I’m going to say something that will piss a lot of people off, and I’m saying it anyway:
The worst thing a woman can do for her happiness, her peace of mind, her life expectancy, and her overall wellbeing is marry a man who hasn’t done the work.
Not marry anyone. Not stay single forever. Not swear off partnership.
Marry a man on his default settings.
Let me explain before you close this tab.
The Data Doesn’t Lie (Even If Disney Does)
Here’s what the research actually shows, and I promise you nobody shared this at your bridal shower:
Women report significantly higher contentment and satisfaction for up to 5 years after ending their marriages, even accounting for the devastating financial hit most women take in divorce. Men, by contrast, show only slight increases in happiness after divorce.
When a spouse dies, men face a 70% increased risk of death within the first year, compared to 27% for women. Men’s mortality rates spike dramatically in those first three months of widowhood. Women? Our mortality risk increases too, but nowhere near as catastrophically.
Here’s the part that really gets me: after men survive the first three months following a wife’s death, their mortality rates actually drop by nearly 30% below normal. They adjust. They’re fine. Meanwhile, the woman who died? She spent the last years of her life keeping that man alive.
Let that sink in for a moment.
What “Default Settings” Actually Means
I’m not saying all men are terrible. I’m saying that men raised in this culture, without significant intervention and personal development work, come programmed with settings that make them objectively worse partners for women than women are for them.
Default settings look like this:
Believing household labor is “helping” rather than sharing equally. Women still do significantly more domestic work than men, even when both partners work full-time. This isn’t because women are naturally better at remembering when the pediatrician appointment is or when we last bought toilet paper. It’s because we were trained to notice, track, plan, and execute while men were trained to… not.
Expecting emotional labor without reciprocation. Wives manage their husbands’ relationships with extended family, remember everyone’s birthdays, notice when he needs to talk, provide comfort and support. Ask most married men when their wife last needed emotional support from them, and watch them struggle to remember a specific instance.
Treating marriage as an enhancement to life rather than the infrastructure. When a wife dies, the husband’s whole support system collapses because she was the support system. When a husband dies, the wife grieves deeply but her friend network, her family connections, her emotional regulation skills—they’re all still there. Because she built them. And maintained them. While also maintaining his.
Assuming their career is the priority. Even in Sweden, where women have more income parity and social support than American women, marriages fall apart when women’s careers require primary support from their partners. As one researcher noted: ask for 50-50 and that’s okay. Ask for 51-49 in your favor, and the marriage collapses.
These aren’t conscious choices most men make. This is the culture’s operating system, installed at birth, updated through every movie and TV show and conversation that modeled how relationships “should” work.
Default settings kill women’s happiness. Provably. Measurably. Consistently.
The Most Important Day of Your Life (Is a Lie)
Let’s talk about the con we’ve all been sold since we could first grasp the concept of a princess.
The wedding. The dress. The flowers. The carefully curated Pinterest board. The most important day of your life.
The wedding industry generates $72 billion annually in the United States, convincing women that this single day matters more than the thousands of days that follow. Brides spend an average of 200-300 hours planning their weddings. That’s more time than you need to make a close friend, by the way. More time than most couples spend discussing how they’ll actually split household responsibilities or whose career will take precedence or how they’ll handle caregiving for aging parents.
The messaging starts young. Girls get toy kitchens and baby dolls and dress-up weddings. The story ends at the altar. Happily ever after begins the moment she says “I do,” and we learn nothing about the after. Nothing about the 15-30 hours per week of unpaid domestic labor that awaits. Nothing about the career sacrifices or the emotional exhaustion or the second shift that starts when the first one ends.
Drew Barrymore, after her third divorce, said it plainly: “I had so much shame around divorce and, for some reason, something happened, and I said, ‘I’m no longer willing to feel this way.’ And it just lifted from me. I am totally free.”
Not “I found another man.” Not “I’m getting married again, the right way this time.”
Free.
The History Nobody Mentions at Bridal Showers
Here’s something that should be taught in every history class but conveniently gets skipped: women couldn’t get credit cards in their own names until 1974.
