A commenter asked me to spell out more of the differences.
I start with an old-fashioned opinion about marriage, which is that the main point is to raise children. I find myself quite baffled by the “new” view that just treats children as a troublesome time-sink.
There are certainly childless couples with good marriages. I have nothing against it. But for the childless, I see marriage as just an option.
If we limit the discussion to couples who have children, then I think that you owe it to your children to try to behave positively toward your spouse. If you remain married, then events like family get-togethers, your children’s graduations, their marriages, and the births of their own children become highlights of your life. If you don’t remain married, then those moments are awkward at best and painful at worst.
Those elements are not present in a job. If you leave an employer, you might leave behind a pet project or two. But that is not the same thing as messing up your relationship with your children.
And I think that it’s easy to err on the side of becoming too committed to a job. You can be very giving and self-sacrificing, but the relationship is transactional. Your employer does not and cannot love you unconditionally.
If you are in a marriage with children, it’s stupid to go around asking yourself if there is a better potential spouse out there somewhere. With your career, it’s stupid not to ask yourself if there is a better potential job out there somewhere.
1) My guess is most people feel married to a job as they ability to get more or same money diminishes with tenure. Somebody marginal product improves with 20 year veteran within same company, say experience gives them lots expertise to work within the system, I would expect this not be true with the 10% of most productive (say yourself or CEOs) but I bet this is true with worker productivity in the 10 – 70% range.
2) I still don’t think there are a lot of childless couples but it is increasingly true that couples having less children. Probably at the heart of this, is couple lose income/productivity with more children and each child after 1 starts losing income for all kids. (Tyler Cowen theory Average Is Over stuff.)
3) I bet most later divorces are people (over 40+) not thinking “There is someone better” but I rather not live with this person right now. A lot of resentments build for each partner that is given up years for family and now they rather spend alone for awhile. (Note there are a lot marriages that thrive better with empty nests.)
4) I say the biggest change in marriages is late marriage in which people wait until 30 to say vows. (Note this effects 2.)
The other reality is I bet most people underestimate the pain of divorce.
Look at what is happening with Brexit failures in which I believe there are a lot details people did not take into account.
If you think about the Hillary Clinton character played by Glenn Close in The Wife, she’s made a mess of both.
The marriage is the job, and the job is the marriage, but either way she’s compromised herself so completely that in the end it’s this corrosive, self-destructive acid. It was all very successful until it wasn’t.
Early on she’s ambitious. She wants to go places. So she forms a limited partnership, moves closer to the prize. By the end of 1992, which is when the film is set, she has outwardly succeeded. Her triumph is, by all appearances, complete.
But the compromises she made to get to the top are her undoing. In the real-life case of Hillary Clinton, she stuck by her man, calling Monica “a narcissistic looney toon” in the 90s and “an adult” now. She never broke free of him, even after he became a liability.
She made these compromises for the sake of success, but what if she had chosen differently, and been her own woman? If not in 1992, then a decade later, or another decade after that? She could have chosen self-respect instead of hypocrisy.