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Comment by minikites | Hacker News Reader

>remained single most of my life despite my other successes

I think the media has a role to play here too, the idea that you need romantic love in order to be successful or complete is a toxic one.

Edit: a lot of replies to my comment are misinterpreting what I'm saying as "romance is a new idea invented by the media" when all I said is that it's possible to have a complete and successful life without romance.

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I'm pretty sure we've been hardwired to seek sexual/romantic companionship since long, long, before there was such a thing as "media" or even the written word.

Interestingly that's a lot less the case in Japanese media IME. E.g. Honey and Clover concludes (spoilers) with Hagu deciding to pursue her art instead of a romantic relationship, which I can't imagine happening in a western movie or tv show.

Gilmore Girls ended this way.

Have you seen the movie Whiplash from 2014?

I think that there's certainly some influence from the media on how people perceive how to obtain romantic relationships or how a romantic relationship works. That said, I personally don't consider it a requirement to find romance in order to be or feel successful. I do understand however that society in general somewhat views it that way, and I do feel like I am lacking in that department. For someone who is a bit of a completionist and has managed to do many other things in my life, my lack of romance is definitely somewhat troubling.

Plenty of people would get that idea without the media.

It is sublime how when you feel lonely you look for a lover and then pretty soon you have more people around. It makes heterosex seem almost subversive these days...

Loneliness due to lack of romantic relationships is a real thing.

This idea have been in place for ages, so I don't think we can connect it to changes that we see.

Do you mean one does not need romantic love to have a relationship or one does not need a relationship at all? The former seems like an archaic idea (arranged marriages for example) while the later I've seen very questioned by society, mostly by older people.

HN is a young people echo chamber, yet not entirely, and I can assure you from personal experience and observation of peers that a successful twenty year marriage involves remarkably little romance, although keeping a little going is nice. I think there's a lot of young people with soon to be broken expectations who think that marriage means every night is romantic date night. Most life is muddling thru.

From a young person's perspective who has seen older coworkers get divorced and observing remarkable fallout from divorce, why get married then? Please don't take the question as an insult, its a query from a young developer who scarcely has relationships longer than a year.

Mostly to raise kids in a stable manner. And the finances are much more stable. You need someone you can have fun with; little league games are not romantic, but are fun. Ditto doing the laundry or yardwork or cooking dinner or whatever. We have similar outlooks on hobby / life / work balance.

We're also both descended from 40+ yrs of marriage couples, so the risk of divorce seems much lower.

After moving here, I was quite surprised to see a significant number of my buddies had divorced parents and were totally against marriage.

You've answered the question "why live in a stable, long term relationship" which is a subtly different question from "why get married".

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