The Problem of Marital Loneliness | Hacker News Reader

The Problem of Marital Loneliness

newyorker.com

301 pointslermontov287 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20210926020656/https://www.newyor...

> Of course, we compromise: by taking turns, and by putting up with the fact that one of us is, to some degree, dragging the other along for the ride. But we can also tell that we are compromising, and that makes each of us feel sad, and somewhat alone.

This is actually the problem. Compromise is when two people in an adversarial relationship both try to look out for themselves and inevitably walk away disappointed.

When two people view marriage as a self-giving endeavor, rather than a self-serving one, happiness follows. You're happy to give and happy to be loved in return.

The trouble is for so many people, a mutually self-giving relationship is unthinkable.

I've been married for 15 years and my wife and I couldn't be more different. I'm an engineer working on my second Masters degree and she has a high school diploma. Our interests differ wildly but we're very happy because we both share a desire to serve and make the other one happy. Me first is the problem.

I've heard good marriages described as a 100 / 100 partnership, not just a 50 / 50 one. You described that idea excellently, thank you.

15 years is a long time.

Congrats and may you have many more together!

Depends really on the Personality traits and Needs of the 2 people involved. Some differences complement each other. Some dont.

And that too depends on the type of problem the couple faces which is not static and changes from year to year. The same couple that complement each other in one situation can be completely hopeless together in another.

So its all about Awareness and Communication of what your traits, needs, strenths and weaknesses are.

Obviously thats non trivial cause the chimp brain is not really designed for such things. The brain looks outward not inward. It takes much more work to look inward.

So all chimps fail a test to produce a list of their personality traits and needs, strengths and weakness wrt to different situations that matches what their partner will produce of them and vice versa.

Couples that minimize that gap, and its lifelong hard work, are usually the most long lasting.

Why does it have to be all self-giving or all self-serving? Why not simply a team, with the team first?

Interesting point, and you need both. Team for things involving challenge and purpose, mutual care to sustain it all.

Amen. “We” is a word that is different than “you and I.” It is a word that requires both a plurality and a sense of unity. It’s an entity that needs both “you and I”, but also transcends “you and I.” It does need to compete with or replace you or I.

Dang autocorrect. Last sentence was meant to read:

“It does not need to compete with or replace you or I.”

Ultimately you can only control your actions and attitudes. What happens if the SO is not playing for the team?

So again, team play comes down to self-giving, because you are not in control of the other person.

Exactly, it's an unrealistic depiction. And it's not a zero sum game. You can care about your spouse's happiness as well as your own, and can't rely on someone else entirely to make you happy.

To me this sounds a lot like a distinction without a difference.

My wife and I have different preferences for different things. We each routinely compromise by going along with the others preferences. We aim to do that in such as way as to achieve a healthy balance, where each of us feel satisfied and have our needs met. We do this by using communication.

To my knowledge, neither of us feel any animosity towards those compromises, because we’re both very interested in taking care of each other, and meeting each other’s needs.

Is this self-giving or self-serving? It just seems like using different vocabulary for the same thing.

You can give your heart, but if your significant other doesn't speak your love language, no matter how much you give, it may not be right for you. If you're focused exclusively on giving, are you considering your own needs as a person? Granted, if both people are focused on giving, hopefully they can figure it out among one another.

Languages can and have to be learned. This is also true for love language.

Love languages were invented to sell a book in 1992.

Is this an American thing? I had no idea the OP was talking about an actual thing until now and understood the phrase "love language" as figurative.

"Love language" is a hugely popular, but pseudoscientific concept in the relationship community in the US. It's BS, just like astrology, the law of attraction, and all that jazz. But people swear by it, and they won't back down from it if it works for them.

I mean, if you consider psychology psuedoscience, I suppose that could be true. It has numerous articles written about it in psychology publications.

Would you be so kind as to point out some well executed research on the love languages? I had been under the impression that they are pop-psychology.

https://www.mic.com/p/do-love-languages-actually-matter-psyc...

“I don’t consider it to be an evidence-based practice, but I do find it to be a very useful tool and use it in all of my work with couples,” says Stefani Goerlich, a Detroit-based psychotherapist.

research conducted in 2017 suggests that the five love languages only work when “both spouses exhibit appropriate self-regulatory behaviors.”

From that same article, it says that it's a communication technique/framework that is used in therapy. That it's a useful tool. I don't consider useful tools to be "BS".

Also, just because something only works within specific parameters (spouses with self-regulating behaviors), doesn't mean it doesn't work. It just isn't a cure-all. It would be like saying antibiotics are BS just because they only work on a subset of bacterial infections.

https://www.jhseonline.com/article/view/788

Hard to tell if a tool is useful if there is not high quality research backing up the claim. That a tool is used, especially in psychology, does not mean that it is useful or a good model of actual human psychology. Freud's stuff is a great example of this. None of it has any basis in reality or formal research, but it was still widely used for many years.

Hence my qualifier of if you think psychology is psuedoscience. There is some research on ths subject, but most psychology research uses self reporting or self evaluation. If this is psuedoscience, then we should also be talking about how psychology in general is psuedoscience. Let's not forget, psychologist are used in court and even for things like psychological evaluations for employment. If they really are using psuedoscience, this presents a threat to the rights and freedoms of many individuals.

Another study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233241159_Speaking_...

I think self-reporting can provide some evidence, but of course it's much weaker than many other study methods. But even within survey studies, there are degrees of quality. And studies that sample undergrads in psychology classes (like the one you linked) are of particularly poor quality and generalizability. To me, that only barely counts as research at all.

That doesn't mean psychology in general is pseudoscience. But it does mean this is a bad study that tells us almost nothing, and if this is representative of the quality of studies on the love languages overall, then we basically have no evidence one way or another about them.

What evidence do you have that the two studies are bad? Just claiming that a study using undergrads is bad sounds like terrible evidence.

Small, non-representative subsets of the population are inherently bad as study targets from the perspective of epistemological power. Results derived from such sample sets often do not generalize. If you combine this weakness with a weak investigative methods like survey, the problem compounds. My definition of a good study is one that gives us strong evidence about the world, and a bad study is one that doesn't. What else can you call a study like this one but bad?

> What evidence do you have that the two studies are bad?

The study indicts itself (i.e. it describes its methods, and the methods are not ones that lead to strong evidence).

I asked for evidence and you are essentially saying "cause I say so". Explain why the methods are wrong. Show some evidence.

The study population is only non-representative if applying it to populations that don't match. For example, this study supports the results for university students 18-22. Again, we come back to the point that just because it only applies for a subset does not make it "BS".

So what's wrong with the other study? Or will it be more of the same generalized claims about poor methods without any specific details from the study being given, nor any supporting facts to back up your determination?

> Explain why the methods are wrong. Show some evidence.

When you sample a non-representative subset, you often get different results from the population at large. For example, you might get a different answer if you ask the Porsche enthusiasts club what the best car is, compared to if you ask random people in the population.

Undergrads are the same way. Asking a group of people, almost half of whom are virgins, questions about romantic relationships . . . well let's just say it might not generalize to the adult population.

This is covered in detail in any intro stats course or textbook. You may also be able to Google something like "unrepresentative subset psychology" to get an explainer. I can't do the issue complete justice in a comment here.

> So what's wrong with the other study?

I'm sorry, I did not sign up for reviewing every study you link me to. I reviewed the one, and explained my perception that it is a good example of the overall quality of the research on this topic. If you want an assessment of the other study, you'll need to look elsewhere.

The point of this site is to have discussion. If you dont want to discuss things, then maybe you shouldn't be commenting.

It sounds a bit like trolling when you call something BS, then the source you give shows evidence that it does work in some populations. Then there are two other supportive studies. Yet you want to give non-sensical and non-applicable examples of asking Porche owners questions.

> Hard to tell if a tool is useful if there is not high quality research backing up the claim.

That's obviously not true. Show me the high quality research studies backing up the idea that a hammer is useful for hammering nails or that a flat-head screwdriver is useful as a improvised chisel. The way to tell if a tool is useful is if you use it and it works for your application.

>> Languages can and have to be learned. This is also true for love language.

> Love languages were invented to sell a book in 1992.

Can you clarify? Are you saying that someone first decided they were going to sell a book in 1992, and "invented" love languages to "fill in the blank" in order to do so? Or are you just talking about the normal situation of someone introducing a new idea of theirs (or in this case, schema) in the form of a book?

I get the impression that you're objecting to the concept as not really a thing because it doesn't have a deep history. However, not all real things have names, or always had names.

"The Five Love Languages" is literally trademarked. It's a framework that's designed to sound plausible, like a horoscope. It's not designed to be accurate, it's designed to make you go, "oooooh" and repeat the trademark. "Having relationship issues? Oh, have you heard of the Love Languages®? I read about it the other day..."

If your partner doesn't want to touch you, what's the most likely explanation? That they "don't speak your love language", or that they aren't attracted to you?

Ok, and if you are that partner, but you don't want to lose the relationship, what's an easy response? "I don't want to touch you because I don't find you attractive," or "I'm sorry babe, I do love you, but we just don't speak the same love language"?

The whole thing is very Cosmo. It's designed to sell in the same way as Cosmo.

You're probably right but does that mean it can't also contain some useful truths? Personally, these types of frameworks do help me break out of my own self centered paradigm and appreciate differences in friends, coworkers and partners. For work teams I highly recommend the DISC survey.

I do agree with the part about not touching though. It seems like a lot of problems are invented in marriages because people are unwilling or unable to say or even think the ugly truth that they simply don't want to have sex with their partner anymore.

In my opinion the issue with pop-psych marketing constructs is that there are kernels of truth embedded within a misleading superstructure. They tend to leave you worse off because the structure (which is wrong, incomplete, misleading) is bundled with the kernels of truth. They also usually purport to be rosetta stones. There are exactly five love languages, and humans happen to each speak a different variety of them? Hmmmmm.

Another example: what if someone feels "loved" when they're bought gifts, but that's because they're materialistic, a gold digger? Likewise if someone wants to be touched because they're more interested in sex than a relationship, and they derive validation from your sexual interest. "It's just their Love Language" is technically correct, but it's the wrong lens to apply to those situations.

One thing is that those aspects map to quite real needs, and the book does provide a set of reasonable metaphors to talk about those needs between partners in a way that gets the point across where previous attempts didn't succeed. It's genuinely hard for many people to define and communicate their own feelings and expectations, and even more so for someone else's feelings and expectations, complicated by the natural tendency to presume that other's preferences work similarly to yours, so a framework that helps this communication is really useful in those cases where relationship problems involve a misunderstanding about those expectations; which is not all relationship problems but certainly a meaningful part of them.

In the examples you provide, I would say that it's exactly the right lens to apply to those situations - it's imperative for both parties to understand that those are the factors that matter instead of trying to work out a relationship around them, ignoring those core issues; and this lens allows to understand/specify/communicate it better.

Like, if someone does derive validation from your sexual interest, then that's a quite important thing to understand for the partner (even if for them personally the concept of needing such validation is a bit alien, because their self-worth is filled differently), because that's not going to change easily and is going to be a big factor in making the relationship work. And if someone is materialistic, pretending otherwise won't be helpful and neither will trying to change someone's values, that generally takes huge time and effort and/or crisis events. Of course, obtaining a proper understanding may also mean understanding that the relationship should not continue, but for such relationships that's also a beneficial result.

There may be more effective ways of facilitating this communication and common understanding of the partner's inner needs, e.g. perhaps couple's therapy can do it faster, but that's a quite expensive process and a simplified set of metaphors can be a cheap and useful approach ("A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points") if there's sufficient material to ensure that both partners, likely coming from very different perspectives given that they have this communications problem, get a common understanding of how they understand them.

