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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.
Look, maybe I’ve wildly misinterpreted the character of your coworker. It’s possible.
Maybe he’s a genuine stoic and competent and successful badass in a way that an internet tough guy such as myself can only dream of.
Unfortunately, I only have the anecdotes you provide, and which you are using to bolster your argument, and you don’t paint a flattering picture of him.
Maybe these are different guys, but I’ve never met someone who complained about one thing as often as you allege this guy complains, who wasn’t just a generally bitchy loser at life. Telling you what it looks like from outside of whatever pre-existing relationship you have with this guy is a suggestion, a blunt but fair one in my opinion, to take stock of the amount of credibility you give this guy.
Because the male winners of the world are clearly finding something in marriage that is valuable enough to keep going back for it. A quick glance at the world’s 10 richest men tells me that they are all either currently married or have had multiple marriages. Larry Ellison, 80, has had 6! He clearly thinks his current 33-year old Chinese fuck doll/trophy wife is bringing something to the table that he couldn’t get from a rotating stable of prostitutes and 3 additional assistants. Even Elon, who seems most willing to break the mold, appears to pine for marriage in general and Grimes specifically.
The richest men who ever lived, wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of kings and potentates, easily able to move to Thailand or Dubai and have more concubines than Solomon, are still choosing to get married. So maybe “wife guys” are more directionally correct than your coworker, because his constant griping does not appear to bear out in reality.
Maybe to you I’m just another internet tough guy loser. That’s fair if you want to think that way! But Bezos isn’t. Shit, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un aren’t. These are guys who are still ruthlessly having their opposition beheaded or AA gun’d to death.
So maybe “wife guys” are more directionally correct than your coworker, because his constant griping does not appear to bear out in reality. Maybe he is just the male version of:
Which is the same as my argument, except mine had more rude words, I guess. Although I want to reiterate; you paint a very unflattering picture of your coworker.
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