Studies: Premarital Sex, Cohabitation, and Divorce | Hacker News Reader

Studies: Premarital Sex, Cohabitation, and Divorce

focusonthefamily.com

15 pointsmgh234 comments

This is research that people do not want to hear, but is quite interesting.

If you develop a habit pattern, and then want to change your life and follow a new habit pattern, you're going to be less successful at achieving that 2nd habit pattern.

If you want to live a healthy life, giving smoking a go is not a good start to that, and will make achieving healthy living much harder.

So, it's not really a surprise that engaging in non-monogamous behavior would set someone up for failure in marriage.

Uhm... How and why did you go from premarital sex to non-monogamous behavior?

There are very few people who don't believe the claims in the linked article who have never engaged in non-monogamous behavior (this is not a euphemism for cheating, it is a category that includes it).

Could have swore I saw this on the front page for just a moment, but it's gone now. Did it get downvoted into oblivion or is there some other reason this was on the front page with under ten points?

Users flagged it. When enough users do that relative to upvotes, the submission falls in rank.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Paul Graham developed this flagging system.

I understand; I don't mean to criticize the flagging system or moderation team. I just wanted to nod at the fact that we can't talk about this.

It's ok to talk about it! we answer questions about things like flagging all the time.

I mean the content of the flagged submission, which is morally unfashionable.

Ah, now I get you. Took me a while.

Sincere question: when will ‘marriage’ become unfashionable? It has outlived its usefulness. We can test paternity..women are financially independent and shared dna can claim shared costs. You can store genetic material.

There is literally no reason for marriage ..an archaic social institution..to exist.

I can only see two (arguably questionable) purposes for legal union, health insurance(in America) and filing taxes jointly.

ETA: Ok. One more. Immigration.

Change my mind.

Have you ever been in love?

Yes.

What does love have to do with the utility function of state and church/religion approved legal union?

Marriage is an ancient tradition centered around the realities of human pair-bonding, which transcend Church and State. The social institution is built around our nature, and its congruency is apparent to any neurotypical human who's ever been in love. Atypical people might benefit from alternate arrangements but they comprise a very small minority of humans at this point in evolution.

It’s not that ancient.

I remain unconvinced. Change my mind.

https://theweek.com/articles/528746/origins-marriage

[..]The best available evidence suggests that it’s about 4,350 years old. For thousands of years before that, most anthropologists believe, families consisted of loosely organized groups of as many as 30 people, with several male leaders, multiple women shared by them, and children. As hunter-gatherers settled down into agrarian civilizations, society had a need for more stable arrangements. The first recorded evidence of marriage ceremonies uniting one woman and one man dates from about 2350 B.C., in Mesopotamia. Over the next several hundred years, marriage evolved into a widespread institution embraced by the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. But back then, marriage had little to do with love or with religion.[..]

If you don't feel called to marriage, that's absolutely fine. It's not for everybody. Priests take vows of celibacy, and that is a high calling, to give one example.

As an aside, I see you have a very deep view into the past and are unmoved by mere thousands of years of culture and tradition. You might find Dr. Theodore Kaczynski's Industrial Society and Its Future interesting and enjoyable.

I don’t know why you are making this personal.

I am questioning the system and the foundation of the system. I am claiming that it has outlived its usefulness and we can build another social construct that doesn’t have to be defined by old thought patterns and ossified concepts.

We keep changing..don’t we? And shouldn’t our way of life change too?

You've directly asked me to change your mind, and I'm saying it doesn't necessarily have to be changed. If you're just interested as a matter of public policy, I can tell you that you're going to have a tremendously hard time getting people to raise children properly through other arrangements.

> We keep changing..don’t we? And shouldn’t our way of life change too?

We haven't really changed much at all. This is actually covered very adeptly in Dr. Kacyznski's work cited above.

> Marriage is an ancient tradition centered around the realities of human pair-bonding

If it's based around “realities of human pair-bonding”, why is polygyny a historically common mode of socially accepted marriage?

