So what exactly is left of the husk of marriage, other than obligation for the man and benefit for the woman???

Ooooh, story time. Take it from 2 old guys(me and polishknight) who got women a long time ago in a land far away... stay the hell away from modern women and never marry one. Your life will be awesome. If you do find a unicorn, you still need to use red pill if you want a successful marriage.

I recently went trough 'Married man sex life primer' book I also liked author's, summary of today's [book from 2011] marriage.

All about marriage what really will matter in some time [any time after signing up for it] is written in legal act, contract, And that contract can change in future and affect you retrospectively. Here was an example of his grans that got married when bond was for life but then arrived new era and they could split just 'because'.

PS. the book sometimes gave me the feeling that it was softened in certain areas to protect the author couching business, but overall worth reading... Also that is very good book to someone considering marriage. When you read it and see how many hoops you have to jump trough, without warranty of success, you might just rethink and jump the same hoops as a unmarried man.

Also all the vows said in front of priest or 'Elvis impersonator' have the same weight: none. They are only words not written anywhere in contract or law and they have value of paper they are written on. Promise of love to death or sex is non binding.

In arguments I had with feminists on the original internet back in the 1990’s, their ideal for how marriage would work was a one way contract. Their argument was that it was a “contract” like how rock stars could sometimes negotiate insane contracts such as the right to not even show up and still get paid or something like that.

And crazily enough, a lot of men I know signed on the dotted line to such a satanic arrangement because they treated women like rock stars.

Their rational was this: “marital rape” is wrong hence a married man deserves no more sexual access to his wife than he would if he was dating her but HIS financial and household burdens are non-negotiable. She can demand he clean out the gutters whether he’s “in the mood” or not.

If she “sacrifices” her career to spend his money watching TV while the kid is in daycare and the maid cleans the home, he should pay her alimony if she gets rid of him. Well, he wants a chance at sex, yes?

They also were planning on a massive welfare state and affirmative action meaning that it was ok if men didn’t marry because they would have Chad’s kid and make the taxpayer or stockholder foot the bill.

I see that in corporate America, the system largely exploits EVERYONE even if they pay lip service to “women in STEM” and women may get paid well, but they are overworked often like the rest of us. Working class women have especially suffered. Feminism’s goal was to make life as easy as possible for upper middle class man-hating shrews or lesbians but that wasn’t much of an accomplishment since those women already have been privileged for the past 2 centuries.

In a far away land, long long ago, when our ancestors were cavemen - a person had to get married if they wanted to have sex. Once married, they were committed to sexual exclusivity for life.

In a far away land, long long ago, when our ancestors were cavemen - a woman had to get married if she wanted to be taken care of - for life - by a man.

While I agree with your conclusion, I think your historical understanding of marriage is bullshit. Marriage is a feature of civilization. In caveman days, only 40% of men were successful at having offspring, while 95% of women were. Marriage was not the sacred thing it became later. In the caveman era, most of the women who weren't prostitutes went with the strongest local warlord: Someone with significant resources, who controlled enough people to defend his stuff. This guy might have 8-10 wives (literally "women") pushing out kids, and the women were happy to share him. The risk of branch swinging was the fact that jealous cave Chad might hunt you down and kill you out of jealously. This didn't make things super stable, because so many men were on the sidelines waiting for their shot, and whenever they got one, conflict broke out. Men also routinely threw out women, when they got old, or sufficiently pissed them off. If the woman was young enough, she might be able to find another man, but most of the time she became destitute unless she had a grown son that would care for her. Having a son, not marriage, was the social security of the ancient world. This is especially true, because it was common for girls to find a man as young as 16, and men wouldn't settle until at least 35. So even if the man didn't throw her out, she was going to outlive him by 20-60 years.

Even as marriage became an official thing, most of this model prevailed. Think of ancient near eastern texts like Genesis, which depicts nomadic tribal warlords raising massive herds and coupling with many women and their handmaids, while their servants had no wives.

Marriage was historically never about a man's exclusivity. Exclusivity did not really arise until middle-age Roman Catholicism. Under the Roman system, Men had multiple women, but only their church-sanctioned wives were allowed to produce heirs. Second and third sons were "celibate". While they still had unofficial wives, those children could not inherit. This made the church rich. So if the first son had ten sons, but nine were bastards, and then he and his official son died, the property would pass to the second son (uncle), however the second son was not allowed to have heirs and so the property would pass after his death to the church.

This eventually evolved into a one woman one man courtly-love soulmate thing. But even going back to Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne, he had 6 wives, even though only one was official.

In most of the world's recorded history, the only limit on a man's wives were his resources, or religious prescription. In early Christianity, priests were limited to one wife, and under Islam, men are limited to four. Marriage was a system of economic advantage, it allowed about 60% of the men to marry and procreate provided they could secure the resources to do so. It also provided stern religious curses and penalties for those who would commit adultery and fuck another man's wife.

You can read in the wisdom of Solomon that women were married chattel, and pretty desperate to fuck any young man they could corner, but the penalties were harsh, death or slavery. In Greece, a man that seduced another's wife was subject to being raped with thistles, before his execution.

Civilizations with marriage outperformed civilizations without marriage, because more men were engaged in maximizing their economic output. These civilization were more successful and eventually conquered or absorbed civilizations without protections on marriage. This led to the universal existence of marriage throughout the major civilizations of the world. You can still find remote tribes, though, where marriage is not sacred, and men and women couple and decouple as frequently as they do in the modern west.