re: Only takes Attorney 32 seconds to articulate why marriage is a raw deal for men.

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Gray Divorce has the 2nd highest divorce rate of any age demographic.

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How many of those are second or third marriages?

This is an extremely myopic and adolescent view of marriage.

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Given the fact that none of us can do anything about that, I guess there are two approaches:

1) Take the worldview of the OP and run around screaming that marriage is a man-ruining trap.

Or

2) Mitigate the risk of “things going wrong”. I think this starts by understanding that you are part of the thing that could go wrong. The “failed marriage” doesn’t just happen to you, you are a part of a marriage that fails.

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You can do number 2 (and absolutely should), but also continue to call out the insanity of how we treat the situation. By fixing that, you will also fix a big part about "it not being easy". I do think it's hard for both sides, but certainly easier for women. If there is equal difficulty, it's easier to reconcile. I recognize I'm responsible for a lot of the difficulties we may have in my marriage. But funny how I certainly have to work harder to fix myself than my wife does with herself

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You can do number 2 (and absolutely should), but also continue to call out the insanity of how we treat the situation.

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You can, sure. But is it helpful to you personally or to your marriage?

If a husband is constantly thinking about how poorly men are treated in divorce court, he’s not wrong, but might he be coloring his view of his own marriage in a way that is detrimental by dwelling on one part of the institution that might end up being unfair to him? I can’t change the way divorces are adjudicated so I just don’t see the point.

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I do think it's hard for both sides, but certainly easier for women. If there is equal difficulty, it's easier to reconcile. I recognize I'm responsible for a lot of the difficulties we may have in my marriage. But funny how I certainly have to work harder to fix myself than my wife does with herself

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One thing I learned the second-to-last time we did marriage counseling was that a good therapist isn’t trying to “fix” either of you, he/she is trying to equip you both to succeed. In our case, equipping me with “tools 1-3” turned out to be what needed to happen first for our marriage to survive.

Which, to your point, feels pretty craptastic. Nobody wants to be “the problem”. But if you look at it the way I just laid it, it’s not “me being a problem”. It’s “me being ill-equipped”. If my wife is more equipped to operate successfully in a marriage, that doesn’t make me “less than”. She had to work harder to get back in shape after kids than I ever did. Life isn’t fair.

I think it’s helpful to remember that everything is not going to be “equal effort” along every dimension. It should not be 50/50, it should be “what’s needed/what’s needed” for the marriage. If one of you is “stronger” in one area, that should benefit you both.