I don't mean this disrespectfully, but your comment is a perfect example of someone falling into the trap I was describing. If someone's using you, they don't love you. They won't love you. It doesn't matter what their "love language" is - giving them the thing they're looking to extract isn't going to help, it's just going to get you exploited.

That case doesn't apply because it's not love and that partner is not committed to the relationship. In fact I would go so far to say it's pathological.

I think GP would agree that this type of self help book is not a Rosetta Stone and its core truth may be somewhat banal ie think about what makes your partner feel special not only what makes you feel special. Maybe part of the success formula for these pop psyc books is that we need these truths to be wrapped in a story and labeled so we can remember them more easily.

My point is that he's trying to shoehorn the "Love Languages" framework onto that situation, because the model is designed to encourage you to do that - it's the same thing that makes it sell. You shouldn't dismiss that as a coincidence, it's not as simple as divorcing that from the legitimate insights. The framework is designed to be a brain worm.

Here's a question: you like the framework. Have you ever seen a specific relationship be saved by it?

While it's hard to attribute "saving a relationship" to any one thing, yes, I've seen multiple relationships where this book helped the couple's communication during a crisis in a very long-term relationship; surfacing some things that (with hindsight) could and needed to be communicated and fixed many years ago but which simply were not; because they lacked "skill"(? or had ingrained/cultural barriers?) to meaningfully talk with their partner about the specific issues and unmet needs they had.

However, your objections seem to be about something other than what I'm talking about - what I hear in your responses is something like equivocating "Understand that it's their love language" with "you should accept it unconditionally", especially in the context of abusive relationships, which is definitely not what I'm arguing about. The decision whether a particular relationship is good for both people involved and whether should continue is orthogonal to that aspect, and "love languages" don't/shouldn't affect that decision; But in the context of various one-sided and possibly relationships, however, understanding that (for example) one partner really only cares about sex in this relationship and doesn't care about the other aspects - well, that's useful information to make the decision whether to move on away from the relationship.

I see it's use solely as a means of improving communication, and it's scope limited for couples which have a problem with that communication (which is common) and also a mutual desire to improve it (which is not that common, and already excludes many destined-to-fail relationships), in this regard, it's useful only if applied by the couple, not by one of them. It's definitely not an universal solution - it solves a particular type (though IMHO popular) of miscommunication, and if the couple has fixed those, this book will be useless for any other types of problems in their relationship.

> "The Five Love Languages" is literally trademarked.

So?

> It's a framework that's designed to sound plausible, like a horoscope. It's not designed to be accurate, it's designed to make you go, "oooooh" and repeat the trademark. "Having relationship issues? Oh, have you heard of the Love Languages®? I read about it the other day..."

That sounds like you think it was constructed in bad faith. Do you have any evidence for that?

A model that's simplified can still have value even if it doesn't perfectly fit every situation.

> If your partner doesn't want to touch you, what's the most likely explanation? That they "don't speak your love language", or that they aren't attracted to you?

I'm only passingly familiar with the love languages thing, but I think it does have a point, and I've experienced some of the differences in relationships that is schematizes. Reducing it to sexual attraction is kinda missing the point.

Plenty of it has a point - so does Cosmo. The problem is that it's a psychological model written primarily to be sold. You're welcome to put your trust in that, but I think that's a mistake, and the way that type of stuff usually hurts people is that the model being peddled cuts off deeper understanding of human relationships.

Some people need to read a book to realize or justify their incompatibility

I'd go one step further and assert that "love languages" are mostly bunk, in the same way that "learning styles" are not really a thing.

Meyers-briggs, zodiac, learning styles, love languages, etc. are all self-fulfilling prophecies that are sold as empowering but are mostly just traps which limit your potential.

I disagree. Love language improved my relationship for the better. It gives us language and priority to things that felt important but were difficult to describe and help the other understand.

To your point tho we use all the languages, and many other things beyond the languages. I think it’s important to not get too fixated on them. It’s just one piece of the puzzle. There’s many other things required besides speaking someone’s love language, but it helps!

Individual people can be radically different in what makes them feel loved, satisfied and connected. If the OP never has to understand this, he/she is fortunate. More likely, there is someone in that person's life who would appreciate some directed curiosity.

> mostly bunk

Does this style of post ever work? You are dismissive of all these things but you lack a single reason/argument. Is there a chain of logic that leads you to this conclusion?

It's a bit fascinating to me. I imagine the purpose of a post is to share ideas, to give people a chance to think more like you and that takes a persuasive argument.

Not sure why the burden of proof is on me to demonstrate that they are bunk. Seems like the burden of proof is on anyone who asserts they exist in the first place, since "love languages" are not an objective thing.

> Not sure why the burden of proof is on me

There's no burden of proof here, the question is: what is the point of the post? I assume the goal is to help someone change their mind - to think more like you. And my observation is that you are not providing anything in your comment that would enable someone to follow a logical thread to reach the same conclusion as you.

So the net effect is, whoever already agreed with you continues to agree with you, and anyone who doesn't already agree with you isn't given a reason to change their mind.

In my mind that's a lost opportunity to persuade people, in which case what's the point of the comment?

Well first off it is entirely possible that there are people who have been introduced to the concept of love languages in a way where they never questioned them critically, and merely pointing out that I think they are "bunk" might start someone down that path of questioning.

On top of that, however, I specifically compared love languages to other things which people might have already examined critically. Since this is HN, probably the most cogent item from my list is zodiac/horoscope, as techies tend to be fairly dismissive of it already, and therefore might have the realization (after reading my comment): "oh wow, I've been believing in love languages this whole time but been dismissive of zodiac, even though both have the same amount of evidentiary backing (~ 0)". However, I actually think "learning styles" is a better example because it is something a lot of people believe in (something like 90% from the surveys I've seen), even though in reality there is almost zero experimental evidence for them as well, despite many biased attempts to do so. My opinion is that love languages are very similar – people believe strongly that there are certain actions/behaviors that they are most receptive to when it comes to romance, but that fundamentally people just want to be loved in a much more generic way and that if the particular way in which love is expressed matters that much to you, you are probably focused on the wrong thing (missing the forest for the trees).

To really spell out why this is bad, let's look back at learning styles: someone believes in learning styles, which don't exist[1]. Specifically, they believe they are a "visual learner". As soon as this belief forms, it almost instantly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – they think they are a visual learner, so whenever they are faced with learning something in a non-visual way they don't try as hard, and therefore do not learn the material as well. They are effectively self-sabotaging by having this constrained picture of themselves in their head. There is no reason to believe that people who take love languages seriously will not suffer a similar fate. Imagine someone who thinks of themself as a lover whose primary love language is "physical touch", so when someone demonstrates love in a way that is not touch, they say to themselves (maybe not in an explicitly conscious way): "hmm, this isn't as compelling as it could be because I'm a physical touch lover – I wish my partner demonstrated their love with more touch".

In essence, I feel that all of these things, love languages included, are artificial and mostly arbitrary labels (some more arbitrary than others) which only serve to constrain your breadth of experience and openness to new things, resulting in unfortunate self-fulfilling downsides with no clear upside.

[1] https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/edu-a0037478.pdf

I think the poster anchored their argument better than what the post they replied to did, by comparison to other things. The post they replied to stated something to be an absolute truth without any support whatsoever.

I would argue that they're all different forms of "maps" and have their uses, but they are not the territory.

If you start to confuse the map for the territory then yes they can be limiting in some ways, because you no longer see any features that are not included on the map. And the features that have been included seem more prominent.

All we can create as humans are maps for things. Different types of abstractions. And refine them over time as we gain better understanding. But when using these maps it's important to keep in mind that they're just one of many ways of describing the thing you're trying to understand.

Myers-Briggs for me was very enlightening, and started me on a journey of understanding how people can be different (led to greater empathy and awareness on my part). I don't walk around classifying people's MBTI type though.

Zodiac... not so much. That map is a bit old now!

This is a fair point, though I'd say my main concern is that "confusing the map for the territory" seems to be the status quo with these types of things.

As an example of this with Myers-Briggs: I think your MBTI can be helpful if you think of it as "these are the patterns of behavior I naturally fall into, I should try harder to be aware of and use patterns outside my comfort zone in situations where that might be more productive than my default".

However, 9 times out of 10 when I actually meet someone who brings up their MBTI in conversation, the way they think about it is more like "I'm an INTJ, X just isn't something I do", where X is something they probably should do but are avoiding because their MBTI is giving them a pass (in their mind).

So on balance I feel that "maps" like this do more harm than good, because our human instinct when given such a map is to point to it and say "this bit of territory looks scary so I'm gonna avoid it".

Good counterargument to my counterargument :)

I think you're right that confusing the map for the territory is by far the default. So in that sense I do agree with the downsides that you're bringing attention to. And as always, it's not so much about the tool but how you use it.

If you give a power saw to someone who hasn't used it before and hasn't been remotely trained on how to, then they'll probably end up chopping off a limb. But that's not to say the power saw isn't an incredibly effective tool for achieving a very specific task in the right context.

So I can't agree that these maps do more harm than good. It's not as binary as that in my view.

Even if maps like MBTI are wrong - there is a lot of meta-understanding that can come from just going through the exercise. Most people go through life not really understanding that other people don't see the world exactly the same way as they do. And we judge people on their external actions alone with, most of the time, very little understanding or empathy as to what beliefs, traits and preferences might exist below the surface that drives their behaviour.

The bar is very low even for the best of us in our ability to really understand ourselves and others. So just the process of discovering a map that shows you a different view of the world can be very powerful - even if ultimately the map itself isn't quite right.

Without the use of external maps, we create our own internal maps by default anyway - this is just how the brain works. And those maps can have the exact same effect that you're describing. "I believe that I am X and so this is why I can't do Y". But often those maps aren't created with intention, nor are they based on information that is up-to-date and relevant (eg. our limbic system by default wants to pull our default behaviours/actions back towards surviving tiger attacks and hunting for food - this is out of date information encoded in an out of date map).

I guess another way to put it, is we're always following a map of some sort. Our default maps (our beliefs about ourselves) aren't as a rule known to be the most accurate either!

Don't forget enneagrams. These things are all based on very shaky research at best. I would argue that love languages of all of these are probably the best supported, or at least the most plausible a priori. After all they mostly boil down to, "I especially like {touch, gifts, service, ...}." But even then I think that for most people you need a mix of all of these things in a romantic relationship. Getting great gifts from a spouse is not going to save the relationship if they won't touch you, nine times out of ten.

The way my guru would respond to question like “how do I avoid giving too much” type questions was to retort with a question…

“If you’re a giver, what are you looking for?”

…

“Takers!”

That is, if you’re giving with an expectation of something in return, you’re not looking to give, you’re looking for a transaction. True giving, then, does not carry with it the weight of any expectation or fruit. The joy is in the act of giving itself, the sacrifice, as a candle sacrifices itself to give light.

He elaborated further to say that if one person is giving oriented in a relationship, it would be stable. If both, it would be heaven. To come back to the point of the OP, it’s the focus on “me, me, me” that’s the issue.

Abraham Lincoln said (paraphrase) “there is one way to bring up your children, and that is to walk that way yourself.” I feel in relationships it’s similar. Less sermons, more leading by example without expectations.

I don't disagree, because there is a lot of wisdom in what you say. But...

1. If kids see the example of a marital power dynamic of taking and giving, it's not that they will necessarily learn to be selfless givers!

