Reasons You Should Think Twice Before Getting Married
I want to start by stripping marriage of its romance for a moment—not to be cynical, but to be precise. When I say “think twice before getting married,” I’m not arguing against love, partnership, or long-term commitment. I’m arguing against treating marriage as a neutral upgrade. It isn’t. It’s a binding institutional decision with asymmetric risks and long tails, and we don’t usually talk about it that way.
Most of us in this space already know the headline stats—divorce rates, declining marital satisfaction curves, selection effects. What I’m more interested in is the stuff that sits underneath those numbers: how incentives are structured, how risk is distributed, and how little room there is for course correction once you’re in. Marriage isn’t just a personal promise; it’s a legal and economic framework that assumes stability in a world that increasingly rewards adaptability. That mismatch alone should make any rational actor pause.
The Hidden Structure Behind “I Do”
Marriage as a legal system, not a vibe
One thing I think we underemphasize is that marriage is fundamentally a state-backed contract designed for average outcomes, not edge cases—and most modern lives are edge cases. The law doesn’t care how self-aware, egalitarian, or emotionally literate you and your partner are. Once you’re married, you’re governed by a default legal template that was built decades ago under very different social assumptions.
For example, marriage law still quietly assumes some form of role specialization, even when couples explicitly reject it. You see this most clearly in divorce proceedings. I’ve had friends—highly educated, dual-income, self-described progressive couples—be genuinely shocked when courts treated one partner as the “primary caregiver” and the other as the “financial engine,” even though that wasn’t how their marriage actually functioned. The system snaps you back into categories you thought you’d outgrown.
Asymmetry and why it matters more than averages
Experts love to talk about averages, but marriage is a game where variance matters more than the mean. Even if marriage produces net benefits on average, the downside risk is brutal and unevenly distributed. Divorce isn’t just emotionally costly; it’s financially and psychologically destabilizing in ways that compound over time.
Think about it like this: marriage dramatically increases exposure to low-probability, high-impact events. Asset division, custody arrangements, geographic constraints—these are not linear costs. They’re cliff-edge risks. And what’s interesting is that people who are most confident going into marriage often underestimate these risks the most. High trust feels like a substitute for legal robustness, but it isn’t.
I’ve noticed that people who negotiate ironclad prenups are often seen as pessimistic, while people who don’t are seen as romantic. From a risk perspective, that framing is completely backward.
The irreversibility problem
Here’s where I think marriage really diverges from other forms of commitment: irreversibility. You can leave a job, unwind a business partnership, even exit a long-term lease with relatively bounded damage. Marriage, on the other hand, is designed to make exit painful by default. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature meant to stabilize families. The problem is that stability mechanisms don’t distinguish between healthy and unhealthy persistence.
Once married, every major life change—career pivots, relocations, health shocks—gets filtered through a joint decision-making structure that you can’t easily dissolve. This creates what economists would call path dependence. Early decisions lock in future constraints, and by the time misalignment becomes obvious, the cost of correction is already high.
I’ve seen this play out with founders who turned down high-upside opportunities because a spouse couldn’t relocate, only to divorce years later anyway. The marriage didn’t prevent the breakup; it just delayed adaptation and amplified regret.
Moral hazard inside the contract
Another under-discussed issue is moral hazard. When exit costs are uneven or delayed, behavior changes. This isn’t about bad people; it’s about incentives. If one partner implicitly bears more downside risk—financially, socially, or legally—the other partner has less pressure to self-correct when things deteriorate.
You can see this in how conflict is handled. In non-marital long-term relationships, unresolved issues tend to surface faster because the threat of exit is real and immediate. In marriage, problems can fester precisely because the contract absorbs short-term dysfunction. By the time consequences arrive, they arrive all at once.
Why “just choose better” isn’t a solution
Whenever I raise these points, someone inevitably says, “Sure, but this assumes people choose poorly.” I don’t buy that. Selection improves outcomes at the margin, but it doesn’t eliminate structural risk. People change. Incentives change. External shocks happen. Marriage assumes a level of predictability that human lives simply don’t offer.
What I’m suggesting isn’t fear—it’s literacy. If we can analyze financial instruments, labor contracts, and governance systems with clear eyes, we should be able to do the same with marriage. Romantic optimism is not a substitute for structural understanding, and treating it as such is one of the biggest unforced errors smart people still make.
The Costs You Don’t See Until You’re In
When people talk about the “cost” of marriage, they usually mean money. Taxes. Weddings. Divorce settlements. That’s all real, but it’s not the part I find most interesting. The bigger costs are quieter. They show up as lost options, delayed moves, and subtle behavioral changes that don’t feel like sacrifices in the moment—but absolutely are in hindsight.
I want to talk about opportunity cost, not in the abstract “econ textbook” sense, but in the lived, compounding sense that experts tend to underestimate because it doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.
How marriage reshapes your decision surface
Before marriage, most people operate with a relatively clean optimization function. You might compromise for a partner, sure, but the ultimate decision-maker is still you. After marriage, that changes structurally. Every major decision becomes a joint optimization problem, and joint optimization is not just harder—it’s slower and more conservative by design.