Why is rape a historically common mode of sexual relation? Because feral man likes sex and doesn't care about the people he's having it with. When man begins to care about the multitude of his progeny, he gets polygyny. When he cares further about the woman, marriage.

Only reason you need: It exists in most places and is so ubiquitous that you will probably never get rid of the concept of marriage no matter how hard you try, so you might as well live with it and work around it. Maybe it's useless to you, but a lot of people like to do it. It's like asking why some cultures still eat really unhealthy(but hella delicious) stuff when they have access to organic cow-fed vegetables. Because it's their culture they always had, and it's just really delicious.

That sounds defeatist. We don’t have to accept anything we don’t reasonate with..I would like to believe that we have at least come that far..

I agree that people can do whatever they want but like I said earlier, it restricts people. I beckon the same examples...immigration, taxation, insurance etc.

Why can’t I include my elderly neighbour in my health insurance? If my parents visit me and they are not citizens, I have to purchase a tourist health policy for them and they are family..why should only my spouse and children be considered family.

If I have a partner I love and would like to travel to another country to live for a few years, I can’t do it unless they are a spouse. Etc.

I don’t want to touch taxation. But you get the idea.

We reward legal and religious marriages while unions and friendships or other relationships are not equitable. Why?

The state subsidizes marriage primarily for the purpose of subsidizing child-rearing. This has been obfuscated in recent times, but there is little other reason for these subsidies to exist and your confusion is warranted.

Lol,

reducing risk of divorce != increasing happiness

You're joking, but this is true at the individual level because you can marry the wrong person. At the population level, reducing divorce does increase happiness and is something we should design for.

Not at the cost of forcing people to stay with the wrong partner.

What’s the likelihood of a person who is unlikely to engage in premarital sex to stay with a bad partner? Seems like set has large overlap because religion would be a common factor for both.

I agree. The idea is we all be extremely selective about who we choose to give ourselves to.

Your comment raises the question, what is a bad partner? How do incompatible relationships arise? I'd say most often the dominating force behind bad relationships is strong physical attraction. To give a personal example, I married a very beautiful woman who turned out to be immensely destructive to myself and everyone I loved, including her and her family. She had a serious personality disorder. I was immediately blinded by how attractive she was, how good the sex was, and how intimately we engaged with each other in general (though often this had dark sources like codependency and fear of abandonment). There were warning signs I could have chosen to pay attention to, but I thought at the time this is an incredible woman I've met and if things don't work out, that's O.K., there's nothing to lose.

But I lost a lot. I fell in love deeply enough to tolerate all sorts of madness and it ended tragically. I won't even allude to the details here.

If I really forced myself in the beginning to think about whether I could in fact devote my life to this woman and our future family (which is the calling of sacramental marriage) before choosing to date her, my life would be unrecognizably different and certainly contain less tragedy.

Sex allows unstable relationships to develop into failed serious relationships. Failed relationships harden the heart, reducing one's ability to love, trust, and enjoy other people. It's terrible but it's true, and anybody who's had at least one bad relationship will tell you. If you're lucky you can mostly recover but the damage is still done and it shows in the numbers.

I agree with everything this person just said.

Why did you post this here?

I thought HN community was a data/evidence driven community no matter the POV. I am afraid I am mistaken for the 2nd time, liberal thinking is the norm, so something diff just gets flagged... sigh

This is a specific brand of left-wing liberalism causing the trouble. I've always called myself a liberal and I'm tremendously disappointed that James Damore got fired from Google and basic survey articles get flagged off HN for involving "dangerous facts". It's hard to be a straightforward and honest person in these conditions, and it only encourages people to retreat into insular and subversive communities. Those complicit with left-wing censorship have an incomplete appreciation for the dangers of building a community that doesn't care about truth before hurting people's feelings or fumbling negative-sum political games they've accidentally participated in.

Thanks for flagging this Christian conservative propaganda.

This may be Christian propaganda, but if it is propaganda it is such in the classical sense: a truthful presentation designed to influence your thoughts and behavior toward a particular worthwhile end. It resides in the same spiritual realm as Plato and Epictetus.

God bless,

1000units

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