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The military achieves a high marriage rate by legislating benefits for married servicemen.
Most businesses tend to give better benefits towards men who are married, even if it isn't explicit. This can involve promotions or better opportunities (as married men tend to be seen as more stable or more reliable), better financial compensation (as the man is "providing for a family"), or better work-life balance (the number of times I've been asked to work late or on holidays while my married coworkers get to go home early is way too high).
Those are unspoken or indirect or accrue over time, the military gives benefits immediately upon marriage for the act of marriage.
Does that matter, though? If everyone sees that the married men are getting all the best assignments, and get constantly let out early to go pick up their kids, and are paid the best - then it doesn't actually matter if it's official or not. Everyone knows what needs to be done to get the benefits.
Yes. It's pretty universal that a consequence that is immediate, certain, and in cash achieves more in motivation than a consequence that is vague, eventual, socially consequent.
Honestly, you've convinced me; I hadn't thought about it that way, but you're absolutely right.
To be clear: we are totally capable of gating benefits behind legal marriage, and it would increase the marriage rate to do so. To a large extent, even if it leads to lots of fake marriages and quick divorces, it would probably still lead to a net increase in good marriages.
Please do not do this. Marriage as a family institution will be totally destroyed. Every marriage will be a sham marriage. The only way it might work is if you restricted it to heterosexual couples and made marriage bestow a legally-enforceable right to sexual access, and that’s still a maybe.
Is this the case in the military where they already do this?
Lots of young recruits marry a girl who they would otherwise just date, because you get an increased housing allowance and she gets covered on the healthcare and on the chance he dies overseas she gets serious widow's benefits. Military marriages are notorious for problems, but not I think for being shams.
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He might be right, but if you dig deeper; why does the military incentivise marriage?
I would hazard a guess that it's because the military values married men more; it considers them more reliable, more trustworthy, more stable than unmarried men.
If society were to value marriage, its different actors will reward it in the immediate too... You'd see newlywed discounts everywhere, family discounts, we'd be back to (depending whether your jurisdiction did away with them) tax benefits for marriage over living with a partner, etc...
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In terms of fuckoverability when it comes to work-life balance (e.g., dumping an urgent task on someone and wrecking their night or weekend)—or fuckoverability in general—the rank-order I’ve seen over the years, holding seniority/age equal:
Single man. He likely has nothing better to do and if he does have plans who cares, so fuck him. If anything, he should be grateful for the extra opportunity to contribute.
Married man, no children. The victim here is the poor wife who may have her plans disrupted.
Married man with children. We’re basically doing him a favor by giving him an excuse to be out of the house. The victim here is the poor wife who has to perform even more childcare-related physical and Emotional Labor.
Single woman. What kind of jerk would be so MEAN as to disrupt the FUN that she has planned? We should find someone else who better has the bandwidth to take this on.
Married woman, no children. Similar to 4. We should find someone else who better has the bandwidth to take this on.
Married woman with children. What kind of monster would interfere with a brave working mother’s work-life balance? We should find someone else who better has the bandwidth to take this on.
Where the biggest gap between contiguous ranks is that between 3. and 4. The smallest one, to the extent it exists, is between 4. and 5. and the rank-order there can arguably be even inverted.
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And these marriages are attractive to local women because the status of soldiers is boosted.
I'm not sure that's true. I don't think soldiers have a higher rate of being paired off than guys the same age that work at Wal Mart, but Walmart doesn't instantly pay their young male workers thousands of dollars extra for getting married.
Soldiers also have higher divorce rates than civilians.
If we made it a national policy to pay everyone thousands extra for getting married, instantly, we'd raise the marriage rate. I'm not sure that's increasing the status of young men, exactly, just paying people to get married.
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