The Economics of Dining as a Couple
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Which is why people should live together before getting married. If it doesn't work out, it's a whole lot easier to undo than a divorce.
Living together produces all kinds of 'mundane' contact that dating doesn't, which can facilitate those possibly uncomfortable discussions.
Those discussions are certainly possible without living together, but they are far more likely to happen if people do live together.
For example if they're happy not to wash the dishes for a whole week, you'll find that out and can argue about it when living together, but when travelling you might stay in a hotel where others do the dishes, or might stay for short enough period of time that you'll never find this out.
I'd also recommend doing some projects together. Are you there type that likes to wing it, and your partner is the type to careful read the all the directions? You want to find out these sort of temperament issues before getting married.
In fact, people who live together before marriage are more likely to divorce, not less.
Look at it this way: you move in with someone you're in love with, but haven't made a substantial commitment to. However, now you're sharing rent, utilities, etc., and are monogamous in the sense that you're not dating anyone else.
Time passes, and you find you're not compatible... but all those side commitments you've made become really hard to undo... and it looks easier to just stay together.
On the other hand, if you're willing to take the time to ensure the relationship is sound before marriage, you're more likely to stay that way.
Always interesting to see how easy it is to make faulty statistical inferences.
Fascinating. I find the middle one pretty interesting: that "more likely to have previously lived with another partner" is correlated with divorce.
Off the top of my head I can think of a number of possible explanations: some people may never consider divorce for moral/religious reasons, some people may be better or worse than others at entering into and maintaining long term relationships, some people have learned from one or more prior experiences and are less tolerant of bad relationships[0], etc.
[0] i'd like to believe it's largely this one, but maybe that's because i've spent too much time reading relationship advice threads
But that's not a separate factor. If the whole point of cohabiting is to try things out and provide an easier dissolution if they work, the higher risk of cohabitors having cohabited with someone else before isn't orthogonal to the decision to cohabitate, its central to it.
In addition to what others have said, using divorce rate as a metric of relationship success is itself a flawed method of looking at the problem.
As an example, many folks consider divorce to be an immoral act. They would rather sit in an unhappy marriage for decades than get divorced. Thus, it could easily be that those willing to cohabit prior to marriage also tend to be those who do not think divorce is an immoral act, so that the statistical observation you're making here (assuming it's even true) is really just a reflection of the underlying beliefs of two different groups of people regarding the act of divorce.
Or; have I misunderstood?
i.e. There's one or more confounding variables.
Unless it could somehow control for all these variables, I wouldn't be too convinced.
I think it's probable that they did control for these things... but it seems interesting.
http://psych-your-mind.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-cohabitation...
And a more recent one, with a lot more references:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/close-encounters/201504...
It comes out of a time when keeping the paperwork to figure out inheritance was difficult to put it mildly. So instead one put on a formal event before witnesses.
And because back then the line between government and religion was downright non-existing, the formal event was given a religious meaning.
And so we have the mess we are still dealing with today...
The ubiquity of marriage across vastly disparate cultures means either that there's a strong force compelling all societies to develop it, or it's so old that we took it out of Africa with us.
Are you sure? It seems to me the paperwork involved is a whole lot easier than the emotions involved. You aren't really saving much head/heart ache by living together first as a trial.
It takes a lot less time, effort, and emotions to simply discuss the things first. Plus you can meet a lot more people in that time, vs living with each one as a trial.
You might say "so is living together" but I know people who started living together just because they are already having sex so might as well combine finances on the rent and groceries and they don't really view it as a huge step.
Not heart ache, but you'd be saving a lot of headaches by living together before marriage. Finances these days... retirement accounts, who paid what into the house... It can be a huge mess.
Yes, probably by at least one trip to a lawyer and at least one trip to court, regardless of relative difficulty of dealing with the paperwork and the emotions.
Pray together, go to church together (yes, I realize not everyone prays and/or goes to church). Discover points of contention and find the time and will to discuss them in a manner that's constructive, even (or especially) if it takes several attempts.
Make friends and spend time with married couples in various stages of their married lives: recently married, with infants and young children, mature couples with teenagers or whose kids have flown the nest.
Be open to life, and encourage one another in the lifelong struggle to be less self-centered and more self-giving.
So, on the one hand, I encourage such persons to learn more about why their religion (and/or the religion of their parents) teaches what it teaches[+]. And on the other, to recognize that there are good ways to prepare for life together that don't involve cohabitation.
[+] Catholic POV: http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/marriage-and-family/m...
[&] https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?rec...
see also: Cohabitation and Marriage: How Are They Related?
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?rec...
In some ways, its harder, since one of the things legal marriage and divorce provides is default and orderly ways of assigning property rights and disentangling those things that have become entangled. Informal cohabitation and shared use of property without clear identification of ownership, gift status, etc., can only seem "easier" to resolve because its so difficult that its often not worth the effort to challenge whoever first effects a division of possession as the relationship collapses.
