Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person | Hacker News Reader

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

nytimes.com

69 pointsFuNe40 comments

This was posted to HN when it was new. (This is non-judgemental)

Link to the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11809381

Interesting conclusion. I agree that we need to let go of the notion that there is someone "perfect" for us. That person doesn't exist. True, lasting happiness in marriage is possible. Joy in marriage occurs when we seek the highest good of the other through unselfish sacrifice and compromise, and the other does the same toward us. That isn't easy, and could take years of discipline and failure. I've seen couples that I knew were heading for divorce grasp this and are now the happiest people I know. Of course, sometimes divorce is inevitable, but I think some could be avoided if each recommitted themselves to the higher good of the other.

Your post contains a contradiction, at least it appears to me to be so.

If something is countable or quantifiable, like 'True, lasting happiness'. Isn't the partner that is capable of providing the 'True, lasting happiness' the perfect match for you? There might be multiple potential partners that will provide lasting happiness, and the one that does this in the most expedient fashion (or perhaps the result of doing happinessp1 * happinessp2) is the 'perfect' partner. My understanding of what you wrote is that you mean to say that there is no Disney prince/princess waiting for anyone out there. I can agree with that, but certainly there is a match somewhere that is maximally mutually compatible (perfect??)?

I think what he's saying is that true, lasting happiness comes from "unselfish sacrifice and compromise" to one another, instead of from from finding a "match somewhere that is maximally mutually compatible".

That is how I see it too, and in fact it seems to be how the writer sees it:

  > The person who is best suited to us
  > is not the person who shares our every
  > taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but
  > the person who can negotiate differences
  > in taste intelligently — the person
  > who is good at disagreement. Rather 
  > than some notional idea of perfect 
  > complementarity, it is the capacity
  > to tolerate differences with 
  > generosity that is the true marker
  > of the “not overly wrong” person.

If you want to make a formal argument, I think you will need a formal definition of 'true, lasting happiness' and of expediency in its provision.

Agreed, I've admitted in another comment that this was an inexact term. I'm not a happiness expert, so I'm open to suggestions!

Thanks for raising my apparent contradiction. What I meant to say, perhaps not very well, is that _no_ partner is capable of proving true, lasting happiness, which I now realize is an unexact term. However close one can come to that happiness, though, is a consequence of ones own resolve to seek the highest good of the other. In my marriage, the more loved, safe, happy, secure, etc, my wife is, the happier I am free to be. And my wife strives for the same. We are satisfied in the others satisfaction, and therefore don't depend on the other for satisfaction.

My dad, who is divorced, tried to sum up his marriage advice for me: "Marriage can work if each person is willing to contribute more than half to the relationship."

Now that I'm married with three kids (one a teenager), I think he might actually have been on to something. Life isn't fair, things probably won't even out in the end, and nobody will ever fully appreciate the thousand invisible things you do to make your family work. If your belief system expects the opposite of those statements to be true, then you might not allow yourself the emotional slack to buffer the incredible variance of a marriage that lasts long enough to cover the normal trials of real life (illness, death, job change, envy, jealousy, in-laws, travel, aging, boredom, financial trouble, etc.).

Reminds me of Mark Twain:

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

I get the intended meaning, and also I will be sorely disappointed in myself if I don't learn a hell of a lot between my kid turning 14 and 21.

"The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste...but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently"

I do agree with this bit. It's confusing to me that many of the online dating sites are trying to pair people based on how alike they are.

Is there any real research that this is somehow the key to marital bliss? Anecdotal, but most of the long married couples I know aren't very alike, and don't share the same interests...other than things like grandchildren, etc.

I've been much happier from the relationships I've found on Tindr (the current one is a few weeks shy of a year). AFAICT Tindr largely matches people at random, so I think there's some truth to what you're seeing. The other site I used was OKCupid which was just terrible, either their algorithm is flawed or I just never learned how to use it "correctly."

I'm with you - I like Tinder substantially more than OKCupid. I feel like Tinder gives you a much better shot at making a connection with a person based on their personality, rather than a big bullet list of trivia.

Remember that we're still talking about a life partner here, which is very different from, say, a roommate. As long as you and a roommate are respectful of each other's sleep, possessions, ability to host friends at least occasionally, and mutually agreed levels of general cleanliness, you'll probably get along just fine, even if you're different in almost every other way. You're two different people in different places in life with different goals and ideologies and you just happen to live with each other for now. It's perfunctory and emotionally cold, but that's OK, because that fits within both you and your roommate's expectations, given that the rent needs to be paid and you only have so much time to find someone to help you pay it.

Of course it's possible to be wonderful friends with your roommate, but the point to be made is that if that's your grand sum of what you expect out of a relationship, you're going to feel profoundly lonely, unsupported, and unloved. Fulfilling our emotional needs is also important, and dating sites that focus on finding people who are similar to each other are sites which understand that people will build that relationship of love, trust, and understanding on a foundation of what they have in common.

What the author is trying to remind us is that no matter who much in common we have with someone, and thus no matter who we marry, there will be areas in which we will differ from and disagree with our partners. As such, healthy dating requires you to find not only that base of similarity but also that ability to disagree without a sense of disappointment that you disagree with The One on something.

So the article isn't meant for people in healthy marriages. They already understand that. It's written for the serial daters who reject suitors for ultimately irrelevant reasons.

