[ndriscoll]

Your comment's framing makes no sense to me. My wife pushed for me to go into engineering instead of academia so she could stay home and we could be comfortable. We're married. We have kids. The entire point is we're not independent. That's what married literally means. Unioned. Joined. There is no her and me. There is us.

Why would you need or even want to be independent? Why would you plan to form a family while keeping your options open/having one foot out the door?

[lotsofpulp]

> Why would you need or even want to be independent?

Because I would want my kids to be able to get out of an abusive partnership if they needed to. See the history of domestic abuse.

> Why would you plan to form a family while keeping your options open/having one foot out the door?

Everyone should have options open for basic sustenance. Death, abuse, job b loss, etc. As they say in engineering, two is one and one is none.

[amanaplanacanal]

Plenty of women (and men) end up in relationships they hate, and if they have no independence they are pretty much fucked. They have no way to escape. Women having options makes a huge difference.

What you are describing is pretty much ideal for a lot of people, but it's not what everybody gets.

[ndriscoll]

How does this happen though? It's not like you wake up one day, look around and see you've started life in the middle, you're married and have kids, and you hate your spouse. Did your spouse have a stroke and undergo some massive personality change or something?

Assuming you want a family, your very top priority when evaluating someone for dating from the very beginning should be whether that person would make a good spouse and help you to form that family. Otherwise what are you even doing? Someone who can't commit is its own red flag for that purpose. If you have kids, that's it. You're in it. You need to be committed.

And having a job doesn't mean you're independent of your spouse anyway. If one of us died or we split, it'd be absolutely devastating to our family regardless of the money (e.g. if life insurance/social security covered everything). I would be hugely screwed trying to raise the kids without her, job notwithstanding.

[keiferski]

I think the simple fact of the matter is that most people have absolutely no clue what they’re doing when it comes to relationships, and think their social media hot takes are indicative of what they ought to want.

[amanaplanacanal]

This is on top of societal pressures. In more liberal parts of the US (and the world) it's accepted that you will take your time finding a partner, or even stay single if you want. In more conservative societies the expectation that you will marry young and start popping out kids is intense.

[mothballed]

I think it goes both ways. I moved from a liberal to a conservative area. Maybe there are people shaming those who don't pop out kids, but more so I I've noticed it's that they're not shamed if they want to just let loose to their instincts and get impregnated as an 18-year-old and yield to their natural desires and interests. In a liberal city a 18 year old popping out a kid and is often viewed as a pariah.

I mean people do not naturally grow up wanting to stare at a desk/PC all day deciding to become a scientist or a doctor and study a bunch of shit that his almost no relation to what humans were adapted for for millions of years. Our evolutionary programming was to bang, have kids, and roam the jungle and grab the resources and satisfy our short brutish lives.

Now the fact that something is evolutionarily natural or historically normal doesn't mean it is good or right. But just letting loose on that particular natural instinct tends to be more accepted in conservative societies while in the city or liberal areas teenage (past age of consent) pregnancy is seen maybe more of something they will shame you for. You're supposed to do a pretty unnatural thing of staring at books until you're 22 or 26 and then stare at a computer screen so you can get a good job to pay a gazillion dollars for childcare delivered by minimum wage workers. You're supposed to take your time and maybe about the time your biological clock has run out, you pay $20,000 for IVF and you do a speedrun.

So which is a greater imposition of societal pressure? I won't claim conservative societies don't exhibit more social pressure than liberal ones. But on this point, it's not clear to me the conservative one is doing the greater of the pressuring.