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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.
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.
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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