2. I like the F Scott Peck definition of love, which is to extend ones self to support the spiritual growth of another. And, often the growth that a taker needs is to learn to be giving. Often, takers take because they view themselves as a victim.

For a giver, it can be really difficult to go outside of one's normal giving mode without being sucked into a mode of anger or resentment.

3."Being married" is not an ultimate value—it can hurt all the people involved. Complicated! Sometimes I feel I could be a much better, more giving person in a healthier relationship because I could be helping many more people. If i take your example of the candle—it may be great to sacrifice yourself to create light, but is it worth the sacrifice if you aren't producing light?

The way I interpret what he said is, “if the sacrifice is genuine, light is the necessary result”

I like it because it puts the ball back in my court and forces me to take responsibility without judging the other.

Who is your guru?

A Parthasarathy — www.vedantaworld.org

There is such a thing as one sided relationship where one person gives and other don't. And the giver is not happy in the long term.

There is value in being able to ask for what you need and being able to realize when giving is not reciprocated.

That's because the giver secretly expected something in return.

And that's okay and expected - it would be unrealistic to expect people to be 100% ideal givers.

In the parent post's quote "If you’re a giver, what are you looking for?" the "If" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

No. Prior expectations are not the only way how one gets resentful. Being tired is another. Realizing you have not done something you like for long time is yet another.

And all of it is healthy. Being submissive doormat and not having boundaries is not healthy.

>you’re looking for a transaction

And what is wrong with that? I help you with your shit and you help me with mine.

It's not at the level of transactional quid pro quos. But at a basic level you can't have one giver and one taker. Eventually that breaks down into resentment.

You might be a giver looking for another giver to build something bigger together. It isn’t correct that givers only want takers. Think of it like cofounders.

>if your significant other doesn't speak your love language, no matter how much you give, it may not be right for you

Thats why people communicate.

That is true, personal experience showed me that what I took as love wasn't seen as such by the other one. Absolute crash ensued. Wisdom makes you pick the people that you feel compatible, or at least make you able to communicate in finer ways to make sure both are aiming at the same ballpark.

> a self-giving endeavor

This seems like a step 2 to me. I think when people try to be giving as a step 1, before their own needs are met, they can end up miserable and resentful. But when your needs are met, giving is natural and joyful.

The NVC assumption is that when two people can identify each other's needs and connect with them, they find that their needs aren't actually in conflict. Compromise isn't necessary. That's the idea in theory at least.

What you say sounds nice, but either I don't understand it, or I feel it just isn't true.

For example, you want to watch a movie together, but neither of you have the same tastes in movies. What do you do?

Because both of you are self-giving, you both say that the other can pick, you're thus in a deadlock.

At some point, there's going to need a compromise, because you can only pick one movie and neither of you happen to like the same movie.

So best you can do is compromise by alternating, this time you watch your preferred movie, next time there's.

Or you compromise by not watching movies together, but seperately.

My guess? Have a relaxed, open attitude. Even if the movies you'll see are not what you'd watch, they are made for an audience and generally have some redeeming qualities. You try to find those and maybe even learn from them (about the actual movies or what they reveal about their target audience).

That's the best case scenario, that you end up enjoying the movie. But I'm saying in a scenario where you don't. You simply have very different movie tastes.

So if you want to watch a movie together, I just don't see how you could both enjoy it without any compromise.

> That's the best case scenario, that you end up enjoying the movie. But I'm saying in a scenario where you don't. You simply have very different movie tastes.

> So if you want to watch a movie together, I just don't see how you could both enjoy it without any compromise.

It kinda seems like you're setting up the scenario to force a particular result. If both your tastes are so fixed and incompatible that you can't like a movie without your partner disliking it, then maybe decide to do something else besides watch a movie?

> them maybe decide to do something else besides watch a movie?

This solution is part of the original comment; i.e.: “Or you compromise by not watching movies together, but seperately.”[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28659212

The author of that comment is missing the idea that the entire question is beside the point.

I mean if your SO will only watch “Minions” straight to video movies then maybe you just need to find one of the other million activities out there to do together.

I don't understand why this is so hard to accept.

I used to love watching horrors. I watched them a lot and that made me less sensitive to them - I needed more scarier and badly looking to feel scared. And it is 100% legitimate for someone else to dislike horrors. To be sensitive to pain on the screen, to not be used to the tensions and anticipation of bad these movies create.

It has nothing to do with whether that horror has redeeming qualities. It does not matter whether it has deep philosophical meaning. The experience of watching it is deeply uncomfortable for some people and that is fine. It does not says anything bad about them.

That is the mistake: thinking of watching a movie as a personal act. In a good relationship the fact that the other one is enjoying a movie is most of the satisfaction.

Otherwise a marriage is a union of two individuals, not a project for a single joint life.

Of course the above is just a silly example but enlightening.

So in your case, you suggest that you'd simply always let your partner choose the movie, even though you never enjoy the movies they pick?

That means your partner is not self-giving.

Assuming both of you are self-giving, I just don't see a resolution that doesn't involve a compromise.

Perhaps they could simply take turns?

Exactly! That's my point, you've got to compromise like the author said:

> Of course, we compromise: by taking turns

What happens next time? In a decent relationship your spouse will want you to pick the movie next time.

And so everyone is happy half the time, and you are mutually trying to make each other happy.

That’s fair, supportive, and a good marriage basically.

The author says:

> Of course, we compromise: by taking turns

And the OP I replied to said that's not a self-giving attitude.

So in my case, taking turn counts as a compromise.

And so this is my point, I don't think compromising means that you're not in a self-giving relationship, in fact, I think it shows that you are, since both of you are considerate of the other and finding ways to please the other in turn.

I think maybe its the attitude, not the act that is different between a "self giving" turn taking, and a "compromise" turn taking.

Under a "self giving" regime, I want to spend time with my partner, enjoying her enjoying the movie she wants to watch. My partner wants to spend time with me enjoying the movie I want to watch. We can't both do that, so we each take turns letting the other one enjoy being with us while we watch the movie we want to watch.

Under the "compromise" option, we each get to watch the movie we want to watch, taking turn and turn about. That is what is important about the event: that we get to watch the movie we want to watch.

I think maybe the movie choice is a pretty trivial aspect of the relationship anyway, the GPs post around the willingness to serve your partner was a lovely insight to what makes a partnership work over the long term, far beyond how you both decide what movie to watch.

Until she accidentally bumps into someone she actually enjoys watching movies with! Whoops. Sorry!

That could of course happen. Or you might actually start to actually like what your partner liked, fail to realize your partner's taste in movies moving on and eventually end up with a weird foster taste if/when the relationship ends (for that reason or another)

(sfbsab)

I think the nit thats getting picked at is that the word ‘compromise’ might suggest sacrifice or debt in that you’re not getting something you want.

In a parent/child relationship most wouldn’t call it a compromise to watch cartoons with their kid because a) some cartoons are great and b) even when they aren’t, just being with your kids when they are enjoying something is a wonderful experience.

Yes it’s possible for that to become pathological in a romantic relationship if there is no balance, but if neither partner has any personal fulfillment in letting their significant other enjoy something it’s going to get lonely quickly.

I think you nailed the nuance.

That said, I'm curious about the realism of all this. Just being with your partner when they are enjoying something is a wonderful experience. Is that true? Can this continue to be the case over many many years of a marriage?

The article mentioned a much more extreme scenario than movie watching, having someone walk you through the details of a geometry proof that they came up with. How many times can you enjoy having them walk you through a proof and still think it's a wonderful experience listening to them about this thing that you find so boring and soul crushing and might not even understand any piece of it, yet because of the passion in their voice, you enjoy the time and pretend to be excited and interested?

In my opinion, there's a bucket of how much you can do this for. Once the bucket is depleted, to refill the bucket, you need to either spend some time apart, have them spend time with you doing something of your enjoyment or spend time doing things you both enjoy together.

>> For example, you want to watch a movie together, but neither of you have the same tastes in movies. What do you do?

>> Because both of you are self-giving, you both say that the other can pick, you're thus in a deadlock.

> That is the mistake: thinking of watching a movie as a personal act.

Another mistake might be conceiving of one's "taste in movies" as fixed and unchanging when it isn't. You might be able to find something to like in your partner's preferences, when you didn't before; or find some new type of movie you both like. Making that effort may be what being "self-giving" is in this case.

In a way in a good relationship the other person knows you won't like it, so either he will find something else to share for both pleasure, or he will make it enjoyable (don't just watch the movie with someone on the side, talk about the movie, make her part of the moment). The idea is that sharing together is more important than self pleasure. (as long as its reciprocal indeed)

Tastes are not a fixed thing, and it's not certain they are even real.

In many (most?) cases what we call "tastes" -- and especially distastes -- are a way for us to broadcast our identities to the world.

In an intimate, functioning relationship those broadcasts shouldn't be necessary because we know they are, if not fake, at least a proxy for what we want others to think who we really are. Intimacy is about shedding masks.

In a couple one should be able to appreciate, if not outright enjoy, what the other likes.

(Not to say there aren't limits; but it would be a symptom of an abusive relationship if one would insist they always watch what the other truly hates.)

This is just not true. Some people, many of them in fact, do have emotional reactions to movies and art in general. And that emotional reaction is either pleasant or not.

People get bored watching movies and it is not a mask nor identity - it is feeling. Some people genuinely feel bad watching horrrors and it is not identity, it is genuinely feeling bad. I hate cringe in comic super heroes movie and thus dislike them. It is not a mask I wear it is genuinely unpleasant and if alone I would never ever watch that.

The movies creators put a lot of work unto making you experience feelings while watching their movies in fact.

Yes - quite. I don't like gore and I think superhero movies are dumb. So if someone lived for both, there would be a problem.

But it's not just about "taste", it's about values. I strongly suspect I won't have many shared values with someone who loves gore. And conflicting values are more likely to break a relationship than incompatible movie tastes.

Of course "taste" does not exist if you define "superhero movies are dumb" as a value judgement that has nothing to do about taste. Simple calling it something else does not make it disappear, though.

One person likes superhero movies, the other does not. Is seems that by your worldview it will be an insurmountable barrier to forming a healthy relationship unless someone changes their mind, which seems to be a rather bleak attitude to me. Are you sure we couldn't find countless couples with different movie tastes (or movie values) who, despite this obstacle, are in happy and loving relationships?

I'm pretty sure my cultural tastes are not just real, but almost innate. When I was in that discovery phase in late childhood through teens I really connected with some things and really didn't like others. I wasn't told to do this by anyone - certainly not by parents or teachers or peers.

Some years later I'm more appreciative of why other people might like different things now, and I've also picked up on nuances and contexts I used to miss.

But the things I like have barely changed. I don't spend much time "broadcasting them to the world" because why would the world even care what music I listen to?

There's enough overlap with my partner that we can have conversations about certain things we have in common, but there are things and activities that work for her that I'm utterly disinterested in, and vice versa.

We don't expect to share those, and that works for us.

> I don't like gore and I think superhero movies are dumb (in your other comment in that same thread)

> I don't spend much time "broadcasting them to the world"

Yes, you do. We all do. We build a personality and then we want the world to pay attention to it.

I just don’t see that as a problem. I’m not looking to date a clone of myself. That would be boring and unhealthy as I’d re-re-inforce my worst habits without any counterbalance

> What do you do?

You recognise that it's not about the movie, it's about the activity you do together.

Really, the lengths the threads here are going through to facilitate poor interpersonal interaction are sort of mystifying. Perhaps being a good person (or even just a good friend) is not obvious to everyone, but the information on how to be one definitely is easy to find. How come nobody is finding it?

