It seems like there are two purposes to marriage, and they are fundamentally opposed.
One is to accomplish things together: to make an income, to run a household, to rear children. For this purpose it’s best if the two people have complementary skill sets.
The other is the whole love thing, and on just about every dimension people seem more attracted to people who are more similar to them.
In the past the former purpose was considered the more important one, and you didn’t even have to worry about who would provide an income (or freshly killed animals or whatever) and who would vacuum the carpets, because gender roles took care of that for you.
But now that the second purpose is considered paramount, mating is becoming more and more assortative to the point where every smart, ambitious person I know is married to a more or less equally smart and ambitious person, probably in the same field. And then they both have demanding jobs and compared to 99% of the population their comparative advantage would not be housework and childrearing, but someone has to do it and so it defaults to the woman who now has to work a second shift after she comes home from running her hedge fund.
(Or they don’t have children, or they delegate childrearing to hired help. Anecdotal evidence suggests the latter leads to dissatisfied children.)
Like, optimizing for comparative advantage is great in theory! I’d like to advise smart and ambitious women to go forth and find housespouses! But my confidence in the efficacy of this is very low as a result of actually knowing many smart and ambitious women, who seem to agree that they would like to date and marry guys who at minimum are as smart as them and have pretty good career prospects, and ideally the higher-status the better.
And you’d expect optimizing for comparative advantage would work better in the other direction, but actually two professors of my acquaintance immediately come to mind who married attractive, unintelligent women, had unhappy marriages and divorced soon after, and are now happily married to women of similar intelligence and career status and have multiple kids together.
Clearly the solution to all of this is that women aren’t allowed to have jobs anymore. But this seems sort of economically inefficient as well as politically untenable.
I feel like the ideal solution here would be for group living to become more socially acceptable, and to designate one or two people to do the maintenance stuff. Unfortunately, this requires a group of people that all trust each other highly, and it’s difficult to make that happen in modern America. If anyone can come up with a social technology to make that work, we’d be able to solve a huge number of problems with social isolation as well. Additional challenges: has to work for introverts, should be accommodating to people who want to minimize time spent around children, have to decide how easily a person can escape a bad reputation, has to somehow maintain an ideal ratio of homemakers to breadwinners, has to come up with a system for arbitrating financial allocations to homemakers.
Colleges, incidentally, seem pretty good at making group living work among people who were previously strangers, but doesn’t include a system for having people’s individual living spaces get cleaned by someone else. They have the benefit of not normally needing to deal with people having young children, so I’m not sure how viable of a solution that is. The idea that keeps popping up in my mind is having (parents + people who want to help raise children) live separately from childfree people, but then you need a way to deal with accidental pregnancies in the childfree groups. Voluntary sterilization maybe? This still unfortunately leave people who want children later but don’t want to deal with them now in weird spot. We would want them to live with like individuals, but again, accidental pregnancies are a problem. Then there’s the question of how to keep pedophiles out of childrearing groups.
I can sorta see why society has been slow to adapt here.
Yes this is actually a great solution, I totally support more group living. Provides opportunities to exploit comparative advantage, gives people close-knit communities, counters the atomization of society.