Tag: marriage

The Separation Trap: When “Separate but Equal” Hides Unfairness

~ cafebedouin

The Basic Problem

When two people or groups have different needs, there are two ways to handle it:

  1. Merge the resources and divide them based on who needs what
  2. Keep resources separate and let each side handle their own needs

The second option sounds fair. It sounds like independence and respect for differences. But it usually makes inequality worse.

Here’s why.

The Core Mechanism

Separation turns resource splits from visible decisions into invisible facts.

Let’s say you and your friend start a business together. You put in $80,000. Your friend puts in $20,000.

If you keep the money separate:

  • You have $80,000 to work with
  • Your friend has $20,000 to work with
  • This split just becomes “how things are”

If you merge the money:

  • The business has $100,000
  • Every spending decision is a choice: “Should we invest in your project or mine?”
  • The 80/20 split is visible in every conversation

Separate accounts make the original inequality disappear from view.

Why This Matters

Once the split becomes invisible, several things happen automatically:

  1. You can’t compare anymore. With separate pots of money, there’s no way to see if things are actually fair. You each just have “yours.”
  2. The person with less can’t negotiate. If your friend needs $10,000 for an important business expense, they can’t argue that the business should pay for it. They just “don’t have the money.”
  3. It feels like independence, not inequality. Your friend isn’t being cheated – they have their own account! But they’re permanently working with a quarter of the resources.
  4. Nobody has to justify the split. With merged resources, you’d have to explain why you’re taking 80% of the profits. With separate accounts, that’s just the starting point.

Real Examples

Marriage finances: When couples keep separate accounts, the person who earns more keeps that advantage forever. Every spending decision gets made from “your money” vs “my money” instead of “our money for our household.”

School systems: When rich and poor neighborhoods have separate school systems, the funding inequality just becomes background. Nobody has to justify why one school gets $20,000 per student and another gets $8,000. They’re just “different schools.”

Healthcare: When wealthy people use private hospitals and everyone else uses public hospitals, the public system never gets better. The people with power to demand improvements have left the system.

The Guide: When to Merge vs Stay Separate

Merge resources when:

  • You’re actually trying to build something together (a household, a community, a project)
  • The initial split wasn’t fair and you know it
  • Decisions affect both parties equally
  • You want accountability for how resources get used
  • The weaker party needs protection

Stay separate when:

  • You’re genuinely independent with no shared goals
  • Both parties truly have equal resources and power
  • Neither party’s decisions significantly affect the other
  • There’s a real risk of exploitation going the other direction
  • You’re testing out a relationship before deeper commitment

The Key Question

Ask yourself: “Is the separation serving a shared purpose, or is it protecting someone’s advantage?”

If you can’t clearly explain how the separation helps both parties equally, it’s probably hiding inequality.

The Hard Truth

Separation feels like respect for differences. It feels like independence and autonomy.

But when resources are unequal, separation is almost always a way to lock in that inequality without having to defend it.

Real fairness requires:

  • Visible resource pools
  • Ongoing negotiation
  • Accountability for splits
  • Shared stakes in outcomes

This is why married couples with truly merged finances tend to be more stable. It’s not about romance or trust. It’s about making every resource decision visible and negotiable instead of locked in at the start.

Bottom Line

When someone suggests “separate but equal,” ask: “Separate from what accountability?”

The separation itself is usually the answer.

Brief Comments on Consensual Hostility

~ cafebedouin

“Once consent becomes the only value by which an individual can assess sex to be good or bad and justify their assessment to their partner or anyone else, all that’s left of seduction is contract negotiation fueled by whatever mix of horniness and loneliness brought the two parties together.

There’s an alternative. As Srinivasan herself suggested, to treat any romantic partner like your oldest friend. Fine attunement to your partner’s wants and needs, a willingness to place them at least on par with your own, and giving your partner the benefit of the doubt that they are doing the same. Since your partner doesn’t want their consent violated that part is a given, but it’s not the main focus or a sufficient condition.”

-Jake, “Consensual Hostility.” putanumonit.com. October 11, 2021

Not much to add here beyond two points:

  1. Transaction model: A transaction model for relationships is the model of psychopaths, sociopaths and others with Cluster B personality disorders. Framing everything around consent frames every interaction as a transaction.
  2. Love is a Blank Check: “[M]ake a commitment to put someone else before ourselves over the long haul, over a life, without any guarantees that it’ll work out well, and a virtual certainty, that, for some period, it’ll be a bad bargain. Love is what transforms a bad bargain into a good one, where you give someone a blank check, the ability to ask for and get more than you have, and by some miracle, at the moment it is needed, you find there is enough in the bank to cover it, money you never knew you had.”

The mystery of love is it transcends transactions. If it’s a transaction, it isn’t love.

Sleeping Together

~ cafebedouin

“Results show that those who shared a bed with a partner most nights reported less severe insomnia, less fatigue, and more time asleep than those who said they never share a bed with a partner. Those sleeping with a partner also fell asleep faster, stayed asleep longer after falling asleep, and had less risk of sleep apnea. However, those who slept with their child most nights reported greater insomnia severity, greater sleep apnea risk, and less control over their sleep.

Researchers also found that sleeping with a partner was associated with lower depression, anxiety, and stress scores, and greater social support and satisfaction with life and relationships. Sleeping with children was associated with more stress. Sleeping alone was associated with higher depression scores, lower social support, and worse life and relationship satisfaction.”

-“Adults sleep better together than they do alone.” eurekalert.org. June 5, 2022.

The Referendum

~ cafebedouin

“The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning….

….Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.”

-Tim Kreider, “The Referendum.” The New York Times. September 17, 2009.

This is so good, h/t Austin Kleon. Also, this line: “It’s not as if being married means you’re any less alone.”