Or you do something else together that you both enjoy. Trying to be everything to your partner is simply impossible. Do neither of you have other friends that you do things with?

I'll play devil's advocate. Your marriage doesn't sound like one of equals. You're doing a Masters while working full time I imagine. So who picks up the slack for household management? I'm guessing your wife. If you have kids, then it is even more unbalanced I imagine.

I know people in similar marriages - it works great, as long as the spouse is happy being the dutiful house wife. But I also know people in this situation who are now separated - usually the man/provider is completely blind sided when their ever loving, house wife says one day "no" and just walks out. They had no idea there was an inequality in the first place, and assumed their spouse is happy like this.

I personally believe that when marrying someone, "marry your equal" is incredibly important advice. Marry someone of similar earning power, with similar career and life accomplishments. This helps ensures a equal relationship that has the greatest chance of success.

I know women in marriages you have in mind who, after they felt closed to me opened up and turned out they were super unhappy. They stay because of kids and because the have some feelings for husband still. But they don't like that and have a lot of resentment.

But, it does not necessary describes his situation. It sounds like two people with different initial interests.

I've known some husbands in marriages who resent that they're expected to do half the housework and child rearing with a full time job when the spouse has no formal employment. Kids take a huge amount of time, and the pandemic has limited school and daycare choices for many.

Still, kids become gradually more independent. And some housework can be outsourced (landscaping, no yard, surface cleaning). A career in the marketplace is often 40+ years before reaching retirement or financial independence.

I don't know any couple where husband would do half child caring while woman has no job. Like, not a single one. I do know couples with various splits including husband doing more. But this particular scenario, not really.

> Kids take a huge amount of time, and the pandemic has limited school and daycare choices for many.

I know couples that split it and the ones where it falls on woman. I know couples where women are resentful that work sacrifice is disproportionately on them. Women who would prefer job. And woman being intentionally at home and wanting it so.

But like, only husband being employed and he doing half homeschooling is something I did not seen.

We all have different circles. My point was less about the gender and more that some partners (at least those IME) have unrealistic expectations. They may also not consider the quantity of work the other side is putting in over the years.

If neither the wife nor children have any disabilities, none of the children are in a high achieving sport or similar and the children are of schooling age the husbands’ resentment is fully justified.

Seems kinda unromantic to say that, just because I'm a millionaire with a PhD, I can't fall in love with 99% of the population.

This. Part of the thing that makes for a good marriage mindset is just being willing/able to find/recognize the humanity in another.

Why is equality determined by educational attainment? Seems to be the measure of “equality” for purposes of a romantic marriage should be personality and compatibility and not wealth or degrees earned.

An equal relationship is going to vary depending on who you ask, and as long as both partners agree, then you’re set.

I think that the comment was talking about raw amount of hours full time job + school takes. Which means there is very little remaining time for household chores (including kids and pets) meaning partner has to do almost all of them.

It was not about educational attainment, but about assumed silent expectation that partner does all the housework.

If only one partner is working full time, how is it not equal (and expected) that the other does the housework?

You are changing premise. Just like the person I am responding to changed premise from "partner does all boring stuff" into "education level".

The original comment and rwsponse were neither about stay at home wife nor about educational differences.

Let’s imagine there are 6 hours of housework to do daily. Only one partner is working on an income-generating job. Do they then come home and do “their fair share” of 3 hours of housework as well?

The benefits of the income are shared with the entire household and represent their contribution. It seems reasonable for the other partner to shoulder most of the housework (the benefits of which are also shared with the entire household). The opposite is what would seem unreasonable to me.

For clarity, I’m not saying the employed partner never has to wash a dish or put their dirty socks in the basket.

And this is why I would not marry someone with significantly higher income. Because that would mean, I do all housework and my job don't matter.

Unless explicitly arranged and agreed upon by both in advance, it is unfair to assume the partner should be doing it all and that you should be doing only stuff you enjoy.

> should be doing only stuff you enjoy

The vast majority of people don’t genuinely enjoy their 40 hours plus 6 hours of commuting to their income-generating job.

We do it because we like food with our meals.

Sure. And wast majority of people don't enjoy vacuum cleaning and other routine household chores. Most people, when they actually end up being at home whole day, doing those same routines every day end up depressed and demotivated.

People who loose their jobs, even if partner earns enough for them to not be in major stress, are unhappy after a week or too. They don't tend to be happy in the long term.

Many jobs and bosses sux. And people in them generally want better job rather then no job. They feel bad when being unemplyed long term.

Most employed people don't enjoy coming home to household work. No one, actually. That is why those are such frequent strain of relationship - cause people rarely like then.

That’s exactly the reason why I think that two adults facing around a total of 14 hours per day of mostly suckage have a more fair arrangement when that’s split around 8.5 hours for person 1 and 5.5 hours for person 2 rather than 11 hours for person 1 and 3 hours for person 2.

I really don't know what hypothetical are you building there. The original posts in thread did not assumend unemployed stay at home partner.

But I think that you really need new job. Cause mine is not 8.5 hours of suckage. People on this forums are not struggling miners in bad economy having no choice but to put up with abusive boss. (And I know miner who claimed he loved his job, but that is one guy).

Anyway, if it is about insisting one has to stay at home, I don't want to be the one stay at home. Because I would not like it. And I would also feel economically in trap - dependent and helpless in case of issues.

> and that you should be doing only stuff you enjoy

This seems like quite the assumption.

My baseline assumption for a functional relationship would be that the partner that has the least time to help with housework would try to pick up the parts of it that the other partner least enjoys.

How high?

There is a point where you hire help and this becomes moot.

Below that point, it comes to how you want to solve the finance problem as a couple IMO: if both your salaries are required, then obviously it means a full split.

Anecdotally - my wife chose to remain home and help raise our child / take care of the home and this turned out to be a force multiplier for me. I don’t think I would’ve made it to where I am, made whatever I made, built all my time sink hobbies without that decision.

It comes down to communication and being truthful to yourself Re: why do you want that job? If it is a passion, you should go for it irrespective of the earnings. If it is just an income, you’re just working for a random person instead of your own family. That’s a tough line to cross, but it worked for us with enough comms.

No matter how high, honestly. Because even with maids, the underlying sentiment there is that I count for less. In case of conflict of interest, partner earning more means I automatically loose. "I earn more therefore I contribute more therefore I get what I want" is situation I would find pleasant. However, "I earn less, therefore I contribute less, therefore I have to suck it up and accept being second" is situation I would resent and dislike.

Your wife and you situation sounds like falling into "mutually agreed upon in advance".

Again I think there is a curve :)

There is a point beyond which earning potential stops being a differentiator: you both have enough that it doesn’t matter. I agree there will be some hard conversations to get out of the preset habits though.

Till the point where the earning is necessary for your lifestyle - I can see how the first and second concept will play out: but that’s the trade off you’re taking for the benefits I mentioned.

I do agree all of this is based on the mutual agreement part. I was just pointing out it isn’t as dire as you say :)

Indeed, if you're "keeping score" with compensation with your peers, colleagues, and friends, it might not be the healthiest thing to do, but I get it.

If you're "keeping score" in compensation with your life partner, that seems deeply unhealthy. I'd love for my partner to make some multiple of what I make; we could retire that much earlier.

Why would it mean you do all the housework and your job doesn’t matter? That’s only the case if your partner thinks your job doesn’t matter. It’s not a function of income difference, it’s a function of how much your spouse supports you in your endeavors.

You can still be equal partners even with vastly disparate incomes simply by treating each other as equals. It’s entirely in your control, as a couple.

If my wife wanted to work a job that earns a fraction of what mine does, I’d still split all the housework equitably because she is my equal no matter what job she works.

I think in that scenario, the real issue is if one of the partners views educational attainment as more important, or worthy of respect, than maintaining the household. There are people who find taking on those responsibilities more fulfilling than work or education. If both people are putting in the same amount of work on different things, its a division of labor. Having equal respect for one another's contributions is the crucial facor.

There are no real equals in life; everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. Even trying to estimate whether your partner is equal to you is a kind of competitive spirit which isn’t really healthy IMO.

>Your marriage doesn't sound like one of equals. You're doing a Masters while working full time I imagine. So who picks up the slack for household management? I'm guessing your wife. If you have kids, then it is even more unbalanced I imagine.

You confuse 'equality' for 'symmetry', and this is extremely flawed.

Even in non-romantic teams, the entire purpose of cooperation is to perform different roles in parallel. This is fundamental to human existence.

>I know people in similar marriages - it works great, as long as the spouse is happy being the dutiful house wife. But I also know people in this situation who are now separated - usually the man/provider is completely blind sided when their ever loving, house wife says one day "no" and just walks out. They had no idea there was an inequality in the first place, and assumed their spouse is happy like this.

....and as long as the husband is happy being a dutiful provider.

Getting blind sided by a partner suddenly walking out? They assumed their partner was happy? This is almost a parody of a bad marriage.

>I personally believe that when marrying someone, "marry your equal" is incredibly important advice. Marry someone of similar earning power, with similar career and life accomplishments. This helps ensures a equal relationship that has the greatest chance of success.

IMO, this doesn't address the nightmare scenario you described in your second paragraph, and sounds more likely to make you vulnerable to it.

If you got blind sided by your partner because the two of you were 'assuming the other was happy', you started deeply fucking up years ago and making sure your partner was a close rival in earning career progression had almost nothing to do with it.

> You're doing a Masters while working full time I imagine. So who picks up the slack for household management? I'm guessing your wife. If you have kids, then it is even more unbalanced

One could just as well find inequality the other way - that the poster is going above and beyond to improve the family's financial situation.

The point being - who cares? If the division of labor works for them, amazing. My wife probably spends more time with the kid than I do, I definitely spend more time fixing shit around the house. I, my wife, the kid, and the house are all better off with this situation than any other combination, nobody is walking out. Maybe the house.

> "marry your equal" is incredibly important advice. Marry someone of similar earning power, with similar career and life accomplishments. This helps ensures a equal relationship that has the greatest chance of success.

Eh. You should marry someone you love and respect, but you are defining "equal" like "clone."

Personally, I am driven by knowledge, growth, ambition, etc. I used to think these are my values and looked for the same in women I dated. So I ended up dating a bunch of CEOs, a famous professor, etc. But while it was very interesting, it wasn't additive.

The woman I actually married is no slouch in earning and intelligence but the things she values are very different from mine. She values creating a home, family connections etc in a way that I didn't know to, but benefit from. It does mean we have a different natural division of labor at home etc but the bigger deal is that we both bring a lot that the other person needs to the table. Life is not without it's conflicts but it's working out much better than if I was stuck with another me

> "marry your equal"

Sorry but this is incredibly stupid advice. There are no magical formulas or flow charts for who to marry.

That’s true. It depends on what you’re willing to give and take. On your values and vision of life with your partner. I’ve met plenty of guys without a degree who were very intelligent and could talk about the ways of the world and their jobs. And degree holders who couldn’t’ even explain their own subject.

'Equal' in the sense of outlook is fair but you cant judge a person by external metrics.

Sounds like they were blindsided because they were too focused on work? And poor communication in the relationship.

It sounds like you think 2 workaholics make a better marriage because they are both "accomplished" and both focused on work, also sounds elitist.

I think this is true, but it really comes down to: how much do you and your spouse like each other?

If you both like each other, you'll want to give, and the relationship is probably going to feel mutually fulfilling. If it's not mutual, you won't want to give, even if you force yourself, and you'll resent doing things for them.

