. You don't need marriage for companionate love. You don't need marriage for pair bonding. I would however argue that you need marriage as proof of commitment for some long term goal, like children. Marriage, I'd argue, is a 'utilitarian' or 'materialist' contract.
To that end, marriage is not of any utility for a billionaire. Bezos doesn't need the utility of marriage to experience any of the love a woman could give him. And I'm not saying that in some 'penis into hole' utilitarian sexual gratification kind of way. Bezos can get the purest love of any man and would never need marriage to deal with any of life's problems because the material problems marriage can help ameliorate will never exist for a billionaire to begin with.
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Is this what the argument is?
Almost. Here's the tidbit I replied to and my reply:
Now, maybe that connection wasn't clear to people, even if I directly replied to that short comment, thinking it did not need a quote to be clear. So I clarified in this comment chain:
Is it easier having a wife than a paid assistant if you are a billionaire? (Maybe if that assistant has a termination clause of 36 billion dollars.) Queue the wifeguys talking about how great their personal marriages are and how good of an arrangement it is for them. Now, was I to assume they are billionaires or middle class joes when interpreting their comments?
I wouldn't really care but I get the feeling of... I don't know, groupthink and fallacy? when getting a reaction like this:
This sort of internet tough guy talking coming out of thin air just seems like a silly overreaction to me. Like... You don't know my coworkers. Same with some other comments. What are these people trying to prove and why? I don't see the reason why one would assume that marriage was a necessary or hold the same or similar utility for people like Bezos compared to the average joe.
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Most guys with jobs complain about their jobs, it is nonetheless easier to have a job than not to have one.
Leaving aside those who can get all the benefits of a job without one, but those are rare individuals.
Jeff Bezos is one of the rarest.
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It's way easier to have a wife. And yeah a lot of guys complain about theirs, but that's generally venting about minor grievances rather than a serious complaint. In truth, most of those guys would be miserable without their wives, and they probably know it.
I think there are two moving parts here: Jeff's marriage and the average dudes marriage. I don't think these two are comparable. And I doubt Bezos doesn't have a bunch of personal assistants and potentially prostitutes.
To that extent the argument that monogamy is a huge time saver does not apply to someone who is in the position to outsource the work. Nor would it apply to Bezos like it would some average guy.
So I'd agree that the average guy is better of with a wife to the extent he can not achieve his wants without one, but that's not saying much in my mind.
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It is easier to have a wife.
My recently divorced coworker begs to differ.
Doesn't have a wife, now does he?
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