re: My girlfriend gave me an ultimatum.

quote:

---

I have never understood why some of y’all act like this is a forgone conclusion.

BTW, tons of research indicating that married men earn more and accumulate more assets over their lifetimes than men who never get married.

Here's how much more money married men in America are making than everyone else

---

It's not a foregone conclusion that divorce follows marriage (and people who act otherwise are being unreasonable), but the risk is very high given how costly it often is for men.

I would also take your chart there with several grains of salt. The big issue is that marriage is increasingly a lagging indicator of wealth - that is, it's becoming less and less feasible for the "ordinary man" to get married in the first place for many reasons (this is actually true of men and women both, even though we're just dealing with men here). Chief among them on the male side of things is that very few women want to marry men who make less than them, while the reverse is not true, so it makes sense that married men would be an income outlier. This is a reflection not of a man's future windfall if he gets married but of women's selection of wealthier men, all else equal, for marriage.