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Notes -
The issue is that there's no guarantee that the partnership will continue. Imagine a 23 year old woman who pairs with a similarly situated man and agrees with the traditional breakdown of labor. 10 years later, the man will be in a much more powerful position than her: if he reneges on the deal, he'll be better situated than she was and can take the large majority of the extra human capital that accrued due to the agreement to continue his job and find a new (younger, hotter, more in line with his ideal) partner. Alimony/child support/splitting of assets doesn't help the wife much there. And the woman will be older, have kids, and will have basically nuked her position in the job market; any future jobs or partners will be much worse than if she had not chosen to enter the initial agreement.
And that's a real risk. It's entirely rational for her to want to hedge her bets by building her career at the expense of fertility.
Most divorce courts will take account of the relative financial/wealth positions of the parties in parceling up assets and determining alimony. The goal is explicitly to keep the disadvantaged spouse at the standard of living they have become accustomed to.
But yes, the ability of the man to scurry off (maybe after the kids have left) with a new, younger lady is indeed a risk.
And that imposes a cost on younger single men as well by taking an otherwise eligible woman off the market for a time.
If we don't have strong social taboos on either adultery or men dating substantially younger, that would be a hard 'problem' to solve legislatively.
Personally, the way I'm looking at marriage now is something like "I am making an almost irrevocable 25-year commitment, I will accept heavy penalties for for breaching this commitment if you will do the same, and then at the 25 year mark, after the kids have been raised, we will discuss whether the partnership will continue." Perhaps both sides agree that some portion of the man's income should go into a trust which will be inaccessible to either party (except in dire emergencies) until the relationship hits the 25 year mark.
I honestly doubt that pure financial or emotional incentives suffice to replace the role that religion previously filled. It is a hard problem.
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