Read that year again. 1974. Your mother—or certainly your grandmother—lived in an America where banks could legally refuse to issue women credit cards without a husband’s or father’s signature. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act wasn’t passed until 1974, making it illegal for creditors to discriminate based on sex or marital status.
Before 1974, a woman’s financial identity was her husband’s shadow. Getting a mortgage was nearly impossible for single women. Opening a bank account required male permission in many states. Divorcing meant potential financial devastation not because of assets split but because you suddenly had no credit history, no established financial identity, no economic existence outside of your marriage.
The cultural conditioning runs deeper than most people realize. Women were taught to marry not for love but for survival. Economic dependence wasn’t romantic—it was legally mandated.
We’re only two generations removed from that reality. Fifty years. Your grandmother probably remembers when marriage wasn’t a choice so much as an economic necessity for women. The romantic mythology built around marriage served to disguise the fact that women had no other options.
We have options now. Women build wealth, own property, establish credit, pursue careers, support ourselves. The economic gun to our heads has been removed.
So why are we still performing like it hasn’t?
When Marriage Works (And What Makes It Rare)
I need to be clear: I’m not anti-marriage. I’m anti-marriages that make women miserable while men remain blissfully unaware of the imbalance.
Good marriages exist. Partnerships between equals exist. Relationships where both people grow and support each other’s flourishing exist.
But they require something that doesn’t come standard: a man who has actively rejected his default settings.
What That Looks Like in Practice
Tracking household labor. He monitors the work he does versus what gets done overall. Not because you asked him to, but because he understands that invisible work is still work. He notices when something needs doing and does it without being asked, without expecting praise, without calling it “babysitting” when he watches his own children.
Maintaining his own emotional support system. Friends he talks to about real things. A therapist, maybe. Relationships he maintains without you serving as social coordinator. When he’s struggling, he doesn’t make his wife responsible for fixing his emotional state.
Understanding partnership versus “helping.” “Helping” means he views household labor as your responsibility that he occasionally assists with. Partners don’t help. Partners split the load.
Examining his assumptions. Why does he think his career should take priority? Why does he feel uncomfortable when his wife earns more? Why does the idea of doing more than 50% of childcare feel like an unfair burden? A man who’s done the work asks these questions and sits with the uncomfortable answers.
Taking feedback without defensiveness. When his partner says “I need more support,” he doesn’t hear “you’re failing as a husband.” He hears “let me tell you what I need” and then provides it.
Recognizing that equality isn’t always 50-50. Sometimes it’s 70-30 or 20-80, depending on what each person has capacity for at that moment. He doesn’t keep score. He doesn’t need credit. He just shows up.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Men like this are rare. Not because men are incapable of growth, but because the culture doesn’t require it of them. Marriage works fine for most men on default settings. They’re statistically happier married than single. Research consistently shows marriage benefits men’s health and happiness more than women’s.
So where’s the incentive to change?
Women file for divorce at much higher rates than men—up to 69% of divorces are initiated by women. Not because women give up too easily. Because women get tired of managing adult men who refuse to manage themselves.
“Leaving my husband didn’t increase my workload,” one mother of four told researchers. “He wasn’t doing much. My workload is the same, but I have more peace now.”
Same work. More peace. Because she stopped waiting for partnership that wasn’t coming.
The Question Nobody Wants You to Ask
If marriage makes men happier and healthier but costs women happiness and health, what does that tell you about the institution itself?
If women consistently report increased contentment, self-confidence, better social lives, more career opportunities, and higher overall happiness after divorce despite facing worse financial outcomes, what does that tell you about what they were sacrificing in those marriages?
If men are 70% more likely to die after losing a spouse while women’s risk increases by only 27%, what does that tell you about who was holding up the relationship’s infrastructure?
One study found that despite the negative financial impact of divorce on women, they are generally happier than men afterward. Professor Yannis Georgellis, who led a Kingston University study tracking 10,000 people over 20 years, explained: “One possible explanation could be that women who enter into an unhappy marriage feel much more liberated after divorce than their male counterparts.”