That’s not inherently bad, but it has consequences. Systems that require consensus tend to favor stability over upside. Marriage quietly pushes people toward risk minimization, even when their skills, age, or market position would rationally justify more volatility.
I’ve seen this most clearly in high-growth careers. People delay founding companies, switching industries, or taking geographic bets not because they don’t want to—but because coordinating that move feels too expensive relationally. Over time, optionality erodes.
The opportunity costs that rarely get named
Here are some of the most common ones I see, especially among high-agency, high-capability people:
- Career mobility loss
Dual-career marriages often default to the path of least resistance. One partner’s opportunity becomes “too disruptive,” so it’s deferred. Deferred often turns into abandoned. - Reduced appetite for asymmetric upside
Entrepreneurship, creative work, and frontier research all involve periods of instability. Marriage makes those periods harder to justify, even when the expected value is high. - Geographic lock-in
Location becomes a negotiation, not a strategy. This matters more now, when talent clusters and timing windows are increasingly decisive. - Social network contraction
Married people—especially men—tend to shrink their weak-tie networks faster. Fewer serendipitous connections means fewer unexpected opportunities. - Lifestyle rigidity during peak years
The years when experimentation pays the highest dividends are often the same years when marriage introduces pressure to “settle.”
None of this shows up as a dramatic loss. It shows up as a series of “not now” decisions that quietly narrow the future.
Why smart people underestimate these costs
What’s fascinating is that experts are often worse at spotting these trade-offs, not better. High competence breeds confidence, and confidence breeds the belief that you’ll “figure it out” later. The problem is that systems shape behavior more than intentions do.
Marriage introduces friction into change. Friction isn’t neutral—it biases outcomes toward inertia. Even when both partners are supportive, the sheer cognitive load of coordination slows action. Over time, people adapt by wanting less, not because their ambitions changed, but because wanting becomes costly.
I don’t think this is talked about enough, especially among people who pride themselves on being intentional.
The Psychology That Keeps People Locked In
If Part 3 is about external constraints, Part 4 is about internal ones. This is where things get uncomfortable, because the forces at play aren’t dramatic or malicious. They’re ordinary human biases amplified by a powerful social institution.
Selection effects we pretend don’t exist
We’re all aware of selection bias in theory, but marriage discourse routinely ignores it in practice. Married people are not a random sample. Neither are divorced people. Yet we constantly compare outcomes as if they were.
For example, when people say married people are healthier or wealthier, they’re often pointing at pre-existing traits, not causal effects. People who are more stable, risk-averse, or socially conforming are more likely to marry—and to stay married. That doesn’t mean marriage caused those traits to pay off.
What’s more interesting is who opts out or delays marriage. Often, it’s people with higher uncertainty tolerance, non-linear career paths, or unconventional goals. Comparing their outcomes to married peers without adjusting for this is analytically sloppy.
Commitment escalation and the sunk cost trap
Once married, sunk costs pile up fast—financial, social, reputational. The longer the marriage lasts, the harder it becomes to evaluate it honestly. This is classic commitment escalation, but with moral weight attached.
People don’t just ask, “Is this working?” They ask, “What does it say about me if it’s not?” That question alone is enough to distort judgment.
I’ve talked to people who stayed in deeply unhappy marriages not because they believed things would improve, but because leaving felt like invalidating a decade of effort. The marriage became something to justify, not something to choose.
Identity foreclosure and shrinking selves
Another underappreciated dynamic is identity foreclosure. Marriage encourages people to collapse their identity into a shared narrative earlier than they otherwise might. Again, not inherently bad—but it reduces exploration.
When major life decisions are made jointly early on, individual identity development can stall. You stop asking, “Who am I becoming?” and start asking, “Who are we?” For some people, that’s grounding. For others, it’s quietly suffocating.
The risk here isn’t conflict—it’s numbness. You don’t notice the loss because nothing is “wrong” enough to demand attention.
Social pressure as a stabilizing force
Marriage is heavily protected by social norms. Friends, family, institutions—all subtly reinforce staying put. This creates a strong status quo bias. Reconsidering the marriage doesn’t just feel disruptive; it feels transgressive.
That pressure works even when both partners privately have doubts. Each assumes the other is more committed, more satisfied, more invested. So nothing gets said until resentment hardens.
Ironically, the same social forces that make marriage durable also make course correction emotionally expensive.
Why alternatives aren’t really discussed
What’s striking is how rarely we talk seriously about alternative commitment structures. Long-term partnerships without legal marriage, renewable contracts, intentional co-parenting without romantic entanglement—these exist, but they’re treated as fringe.
That’s not because they don’t work. It’s because they challenge the idea that commitment has to be maximally rigid to be real. For people who value adaptability, that rigidity can be the very thing that undermines long-term wellbeing.
Final Thoughts
I don’t think marriage is a mistake by default. I think treating it as a default is the mistake. It’s a powerful tool with real benefits—but also real structural, psychological, and opportunity costs that don’t get nearly enough airtime.
For people who pride themselves on thinking clearly about incentives and systems, marriage deserves the same scrutiny as any other high-stakes, long-term commitment. Not fear. Not cynicism. Just honesty.
