Why Marriage?

A recent tweet exchange between Andrew Tate and Richard Cooper lit up social media. It was brief, smug, and resonated with a growing number of disillusioned men:

“What’s the benefit of marriage for a man?” “There is none.”

This sentiment has become increasingly common in certain circles: marriage is framed as a raw deal, a trap, or worse—a calculated loss. Influencers speak of relationships like contracts to be optimized, pleasures to be weighed, and risks to be avoided.

But what if the problem isn’t with marriage itself?

What if the problem is with how we’re thinking about marriage?

When we reduce life-defining choices to cost-benefit analyses, we end up asking the wrong questions—and missing the point entirely. Marriage isn’t just about gain or loss, fun or frustration. It’s about who we become when we give ourselves to something bigger than ourselves.

The Error of Cost-Benefit Thinking

In his 2022 interview with Tim Ferriss, economist Russ Roberts shared a story about a friend struggling to decide whether to have children. The man and his wife had created a list of pros and cons—an honest attempt to weigh the benefits and costs of becoming parents. But even after putting everything on paper, they were stuck. The numbers didn’t give them clarity. If anything, they made the decision harder.