African Polyandry

~ cafebedouin

“In polyandry, the woman often initiates the relationships, and invites the husbands to join her union. Some pay the bride price, others opt to contribute to her livelihood. She has the power to remove a co-husband if she believes he is destabilising her other relationships.

Prof Machoko said love was the main reason the men he interviewed said they had agreed to be co-husbands. They did not want to risk losing their wife.

Some men also referred to the fact that they did not satisfy their wives sexually, agreeing to the suggestion of a co-husband to avoid divorce or affairs.

Another reason was infertility – some men consented to the wife taking another husband so that she could have children. In this way, the men ‘saved face’ in public and avoided being stigmatised as ’emasculated’.”

-Pumza Fihlani, “Outcry over South Africa’s multiple husbands proposal.” BBC. June 27, 2021

What’s good for the goose….

The basic idea is this: people should live as seems best to them. If that involves a man and a woman, two men, two women, or multiple men and/or women, who cares? Designate a family union as a contract, and any children born or adopted by parties to that contract are parents. It’s not difficult to implement, and it is clean conceptually. Further, the whole world doesn’t have to live by the ethics of pastoral people from the Middle East from 1500 years or more ago. We can create new family structures beyond the traditional ones, and in the case of polyamory, the fact that more people are involved even creates the possibility of more stable structures where when one person leaves, the union can possibly continue.

No. 1 Rule: Keep Your Shit to Yourself

~ cafebedouin ~ 6 Comments

“A day before I sent Malcolm the email saying I wanted to break up, I came across a term online: solo polyamory. It described a person who is romantically involved with many people but is not seeking a committed relationship with anyone. What makes this different from casual dating is that they’re not looking for a partner, and the relationship isn’t expected to escalate to long-term commitments, like marriage or children. More important, the relationship isn’t seen as wasted time or lacking significance because it doesn’t lead to those things.”

-Haili Blassingame, “My Choice Isn’t Marriage or Loneliness.” The New York Times. April 2, 2021.

It starts with an email that reads like a PR piece for an event. It has talking points. She’s trying to sell it.

This piece seems to be generating a lot of discussion on Twitter, to the point I’m hearing about it, and I don’t use Twitter. And, sure, it’s sophomoric and stupid. You don’t break up with people you are in relationships with over email. She’s adopted the passive voice of the corporation to try to spare herself, and perhaps this man, some pain.

The effort is inept, but I think the heart of it is kind. They graduated from college, and they lived on opposite coasts. This man was her first boyfriend. They’ve been together for five years. While there are a few exceptions to how this plays out, the normal course is a breakup, typically within a year. This is obvious to anyone with any life experience.

Another thing that becomes obvious to everyone over time is that relationships are defined by limits. She says:

“My entire girlhood had been consumed by fantasies that were force-fed to me. Love and relationships were presented as binary, and in this binary, the woman must get married or be lonely (or, in classic novels, die). The path to freedom and happiness was narrower still for Black women. Even in our extremely loving relationship, I had felt confined.

–ibid.

To be in a relationship is to be confined. But, it is through constraints that we open up other kinds of freedom. Infinite options are just another kind of confinement. At some point, you choose or time chooses for you. Even in polyamorous relationships, there are limits. In fact, I’d wager that there are more limits in polyamorous relationships simply by virtue of the fact that there are more people involved, even if those limits may not apply all the time. But, there are limits because relationships imply limits.

It’s easy to crack on the naiveté of the author of this article. But, there’s an important lesson to be learned. When you learn something new about yourself – your needs, your wants, your desires, your thoughts about who you are – keep it to yourself and the people that care about you, at least for a few years. Integrating insights is hard work, and it takes time, particularly when they are part of the process of identity formation and how we define ourselves.

In general, it’s a good idea to work with the garage door up, to share your thoughts and processes in how you think about the world and how you do whatever it is that you do. But, your feelings, your sense of identity and your issues, and we all have issues, are not where you do it.

When you close the door to go to the bathroom, everyone knows what you are doing in there. There’s no need to throw open the door and put yourself on display. It isn’t doing anyone any favors, least of all yourself.

So, close the door. Keep that shit to yourself. Work it out. Flush when you’re done, and as a courtesy, light a candle or a match on the way out, so the person behind you can focus on their business and not yours.

The Crane Wife

~ cafebedouin ~ 2 Comments

“‘The Crane Wife’ is a story from Japanese folklore. I found a copy in the reserve’s gift shop among the baseball caps and bumper stickers that said GIVE A WHOOP. In the story, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.”

—CJ Hauser, “The Crane Wife.” The Paris Review. July 16, 2019.

The Theory of Visitors

~ cafebedouin ~ 1 Comment

“She leaned in. ‘Do you believe in the theory of visitors?’ She said this conspiratorially, as if she was sharing with me a secret.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘All relationships are transient,’ she said. ‘Friends who stab you in the back. People you network with at a fancy party. Relatives who die. The love of your life. Everything is temporary. People come into your life for a limited amount of time, and then they go away. So you welcome their arrival, and you surrender to their departure. Because they are all visitors. And when the visitors go home, they might take something from you. Something that you can’t ever get back. And that part sucks. But visitors always leave souvenirs. And you get to keep those forever.'”

—Sam Lansky, “The Theory of Visitors.” Medium.com. November 10, 2017.

Enjoyed the whole essay. It invites us to consider that the theory of visitors and the looking for the next swipe right encounter might be preventing us from interacting more deeply with people. Engaging with the projected personas that are reflected in the digital medium that can only be maintained at short intervals or at a distance, we make quick judgments about complicated, multi-faceted human beings. Perhaps everyone is a visitor, but the key point may be that relationships (at least some of them) are worth investing time in, irrespective of their duration.