QA问答：为什么有这么多美国人35岁还没结婚？_风闻

【来源龙腾网】

评论原创翻译：

Danny Willams

The average 1st Time marriage in The United States is 8.3 years.

The average cost of a marriage in 2022? $35,000

The divorce rate for

1st Time Marriage ~ 50%

2nd Marriages ~ 60%

3rd Marriages ~70%

Men who marry prior to age 25? 90%

Men who marry because they got the woman got pregnant? 90%

在美国，第一次结婚的平均持续时间是8.3年。

2022年结婚的平均成本是多少？35000美元

英国的离婚率

第一次婚姻~ 50%

第二次婚姻~ 60%

第三次婚姻~70%

在25岁之前结婚的男人？90％

因为女人怀孕而结婚的男人？90％

Of the 50% of 1st time marriages who DON’T get divorce

Only 13% report that “They’re Happly Married

Of the other 37% They reported they stay married because

Of religious convictions and reasons

What would parents, family, friends, neighbors think or say?

Finances

Children

If a man and want more sex? Stay single. If you want less sex, get married.

有50%的人在第一次婚姻后没有离婚

只有13%的人说“他们的婚姻是幸福”

另外37%的人说他们维持婚姻是因为宗教信仰和其他原因

父母、家人、朋友、邻居会怎么想或怎么说？

财务

孩子

如果一个男人想要更多的性？保持单身。如果你想少点性，那就结婚。

Jay Bazzinotti

There is a concept in economics known as “Diminishing Marginal Utility”. It seems complicated but it’s really very simple. Imagine for a moment you have no shoes. You are barefoot. What do you do? Why, you go out and get a pair of shoes of course. Right? Isn’t that what you do? And once you have them, how do you FEEL about them? You probably love them and are very satisfied with them, wouldn’t you say? However, it’s impossible to measure satisfaction. Economists use the word “utils” to represent “satisfaction units” to fill in that blank for economic purposes. Because once you have that new pair of shoes and are very happy, what is your incentive to go out and get ANOTHER pair of shoes? Well, maybe you bought work shoes and now you need running shoes. So you go out and get running shoes. And maybe after that you need dress shoes for funerals and weddings and big dates.

经济学中有一个概念叫做“边际效用递减”。这看起来很复杂，但其实很简单。想象一下，你没有鞋子。你是赤脚，你会怎么做？你当然要出去买双鞋。对吧？你不就是这么做的吗？一旦你拥有了它们，你对它们有什么感觉？你可能很喜欢它们，对它们很满意，不是吗？然而，满意度是无法衡量的。经济学家使用“效用”这个词来代表“满意度”，以填补经济目标的空白。因为一旦你有了一双新鞋，你很高兴，你会有什么动力去买另一双鞋呢？嗯，也许你买了工作鞋，现在你需要跑步鞋。所以你出去买了跑鞋。在那之后，你可能需要在葬礼、婚礼和重要的约会时穿正装鞋。

But there will come a time when, if you keep buying more shoes, the NEXT pair will no longer provide the same level of satisfaction as the FIRST pair, the pair you really needed, and each additional pair will provide even less satisfaction. The number of “utils” for each ADDITIONAL pair is less than the previous pair and continues to decline until you stop buying shoes. Even women who have 100 pairs of Jimmy Chiu shoes in their closet will find pairs they’ve forgotten about a year later - how many “utils” of satisfaction does a forgotten pair of shoes provide?

That is the concept of diminished marginal utility.

但总有一天，如果你继续买更多的鞋，那么那双鞋将不再像你真正第一次需要的那双鞋那样让你满意，每多买一双鞋带来的满足感就会更低。每一双额外鞋子的“满意度”的量少于前一双，并继续下降，直到你停止购买鞋子。即使女人的衣橱里有100双吉米·邱的鞋子，一年后也会发现自己忘记了那双买的鞋子——一双被遗忘的鞋子能带来多少满足感呢？

这就是边际效用递减的概念。

Marriage has become like that. In the old days, “love” was barely a tertiary consideration when marriage was in play. In old New England in the 1600s, if you were a woman with children and your husband died, the last thing you were thinking about was love. You were thinking about feeding and housing those kids because there was no social welfare if your dead husband didn’t provide for you. You were looking at the workhouse or moving to Mt Whoredom to sell your body to buy food and rent for those kids. (In Boston 3/4s of the unmarried women with kids were engaged in prostitution in 1870. In 1700, fully 7 percent of all the women in town were selling their bodies).

