I don’t currently make it my all-consuming priority in life by any stretch of the imagination, but I would like someday to find a true love and have a lot of children with her. She’d have to be highly intelligent, sweet, cute, charming, classy, youthful, fun-loving, independent-minded, artistically creative, and above all absolutely gorgeous, a goddess of a woman; basically a 21st century Lady Hamilton, so I’m extremely choosy. Nevertheless, like attracts like, and as I move through and up in life I might meet somebody like that who finds me as lovable as I do her. Should that befall myself and my dream girl, what kind of relationship would I like to have with her?
Cohabitation? What for? Why?
A shocking array of problems are introduced in loving relationships by living together, cohabitation, but everyone puts up with it because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re serious about somebody. Well, who says so? Attraction is stoked by your beloved being an oasis from your everyday humdrum workaday home life, not its locus. Turning her from your hot girlfriend you’re excited about taking out on a date into your housemate that’s always hanging around nagging you and not looking her best is the fast track to a dead bedroom. So why does anybody do it?
Sure, some couples make it work, but there are reasons why ladies of the night sell “the girlfriend experience” en masse for thousands of dollars a night, not “the wife experience”, and that’s one of the biggest ones. I honestly think most people would be much better off in a “living apart together” relationship, even if they only live right down the street from each other. I know I would; I find it even harder to live with anybody else than most people do, so I would never consider cohabitation. Spending a night of fiery passion at each other’s place? Sure, all the time! But when the date is over, what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours.
No Choreplay, No Regrets
The same approach naturally extends to housework and chores; each lover is responsible for the upkeep of their own home, so discord about chores is obviated altogether. A big deal, since according to a 2018 working paper from Harvard Business School and the University of British Columbia (summarized here), a quarter of all divorces are caused by housework! Biasing joint spending toward outsourcing the chores in both homes helps still further, freeing up enormous quantities of time and energy that can be used for higher and better pursuits (like making love…).
Combine Finances? Bah!
“What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours” would be the foundational principle of our finances, another aspect of lovers’ lives where co-mingling often causes divorce. There would be sharing, but once all the profits are pooled together we each get our separate shares that we each spend or save as we please, without having one joint account or any such nonsense that people fight over all the time.
Good Money for a Good Girl
One thing I think I’d spend my share on is paying my woman for her time and for being a good sweet little darling for me, both in expensive gifts to make her an even prettier and more alluring woman and in cold hard cash. “Prostitution!” you might say, but consider the power of money: it enables relationships to blossom and reach the heights of ecstasy that without it would never have even existed. Why not apply these same techniques to conventional relationships? The realm of the courtesan isn’t fundamentally different from the realm of the girlfriend; if you want a girl, even a loving girl you’re already with, to spend a lot of time with you and devote herself to being absolutely perfect for you during that time, the best way to make that wish come true is to make fulfilling it a well-paid career for her.
The basic idea of all this, when taken as a whole, is to cultivate, in the context of true love, a relationship like that enjoyed by the best courtesans and their men, to as nearly as possible approach the girlfriend-experience ideal of all of the good parts of a relationship and none of the bad parts. We don’t have to, and I for one don’t intend to, put up with so many of the indignities and inconveniences we’re told are inevitable (or even, *gag*, good), as long as we’re willing to be imaginative and color outside the lines of our social conditioning.
Bundles of Love, and lots of Them!
In addition to her time and being a good girl, she would also get a generous payment for each child we have; with everything childbearing puts her through she deserves to treat herself, as is commonly acknowledged (!) in the custom of the “push present”. And I’d never want to have a goody-goodie middle-class-style “one boy and one girl” family; I’d like to have like five or six children, maybe more. Why not have as many bundles of love as we want? Especially smart, artsy, pretty bundles of love, as I’m sure they would be if me and my dream girl had them. The future, ours and mankind’s alike, needs more kids like that.
We’d both raise the children of course, but they’d flit between our two places as they pleased. They’ll be raised “free-range”, be fed only wholesome organic foods, and be home-educated; no child of mine is ever going to be put in a school or a daycare center. Given the creative and artsy inclinations of their independently wealthy parents, they’ll get much the same kind of upbringing Billie Eilish and her brother enjoyed. It’s what I deserved, it’s what makes Billie Eilish about the only person I’m genuinely jealous of, and it’s what I’ll give to my own children should I ever have any.
We’d be Global Nomads
These two residences this teeming little mob will enjoy won’t be fixed; I’m planning to not own a home again and to rent villas, luxury hotels, AirBnBs, and the like as we roam the world together in perpetuity. Travel enriches the soul by broadening one’s horizons, and one thing I desperately don’t want for my children is for them to become some kind of local yokels by default; no, they’re going to have as cosmopolitan an upbringing as their parents’ money can buy.
Uncle Sam, keep out of my Bedroom!
Last but not least, I must say I detest the whole idea of marriage licensing. In my recent horrible experience getting my passport renewed, I glared at the other forms on the county clerk’s shelf, one of which was a marriage license application. And I saw such red, it only deepened my feeling that I didn’t ever want anything to do with such an institution. I have no objection to marriage per se, but I find the man, woman, and state threesome that passes for marriage in this modern world to be an anathema. Why invite the government into my life if I don’t have to?
It also occurs to me that the most likely situation, namely one where I have far more assets than the girl, makes getting legally married a very bad risk. At the very least I wouldn’t marry anybody without an ironclad pre-nupital agreement. But even that still has significant risk of being thrown out in a divorce, so ideally I wouldn’t get legally married at all. We’d have a swanky ceremony, perhaps a handfasting, sealing our love without a legal marriage, followed by a honeymoon.
One bonus of the relationship style I prefer is the risk of being declared common-law married to each other after a certain number of years cohabiting is also obviated, since there is no cohabitation. No risk of a pre-nupital or post-nupital agreement being thrown out either; we can make whatever arrangements we please.
Conclusion
This kind of relationship might seem countercultural, even strange, but among the 1% in Hollywood and Wall Street it’s not all that weird. Every few years some big gossip gets out about some celebrity couple who are happily married but don’t live together, and there are significant numbers of rich people who scrupulously avoid getting legally married. Even the idea of paying money to your woman to be a good wife and mother for you is downright mainstream among 1%er professionals; it’s called a “wife bonus”.
My own mentality has serious 1%er energy, and I quite like the idea of me pursuing this path as I reach the 1% of the 1%. Someday all my dreams will come true, and that’s one of them. Someday…