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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

That sounds great. But that "each know that the other has their back" ends at divorce. And indeed, that vow ends with "until death do us part". So for it to actually mean anything, divorce would necessarily be impossible.

But divorce is ~50% likely. So the entire contract is fraudulent, and cannot be binding.

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The point of a contract is to provide disincentives to breaking it, not to ensure that it is never broken. Contracts are broken all the time - that's what bankruptcy, non-payment, eviction, lawsuits, etc. are. But these are expensive and come with penalties to the breaker, so people have a strong incentive to keep their word.

(For that matter - it's not actually possible to compel someone to do something. Even laws can be broken; it is physically pretty easy to say run over a crowd of people with a car. But that's why laws are structured as a social contract: if you break the law, then you can expect the full force of the state to come down on you, leading to a long prison term or even execution. So you have a pretty strong incentive to follow them.)

From this POV, divorce being expensive, time-consuming, and costing you a whole lot is a feature, not a bug. That makes it a strong disincentive on both parties to cutting and running when things get hard.

Not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that the idea isn't just to have a penalty for breaking the contract, it's to provide a basis for resolving the dispute. So it seems like a messy lawsuit means the contract wasn't well written?

I get that. It's just that "until death do us part" is so blatantly unrealistic.

For what it's worth, my wife and I have both been married three times. My first marriage lasted five years, my second lasted 10 years, and my third has lasted 20 years, so far.

Still, I've always been fundamentally a single guy. But I'm also agreeable, so I keep getting married. However, I don't recall that I ever said "until death do us part". You gotta be realistic.

Edit: By "fundamentally a single guy", I mean that I'm extremely independent. I've learned how to be social, but I don't get lonely. And I resent commitments that distract me from whatever I'm currently focused on. Also, I've never wanted to have children.

Just to be clear, I didn't get the "fundamentally a single guy" insight until about seven years into my third marriage. I got that I'd been trying to be the guy that my partners wanted me to be. Or indeed, that I'd decided that I wanted to be. But I just couldn't manage it, for more than five years or so. As in the Woody Allen line that lifeisstillgood quoted: "I couldn't keep that up - I would have had a heart attack."

So I shared that with my wife, and apologized. And that transformed our marriage. I stopped pretending to be someone I'm not, and resenting her for it. And I gather that she stopped expecting me to be someone I'm not.

The 50% divorce rate is a myth

Source?

It was true in the 1980s, but there are a few caveats with it:

1.) It measures the chance that a given marriage will end in divorce, not the chance that a given person will get divorced (which was closer to 40%). The stat is skewed upwards by a few serial divorcers: 60% of second marriages end in divorce, and 73% of third marriages. [1]

2.) The divorce rate has fallen: Millenials are 18% less likely to get divorced than Baby Boomers are (largely because they're less likely to get married in the first place unless they're in a stable relationship). [2]

3.) It's heavily class-based. College educated professionals have only a ~20% chance of getting divorced, while unskilled blue-collar laborers have a ~50% chance of getting divorced. [3]

[1] https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/

[2] https://time.com/5434949/divorce-rate-children-marriage-bene...

[3] https://qz.com/1069806/the-highest-and-lowest-divorce-rates-...

Millennials are still young. Maybe they just need more time to catch up to the previous divorce rate.

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