Honestly I think all these reframings are a way of avoiding the basic fact that the main source of satisfaction in a relationship is just: how much you're romantically into the other person, and how much they return that. Throw trust in too, since that's sort of separate, but that's the meat and potatoes of the dish. Romance is romance, vast majority of relationship dissatisfaction I see comes from a lack of desire from one person.

Romance is not the basis of marriage or any relationship. Romance is affective. It can coax us into a relationship, but it isn’t the basis. That is a sign of immaturity. You also end up in the absurd situation where you seek divorce because you’re no longer in “love”.

I'm not talking about the thrill of a new relationship. I would define a feeling of old, secure warmth towards your partner of 50 years as romance, and your satisfaction in a 50-year-old relationship is primarily a function of whether you have that. That's the kind of thing that makes someone happy to take care of their wife for 5 or 10 years as she suffers through alzheimers.

But in any case, romance is absolutely the basis of a relationship, otherwise you could marry your best friend. If you don't have it, you're likely to be dissatisfied. Of course it can wane - but that's also why you work to get it back, because if it goes away for good, your relationship is going to suck.

Many do marry their best friends, or consider their spouse their best friend.

I knew someone would post this response. I mean if romance wasn't an issue, you could be a straight male and marry your male best friend.

    the absurd situation where you seek divorce because you’re no longer in “love”.

Why is it absurd?

Probably because what most people call "love" is really just the first stage of it, and if it has not been replaced by something deeper (i.e. respect) by the time the initial love fades, then it wasn't love but infatuation - or, more precisely passion was not nurtured carefully enough to become respect, and so it was just an infatuation.

In short, it would be absurd to mix up infatuation with love.

If it was - as you say - just infatuation, then wouldn't it be better to seek a divorce? Why does that become absurd?

This:

> [a] situation where you seek divorce because you’re no longer in “love”

is not:

[a] situation where you seek divorce because you’re no longer infatuated

One might well call the second situation absurd too, as, if you knew it was absurd then you shouldn't have wed, but it's still a different absurdity.

Sometimes. The entire problem is that the infatuation stage just doesn't last that long, which of course makes one ask...why did you get married too soon?

The bigger problem as I've seen over the years with people is that they confuse the two with -other- people. A person married for 5 years becomes infatuated with someone else, which of course means they love them and not their spouse anymore. In their eyes, at least. And the problem with that thinking should be immediately apparent.

It's a complicated subject and I'm not an expert by any means, just sharing my observations.

Was it really love, if you become willing to hurt your spouse. Is being ruled by desire big enough for you?

Presumably this could be sussed out long before marriage. And if that deeper love and respect should disintegrate, there would be some sort of catalyst.

My expectation is that it's unlikely in the long-run to fall out of love if both parties still nurture the relationship and invest themselves. But maybe I'm wrong and it happens anyway.

Because that's reacting in surprise to an expected inevitable thing (infatuation fading), and presumably afterwards trying again with a different partner with an unrealistic expectation that in those relationships they might permanently stay "in love" i.e. the infatuated feeling of falling in love, which is quite distinct from long term relationships that we call "love" but IMHO don't apply the label of "fallen in love" anymore.

In this case, if reality doesn't meet expectations, then divorcing just to try the same thing again to get the same result is absurd insanity, instead the expectations should be adjusted.

I think if I’m interpreting your comment correctly you are correct. Physical attraction is what you mean instead of romance. Romance by itself is simply a series of steps you use to express your continuing interest in a partner or possible partner. Small gifts, kind words, charming activities. Those are romance, and I think are critical to Maintaining a solid relationship (all couples may find different things romantic—-some people may want sunset sails on the harbor, some people might want kebabs from round the corner).

Yeah, I also think GP is right, but used the wrong word. He probably means: infatuation, limerence, obsession, thrill, animal magnetism, etc.

Lots of people never who never really "knew" successful long-term relationships only associate love with those, and that's indeed somewhat immature.

I always practice giving, even with people I don’t like, and the results are fantastic.

Ok, but are you married to someone that you don't like?

I think that's more of a symptom in this case. The problem is that the writer and, likely, her husband are driven by ego. Everything about the first few paragraphs screams, I'm putting on all sorts of fronts (bc I think I'm being smart/cool).

If you feed your ego ahead of your soul, you won't know what you really want/need, and if you don't know what you want/need, how is anyone else supposed to satisfy you in any sustainable fashion?

The good news is that relationships can help you develop as a person. You should be growing together and on your own. If you care for someone and feel you're failing them in some way, it should drive you towards self-examination, which should spur new perspectives and development.

I would guess that you and your wife are less driven by ego than most. You probably don't reach a place where you're self-giving without at least corraling your ego. You may be at a point where you take it as a given.

To be clear, everything in your post is good. I just think it's Step 2, rather than Step 1.

I think the problem is… I like many people know what it is to have an ego, but I can’t recognize a soul.

Heck in many contexts soul is just a synonym for an ineffable immaterial thing that makes things better (e.g. the soul of a song).

So how can you feed your own soul? How do you know the nature of your soul?

The word "soul" has been mixed up with a lot of confusing voodoo, but when I was trying to look up the historic definitions, it was basically equivalent to 'the part of you that thinks and makes choices'

With that definition I feel like a lot of the soul talk makes sense. Like here you 'feed' your soul the information, experiences, and media you seek out, and that influences the 'nature of your soul' by creating the environment it reacts to.

For example, now you've exposed yourself to the idea of a mutually self-giving relationship, and if you keep trying to figure out more about what that means, then your thoughts and choices can start falling in line with that concept.

That definition would mean that it's essentially the same as ego, and would make the grandparent's post warning against "feed[ing] your ego ahead of your soul" meaningless. What would be the difference between ego and "soul" in your understanding, allowing to prioritize one over the other?

I think that may be correct for a technical definition of 'ego' - and you could cultivate a selfless ego or something.

In common use 'ego' tends to mean someone with selfish or slightly narcissistic personality trait, though, right?

I italicized "soul" in an attempt to indicate that I meant it as a symbol. I thought the context made it clear, so I was comfortable using it as a shortcut, but perhaps I miscalculated.

Oh not a problem. It’s just that since the soul is ineffable, it makes one wonder: a what is it’s usage a shortcut for?

Whoever I see the word soul, in an argument I can otherwise understand… it works and glosses over a lot of complicated common ground.

But if I don’t know what’s going on, it’s as useful as reading “quod erat demonstrandum” at the end of a proof.

I meant the soul as part of you that is balanced, at peace, has perspective of where you fit within things, is aligned with a greater good - as opposed to a self-injuring sense of self-importance.

It's not an easy thing to summarize or pin down, and it's kind of different for everyone.

Ah I see, that clarifies things thank you.

The question remains in earnest, how did you differentiate between the ego and soul without begging the question?

Sometimes "ego" is used to refer to the self, but I think the distinction we're going for here is between "self" (soul) and "sense of self importance" (ego.) So you can feed your ego with praise and self-centered narratives, but it takes wholesome thoughts, good deeds, and self-giving love (both received and given) to nourish a soul.

"Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things." — Phillipians 4:8

"Ego" is a very loose term (nowadays).

Freud intended the term "ego" to refer to conscious awareness, basically. Jung used it to mean the focal point of conscious awareness - he treated awareness as being a lot more "smeary" than Freud did.

Western Buddhists use the term to refer to attachment - to the body, emotions, feelings, and the sense of selfhood. I think the closest term might be "atman" - the selfhood that is derived from Vishnu in hindu thinking (I really don't know). Atman sounds like "atmen" - german for breathing. I assume they have the same root. Anyway, the Buddhist notion is a notion of something of which they deny the existence - the term "anatman" refers to the fundamental Buddhist notion that there is no enduring self (or "soul").

I was raised a Christian, and spent a number of decades as a Buddhist; I've never known what the term "soul" was supposed to refer to.

You have self, your identified being. You also have Self, everything interconnected, which includes self also.

It's about dispelling ignorance about identity. This is easier being a bit dim.

By generalization, there's less need to clarify more coarse concepts.

Yes. Reading this article is like watching Elaine from Seinfeld attempt to navigate a marriage. The expectations for how it works are so deeply, fundamentally off-base that it's kind of funny in a sad way.

The main difference is that Elaine lacks self-awareness, so it's easy to just laugh and not feel bad for her.

There's no need to write a bad review of marriage if it clearly wasn't made for people like you in the first place.

(I do want to stress that Agnes Callard is a good, perceptive thinker on many other topics, even if this piece IMO really misses the point)

I just wish people would stop with the “until death do us part” horse shit unless they are actually willing to do that. Just say “until I grow bored or decide it’s not in my favor anymore” do us part. Let’s be real.

I remember hearing that some people had changed it to "as long as love lasts". Imagine going to that wedding.

There's a 100% chance your marriage will end in Death or Divorce.

Right, but the problem is marriage vows are supposed to be meaningful statements of commitment.

Imagine if a president swore "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Or that I will become a tyrannical dictator. Either way. Hard to tell at this point."

Agreed. My wife and I are more likely to get frustrated with each other because we both are trying to take care of the others needs. We want the other person to be more selfish because we so much want to take care of each other. On the spectrum of problems to have it’s a pretty minor one.

Your own happiness and your significant others' aren't mutually exclusive, or zero-sum. It's a distortion to characterize one as more or less important than the other. It's important to look out for both. You can't just rely on your SO to make you happy.

This is exactly right. Marriage is a commitment to deny yourself so you put the good of the other first.

When I hear people talk about marriage (or any commitment) these days, I sometimes wonder if they're from a distant planet. When any long-term commitment is some form of oppression from which we must be liberated, bonds like marriage cannot work. This is justified in the pursuit of happiness. Ironically, those who seem happiest are those willing to make (and keep) binding commitments.

Exactly - I don’t go to my wife to gush over the latest database optimization details I discovered expecting to have a deep technical discussion. Maybe the executive summary. I talk to my coworkers or friends or online people who are excited about the same details. If someone can only feel close to you when they speak of crossword puzzles I wonder if they’re on the spectrum or need to join a crossword club or something.

We do have a baseline of shared philosophies and views but even there we often find that we slightly disagree on details.

My SO and I do this to each other but neither of us are neurotypical. I’d be so bored with someone who just yammered on about their daily life

In relationships, above all - whatever works. Didn’t mean to sound judgmental of people who are like that and find happiness

I think there is beauty and wisdom in making a commitment (through good and bad, till death do us part) and then actually keeping that commitment regardless of how my personal desires are or are not met over the years.

Once the commitment to honor my wife and word is most important, it becomes an anchor in my life to the waves of wants and desires which are ever changing. Feeling lonely in my marriage, well, I'm in this thing for life, how can I productively address this with my wife? Or, maybe my expectations of her are unrealistic, can I find friends or interests elsewhere while still honoring and remaining committed to her? If our romance becomes dry, then I work to address that with her. If I notice she's not happy or unsatisfied, then I need to care for her and help if I can. If I can't, then I'm just going to be there with her, walking through dark times, because that's my commitment, and it's loving and honorable.

My desires are often fleeting and dishonorable...selfish and wanton. It's good to deny them and pursue more honorable things with my life. The best things in life, the best stories, are those that come after trial and sacrifice. So much of our modern culture is empty and destructive because we've put self, our wants...our desires, in the place of utmost importance. Not having the wisdom to see that philosophy is like dedicating oneself to getting water from a broken cistern.

Furthermore, one of the best things a father can do for his children is to love their mother this way.

In the end, what do you get from that commitment? Why did you make it in the first place, if not for a selfish reason? What is the place of “honor”, if it is not a code that it makes you happy to live by?