Liberated.
From what, exactly? From the person who supposedly loves them most?
The Permission I’m Trying to Give You
You don’t have to marry anyone. Not ever. Women can open bank accounts, get mortgages, build wealth, establish credit, and create entire lives without male approval or participation. We’re the first generations of women in human history with that freedom. Partnership is a choice—based solely on whether it enhances our lives.
The most important day of your life isn’t your wedding day. It’s not even a single day. It’s every day you choose yourself. Every day you refuse to shrink. Every day you build something that can’t collapse if one person leaves.
Your wedding day, if you have one, should be a celebration of a partnership you’ve already built, not the fantasy beginning of one you hope will materialize. The dress doesn’t matter. The flowers don’t matter. The Pinterest-perfect tablescape doesn’t matter.
What matters: Does this person make your life genuinely better? Not “I love them” or “they’re a good person” or “they’d be perfect if only…” but actually, measurably, your life is richer and easier and more joyful with them in it than without them?
Does this person do the work? Have they examined their programming, rejected harmful defaults, built emotional intelligence, developed their own support systems, learned to truly share labor rather than “help”?
Do they see you as an equal or as someone who should support their flourishing while they passively accept yours?
What I Tell My Friends
When my friends ask if they should get married, I tell them this:
Marry someone if and only if your life is demonstrably better with them in it. Not potentially better. Not better if they change. Better right now, today, as they currently are.
Marry someone who knows how to be alone. Who has their own friends, their own therapist, their own emotional regulation skills. You are not responsible for their happiness.
Marry someone who splits the load without being asked. Who tracks what needs doing and does their share. Who doesn’t need credit for basic partnership.
Marry someone who can take feedback without making their hurt feelings your problem to manage. Growth requires discomfort. Can they sit with it?
Marry someone who sees your career, your ambitions, your needs as equally important to theirs. Not in theory. In practice. In whose meetings get scheduled around childcare, whose job relocates the family, whose dreams get funded first.
And if you can’t find that? Stay single. Build wealth. Cultivate friendships. Create community. Pursue your interests. Design a life you don’t need rescue from.
Because the research is clear: women who leave bad marriages don’t just survive. They thrive. They report newfound freedom, independence, and yes—happiness.
Not despite leaving. Because of leaving.
The Ending (Which Is Really About Beginnings)
You have choices your grandmother couldn’t imagine. That staying isn’t mandatory. That leaving, statistically speaking, might be the best decision you ever make.
Because here’s what I really want you to understand: you don’t need marriage to have a good life. Marriage should enhance a life you’ve already built, not serve as its foundation.
Build anyway. Build your career. Build your wealth. Build your friend network. Build your skills, your confidence, your unshakeable sense of self.
Then, if someone comes along who genuinely makes that life better—not just different, but better—you can choose to let them in. Not because you need them to complete you or support you or give your life meaning. But because partnership between equals sounds nice, and this person has demonstrated through consistent action that they understand what equality actually requires.
Women initiate up to 69% of divorces. This isn’t because we’re flighty or selfish or unwilling to work on relationships. It’s because we finally asked ourselves: “Is this worth what it costs me?”
And more and more of us are answering: “No.”
That’s not failure. That’s evolution. That’s women choosing themselves for the first time in history and discovering that choice feels a lot like freedom.
So marry if you want. Or don’t. Build wealth either way. Chase your dreams either way. Cultivate joy either way.
Just remember: the person walking down the aisle toward you shouldn’t be the reason your life starts. They should be the bonus feature on a life that’s already pretty damn good.
Anything less isn’t partnership. It’s charity work.
And you didn’t fight your way through a history that denied you credit cards and bank accounts and economic autonomy just to volunteer for servitude you now call love.
To the women who’ve started over: you’re not broken. You’re not failures. You’re pioneers.
And to the men reading this and feeling defensive: good. Discomfort means you’re paying attention. What you do with that discomfort matters.