婚姻已经变成了这样。在过去，当婚姻出现时，“爱情”几乎不是第三考虑因素。在十七世纪的老新英格兰，如果你是一个有孩子的女人，你的丈夫死了，你最不可能想到的事情就是爱。你在考虑孩子们的食宿问题，因为如果你死去的丈夫不能养活你，那就没有社会福利。你在考虑去济贫院或者搬到Mt Whoredom去卖你的身体，为了给那些孩子们买食物和付租金。（1870年，波士顿有四分之三的未婚妇女带着孩子从事卖淫。1700年，镇上足足有7%的妇女出卖肉体）。

And if you’re a man working the Fairbanks House, you ask the neighbor with four daughters if his daughter can be your servant girl. Everyone knew what that meant. It meant she would come over and cook, clean and do laundry while he was out in the field plowing or making fences or felling trees and that eventually you’d marry and have kids who would take care of you in your dotage. He didn’t ask the neighbor two houses away for his daughter’s hand. He didn’t talk about love. He just needed someone to milk the fucking cows at 4:00Am so he could do the REAL work. And maybe you had a son. When rich Mr. Scillis came by and told you he needed a handyman you’d push that son of yours right over there where he would work from dawn to dusk doing every dirty thing Scillis wanted - and he’d live in his kitchen and eventually marry his daughter and become the heir because, you know, women couldn’t control money and property then. Love had very little to do with it. Maybe those people came to love their partners: based on my readings they did, but it started with a blind date based on need for work, not for love.

如果你是费尔班克斯公馆的工作人员，你会问有四个女儿的邻居，他的女儿是否可以做你的女仆。每个人都知道这意味着什么。这意味着她会过来做饭、打扫卫生、洗衣服，而他会在田里犁地、做篱笆或砍伐树木，最终你们会结婚，有孩子，在你年老时照顾你。他没有向隔着两户人家的邻居求婚。他不谈爱情。他只是需要有人在凌晨四点给奶牛挤奶，这样他才能做真正的工作。也许你有个儿子。当有钱的西利斯先生过来告诉你他需要一个杂工你就把你的儿子推到那里，他可以从早到晚干西利斯想干的任何肮脏的事—他住在他的厨房里，最后娶了他的女儿，成为继承人，因为，你知道，那时女人不能控制金钱和财产。这和爱情没有多大关系。也许这些人开始爱上他们的伴侣：根据我的解读，他们是这样做的，但这是从一场基于工作需求的相亲开始的，而不是为了爱情。

Today, why do people NEED to get married? The only REAL reason anymore is “love” which people are realizing is a pretty bullshit concept anyway. Almost half the people who get married for love get divorced anyway. So love is not enough.

In addition, while in the “old days” people were getting married and starting families at 15 and 16 years of age (imagine a 16 year old boy today desperately plowing a field by hand so his young wife could eat in January. I bet you can’t imagine it.), nowadays that age goes up and up and up because THERE IS NO REAL NEED TO GET MARRIED.

今天，为什么人们需要结婚？唯一真正的原因是“爱”，人们意识到这是一个相当扯淡的概念。因为爱而结婚的人，几乎有一半都离婚了。所以光有爱是不够的。

此外，在“旧时代”，人们在15、16岁结婚成家（想象一下，今天一个16岁的男孩拼命地徒手犁地，好让他年轻的妻子在一月份有饭吃，我打赌你无法想象。）现在这个年龄越来越大，因为没有必要结婚了。

People are not so different now. In those days, they wanted to get laid. Both men AND women were aware of their urges; they knew was sex was all about and they didn’t have two centuries of negative thinking telling them it was always “bad”; but they DID have a strict church, that they believed in with all their heart, telling them that you needed to be married to have acceptable sex. In those days, the engagement ring was a trade for sex; if a man took a girl’s virginity and didn’t marry her, at least she’d have something of value to make up for her lost honor. They paid for sex on the installment plan. So they had sex and then they got married and had sex, and then later fucked the milk maid or the handyman as needed. Today, sex is pretty easy to come by. You don’t need to get married to have sex. You can find whatever sex you want just about anywhere. So why get married?

