[tommorris]

"Do not marry till you are able to support a wife."

It's not so much sexist as just outdated.

Sometimes the wife will be supporting the husband. Sometimes the "wife" will actually be a husband. Sometimes there will be something close to parity between partners. At some points in a person's life they'll be economically on the up-and-up while the other isn't, and the situation might reverse, in which case the direction of support ought to change.

[EliRivers]

"Do not marry till you are able to support a wife."

Sounds pretty valid to me. It doesn't specify whether you're male or female (or other), and doesn't specify that you will have a wife to support; only that you shouldn't marry until you are able to support a wife. Maybe you'll have a wife, maybe you'll have a husband, maybe you'll reject those terms or find them inapplicable. Whatever term you use, if you could support a wife, you could support your <other>.

[Unosolo]

I believe this still to be a very good advice and applies to both sexes. In family life circumstances when a household must depend only on a single source of income are abound. Families where each participating adult can provide a basic standard of living for the entire family in times of need are much stronger financially.

[FellowTraveler]

Don't you think it becomes a lot more difficult to make your fortune, once you are tied down in a relationship? Suddenly the concern becomes about stability instead of success? Would you want your own son getting married before he had made a success of himself?

[tommorris]

I reject the premise that stability is the opposite of success. For some people, having a stable home life might be a condition of their success.

Again, it rests on a gendered notion of support and a traditional model of marriage/relationships, which a lot more people reject these days. I'm currently single, but let's say I were to get into a fairly serious relationship in the next few weeks such that new partner moved in with me: would that mean that my work life would now change to be less concerned about success? No. They'd presumably have a job too. Difference is when I got home at the end of the day, there'd be a friendly, kind, loving companion to care for me.

Having a dual income supporting the household means that in that particular case, I can be less concerned about stability - because making rent and paying bills and so on is a lot less of a struggle.

In the long-term, it might change if one were to have kids, but having kids and getting married are not the same thing. I certainly wouldn't want to have kids until I reached a certain level of success and financial independence (and, hey, one of the benefits of being gay: no unplanned pregnancies!) but that's separate from the question of having a relationship or not, or even getting married or not.

This is why I'm saying it's outdated advice rather than sexist advice: it presumes a model of marriage and relationships that has changed (incidentally, contrary to the views of anti-gay social conservatives, it was mostly changed by straight people unhappy with the previous arrangements). Most of the people I know - straight or gay - spend a lot longer living together before getting married. And they tend to delay having children or opt-out of childbearing altogether. How are people in long-term childless unmarried relationships "tied down" exactly? How does whether I go home to an empty apartment or an apartment with a boyfriend in it change whether or not I can be successful at work?

Think of it like a partnership in business: a successful partnership means the partners can do more together than they could do apart (provide services to bigger clients, say, or have more capital to invest). But there might be a partnership where one partner works very hard, produces a lot of value and the other mooches off their success without doing much. Saying that a romantic relationship leads to people being tied down and stepping away from risk in business is a bit like saying all business partnerships are of the latter rather than the former kind. Some relationships enable both parties to flourish more than they would separately.

[FellowTraveler]

Fair enough if you are gay. However, having been in relationships with various women, I can say my experience has been quite different. There is constant pressure against risk-taking and business-starting, in favor of "finding a normal stable job" as a wage-slave and spending more time away from work, so as not to make her feel neglected.

Her concerns are legitimate, of course, and rooted in her own evolutionary strategy, but I would certainly recommend to my sons that they make their fortune _before_ getting tied down, and that they not get married too early, for this reason. Because they are less likely to take the necessary risks. Women, like it or not, tend to be much more risk-averse than men, and in a committed relationship, they will apply pressure toward this end. (And no risk, no reward.)

This is probably the same reason why many trust-funds are designed to give payouts to those who remain unmarried until at least the age of 25. There are many benefits to having a wife, including their perceptiveness and sensibility, which can be very valuable especially while climbing the social ladder, but given what I know now, I would want to make a success of myself first, before taking one on, and I would advise the same to my sons. (Just as I would advise my daughters to find a man who is already a success, versus getting tied down early on with Johnny Football Hero.)

One piece of advice I was given a few years back, is to "be your own inner parent." Which is to say, whenever you find yourself making a decision, to ask yourself what you would advise your own children to do, if they were to find themselves in the exact same situation you are facing. Then do precisely that.

> This is why I'm saying it's outdated advice rather than sexist advice: it presumes a model of marriage and relationships that has changed...

It very well could be that society has evolved, as you say. But it might instead be that the sexes are living in a bubble of wealth that was created by those who came before, enabling them to afford the luxury of a society that is able to constantly subsidize the "new reality" through educational programming, entertainment programming, social programming, glass ceiling legislation, welfare spending, etc which poorer societies are simply unable to afford.

What we see in Kazakhstan, for example, is a society returning to polygamy as the realities of poverty leave them unable to afford such luxuries as we enjoy. Perhaps, as you say, our culture has progressed. But maybe, just maybe, our culture is currently in a bubble, and as our economic freedoms decline, so will our wealth, causing gender relations to resolve back to equilibrium again -- the same mean we see in many other nations in the world.

Dual incomes may actually be a harbinger of this. For we know from the research that many women in our society do not work because they want to, but because they have no choice. A "modern" household cannot sustain itself without those dual incomes, can it? Yet in decades past, households were easily supported on a single income. Our society is becoming poorer.