Forgone opportunities, Tips #1-4

1. Acknowledge that you and your spouse will probably both forgo, or have already forgone, opportunities as married people that you might have enjoyed if you remained single.

It’s all about economics, like all the choices we make. Do you remember learning about “opportunity costs” in a high school or college Economics course? Among all the details I’ve forgotten from my Econ coursework, I do remember that opportunity costs are whatever you give up when you make a choice. We make all our choices because they are preferable, for some reason or another, to every other alternative.

Henderson had to understand that he would not get to live as well after his divorce as he had beforehand. Moreover, he and Thea would have had more money even after their divorce if they had not had two children.

2. Money isn’t everything, and if you don’t know that when you get married, you will know it once you try to deny it and live with the consequences. But Tex and Cathryn knew acutely from Tex’s personal experience that financial position wasn’t the only thing that mattered.

3. Despite its constraints, being married is usually preferable to living together unmarried, particularly if you have children. There are many advantages to being married. Maude and Elden lived in an unmarried domestic partnership. When everything fell apart between them, neither of them had any legal protection. Maude and Elden had signed a writing that explained how the home-equity loan on Maude’s home would be handled, but that handwritten note was all she had to lean on. There is no formal process for ending a domestic partnership (especially an unsubstantiated one) the way there is with a marriage. You can’t get spousal support, there’s no community property, and there’s no presumption of equal contribution or division.

4. Choose to be a career-minded person, a full-time parent, or some hybrid of the two, but make your choice and live with it, considering the long-term ramifications. Mr. and Mrs. Crazy, Kory and Christine, each exemplified the chances that we go without while we pursue what we do want. Kory married Christine and inherited her two children, who had a crazy mother (Christine) and no father. His budget and his patience were both strained from time to time by Christine’s then-teenage sons. Christine, for her part, continued her mantra of “I should have had a career, I should have had a career” when her marriage to Kory ended and she had to contemplate a $10-an-hour job at the age of 55. If that were not enough, Christine berated Kory for owning his business and pouring his heart into it instead of, in her words, letting her have a career.