People’s terminal preferences are the root of who they are. There is no goal that exists beyond one’s terminal preferences. You can prefer to obey some moral distinction, but you prefer it because that increases your happiness/life satisfaction (or at least, you have absorbed enough second-hand examples that you believe it will increase your happiness/life satisfaction.) If it didn’t, why would your brain ever bother to spit out a “you should do it” answer?

> My desires are often fleeting and dishonorable...selfish and wanton.

I think you’re confusing societal mores that you’ve chosen to adhere to (e.g. monogamy) with some sort of objective moral function that all humans will somehow be judged by regardless of whether anyone is doing the judging. If you’re sleeping around (the thing I’m assuming you’re talking about here) but you’re in a polyamorous relationship, with a partner who experiences compersion rather than jealousy when people outside of your relationship do things to make you happy — is that act still “dishonorable” or “wanton” of you? What would those words mean, for that to be true? If everyone important to you wants you to enjoy yourself, and you do enjoy yourself, then who is saying no?

And, given that, if your marriage partner does say no to something that would make you happy, how is that anything other than an incompatibility between you; something that could have been avoided by ensuring compatibility before commitment?

IMHO, you are rationalizing staying in a relationship with a partner whose preferences do overlap with yours enough for life with them to be generally pleasant; but where in some ways their preferences are extremely incompatible with your own. But, because you are embedded in a society mostly consisting of potential partners who also have those same extremely-incompatible preferences to your own, it doesn’t feel like you’d actually have any luck finding a partner whose preferences cohere more closely to your own. You satisficed, and now are attempting to construct a philosophy that makes satisficing seem optimal, so that you can have one fewer regret.

People should really spend more time looking outside their own culture for partners. It can turn out that what is “dishonorable” or “wanton” to you, is just regular respectable behavior in another culture in another part of the world. The objectivity of social mores is an illusion created by cultural isolation.

(FYI: this is just the standard University “introduction to meta-ethics” stuff, just applied to romantic social mores in particular.)

> People’s terminal preferences are the root of who they are. There is no goal that exists beyond one’s terminal preferences. You can prefer to obey some moral distinction, but you prefer it because that increases your happiness/life satisfaction. If it didn’t, why would your brain ever bother to spit out a “you should do it” answer?

This is circular reasoning. You have baked in the assumption that people operate by maximizing their individual self-interest.

A simple answer to why one might do it, even if it didn’t maximize their own happiness/satisfaction, is that they are genuinely focused on a less individualistic aim.

Self-sacrifice in service of higher value doesn’t necessarily make one happy, but it can be part of one’s nature to recognize that one’s own sacrifice benefits others in some way.

You misunderstand what I mean by “happiness”, I think. (Probably because I should have said “predicted utility of all agents similar to oneself”, but I didn’t, because that’s pretty dang jargon-y, and assumes you’ve walked through the relevant thought experiments about self-sacrifice to help other copies of yourself, etc.)

If someone martyrs themselves, then in the moment they do that, they’re thinking that that is a good thing to do — i.e. the reward calculation in their brain comes out in favour of doing that thing instead of anything else they could be doing instead. They expect that good things will happen due to this—things that cohere with their preferences. This is still true even if they don’t live to see those good things happen, because brains are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers: we prefer the kinds of things that made our lineage successful, not the things that make us successful.

But those are still preferences! “Being of use to others” is a preference. You do it because that’s the thing your brain releases reward chemicals when you do. This is what you are terming something being “part of one’s nature”; “your nature” is equivalent to “your preference function.”

And, if you can assume that to be true for a second, then I can restate my point in terms of it: many of the things people have terms for in their preference functions are based on adhering to an abstract role or identity, something like “an honorable person”, their understanding of which was inculcated by local, culturally-contextual societal mores.

For most people, doing something “because it’s honorable” isn’t a post-hoc rationalization of some spiritual connection to the concept of honor that informs their life. Instead, it’s an instrumental preference — a thing you do in order to work toward some higher-level preference you have — where the higher-level preference is “cohere more closely with my own understanding of what it means to be honorable.”

In these cases, people don’t like X and dislike Y because their brain is directly telling them that X is good and Y isn’t (where they then notice a class of such preferential distinctions they’re making, and then call that class of distinctions “honor” because it seems to be the same as a class of distinctions that other people call “honor.”) Instead, people like X and dislike Y because they learned a concept like “honor” from their societal context, and they learned that their society considers X to be honorable and Y to be dishonorable; and so they then prefer to do X and not do Y because they want to live in the image of what they believe honor to be, as learned from their society.

For these people, if they experience other cultures’ conceptions of these abstract concepts, and through that learn more about what these abstract concepts can mean to different people, this is usually enough to shift how they understand the abstract concept itself; and due to that, they will usually end up with different instrumental preferences—because now what they have learned “is honorable”, is a different set of things.

(Compare and contrast: etiquette. “What is etiquette” can feel objective if you never leave the culture you were born into. But you’ll have a very different idea of things being or not being “polite” if you experience a variety of different cultures that all have developed different customs around etiquette.)

> the reward calculation in their brain comes out in favour of doing that thing instead of anything else they could be doing instead

Nope. That’s you baking in the assumption that they are making a calculation about reward.

That’s an axiom of your way of analyzing the situation. Nothing more.

I'm trying to empathise to your perspective, but I can't see why you would want to remain less happy (or more miserable) that you'd otherwise potentially be while your partner does the same thing, just because it seemed like a good idea at some point in the past.

You add abstract good adjectives to that idea (honorable, wise, beautiful) and bad adjectives to the opposite (wanton, selfish, etc), but you don't really justify that assignation.

I understand that thinking short term by default can lead to harm or missing something in the long term. But there's a whole jump from that to thinking that something has value just for being long lasting. Following your analogy, I wouldn't want to keep reaching from water in a well that went dry long ago.

>The best things in life, the best stories, are those that come after trial and sacrifice.

I'd say that even if that is often true, it is often difficult to tell trials and sacrifices apart from refusal to move on.

And to be clear, since this can be both a philosophical conversation and one that touches personal matters,I don't by any means imply a personal judgement of your personal choices - I'm just speaking about abstract ideas.

Happy to try to explain. But, we are really getting into deeper waters of worldview and foundational values. Where we land on such things is rarely solely objective or analytical, so I'll just try to explain where I'm at, recognizing that it won't be satisfying or sufficient for others. I appreciate the sensitive/personal nature of these things, as you note, and your comments.

My worldview has been shaped by the Bible and, specifically, a reformed evangelical theology. Inherent to that worldview is the belief that my life is not my own, I was designed for a purpose, and my life will have the most meaning (not necessarily the most happiness) when I operate to fulfill that purpose.

> I can't see why you would want to remain less happy (or more miserable) that you'd otherwise potentially be

I don't believe one's personal happiness is a sufficient measurement to optimize one's life around. My worldview is shaped by different questions than, "Does this make me happy?" Even though this belief is, for me, rooted in religion, I actually think there is plenty of evidence for the truly objective to recognize the danger inherent in maximizing that metric.

I have biblical "justifications" for those ideas and for the adjectives I use (honorable, wise, beautiful), but a full defense is beyond what can reasonably be discussed here. "The Meaning of Marriage" by Tim Keller or "Sacred Marriage" by Gary Thomas would further elaborate on these ideas specifically in the context of marriage. TBH, I wasn't really trying to justify my beliefs in the parent comment b/c It's too hard in this context. I just figured I'd share what I thought and let the upvotes and downvotes work it out. :)

I'm not advocating commitment to marriage simply for the sake that it ends up being long lasting. I think there are benefits to the spouses, the children, and to society to not only stick it out, but to work on improving it. One of the things that I guess didn't come out clearly in my original comment was that, if you are in the marriage for life, and you are going to honor that commitment, it's a great reason to invest in that marriage and make it as good as it can be.

> I'd say that even if that is often true, it is often difficult to tell trials and sacrifices apart from refusal to move on.

When moving on is simply not an option, there's no debate, no wrestling. It's not refusal, really. It's more like war. I'm not surprised by the war, by the trial...by the hardship and sacrifice necessary. But I am committed to not leaving my partner behind..we'll go through it together, till death do us part. I think there's glory in that...I think most people feel it and want to be a part of a story like that. I think our attraction to such things is built in, wired into how God has made us. But when we celebrate self and personal happiness, that attraction gets re-wired, and as a society and as individuals we start loving attitudes and actions that really aren't lovable. Things that, in war, we would usually call cowardice.

Not every deserter in wartime is a coward and not every person who gets divorced is selfish. My wife was married and divorced before we met and were married. Complexity exists, wisdom needs to be used, my intention is not to judge. My goal is simply to share the perspective that commitment and steadfast love are better than selfishness. That optimizing for personal happiness is a bad metric. I hope that some will be able to hear and embrace that message...will be able to sense the honor and glory inherent in that perspective, even if I can't well articulate an objective analytical justification for it.

Thanks for the dialogue.

Ah, if your beliefs are rooted in religion then there's not much we can discuss to find a common agreement, since we're starting from very different axioms.

> I don't believe one's personal happiness is a sufficient measurement to optimize one's life around. (...)I actually think there is plenty of evidence for the truly objective to recognize the danger inherent in maximizing that metric.

I do agree that there are more things to take into account than personal happiness, to guide one's life - I could see for example how someone would sacrifice their life for a better cause for example. I just don't see any moral reason that would apply here, since the act of breaking the vows doesn't harm anyone if both partners are in a position of unhappiness. I do see however how you can see those moral reasons there, since marriage for you it's more than a symbol that you want to commit to the relationship, and it has religious implications.

> I think there are benefits to the spouses, the children, and to society to not only stick it out, but to work on improving it. One of the things that I guess didn't come out clearly in my original comment was that, if you are in the marriage for life, and you are going to honor that commitment, it's a great reason to invest in that marriage and make it as good as it can be.

I partially agree, and to be clear I wouldn't defend the position of not fighting to get the marriage to work. I just think that some of the reasons why marriages no longer work are simply not fixable by putting in effort, and that the belief that there must necessarily be a fix if only you work harder can be dangerous to - people can end up in a position where not only they remain unhappy, but also exhausted from their sacrifices and accumulate feelings of guilt since if the marriage doesn't work is because they haven't done enough.

> Ah, if your beliefs are rooted in religion then there's not much we can discuss to find a common agreement, since we're starting from very different axioms.

IMO, much of the world's arguments are a result of starting from very different axioms. I feel like too often people don't realize those "axioms" or as I would put it, those worldviews, are the real source of the disagreement. The actual disagreements themselves are just a result of approaching life or the particular issue with very different set of foundational beliefs and values.

But finding common agreement is, perhaps, not required or even the most valuable outcome. I believe there is value in simply being able to have those discussions, reasonably...respectfully, even if agreement itself is elusive.

I have a feeling that your response, just like OP's is an emotional one, based on experiences you've had in life. In my 50 years on earth, I've witnessed all 4 kinds of marriages.

1. Unhappy couple that stayed together and worked out their problems

2. Unhappy couple that stayed together and remained miserable

3. Unhappy couple that split and are happy with their decision

4. Unhappy couple that split and now regret having done that

You cannot deny that there's beauty in 1, and I think when you made your comment number 2 is probably what was going through your mind.

In any case I did connect with OPs comment, and do think that things have value because they last long. People don't optimize for happiness in life, they optimize for other abstract concepts like fulfillment and purpose etc. Marriage and family can give a great sense of purpose and more fulfillment than any fleeting romance (or selfish decision-making). Life is long and full of ups and downs, marriage (just like religion and children) can serve as a great anchor point.

My post wasn't really shaped by any particular experience, but I did have 2 in mind, as well as 3; not a specific case in mind, but more a point that they do exist, and that they aren't any less likely or worth considering.

