> but isn't divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage?
How is this even a question, never the less the most upvoted comment?
No, divorce is not a healthy end to a marriage.
How is this even a question, never the less the most upvoted comment?
No, divorce is not a healthy end to a marriage.
It's unfair to expect two humans to remain compatible their entire lives. We evolve massively. A person i would have married at 18 is not the same i'd marry now.
Which isn't to say that difficulty should be met with break ups. Rather, it's to say that some marriages should end. Both parties would be better off. Other marriages would be better served to have problems met, worked through, and the couple made stronger as a result.
It is a healthy end. If it's a bad marriage.
People don't just become incompatible. Something went badly wrong for that to happen. It's increasingly common nowadays - nuclear families tend to be more atomized, rather than integrated into an extended family, which increases the stress on the relationship, and many people simply don't prioritize their marriage, but instead their career, kids, or lifestyle. And of course, the modern social environment is more full of distractions and temptations than ever.
For example, if one or both of them prioritize their careers over their marriage, and spend no more than an hour or two a day even in the other's presence, let alone quality time, for years on end, because they're busy at work or with something else...it's entirely predictable that they grow apart. That was the failure. They chose economics or the corporate ladder or an app that's changing the world or...over their marriage.
To you. But not so for many people, i imagine. I think the rate of divorce in America would suggest otherwise. Not to say that those are all healthy individuals, but that description sounds like a very religious-centric outlook on an often secular behavior.
In this framing, i'd argue that the liability of marriage should be thought of as "until death", but still. Sometimes the person you become is not something to be accepted nor desired by your loved ones. So who is to blame?
Do you change who you are? Or does your loved one change what they love? Sometimes both are unfair questions.
I think they have a point.
It would be useful for me that I have some way to assign certain rights relating to me, to someone else.
I am not married, but I have been living with someone for 12 years, and neither of us has plans to change.
But legally, I don't know what happens when one of us meets a misfortune and the other needs to speak for us. Luckily in our case, we both have plenty of other blood relatives all alive and reachable and all on good terms with each other.
So, if say I am incapacitated, and some functionary at a hospital won't accept my partners decision about what to do, both my partner and the functionary can reach several other generally accepted proxies in the form of my mother, my brother, and even more cousins. My partner will be able to say what to do only slightly indirectly if not directly.
And we both have our own jobs with insurance and retirement savings so neither of us really needs to be legally acknowledged to receive benefits like military death benefits or retirements etc.
So for us we can pretty much get away with having NOT addressed these issues.
But they are real issues that generally should be addressed. A legal document on the books would provide a clean path to resolve a lot of potentially messy situations. What if our families didn't all like or respect each other? What if one or both of us had no known and/or reachable bood relatives? What if one of us actually needed to be recognized as a claimant on the others insurance or retirement or property like a house?
Probably a lot of such things could just as well be handled with legal documents other than marriages. Like if I take a job that has spouse insurance benefits, that could just as well be whoever I want to write on that form, rather than having it be determined by my marriage document.
But it would still be useful to have a catch-all document that expresses my wishes in any situation not handled elsewhere.
Simple counterexample: the USSR's views on gay marriage.
Says who? Every country I've lived in has provisions for ending marriages, so clearly it's not the only path.
>It's right there in the vows.
What vows? Nobody in my family is religious, none of us made any claims about being together until death. And even then, lots of religions allow for divorce, even some sects of Christianity...
In many cultures people make wedding vows about staying married until one of you dies.
I think the distinction should be socio-cultural: if you don’t accept that this civil union is “till death do us part”, then by definition it shouldn’t be marriage - it’s a civil union. All the same benefits of marriage with none of the cultural components.
It's not my responsibility to advertise my belief system to you.
The state shouldn't be in the business of certifying christenings or bar mitzvahs, nor should it be in the business of marriage for the same exact reasons.
> Nobody in my family is religious
point is out of place (because whether the family is religious seems to have little relevance)
I think it’s not so much people take it lightly, as that they have no idea of what they are getting into and what kind of work a modern marriage involves.
I am divorced, and got married in my country outside the church. Wether we like it or not, it was literally a contract. An officer of the court was there, read the 'contract' which states our data, the legal parts of it (prenup, how assets were after marriage, etc), and the legal responsibilities. There was nothing there about 'until the end' or the likes.
I'm not sure how it is in other countries, and I am from a very catholic country, but most people don't realize that marriage is the contract that is governed by the government's law and not any vows or whatever the priest says in church. It is a contract and parties to that contract are allowed to change their mind and divorce (break contract).
It sounds horribly complicated. How do assets and dependents get treated? How does a will work? An inheritance?
Eg You marry for 5 years, and at 4.9 a relative leaves an inheritance. The executors get to work at 5.1 years. Where does the money go?
Maybe I’m overthinking it.
https://topnews.in/how-about-fixedterm-marital-contract-rene...
I don’t recall the exact numbers but even just considering how many sexual partners people have can drastically change average likelihood of eventually divorce - with virgin couples above 80% AFAIK (some overlap with religious communities likely). Even a few decades ago when survival was still pretty easy marriage had higher success rates.
The culture probably has a lot more to do with the rate of successful marriages than our safety or lifespan
But parents aren't just two people. Life outcomes for the children of divorced parents are significantly worse than for children whose parents remain together.
Yes, they still are. And parents that stay together in an unhealthy relationship can do more harm to their children than separating.
But as for the life outcomes of divorced children? That's quantifiable and the data simply disagree with you.
"The Consequences of Divorce for Adults and Children" (Amato & Irving, 2005), even has in it's introduction:
"Available research suggests that these associations are partly spurious (due to selection effects) and partly due to the stress associated with marital disruption."
