J4MB has launched a new campaign Men shouldn’t marry. The following introductory piece from our website explains why such a campaign is required, and takes up the rest of this blog piece. – MB
Welcome to a website run by the political party Justice for men & boys (and the women who love them). We campaign against the state’s many assaults on the human rights and interests of men and boys.
Our public consultation document outlines 20 areas in which those rights have long been assaulted – there are no areas in which the state assaults the rights of women and girls. The single area in which the largest number of men have been assaulted is in the divorce courts and family law system.
J4MB considers marriage and the nuclear family to be cornerstones of a civilised society. However, for decade after decade, successive governments have undermined the institutions. Over half of the marriages entered into today will end in divorce. The median duration of a marriage now is 11 years, i.e. 50% of marriages will last no longer than that, and many will last for much shorter periods.
Let’s consider the issue of risk for a moment.
Imagine a group of ten men, most of them in their 20s or 30s, in a plane. They’re all wearing parachutes, and they’re about to jump out of the plane at 10,000 feet, to carry out the first and possibly only parachute jumps of their lives, to raise money for charity.
With less than a minute to go before the first of the men will jump, a panel in the side of the plane opens, and the men are just a few feet away from where they’ll shortly be exiting the plane. Suddenly, the voice of the pilot is heard by the men through their helmets:
I have some news for you. The parachute manufacturer has just warned us of a design fault with the parachutes. About half of them won’t open when you pull the ripcord, and if this happens in your case, you’ll fall to a certain death.
The men aren’t troubled by this information, and duly jump out of the plane. Five land safely, five plummet to their deaths. Given the divorce rate over recent decades, men who marry can be likened to these men, blithely ignoring the risks implicit in their decisions.
In some estates in Britain today, 75% of children are raised by single mothers. British men pay 72% of the income tax collected each year, women only 28%. So it’s overwhelmingly men who support single mothers. The state incentivises women to replace reliance on men as partners, with reliance on men as taxpayers. The state has been ever more hostile towards the nuclear family, towards men in general (and married men in particular) over the past 30+ years. The radical feminist Germaine Greer said the following in the early 1970s:
Women’s liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let’s get on with it.
Women have little incentive to make their marriages work. Men usually bring more financial resources than women to marriages, and typically earn considerably more during the course of them, so when women decide to end their marriages, they often personally stand to gain financially. It’s just one of the reasons 75% of divorce applications are filed by women.
The prime casualties of failed marriages are children. 24% of children in Britain today have no contact with their biological fathers, which leads many of them to become dysfunctional, and causes them and others untold misery. The family courts system rarely enforces contact orders, thereby enabling vindictive women to continue denying their children contact with their fathers, grandparents, and others. We consider this extreme emotional abuse of children and all these other people, yet the state enables it. Fathers are forced by the state to continue paying for the support of children who the state ensures they may never see again.
The state gives wives considerable power over husbands on their wedding days, by giving them the prospect of highly preferential treatment in divorce settlements. It’s as if the state gives wives loaded guns to use at any point during their marriages, however well they’re treated by their husbands. This is toxic for marriage. Our downloadable poster illustrates the point.
Even if you bring most of the financial resources into your marriage, and earn much more than your wife during it, you’ll probably find your financial position devastated by divorce, and you’ll have to start rebuilding your wealth from a low base, possibly at a stage in your life when that will be very difficult, if not impossible.
It’s time to block the beginning of the pipeline of misery which ends in the divorce courts and the family law system. Put simply, if men don’t marry, they won’t divorce, and they won’t suffer any of the grave consequences of divorce.
The solution for the men in the plane was simple. They shouldn’t have jumped. The solution for men who are considering getting married is simple. They shouldn’t marry, at least not until and unless such time that marriage becomes far less risky for men. There’s no sign that will happen in the foreseeable future.
If you’re determined to marry anyway, and you’ll be bringing more financial resources into the marriage and/or expect to be earning more money during it, you should agree with your partner a prenuptial agreement (‘prenup’).
[Disclaimer: Nobody associated with this campaign, including Mike Buchanan, has specialist legal expertise in this area. Accordingly they cannot be held responsible for any decisions you may or not make, and you are advised to seek expert legal advice.]
While prenups are not currently legally binding in England and Wales, the consensus among experts in this area appears to be that if they’re fairly drawn up by a competent legal expert, the divorce courts will probably recognise them. At the very least, you’ll be improving your prospects of a fairer divorce settlement, given your financial contribution to the marital assets. Advice on prenups as well as postnups (postnuptial agreements) is available from a number of law firms, some of which will provide initial advice free of charge. There’s some useful background information on the website of this law firm.
What if your partner won’t agree to a prenup? It’s simple.
Don’t marry her.
Don’t listen to any nonsense about prenups being unreasonable or unromantic. Explain that all couples marry with the hope that their marriage will last until one of the partners dies, but 50% of them find their hopes dashed.
Quite apart from risk issues associated with how the divorce and family law systems work, is there anything you can do to establish the likelihood that your marriage will be a success? My book The Marriage Delusion: the fraud of the rings? was published in 2009. In the course of my extensive research I encountered a book which I felt gave sound advice about ‘individual traits’ and ‘couple traits’, and how they impacted on the prospects of individual marriages being successful. The book includes some excellent questionnaires. It was written by Jeffry Larson, and it has the snappy title Should We Stay Together? A Scientifically Proven Method for Enhancing Your Relationship and Improving its Chances for Long-Term Success. Buying the book might spare you from marrying a woman you shouldn’t, and spare you the enormous emotional and financial turmoil of a failed marriage.
Feel free to email or call me at any time with respect to this campaign, or any other J4MB campaigns. Thank you.
Mike Buchanan
Party Leader
Justice for men & boys (and the women who love them)
Email: mike@j4mb.org.uk
Tel: 07967 026163
Feature image by Lachlan Rogers
