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Notes -
Divorce sob stories are mostly just people whining because they fail to realize a fundamental and obvious truth. Divorce sucks because it is negative sum. At the end of a divorce, neither party can afford the lifestyle they could afford together.
Marriage, or household consolidation more broadly if we want to bring in things like multi-generational households or communes or whatever, are ceteris paribus positive sum for the participants. The difficulty of chores doesn't scale on a linear basis, doing better than twice as much laundry for my wife and I takes me 15-25% longer than it takes to do my laundry when I lived alone. Cooking a bigger plank of salmon or pan of chicken breast adds negligible time to my cooking prep. Before you even get into any complementarity, living together is good.
Now you take that and smash it, and suddenly both parties are worse off.
Another major thing is housing which is very hard to compensate for.
If you live in high cost of living area living alone is really expensive.
Even if both parents are working you're going to be much poorer after a break up.
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