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Comment by astura | Hacker News Reader

This makes no sense. "Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce" do not fix these issues.

I grew up with my parents married. They were married before I was born and are still married now. That didn't and doesn't stop the abuse, the mistreatment, the violent rages, the substance abuse, the mental illness, or the cruelty. I wished every day State authorities would come take us away because the alternative couldn't possibly be worse than this. They never came and I never had the courage to tell anyone. I just had to suffer.

The system failed me badly, but it would have failed me worse if the authorities did come and said "well your parents are married and you have food to eat and a bed to sleep in. Looks good."

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Eh, I sort of disagree. Like, I am fully convinced many marriages are not healthy and the appropriate thing for the partners is to end it. But I've seen people end marriages that were probably perfectly salvageable, without even trying to really save it. One bump in the road and they're calling for a separation.

We've entered a transactional phase where your partner is supposed to show up perfect, well-adjusted and no work on your part for a healthy relationship is required. Not working? Ditch 'em and try again. That's the other extreme, sort of the exact opposite of staying due to social pressure with someone you hate and makes you unhappy, and it's also unhealthy.

I've never usually been able to tell if a relationship was salvageable or not, from both being in one and observing someone else's. It's almost always come down to some "to be, or not to be" moment where someone has to make a fuzzy decision.

Do you feel like there's a good way of measuring whether a relationship is worth saving or not?

Step one is understanding what the problem is. Most people in a relationship have been arguing about the same inane shit for years that they can't take a step back and look at the big-picture perspective of the problem in their relationship. They might see it as "My wife doesn't want to move to another city I got a fantastic job offer in" but the real problem might be something like "my wife values her social connections in this city" or "my wife doesn't want to interrupt her own career because that provides her a sense of security". Some of these underlying issues can be resolved or negotiated, some can't. If you're dealing with a meta-problem like "my husband is unwilling to compromise on anything" or "my wife has contempt for me", it's quite unlikely that you can fix that and impossible that you can just come to an agreement on that.

> Do you feel like there's a good way of measuring whether a relationship is worth saving or not?

kinda depends on what you're looking for in a relationship. all relationships take some level of effort and compromise to maintain. however you measure the "value" of a relationship, it has to at least be better than being single to be worth the trouble. I'd say a relationship is worth saving if a) both partners agree it is better than being single and b) both are willing to take on a roughly symmetrical share of the effort and compromise.

> Not working? Ditch 'em and try again

There used to be pro-familly policies in USA that basically assumed that is male is in the house, the male is responsible to be breadwinner. That meant that if there was make, woman would not get social support money on her nor on kid.

They were even quicker to kick unemployed male out due to that - his presence meant they risk support. It sucked, imo.

> This makes no sense. "Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce" do not fix these issues.

Kids end up in foster care for many reasons, and its not necessarily because their parents are violent and abusive. The ubiquity of single parenthood, for example, dramatically increases the risk that a child will end up in foster care if anything happens to the remaining parent. Likewise, in a society where divorce and single parenthood are ubiquitous, other members of the family are much less likely to be in a position to take in a child when something happens to his or her parents.

I'm not suggesting we do away with social workers who can check in on kids in abusive situations. To the contrary, if social workers weren't overwhelmed taking care of a large number of kids who are in challenging circumstances simply because their dad doesn't feel like being a dad, or for other mundane, solvable reasons, they would have far more attention and resources to devote to kids suffering from alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse, etc., in their families.

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