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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Marriage has become the exception and not the rule for couples I know. The few people I do know who are married take responsibility for their own happiness as individuals and expect their wives and husbands to take responsibility for their own as well. They are individuals with a private friendship, they are not a unit or a completion or extension of each other. It's not placid, but it has been stable.

The breakups happen almost invariably when one person holds the other responsible for their the happiness they are responsible for themselves, because that person has stopped being responsible for themselves, and it breaks the trust they have developed together. It's a breakdown of trust and respect, and that's why they get so nasty and irreconcilable. Marriage is a pre-modern institution in a post-modern society, so I can see why most people I know seem to avoid it.

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> take responsibility for their own happiness

On the list of things that are impossible exists an entry around trying to make other people happy. Literally nobody else can make you happy - only you can make yourself happy.

> They are individuals with a private friendship, they are not a unit or a completion or extension of each other

I am friends with my spouse, but we are also a unit in the sense that we are capable of acting in different cooperative ways to accomplish a single goal whether that's on the macro level of managing finances or a micro level of handling an emergency like a kitchen fire.

I would agree we don't "complete" each other in that we're both complete human beings without the other one - but we do extend each other and broaden each other.

> The breakups happen almost invariably...

The happiness ownership problem is a critical one, but it's not the sole root cause. A common related issue in relationships that I see is when one person wants to be infantilized by the other who ends up playing "the adult" - and that's not functional for anyone involved.

Another critical problem is the inability to meaningful communicate - I once had a pair of friends breakup, only for both of them to complain to me that the other one was never interested in having sex...

But it's a fools errand to narrow down the causes of relationship failure to a finite list.

I'd argue the myriad reasons aggregate up into finite categories. Trust and respect are definitely basic ones. You can develop and exercise how you trust and respect people, or these can be fragile, and their tolerances and resiliency can be mismatched, but among others, I'd assert these have predictive power in the persistence of a union. There are no conditions, as people just do what they do, but if the effect of relating does not yield these, I'd bet against it.

On the other hand, trying to be happy without close relationships is fighting an uphill battle against some of the oldest and deepest systems in your brain.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Just wait for the pendulum swing. Modernity has a real under appreciation for the value of the institutions that naturally arose within almost all human societies.

Sometimes the time for a thing has passed. Sometimes the genius of a thing is only appreciated in its absence.

Maybe modern marriage is mostly useless because people are quick to head for the exit, instead of feeling a sense of loyalty and responsibility to their partner. Without that, I agree, it’s not much of a partnership.

Or maybe the modern divorce rate is so high because it's socially acceptable now, and previously people remained in miserable or abusive marriages.

How have the children of these couples fared?

Brilliantly, so far among the examples I can think of. n=5.

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