There’s a general discussion that’s been going around the internet regarding “Marriage 2.0”.  To quickly bring you up to speed, Marriage 1.0 was marriage prior to the 1960’s, meaning man and woman married at a very young age and stayed married the rest of their lives because of financial and societal realities.

-By Caleb Jones

Starting in the 1960’s, things like feminism, birth control pills, increase in male to female ratios, and women entering the workplace created Marriage 2.0.  This is a system where a woman can wait a while before getting married, even have children before getting married, marry a dude, get bored with him, divorce him, and go date or marry someone else.

It’s summarized by Athol very well here in this excerpt from this article, which is quite good and worth a read.

The entire point of the Marriage 1.0 agreement and law, was in no small part to ensure that a man could not simply leave a wife in the lurch with his children. When the choice for a woman is “stay married” or “poverty”, she would want the law to ensure the “stay married” part was going to stick.

With the advent of those three key technologies though, women no longer were forced to depend on men for income, no longer directly required marriage to enjoy sex, and had a small oversupply of men to choose from. So when the choice for women turns into, “stay married” or “dump this guy and do something else more fun”, then they naturally want to change marriage law to allow that option. Thus Marriage 2.0 is born.

Marriage 1.0 was a pretty good deal for men.  It locked a woman into him for life, forced her to do his bidding and stay with him even if he did something shitty like beat her up or cheat on her.

Marriage 2.0, the current system, is great for women.  Not only does it allow women to dump husbands whenever they feel like it, the dumped guy is forced at gunpoint to pay her huge sums of money even if the divorce is 100% her fault.  If he doesn’t pay, he goes to jail.  Then she can marry or have kids with the next lovestruck dumbass and repeat the process as many times as she likes.  Pretty good deal…for her.

My point: BOTH SYSTEMS ARE COMPLETELY UNFAIR.

Marriage should not be a great deal for one gender and a bullshit deal for the other.  What the fuck is the point of that?  One of the many reasons for my involvement in talking about these issues to do my small part in bringing out a Marriage 3.0, a new system society has never had: a marriage that is fair for men and women both.

I can’t tell the future (though many of my predictions over the years have come true or close to it) so I don’t know exactly what Marriage 3.0 will look like.  My hope is Marriage 3.0 will be an OLTR marriage, an open or semi-open marriage with a prenuptial agreement and no co-owned assets or debts between parties, where fair child support (if there are children) is paid by the wealthier biological parent regardless of gender, and the child custody conversation starts at 50/50 father/mother instead of “automatically mother unless the father can prove otherwise”.

A marriage like this can be completely customized to whatever the man and woman want prior to the marriage.  If the woman wants $500 monthly alimony for the rest of her life after a divorce, no problem, she just puts that into the marriage agreement.  If the man disagrees, she tells him to fuck off and marries someone else.  Same goes for the man.  Neither of them is screwed over later if a divorce occurs…what happens is what they both agreed should happen.

(Yes, sometimes one or both of them would be extremely stupid from the get-go and then an argument would ensue, but I like it when bad things happen to people who behave stupidly.  It ensures people will try harder to not be stupid.  In addition, there’d be a document that spelled everything out, so any argument, even if it became a legal matter, would be brief.)

In other words, it’s fair.

Marriage 3.0 may be this or something close to this.  Here are the current and future factors driving this change, listed here in no particular order:

Men getting tired of getting financially raped in divorces.  At some point (and we have not reached that point yet) men are just going to say “enough of this!” and when girlfriends ask for (or demand) marriage men will actually have the balls to say NO.  Not “not yet”, which is what men are starting to say, but NO.
Economic collapse.  It’s no secret I (and others) have been talking about the coming collapse (or slow death) of the western world.  This will happen.  Men are not going to see the point in ball-crushing marriage agreements, nor are women going to have the power to demand them.
Male birth control pills.  We should already have this.  It’s very interesting to me that women have had a birth control pill since the 1960’s but it’s now 2012 and us guys STILL DON’T.  Hm.  Doesn’t that seem strange to you?  My conspiracy theory detectors have always been blaring full blast on that one.  Anyway, this is going to happen in our lifetimes, and get ready for a serious shift in sexual power from women to men when it does.

Female sex robots.  I’ve already written an entire blog post about this.  Go read it here.  When more or less realistic, sex-capable female robots become inexpensive enough for the typical man to afford, you will witness the single greatest change in sexual relations between men and women since the sexual revolution of the 60’s. Mark my words. Oooooohhh women are going to be furious when they can’t control men sexually anymore.  It’s going to be ugly.

Increased computer power.  The prevalence of free internet porn has already caused a massive shift in dynamic between men and women.  So has increased computer technology.  I would argue that World of Warcraft alone has created a noticeable change.  Combine these two things and multiply it x100.  Forget about sex robots for a minute…what happens when a guy can pay $15 a month (or less, as in nothing) and have realistic girlfriends and do sexual shit with his computer?  The answer is, you lose interest in women.  It’s already happened in Japan.  It’s begun to happen here too, and will only get worse.

Increased life spans.  Due to exploding medical technology if you’re under the age of 50 and live in the western world, it’s entirely possible that by the time you’re 100 years old, average life expectancy will be 130, 160, or even beyond that.  And yes, I’m including the fact that people are fatter.

Soon (as in within one to three decades) it won’t matter. We’ll have hormones, DNA treatments, and/or nanobots that will take care of all that.  Even with half the population dying before the age of 77, most people can’t stay married or long-term monogamous now. What happens when people are living to 150?  And looking like they’re 40 years old well into their 90s?  Long-term monogamy will plummet and polyamory and serial monogamy will be on the rise.

You’ll also see more social acceptance of older folks getting sexual with (legal) younger folks.  Being a 82 year-old man who looks 40 with a 19 year-old girlfriend won’t be the bizarre concept it is now.

More liberal attitudes.  Think about this for a minute.  Premarital sex was taboo just a few decades ago.   Now it’s a normal and widely accepted thing, even among teenagers.  The same goes for things like single motherhood and homosexuality.    Right now, when I talk about open relationships, a lot of people nod their heads in agreement and say “finally!”.  However at least 50% to 60% of people still cringe like I’m scraping fingernails on a chalkboard, especially when I talk about open marriage and raising kids in a discreet OLTR.

However, just like premarital sex, single mothers, and homosexuality, soon people will accept this open relationship stuff too.  In a decade or two, being married to someone you love and having wild sex with someone else on the side will be a normal and accepted thing rather than some evil awful disrespectful divorce-worthy act.

The death of privacy at least as we know it.  This is a huge topic that I could write an entire book on, but suffice it to say that because of continuing technological growth, in a decade or two (or three) the concept of privacy as we understand it will be gone.

As Scott Adams has said, children born 20 years from now won’t even understand this strange thing called “privacy” their parents used to have.  If you fuck an 19 year-old girl, or jerk off four times a day, or cheat on your wife, or falsify one sentence on your resume, or regularly shave your balls, EVERYONE WILL KNOW.

To us primitives in the year 2012, this sounds horrific.  However the good news is it will be the greatest playing-field-leveler you’ve ever seen.  YOU will know everything about everyone else too.  Just imagine going out on an online first date with a gal and having every intimate detail about her life and history available in seconds on your cell phone, making it impossible for her to lie to you.  Heh heh.  Long-term monogamy and traditional divorce under such a system will essentially become impossible, since both of those things are built on deception and outward false fronts.
Get ready for the next decade or two.  We’re all in for a wild ride.

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