Brian, you’ll never get the logic because you are clueless about relationships, much less marriage.
It’s cool that you don’t want to get married or have kids; that is entirely your option, and there is no right or wrong there, IMO. Where you’re wrong is thinking that both sexes bring the same things to a marriage. While I think that the value of what each sex brings is equal, these things are not the same; they are complementary.
The problem lies in the fact that a woman’s contribution to a marriage is front-loaded, while a man’s contribution is back-loaded. Women will often give up their most valuable assets (youth, beauty, fertility) to a man because there is an implicit and explicit understanding that her husband will contribute his most valuable assets (wealth/financial stability, power, social status) in the back half of the marriage. All too often, men take everything of value to a woman, and when it’s his turn to keep his end of the bargain, he backs away from the deal. It’s essentially a deferred compensation agreement, and alimony is a way to make sure that men fulfill their end of the agreement.
If we want to continue down the road of men becoming more and more irrelevant where women are concerned, we will start to see larger-scale societal shifts, like women forming female-centric networks to raise their families, and children bearing their mothers’ names instead of bearing the names of their sperm donors (which is what men become if there is no meaningful relationship with the mothers). We would also see more and more men using surrogates…which will have to be fully legalized, deregulated, and made for profit in order to handle the increased demand (and the use of a woman’s body should never be free, anyway).
Not saying I like how women and men are valued in society (I hate it), but until things genuinely change, we have to deal with what we’ve got. Maybe the artificial uterus will enable us to get to a point where things are more equitable.
