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Me ex left me about 5 years ago.
Previously we were splitting mortgage and utilities that came out to (for ease of calculation) $2000/month.
When she left, she got an apartment that cost (again, ease of calculation) $1500/month. I kept the house/mortgage/utilities and pay those fully out of pocket.
So I'm spending $1000/month more than I would be in the counterfactual where she stayed (was paying $1000 for housing, now $2000). She'd spending an extra $500/month (and I didn't even count utilities and such for her). We'd cumulatively have $1500/month 'extra' if we stayed together. Over a year that's $18,000. Over 5 years, that's $90,000. So I would, individually, be $45,000 richer (probably more! I could invest more!) in that counterfactual. That's several vacations, a new car, that's a new roof on the house or other major renovations.
I am doing well for myself. Salary is fine, debt is manageable.
I would be doing much better if I could find a reliable partner to shoulder either part of the bills or the housework or, ANYTHING really. Financially the 'hole' I'm in compared to the one where I'm happily married is getting deeper by the month.
And there are millions of people in similar situation, could be partnered but are not. Those folks don't, strictly speaking, show up in the economic stats as 'struggling.'
And that's before we talk covid-induced inflation and the attendant increase in prices of housing, vehicles (and insurance, and repairs), and medical care.
So yeah, there are some feedback loops out there that can make someone doing fine 'economically' still be struggling. Big one: difficulty finding affordable housing means more living with parents which means harder to find a partner, which makes it harder to afford housing, AND means there's more housing demand (if people start moving in together, that reduces demand on housing and lowers prices!).
And being clear, I'm not angry at her about it. I've processed and moved on. But I'm acutely aware of the price of being single, if for no other reason than to help me calibrate how much I should 'compromise' to bring a new woman into my life.
Having a partner can also be very very expensive. I'm easily $500k+ in the hole from paying all my ex-girlfriend's costs, who refused to get a job for 15+ years. (I'm extremely low-status in the dating market. I finally got out of the relationship, so at least I'm alone and miserable rather than paying through the nose and miserable.)
What's funny is that I wouldn't even have minded a trophy-wife situation where I at least got decent sex out of the deal. I know suggesting that makes me the worst kind of misogynist. We're supposed to pretend that relationships aren't transactional. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/communication-2
My ex was not the most frugal person.
Racked up student debt paying OUT-OF-STATE TUITION for reasons that read to me as asinine.
But at least it was a decent major. She had a tendency to just assume if you pay a lot for something it must be the best/high quality. Also had a tendency to throw out old things and buy new when something broke. Which, uhhhhh in hindsight was probably a warning sign.
I've made it a hard limit that the next GF has to be 'financially aware" if not thrifty. i.e. they actually consider the cost of things, consider repair vs. replace, and don't assume the most expensive option is always the best.
This winnows out a LOT of the field very early. I was dating a girl the last few months who apparently liked to select fancy restaurants just to see if I'd blink at paying the bill. At least, that's the game as I interpreted it. She would also cook for me so I was curious to see where things went. A few hundred dollars later and I can't even get a text back now.
Getting $500k in the hole is an outcome I'd truly want to avoid, though. I think I would pull the chute when the costs hit $100k.
Seems reasonable. Though, try not to get a new GF that just has a slightly different set of horrible traits! "This time I'm putting my foot down, arson is a hard no." Nobody's perfect, but as long as you're willing to consider "alone" as a viable option, it really does let you be more selective.
Yeah, most people would (and should). I've made a lot of bad choices.
This is kind of the problem. I'm familiar with the concept of 'tradeoffs' and accept that. If I somehow land a smoking hot redhead with DD's, I can accept she might be a bit profligate in spending, which I will corral as best I can.
But the women are generally lacking so many of the desirable traits I'd look for that there's not much to trade off against!
Reading you guys makes me realize I am significantly more of a naive or fatalist romantic than I would have credited myself as. Romance is something that happens, dammit, not the synthetic end result of a deliberate, cold-blooded process.
My Brother in Christ (said completely without irony), that is who I am on the deepest level.
I fully expected I was going to marry my high school sweetheart. But we went to different colleges so you can guess how that turned out.
My entire relationship history is me trying my damndest to wrest a romantic happy ending from an increasingly cynical world. Each time I fail, I make some adaptation that hopefully improves my odds, and each time the reality of the situation proves I wasn't cold and calculating enough. So I become more strategically machievellian with the instrumental intent of finding someone to partner with and then GTFO of the toxic pool.
I've done everything I can in the past three years to maximize by 'social surface area' so I can have that chance encounter with the love of my life.
And unfortunately all this has done, now, is expose me to every single variant of dysfunction you can imagine. I've observed other people's relationships fail for the silliest, most avoidable of reasons, I've seen the very depths of toxic female behavior. I'm still fanning a small, candle-esque flame inside of me that believes a romantic happy ending is possible. But the stats are what the stats are, I won't look away.
If I were able to acquire the necessary power, I would radically restructure the social order enough to allow the sensitive young man to once again be competitive enough in the sexual marketplace that they CAN have their organic, fated encounter with their soulmate and expect the "live happily" to actually last "ever after."
happy_padme.jpg: She was fiercely loyal, regularly visited you, steadfastly refrained from partying or entertaining male attention, and you two eventually got married and lived happily ever after, right?
I told this story in another thread. Its even more tragic than you'd think. She broke it off with me and DIED not too long thereafter
To say that was a formative event for my psyche is underselling it.
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