There's nothing magic about what you'll learn, and a lot seems pretty elementary. But go before you have a problem! This is one of the best things my partner and I have done. We know that if we have an issue there's someone we can talk to for help, and because we go regularly there's no stigma with going.
I drive my wife nuts by keeping my order secret, but eight times out of ten we end up sharing everything. Unless she's eating a whole fried fish in which case I just stare politely like Tom Hanks in Splash.
But damn, people, why let FOMO drive so much angst and gamesmanship at a meal? You're hungry and probably not thinking straight. There's no dishonor in two people ordering the same dish. Just pick something and stick to your guns.
Diminishing returns in food enjoyment are real, we also enjoy variety for it's own sake. You get less of both when your order contains duplicates.
And that's when you know what you're getting -- if you share food, both people ordering the same new dish increases the downside risks dramatically for little upside benefit.
There's an interesting experiment mentioned in Predictably Irrational that suggests you should simply order your first choice and not worry about other people at the table. There's an odd tendency to favor variety in a restaurant setting, which means the people who order last opt for their second or third choices. That is by definition suboptimial.
I consider myself somewhat of a foodie and can be a bit ADD with wanting to try all the things.
So wherever we go to dinner I'm always trying to get things we can fully share.
I'm a picky eater and generally see one thing on the menu I really want. Nothing bothers me more than when someone demands the table does family style and I get 1/5th of what I wanted and 4/5ths of crap.
"The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias). Colloquially, this illusion is known as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...
When I am with friends, no wife present, I like to order pretty much random things from the menu and not get stuck in a rut.
Our best food strategy though is to cook at home because we both really enjoy cooking. We eat out frequently, but it is almost always with friends or family.
you may well prefer “the first bite of sole meuniere” to “the 20th bite of ribeye,”
I'd guess that the cost of food has not risen as much as the cost of labor, and so in the last twenty years or so (again, in the USA) restaurants have been giving out larger and larger meals, perhaps in hopes that you'll see them as a better deal and eat there.
My wife and I fall in the "weird diet" and "allergies" bins (which more determines the restaurant), but we share bites occasionally.
The problem is that people tend to just eat it all because, well, it's there (and I'll include myself in this bucket most of the time).
I see this claim made a lot. Certainly, some restaurants serve large portions--especially bulked up with cheap ingredients like potatoes. But I travel quite a bit, including internationally, and I don't really come out of restaurants in other countries commonly thinking "oh the portions are tiny here."
It is true that some cuisines are built around the idea of having a number of courses and/or mains so, in that case, one dish is going to be smaller. But, at least at most of the places where I eat, I don't find US restaurants to universally serve abnormally large portions.
And if you were raised with parents who always made you eat everything on your plate, it's also physiologically embedded that you should eat everything.
Not if it's putting you over your daily caloric limit. The damage being overweight does to you (and society from healthcare burden) in the long term is much worse than just throwing the food away.
Over 50% of the time she asks to switch plates.
Works for us.
My only objection to tapas is that they often seem like an excuse to charge 1/2 as much for 1/4-1/3 as much food. That's probably not completely fair as there's probably less "filler" than a typical main has. In any case though I find tapas meals tend to be on the pricey side.
It absolutely is. Also keep in mind that profit margins in restaurants are razor-thin, and prices really should be higher (and they are getting higher in reality).
On the plus side, tapas restaurants are usually 'gastronomic' restaurants, so more effort is put into every dish than a typical meat + 3 veg main course.
What does that mean? I don't see how a price 'should' be anything.
Also we started to bring our children to good restaurants of different cuisines when they could sit through dinners. (Of course, no restaurants that explicitly say "no children".) We shared all the dishes. Well, it is more that we encourage our children to try our orders. They have developed very good tastes on foods and the appreciation on different cuisines. They both started ordering "adult" dishes at 9 years old. No more chicken tenders, mac and cheese, etc. It is really one of the best family time that we sit together and all enjoy trying local cuisines when travel aboard.
My wife and I always preferred this style of ordering because we can get a large variety of items, as well as have whatever portion we desire (some things I prefer so eat most of, and vice-versa).
Heck, even when I go out with coworkers or friends, we usually dine like this. Good way to be social and sample variety.
Only if you like to mix up your order.
Shortcut: type DINE and hit <GO>
Would anyone care to share an example of a review? For example, do they have anything to say about Pétrus, in London?
Smaller bites and more chewing is so underrated. And you won't eat as much, either, which is great if you're trying to control your weight.
It's hard to remember to do when you're hungry, though.
It turns out that the steaks that my flatmates eat in a well balanced diet are much smaller than most pictures I can find online.
I'll be honest, if my meal was so large that a 20th bite of something that was a third of the plate was coming up I would be much more inclined to share my plate than I am now.
Restaurants in the UK typically serve 225-400g.
American restaurants seem to serve between 300-600g (!).