But on the other hand, upper-middle-class Hacker Newsers who got divorced because they were "unfulfilled" probably shouldn't point to extreme cases of abuse and neglect to justify their decision, either.
All things being equal, people in this latter category should try to work it out. (Nobody disputes that there are extreme environments for which divorce is the only option.)
Finally, as always, we are talking about averages. Sociology doesn't have a proof-by-counterexample. If I say, "poverty leads to worse outcomes for kids" it's not a legitimate response to say, "there are some wealthy kids who do bad and some poor kids who do well, so you're wrong."
We're always talking about averages.
It's of course not healthy to end a healthy relationship. But hey, water is wet.
There are two ways to think about this.
The first is that once your car gets too broken to repair, you should just ditch it and get a new one.
The other is that once your arm/ankle/hip/liver has problems, you should just transplant a new one instead of doing physical therapy/exercise/eating healthier/drinking less.
In my experience, marriage is much closer to the latter situation than the former.
If you're curious what those "fixes" are for the latter, see https://www.gottman.com/product/the-seven-principles-for-mak....
There are, of course, many situations where divorce is not the right answer for that situation, just like there are many situations for which a hip replacement is not the right answer. But it is within the set of potential right answers across all situations. There's no sense in trying to replace what is easily repairable, and there's also no sense in spending your life trying to repair what needs to be replaced.
And it's totally possible to go through life where neither you nor anyone you know ought to get a divorce - just like it's totally possible to go through life knowing nobody who needs a hip replacement, but that is hardly evidence that the procedure is the wrong answer for everyone!
That's also the generation of people who don't go to the hospital because anything hurts. They go to the hospital 5 years later for something unrelated, when it's discovered it's 4 years too late to do anything about it.
This is unhelpfully extending the metaphor into a straw man. It's simple enough to see the point.
In your example, your ankle is under your control - if you want to exercise it, you can. Your ankle doesn't actively sabotage your body (or if it does spread infection/etc, amputation is often used).
A marriage depends on two people working together to build a life together. If one person is not willing to put in that effort, the marriage fails.
Because marriage is intended as an act of lifetime committent to what is seen as a positive relationship, and so failing this original intent can never be a measure of success.. Preferable to 'failing' in the sense of staying in a 'failed marriage' (where the 'positive relationship' is no more positive) perhaps, but both of these are 'failures'.
Bad people don't tend to go around being bad unless they think they can get away with it. Once someone has pinky swore to dedicate their life to them, no matter what they might do, the true colors come out. I've seen it too many times, the idea does more harm than good.
Life-long good marriages exists, I hope to achieve one myself, but the silly oath doesn't help them in any way, and it makes the bad ones worse.
"Preferable to 'failing' in the sense of staying in a 'failed marriage' (where the 'positive relationship' is no more positive) perhaps, but both of these are 'failures'. "
> Life-long good marriages exists
I'm sure you have this reconciled somehow, but it sounds contradictory to me.
Maybe if the oaths contained an "unless you become an asshole" clause, they'd be more valuable.
sigh.
For most of history marriage was property transfer, let's not pretend it's something more romantic than it is.
Failing to see how this debunks either 'lifetime committment' or 'positive relationship' which are the only logical assertions I made - I did not attempt to qualify how to ascertain 'positive'; financial benefit can also be construed as 'positive'.
If you're married to someone you don't want to be married to, sure sometimes things just don't work out.
If you're a kid and your parents failed marriage is destroying your life, I don't think "sometimes things just don't work out" is the answer.
I guess if you discount the "for better and for worse" part of the vows you take to one another....
Game theory should always be asked when biology is involved. I am not sure myself on the answer, but it seems more plausible than the article's "teenage girls are annoying" theory or the speculated "son preference" theory. If there is an optimal strategy, such a strategy may result in a small biological effect which makes parents look for a new chance of reproduction once the majority of child investment is done, resulting in the statistical data that shows 20.12% becoming 20.48%.
I remembered a case of of a obstetrician impregnating multiple patients but a Google search(1) easily proved this was not an isolated case as the first few links are all separate incidents.
(1) https://www.google.com/search?q=obstetrician+used+own+sperm
As immoral as this strategy sounds I admit it is probably the most effective strategy from an investment/returns pov. It is cheaper than becoming Genghis Khan(2) and the effect is comparable.
(2) https://www.nature.com/news/genghis-khan-s-genetic-legacy-ha...
Humans with our great variations of behaviors has both pair bonding behavior and non-pair bonding behavior, with genes that code for both. If one strategy was always superior to the other then we would have settled for it a long time ago.
(Its a law or something when talking about genes that the behavior is always a gene-enivorment interaction, and there are likely many more factors that influence pair bonding behavior).
"R-selectors" have many offspring, investing fairly litle in each one. K-selectors have a few offspring, but invest a lot of time/resources in caring for each. There's a bit more to it than that--and the theory has needed some adjustment, but...
I think the original comment was referring to divorce being a better outcome in a failed relationship. There are a lot of failed relationships that continue to raise their kids in a disfunctional way and that is not good. A couple who divorces and are on good terms afterwards when raisig their children is way healthier.
In those cases, is the tragedy that the marriage ended, or would the tragedy be if it remained?
Who wants to have a dysfunctional marriage? That seems like a bad ending too
So we can add ‘dysfunctional marriage’ to divorce as undesirable outcomes of marriage
People evolve and so too should marriages.
Also, realize that people don’t generally get to a divorce by talking things out and figuring divorce is the only option. Even if they do talk things out it’s usually only after divorce is inevitable.
Is this often the outcome of divorce? I imagine that spending more time apart should reduce the total volume of conflict