"It’s this notion of this growing equality between husbands and wives having this paradoxical effect of growing inequality across households."

Said University of Wisconsin sociology professor Christine Schwartz, quoted in a NYT article titled "Marriage Equality Grows, and So Does Class Divide."

The headline confused me at first, because I'm used to the term "marriage equality" referring to same-sex marriage. Here, it means that men these days tend to marry women who work at jobs that are at an equivalent economic level. It's not so much the executive marrying the secretary and the doctor marrying the nurse anymore. Executives marry executives and doctors marry doctors — in opposite-sex marriages (and in same-sex marriages too, I suppose, but that's not what the article is about).

The "class divide" in the headline is prompting us to feel bad about male-female equality in marriage, because it means that in one couple 2 high salaries are added together and the next family is stuck pooling 2 low salaries. In the old system, you could have made 2 middling economic units out of these 4 individuals, and now you've got one rich-getting-richer couple and one poor-getting-poor couple. Whatever happened to the olden days when a man being rich was like a girl being pretty? The rich man found the most beautiful woman and the family income averaged down, more like that next family.

Now, we've got "assortative mating," in which "people marry others they enjoy spending time with, and that tends to be people like themselves."

The top-rated comment is:

Let's stop relying on "non-assortative" mating as a protection against inequality, and start encouraging women and men to seek financial independence instead. This means things like fair wage laws, better support of workers, reasonable childcare policies, parental leave for women and men, and even earlier down the road, more emphasis on education and employable skills. The days of Marriage as Career Path are declining fast and in my humble opinion, that's a very good thing.

I still see potential for resurrecting the old division-of-labor model in which one spouse earns a good income and the other contributes in kind, unpaid, saving many expenses and keeping the couple's tax-bracket low. If 2 individuals marry because they are a lot alike and enjoy spending time together, should they not maximize their time? All this frenetic 2-career activity, complicated by children who must be shuttled about to childcare, with evenings soaked up in housework — why are we living like that?

Here, please read this: "The Scold/Mr. Money Mustache’s retirement (sort of) plan." Why not put all your effort into making what you need and preserving it, with frugality, and reveling in the time of your life?

Mr. Money Mustache is the alias of a forty-one-year-old Canadian expatriate named Peter Adeney, who made or, more to the point, saved enough money in his twenties, working as a software engineer, to retire at age thirty. We’re not talking millions. More like tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, which he and his wife diligently salted away at a time of life when most people are piling on debt and living beyond their means. He calculated a way to make these early paychecks last using a strategy of sensible investment and a rigorous, idiosyncratic, but relatively agreeable frugality.

He is, by his own reckoning, a wealthy man, without want, but he and his wife, who have one child, spend an average of just twenty-four thousand dollars a year. Adeney is a kind of human optimization machine, the quintessence of that urge, which is stronger in some of us than in others, to elevate principle over appetite, and to seek out better, cheaper ways of doing things. He presents thrift as liberation rather than as deprivation. Living a certain way is his life’s work. “I’ve become irrationally dedicated to rational living,” he says.