I think that all four options are definitely possible, but that people have a bias for maintaining their circle of comfort, and justify that fear of the unknown.

As for

>You cannot deny that there's beauty in 1

I do deny it; or to be clear, I think it is a story that we've been conditioned to prefer over the others, with sometimes disastrous results for everyone involved. I see the same beauty in any other option that ends up with a person living a great life they don't regret.

I think we'd have a better world if people focused on finding their best possible life without a notion that this choice is the default, more likely option for a live well lived.

> I do deny it; or to be clear, I think it is a story that we've been conditioned to prefer over the others

Speaking personally, and perhaps it is indeed my conditioning, but at 25+ years of marriage I am living that beauty in 1 every day and I know without a doubt it has led me to my best possible life.

Also speaking personally, I know more divorced couples than married couples, and have seen a married partner (who has a child) cheat on their spouse for going on a decade “because it’s the path of least resistance.” Also saw someone during a divorce light $100k on fire (from combined assets) in lawyer fees just to spite the other person (who had exhausted all options in attempting to repair the relationship before asking for the divorce).

Everyone is winging it, and the only beauty is in finding happiness while causing the least harm to others (imho). Do the best you can with the information you have, maybe it works out, maybe it doesn’t.

I don't mean to devalue your experience, nor imply that it is somehow less valid due to it happening to be our society's default "happy ending", for clarification.

If the default happens to work for you, that's awesome, and in fact it's probably what will work for most people - otherwise it wouldn't be the default.

I'm just against considering alternative ways of finding happiness or purpose as consolation prizes, bittersweet stories, or somehow less valuable or beautiful than others. There's effort in keeping a marriage working for decades; there's also effort in daring to leave an unhappy comfort zone to find better ways, or simply to learn to live life in your own terms if "the one" never appears for you.

Marriage is a mutual help commitment. A world with strong mutual help commitments is better than a world where people abandon each other at the first difficulty. So I try to make that world a reality through my actions. It's partly prosocial, partly for my wife and kids' sake, and partly for my own.

IMHO the issue is that society tells couples that 1 is the ideal outcome, creating plenty of 2s who believe they will eventually become 1s if they just keep trying. Some of those couples might be happier as 3s.

I believe both 1 and 3 are preferable to 2 or 4, so I don't find this trope particularly helpful. It doesn't really matter if 1 is best or not, since it's not going to be possible for everyone.

One way to look at it is, are you optimizing for a local maximum of personal happiness, when you'd actually have a more happy and fulfilling lifetime by optimizing it for the both of you (a la Nash equilibrium)?

Another way to look at it, constraints breed creativity. You sometimes come up with better solutions when you don't have total freedom.

Does constraint really breed freedom? It seems obviously true but has there been any studies on this subject?

Traffic signals and constraints help people travel in more freedom.

It's honestly so trite to say that it's not worth studying. More accurately, constraints _can_ breed creativity. They can certainly also squash it. The only reason it's worth saying the former is that sometimes people forget because it is nonintuitive.

My paternal grandparents were married 68 years.

My maternal grandparents had been divorced and remarried three times.

Guess which set were happier with their station in life when I knew them? In my experience, pursuing your immediate happiness at the expense of long term fulfillment is a losing wager every time.

Agree 100% with parent here. I find some of the responses interesting and I think symptomatic of the trend I've seen among the under 35 crowd.. (stay single for as long as you can, marry late, have dogs/cats in place of children..) Ultimately, you're either honorable as a person or you're not. Honor for honor's sake is reason enough.

These sorts of rationalizations against honorable behavior such as commitment are what is driving the degradation of society as we know it. These institutions have formed over hundreds (if not thousands) of years, and are ultimately present to sustain and propagate life itself.

With respect, this sounds miserable.

The only redeeming fact is the commitment to your children, which is honorable and admirable.

Anecdotally, I'm pretty happy in my marriage. There are hard times, as there are with anything, but overall I'm glad I married my wife and she's glad she married me. We enjoy each other's company and have a relationship that is built on trust, compassion, and commitment. We are far from miserable.

I think it's interesting that commitment to children is honorable but commitment to spouse is not. My oldest son, due to selfish life choices, has caused me far more misery than my wife ever has. I still love him, and want good things for him, but my life is now very separate from his. And, perhaps, that's how it should be for children. It's expected that they grow up and leave the nest. But my wife is the one I made a life long commitment to. That seems like the higher priority to me.

FWIW, I'm not advocating staying in a miserable marriage. I'm advocating for, having already committed to staying in the marriage (when you took your vows) do everything possible to have a robust and joy-filled marriage.

Don’t get the wrong impression. I’m not judging.

My opinion, you should be a thousand percent more committed to your children. Your wife is an adult.

You brought your children into this life. You owe them everything.

Most husbands and wives would sacrifice themselves and each for their children.

Although, I understand the subtle distinction that once your children have grown and moved on, that you still have a vow to your wife/husband. I think that’s important.

Interesting topic of the stages of marriage and parenthood.

"If Jonathan and Mira’s relationship seems better than Johan and Marianne’s, it must also be acknowledged that Levi sets his couple an easier problem. Bergman suggested that marriage was meant to address a metaphysical need: our connection to reality. Levi, by contrast, sees marriage as a way of navigating one’s place in the economic and social order.[..]. The shift is telling. If marriage is composed of a set of tasks or projects—a career, parenting, keeping a home—its failures can be displayed as extrinsic to the question of how spouses connect. Levi’s diagnosis is something like: these people have different priorities. This means that their lives can succeed to a greater extent than their marriage does. What was, in Bergman’s hands, a horrifying picture of the limits of human contact becomes, in Levi’s, a set of increasingly independent journeys of personal growth."

This is I think a fantastic observation about a lot of fiction that deals with personal relationships today. What bugs me about so many of them is how narcissistic they are in the sense that the question all of them seem to pose is how relationships can be managed like a project, almost like a self-help career guide.

As the article points out Bergman's original piece asked fundamental questions about the nature (and limits) of human connections. From the first two episodes of the new version I've seen it has exactly the kind of atmosphere the article describes, how marriage is 'managed' and organized in relationship to work, careers and so forth.

I haven't watched either (though was intrigued by the new release), and I have the same sort of feeling about modern romance-focused media. It all seems to revolve around management and coordination rather than the deep existential well that I feel is the basis for all such relationships. Though I do think that the individuals' capacity for introspection leads to two fundamentally different kinds of relationship ills: ones that stem from an externalization of the "problems" to the other person or the relationship itself, and ones that come out of the internal, existential "lightness of being".

I don't presume to analyze someone's marriage, let alone whole life, based on a few paragraphs.

Nevertheless, I can't help but notice that the writer of the article describes herself as lonely, having had "trouble forming friendships", "inconsiderate", and having "love for confusion".

The fact that she feels lonely in her marriage speaks to me more of her innate nature than her marriage. I wonder whether most non-optimal marriages are like this -- people bring their own problems to the marital table, in hopes that the problems will be solved, and become invariably disappointed that it doesn't solve them.

Regardless of what the underlying cause is, my sympathies to the author. Loneliness is a terrible thing to experience.

Yes. Many people have an overwhelming expectation that a partner will fix everything.

I mean, often my wife is the only person I see for a several hour stretch. And it's somewhat sad and lonely when I experience something and it's not really something I can share fully with her -- because it's deep and specialized and nuanced in somewhere that I've obsessed.

But-- how can anyone expect that of anyone? How boring would life be if I'd found such a close twin of myself that all the weird, esoteric stuff that amuses me made sense to her? She brings her own perspective and abilities, and the cost of this is that I don't get to see myself and my little obsessions mirrored every second in her.

A partner can bring an awful lot, but they can't bring everything all of the time.

     And it's somewhat sad and lonely when I 
     experience something and it's not really 
     something I can share fully with her

In a good relationship, people get excited for each other!

When Person B is happy and/or geeking out over something...

Person A doesn't have to love or even care about every detail of the thing itself. But Person A should be genuinely excited that Person B is happy about something and should take some interest in the thing, if only to understand why it makes Person B happy.

I have had a lot of bad relationships.

Oh, sure. My wife will notice I'm excited and be happy. And listen patiently and try and understand.

But it's not the same as bragging or complaining about it to my nerd buddies, you know?

At one point, this used to really bum me out, but it was really an unrealistic expectation.

I like it when my partner can at least ask intelligent questions about the thing I am enthusiastic about though.

They don’t really have to understand it, just get the general idea.

There's a spectrum of possible behaviors here, both on the part of the sender and the receiver. As someone who is interested in things that someone else isn't interested in, it's important to regulate how much time you spend talking about those topics. For example, it's fine to bring up a videogame with non-gamers once in a while, but if your every conversation is about that, it's going to annoy the people listening to you, even if they are the most generous conversation partners in the world. Only get a seven year old talking about their favorite Nintendo game to see how wearing that can be.

Yeah, I was talking about the quality of the conversation here, not the quantity.

If someone is a great listener but never really responds I feel like I’m carrying on by myself, I might as well be talking to a tree.

The greatest thing a partner can give you is encouragement and motivation in your daily tasks and challenges.

We form partnerships and relationships not to have our counter-parties do the work for us, but so that we can discuss, share,console, and motivate each other in our respective journeys.

I don't think the fundamental test of a relationship often is what we do for each other, although of course in sickness and in health comes into that.

I think the fundamental test is what we discuss with each other.

Whether the most important questions in life are something two people think about together, that's what matters.

As an extra data point. Not having her get excited about xyz is one thing. My gf from long long ago(just after varisty) would belittle/disapprove flat out freak out if i showed shared something with her that she didnt like or approve.

Show her some video on YouTube about a random topic, sure she doesnt, have to like it. But just hearing the video presenter from another room will be enough for her to freak out 'urghh are you listening to thatttt guy again !!! I cant stand him he is so boring such a **.'

Going on a roadtrip ? You better tune the radio to 'something good' the first time, Else it will be a 1min lashing of how boring,stupid and irrating the person's voice or topic is !

Just ask/say you want to listen to something else, I dont need to hear all the rest.

I never was/is much of a spiritual person, but that ex showed me how the 'room energy' can change in a instant !

Marriage - sure it can be great, but be careful of ending up in a 'military state' at home. Your mental health wont survive it !

What you describe is a person I wouldn't call an adult.

This is really mostly my issue. She'll even get excited.

But by the time I've explained the 15 pieces of background knowledge needed to understand what I mean... I'm not even excited anymore. :D

We've got a whole lot of common ground-- she's a mechanical engineer, and now we're both involved quite a bit in education and coaching. That stuff we can talk about. But late last night I came up with a clever trick to collapse some tedious keypad-scanning-code down into something surprisingly tidy, and in that moment all I could really say was "I got the keypad on those boards for the robotics kids working in a really nice way".

I mean the problem here sounds to be that you were dating a mental 15 year old.

I couldn't agree more !

I was surprised to see the author's name, because I actually took History of Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy with her at uChicago a decade ago.

Her personality really shows through the article - it's highly amusing. She's an energetic philosophy wonk.

To me, this is just a classic case of a husband who doesn't realize that he can never let boredom creep in and isn't keeping things fresh and having enough sex.

| To me, this is just a classic case of a husband who doesn't realize that he can never let boredom creep in and isn't keeping things fresh and having enough sex.

I mean, personal knowledge of the person aside, it this truly the typical case? I think more often than not if there's something missing, both parties are culpable. Sure, there are situations where one person's sex drive is lower and this causes friction, but the truth is that it's harder still to have two problematic personalities capitulate at the same time to resolve the issue. In other words, in my experience there is a lack of communication from both sides.