现在的人们并没有太大的不同。在那个年代，他们想做爱。男性和女性都意识到自己的欲望； 他们知道性是一切，他们没有两个世纪的消极思想告诉他们性总是“不好的”；但他们有一个严格的教会，他们全心全意地相信，告诉他们你需要结婚才能有可接受的性行为。在那个年代，订婚戒指是性交易；如果一个男人夺走了一个女孩的童贞，但没有娶她，至少她会有一些有价值的东西来弥补她失去的荣誉。他们用分期付款的方式买性服务。所以他们做爱，然后结婚，然后做爱，然后在需要的时候和挤奶女工或者勤杂工上床。今天，性很容易获得。你不需要等结婚后才能做爱。你可以在任何地方找到你想要的性爱。那么为什么要结婚呢？

In the old days, people NEEDED that “helpmate” as the Bible called the wife. The man simply couldn’t do everything because there was just too much to do. And like the birds and animals of the wild, he would build a nest that would be acceptable to a mate who would make it a “home”. Even in those days people remarked about the “eccentric” single man whose wife died and he didn’t remarry or who never took a wife and they would remark about his filthy hovel, because in those days, at the end of the day, the man was just too fucking tired to come home and start doing housework. No one has that problem anymore. We don’t NEED a helpmate.

And young people no longer have the means. They have (by and large) shitty jobs and huge college debts and live with mom and dad who themselves are barely hanging on by a string. Where is he going to take his new wife? To a shitty third floor walk up? Then what? They can live in poverty together? He doesn’t need to get married (nor her) to have a significant other, get laid and go to the movies.

在过去，人们需要像圣经中所说的妻子那样的“伴侣”。他根本不能做所有的事情，因为要做的事情太多了。就像野生的鸟类和动物一样，他会建造一个可以被配偶接受的巢穴，让它成为一个“家”。即使在那个年代，人们也会评论那些“古怪的”单身男人，他的妻子死了，他没有再婚，或者他从来没有娶过妻子，他们会评论他的肮脏的茅屋，因为在那个年代，在一天结束的时候，男人太累了，不想回家开始做家务。现在没人有这个问题了。我们不需要帮手。

年轻人不再有这个能力。他们（总的来说）有糟糕的工作，巨额的大学债务，和父母住在一起，而他们自己也几乎没有生活的支撑。

他要把他的新婚妻子带到哪里去？从三楼爬上去？然后呢？他们能一起生活在贫困中吗？他不需要结婚（也不需要她）来拥有一个重要的另一半，做爱和看电影。

The “utility” of marriage is diminishing every year. The main reason to get married is for the legal rights to care for each other and to be entitled legally to their estate, such as it is. They don’t even need to be married to pay for the kids - the State will try to ensure that one parent or the other pays through the nose for 18 years, marriage or not.

So what is the driving reason to get married now?

To me, the reason to get married is to have a best friend who will hold your hand when you get old and nod when I ask, “Remember when we…?”. The sex is going to diminish. Hopefully, we will both grow and change together and pool our assets so that in our dotage we aren’t eating dog food under the overpass.

婚姻的“效用”每年都在减少。结婚的主要原因是为了获得彼此关爱的法律权利，以及合法获得彼此的财产，尽管如此。他们甚至不需要结婚来养孩子——国家将努力确保父母中的一方在18年里支付大笔费用，不管是否结婚。

那么现在结婚的主要原因是什么呢？

对我来说，结婚的原因是有一个最好的朋友，当你老了，他会握着你的手，当我问“还记得我们……？”时，他会点头。性生活将会减少。希望我们都能一起成长，一起改变，把我们的财产集中起来，这样在我们年老的时候，我们就不会在天桥下吃狗粮了。