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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

I don’t believe it is only a skill. If it were, a master could pick a random person on the street and have an amazing marriage with them.

In my opinion, just like a job, there is only so much willpower and motivation you have. It’s a finite resource. A person that you are

1) Sexually attracted to

2) Emotionally connected with

3) Makes you happy by just being themselves

Will make you happy and motivated to work things out, and vice versa.

Saying it’s a skill is like saying working at a frustrating job for decades is a skill. Sure but why not find one you actually are happy to come to every day?

The actual problem in today’s society is how much we expect from what we see is possible, versus how POOR matchmaking is today when you are single!

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Matchmaking is overrated, and people expect too much out of relationships. My family is from Bangladesh where the marriages, though typically not arranged per se, involve less of a "trying on clothes" aspect than in the U.S. It's not clear to me that marriages are any happier here. (People are of course more likely to get divorced here, but are likely to end up in a second or third marriage that is not particularly happy either.)

I agree but I am not saying dating is the best way. The main thing for monogamous marriage is the matchmaking. When an entire village is involved, and they give you access to a huge pool of men and women ready to marry each other at the same time, that may be BETTER than the average dating strategy.

Traditional societies have this all over the planet!

Tinder gives you the huge binder full of women too though.

Yeah, if it was file search it would be basically swiping left and right on random files until you saw all the files on your hard drive. A brilliant step in matchmaking, to be sure.

Who wants to switch to such a file system? :)

I agree both systems are rubbish. One leaves more dismantled families than the other though.

Right, I wouldn’t argue that it’s “only” anything! Like any human issue, there are many complex factors, including the fact that some matches are better than others. But I think our culture over-emphasizes finding the perfect match and totally ignores the fact that given any two people, their chances of being happy together can dramatically increase if they spend time and effort learning.

The idea that you need to find the perfect match, be totally yourself all the time and spend no effort making compromises is toxic. You’ll never have those expectations met.

You don’t need the perfect match. However, I would say that the task is exponentially harder the longer you want your marriage to last.

Assuming people don’t really change, if each day you have 2x as many negative possibilities to deal with, that compounds. And similarly if you have 2x as many positive things like a smile vicerally lighting up your world. You want to minimize the former and maximize the latter before you get married!

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