When in human history has life for most not been stressful? If anything life for most today (even the young with kids, roommates or tiny apartments) is far less stressful than for most humans in history. There's a complete loss of perspective today.
Some people's lives had meaning, plenty of others were basically surviving in routine .
This makes it sound like you believe love is a bool that gets set at the beginning of the relationship, but from what I understand love is a float that the couple can work to increase.
For long term love, it matters greatly whether you two are match by personality and values. And short term engagement make it easy to select wrong partner.
Stress is the response to every day life. We don't have the coping skills we used to have.
Kids, children, were conscripted, given weapons, and sent to a different continent to fight and die. Twice. After the first time, the Spanish Flu hit and killed millions of people. The kids who lived through that time were mentally tough and capable of coping with the tragedy of both events.
They lived full lives, had purpose, had families. By and large, they had a few things that today's kids don't; religion and nuclear families. To some extent, God is a panacea. Having certainty of one's final destination makes the road there a lot more manageable. They also had nuclear families and all the benefits that go with them.
We are now at the tail end of a "softening". Peace makes for soft people.
If anything the "softening" is that we can now speak of these things, rather than force them down under stoic veneers and alcoholism.
The US has had constant military engagements for the last 20-30 years, the largest terrorist attack on US soil, the complete economic erosion of the middle class followed by the largest recession since the great depression and now the largest depression since the great depression with the largest pandemic since 1918 where we're also on track for millions dying. This is one of the roughest times in history to be growing up in compared to those times.
Then there is their idea of "effective coping". It was to drink more and smack their wives. Your romanticization of those people is utterly off the mark.
That is also a caricature. I think the middle ground between what you have said and I what I have said is more likely to be true.
> Your romanticization of those people is utterly off the mark.
Noted. In retrospect, I agree.
There's a competing line of thought that considers the nuclear family to be one of the worst things that's happened to our society. It's created isolated household units, disconnected truly multigenerational households, and created distance and lack of necessity for extended family. By reducing the amount of direct family connections you can rely on for support, it's caused a massive increase in people depending on the government or charity for their emergency needs and arguably further exacerbated the loneliness epidemic.
The degeneracy is from multigenerational to nuclear and from nuclear to less than nuclear families. Many people who are marxists typically celebrate the demise of both multigenerational homes and nuclear families because the family unit was seen as an opponent of socialist goals.