I logged in just to say that I think this is an excellent answer. But since I'm already here...

> It's written for the serial daters who reject suitors for ultimately irrelevant reasons.

Do you feel that dating sites help cultivate a mindset in people that predisposes them to doing this? I do - I think many dating sites (OKCupid in particular) swamp you with irrelevant information. In my experience, it seems like people are perfectly willing to use superficial reasons to say "no" to potential partners. I'm not talking things like political views or religious beliefs; I'm talking about things like weightlifting or liking Taylor Swift. Is it the perception that these sorts of things go hand in hand with other behaviors, or fit into a preconceived notion of "what kind" of people like this sort of thing? I'm inclined to believe so.

Just a mild rant. I liked this article a lot when it first came out and I'm happy to see it pop up again.

There's no benefit to dating sites to matching people who are truely compatible (assuming this concept even exists, and assuming they had some way to assess it).

All that would mean is they have lost two customers.

Much better, and easier, to match two people based on the superficial factors that we're wired as humans to look for - good looks (as good or better as ourselves), etc.

> The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative.

Is this actually true? I've heard it repeated over and over again, but is there any real evidence that a larger percentage people in "marriages of reason" felt dissatisfied when compared to marriages today? Considering the 50% divorce rate I'd be extremely surprised if the dissatisfaction rate of matches made in days gone by was much higher.

There is no 50% divorce rate, but it used to approach that 40 years ago.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surg...

Divorce rate isn't a great indicator of dissatisfaction rate due to the varying social acceptance of divorce as a result of dissatisfaction.

The lead image for the article contains deeper insight into the state of modern marriage than all the words following.

What are you trying to say?

They are referencing what the image portrays, which is quite funny. Here is my take in describing it if the image was not clear for you:

1.the woman paints a perfect picture of how her partner should be

2.then she marries the fake 'image' of that person. The illusion she has built up inside her head.

3. She discovers the true person behind her false image.

4. She cries in disappointment that the true person behind her built up fake image is not what she expected.

Oddly enough, I feel that there is a positive spin to the last image: the man is holding the woman, who trusts him enough to be vulnerable in his arms. It speaks of the potential for the relationship to still work.

He's saying that we idealize our partner at first, but this picture is guaranteed to be torn down and replaced by the real person behind it.

I've successfully applied the following simplified criterion "am I likely to still enjoy this person's company when I'm 80"

The point of the article is that this is impossible to tell.

Unlikely. We hear endlessly about how you can't change a person. Then when we assert "This person is unlikely to change substantially over their lifetime" then that gets shot down? I call foul.

>And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors.

That's not a historically accurate description. In some cases it lead to that (but so did the "modern" idea of marriage as based on passion). It also lead to countless totally normal and stable marriages.

People weren't even unhappy about not marrying someone they are passionate about, because that was not in the "idea horizon". You don't miss what you don't expect.

Ask Indian people (that have not been westernized) for their arranged marriages, for example, and you'll get the idea. They don't find the appalling or alien in the least, and can be as tender and lovable between them as any couple.

Like with many things in life, success requires failure, even though failure can be devastating. In my experience, having gone through both, failure in a marriage is different from a breakup. It's a deeper, more public, longer-lasting kind of failure. But the depth of the failure opens up access to a corresponding growth, and the personal awakening that I've gone through following my divorce has made me a better partner and person in every way.

Divorce has become too easy and men face too many risks: alimony, children are taken and assets for marriage to make any sense.

70%+ of divorce is by women and men pay 98%+ of alimony.

No thanks

Amen.

Not sure if it's the same in the US, but in Australia women can nick half or more (tends to be 60%) of your stuff (including superannuation) even if you're NOT married through the joys and wonders of a de facto relationship.

I've got a mate going through this exact scenario right now, never married, lived with this woman for two years. She decides she wants to move back to England and sends the lawyers after him for a large slice of his superannuation.

There are personally no advantages to marriage for me.

I can't find an "equal" in real life. I'm very successful play music, draw and research and I can't find a woman that genuinely is interested and excels in these unless it's for some superficial value.

It's like we're biological different.

All well and good, but when the system itself becomes unfair, I just can't get myself to swallow the pill.

Sayonara mofos.

My career, surrogacy or have family in a less misandrist society.

That's how life works anyway: what you get mirrors what you know about yourself, then you learn and move on.

Great article. But it seems like it was cribbed from http://www.thebookoflife.org/how-we-end-up-marrying-the-wron..., even though they come to different conclusions.

Does make me wonder why people ever bother to get married. I mean it makes sense if you want/have kids I suppose, but if you don't then marriage really doesn't offer any benefit and winds up being a HUGE financial disadvantage for men when the marriage inevitably ends.

> winds up being a HUGE financial disadvantage for men when the marriage inevitably ends.

Marriage doesn't inevitably end (other than by death of a partner, which this isn't referring to); less than half of first marriages, in fact, do.

I wonder what the statistics are for "first marriages that don't want kids". Still not inevitable, I assume...

Nugget of wisdom regarding picking partners (in love or other adventures):

> the person who is good at disagreement

This article dates from May 28, 2016.It has been cited on HN many times in the past. Use the search facility to find comments. Nevertheless, it is worth a read.

Wouldn't this bring up one very glaring reason not to marry someone though? They have a completely unrealistic view of marriage.

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