My take is that you've got to have some things you enjoy doing together or talking about, but it doesn't have to be everything, and being in a marriage is no excuse for stopping to have other relationships with other people that can fill those gaps.

For example, if you're a nerd for philosophy, find some friends who are too, talk to them about it, join online communities, etc. Same thing if you're a nerd for geometry.

More importantly I'd say is your partners ability to support you in having those other outlets and relationships or opportunities for doing those things as well. That's what I'd consider love.

Do the things you both enjoy together, encourage each other to also find people and ways to do the things you don't both enjoy seperately, and be okay with that.

Now, if there's nothing you both enjoy doing or talking about, well, I'm sorry to say, but why are you together? Such relationships cannot survive beyond the initial lust.

If one or both of you have grown to enjoy different things and because of that no longer enjoy much in common, well that's how people grow appart, and it's why some relationship do eventually end naturally, and it could be time to move on, and that's okay too.

yes this is a very important point, in a marriage, a partner does not need to fill every need you have to have a good marriage.

I think a lot of people do expect this though, and it's why so many people believe that there is "one person" for you. A lot of times, it foments resentment, and this is an indicator that the resentful person probably has some internal growth to do. There are also just plain jealous people.

In my limited experience, couples create marital loneliness over years via bitter complaints when they should've worked on addressing the issue. Instead of saying "honey I'd really like you to enjoy 24, and could you please let me show you how wonderful that show is", a wife would instead say "You never like any show that I enjoy". And immediately the tension mounts. Instead of saying "honey I know you don't enjoy playing tennis, but how about we find something we both like and we can even get a coach", a husband would simply say nothing and find a bunch of strangers to watch tennis in a bar.

I don't quite understand such behavior, to be honest. We know that we shouldn't bitterly criticize friends, nor should we use absolute words like "never" or "always" on them. We also know that we should find common interests among friends, and it's okay if we occasionally get it wrong, like this one time you took your pacifist friends to a paintball tournament. Then, why can't we treat our spouse, someone we took an oath to spend the rest of our life with, like our friends? We learn how to conduct crucial conversation and nonviolent communication in our job, then why can't we do the same in our home? I puzzles me to no end.

I have a personal theory that we simply live too long for the traditional concept of marriage to make sense. "Until death do us part" means something very different if the average lifespan is 50 years versus 80 years. People change, and grow tired of one another, and that's okay and good and healthy. But a marriage which ends in divorce is considered a "failed marriage", as if all of the prior years count for nothing.

I say all of this as a single 27-year-old who has never been in a committed relationship, and has no plans to enter one in the future. Perhaps that means I lack the authority to weigh in on this topic, and perhaps it means I practice what I preach.

When the average life span was 50 it was because you averaged in a bunch of kids dying at 0 or 1.

If you made it to your 20’s there was a good chance you’d make it to 60 or 70.

Do you have a citation for that?

Big difference between life expectancy (which is an average including child mortality) and life span once people reach adulthood.

> Those records show that child mortality remained high. But if a man got to the age of 21 and didn’t die by accident, violence or poison, he could be expected to live almost as long as men today: from 1200 to 1745, 21-year-olds would reach an average age of anywhere between 62 and 70 years – except for the 14th Century, when the bubonic plague cut life expectancy to a paltry 45.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...

>Those records show that child mortality remained high. But if a man got to the age of 21 and didn’t die by accident, violence or poison, he could be expected to live almost as long as men today: from 1200 to 1745, 21-year-olds would reach an average age of anywhere between 62 and 70 years

If you dig further you can see that these numbers are about male aristocracy in England between 1200 and 1745:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jIMHCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA8&lpg=...

The vast majority of people didn't witness their 70th birthday before modern times.

The Bible says "We are given 70 years, or 80 if we are strong" (psalm 90). Sounds like pretty strong evidence that old age (>50 years) was not that exceptional.

> Once the dangerous childhood years were passed, however, Victorian contemporary sources (including regional variables) reveal that life expectancy in the mid-Victorian period was not markedly different from what it is today.1,8 Once infant mortality is stripped out, life expectancy at age five was 75 for men and 73 for women.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2587384/?report...

I'm in my mid 30s and been with my wife since I was 15

The issue is that people aren't married to their best friends. You have to like the person more than you love them.

Please keep in mind that people can change, sometimes in significant ways.

This is more likely at a young age, i.e. teens into 20s. If you meet your partner in your late 20s and up, they're unlikely to change in significant fashion. Important to consider in pairing with the advice that you can't change a person. Expect a douche to remain a douche.

Yeah I think we've both changed a ton from who we were when we met but we've both become better people, so either we're lucky or we just have a healthy relationship

There is also no guarantee that the person who you emotionally click with will also be someone you consider physically attractive. Expecting your spouse to be #1 in everything is setting the relationship up to fail.

I don't mean to sound so rude, but how does this mean you practice what you preach?

I wanted to give a caveat that I don't really have the experience to justify what I'm talking about.

But, then it also occurred to me that someone who agreed with my assertion would, basically by definition, not have that experience, so it's a catch 22.

I'm legitimately not sure which side of that is more important.

>>>People change, and grow tired of one another, and that's okay and good and healthy.

1. Unless there are kids involved, in which case the fallout extends beyond the relationship and has wider second-and-third-order effects on society. Aren't something like 40% of children in single-parent households in the US? And aren't there significant statistics showing that especially fatherless sons are over-represented in juvenile crime, etc...? Those situations might arise less if the population didn't have such a blasé attitude to starting and ending romantic entanglements.

2. Studies have shown that increasing numbers of sex partners has a permanent deleterious effect on a person's ability to pair-bond, with more serious psychological impacts on women than men. (sorry, don't have a citation handy) So it is not a purely "good and healthy" situation for people to be regularly growing tired of their partners.

I'm 38, essentially polygynous, with my primary female one I selected almost 10 years ago for character traits that I assessed as optimal for raising children and managing a household. So far, so good on both fronts. We have some SLIGHT overlap in our movie tastes such that we can usually find something mutually satisfying (mostly lighthearted action movies with a touch of romance). If I want to watch something extra graphic (13 Assassins, original Robocop, etc...) I'll either watch it alone or call one of the side-chicks that is comfortable with that stuff.

For anyone who is trying to recreate the OPs experience in a more normative setting (e.g. monogamy and no side chicks)… try using your in laws.

Your brother and sister in law are in many ways better than true friends (they’re always available and are technically part of your family so there’s no jealousy). Of course if you have siblings of your own this works too.

> primary female one I selected almost 10 years ago for character traits that I assessed as optimal for raising children and managing a household.

I don't know why I am laughing at this phrasing.

Btw, since we are on hacker news, what's the probability of a randomly choosen guy from a normal urban population sample being able to have side chicks and one fulfilling primary relationship?

> I don't know why I am laughing at this phrasing.

Because it sounds like a robot giving relationship advice?

>>>Btw, since we are on hacker news, what's the probability of a randomly choosen guy from a normal urban population sample being able to have side chicks and one fulfilling primary relationship?

Probably less than 10%. I recognize that my peer group is not a representative slice of a normal distribution.

10% is still pretty large. I think its somewhere around 1% to 4% of the genetically blessed. Also depends on how traditional your 'primary female one' is.

Some people just don't like committed relationships. You might be someone like that. On the other hand, many young people think they don't ever want commitment when they are young, and then end up changing their minds later. This pattern is extremely common. No way except time to tell which category you're in.

With regards to the notion that we live too longer for lifelong monogamy: that's probably true for some people and not for others. I do think that if the human lifespan were stretched to 1000 years, but society were otherwise the same, few people would remain in a single monogamous relationship for the entire duration.

I don't think it's that simple anymore. A person isn't necessarily inherently of the type to be committal or non-committal. Broadly speaking the choices can offer different rewards, but usually it's case-by-case, depending on the circumstances surrounding each prospective relationship.

An easy example in your early-mid 20s is the prospect of moving for work and education, and forgoing long-distance, but we can set this one aside because it's a heavy extraneous circumstance.

The early relationships I had carried a more laissez-faire "let's wait and see" attitude, at least on my part. Most people will not end up marrying their high-school sweetheart, but it's good to date around to discover ourselves and others. What I didn't count on was that a) emotional bonds will happen almost every time, and break ups will hit hard, and b) wait-and-see doesn't work very well for the long-run. People don't change that much. If you're committing in the hopes that you will feel more strongly about someone later, don't. And be honest about the way you feel as soon as you know it. Respect your time and others'.

I carried that non-committal approach into my 20s because I was an emotional fuck-up with lots of anxiety and plagued with insomnia. I couldn't be alone. It wasn't until later that I pulled the plug on a relationship and decided I wouldn't jump on another until I felt more certain about them. Now I'm married. I think we take for granted how difficult being alone can be for some people owing to x y struggles, which is unfair to their partners.

Relationships take work, both parties need to invest in each other. There will be times when things feel more stagnant and familiar, and times of great intimacy, etc. A common apprehension about commitment you hear is "won't I still be attracted to other people?". Yes, you will. It won't matter. "How do I know I'm not settling?". What? It's either a happy relationship or it isn't. Trying to min/max superficial attributes is a fool's errand. Tend to your garden. Rewards are way greater in a loving relationship.

Necessarily, any two paragraph comment on relationships is going to be a simplification. :) But I still contend that the simplification is basically true: some people, during their youth, believe that they never want commitment. For many of those people, their preferences shift, but for some, they don't. Not all the people who prefer non-commitment are "emotional fuckups," but I'll allow that some are.

There's a lot of life to experience, but at some point you want to share your life with someone more than just on social media or whatever. Or at least that's how it was for me.

After you've met people around the world and had fine food and hiked tall mountains, it's like, what's next?

Not necessarily marriage and/or kids. But probably some kind of sharing, and marriage and kids are a great way to do that.

"he’s considerate and unromantic, whereas I’m romantic and inconsiderate."

I appreciated this observation. I have been married for 26 years. I am more expressive to my wife with my words, "I love you" etc. However, her actions speak louder than my words. I seem to be wired for me first where she is wired for me next. I'm trying to get better at being more helpful rather than grand gestures.

There's a book that is often "assigned" to newlyweds or engaged couples called "The Five Love Languages" that provides some insight into this. I was asked to read it via a church-related program for engaged couples. It's no great scientific and psychological insight into relationships, but I know of a few marriages that it has saved.

The general idea is that there are many (the book outlines 5) ways to express love. If you express love one way and your spouse in another way, you may simply miscommunicate. Your anecdote seems to map perfectly to the "love languages" that the author outlines: you'd be a "words of affirmation" type and she's an "acts of service" type. You need to focus on being helpful because "acts of service" moves the needle for her. She needs to be more verbal because "words of affirmation" move the needle for you. And neither you of you should mistake the behavior of the other as being loveless - it's just not expressed in an effective manner.

Marrying my wife is the smartest thing I've ever done. We have three very young children (all three 5 and under), never get to go out, never get a break, and are taking an absolute ass-kicking between kids getting sick, potty-training, and all the other normal stuff you deal with. And I've never been more content and happier in my life.

Thanks, it's interesting to have some shape put to my observations. Enjoy the busy stage you are at. My kids are now adults. I enjoyed, am enjoying, the different stages of life. One day your kids will be taking you out to dinner.

Ingmar Bergman was quite an interesting character. From his wikipedia page:

"His father was a conservative parish minister with strict ideas of parenting. Ingmar was locked up in dark closets for infractions such as wetting himself."

I came to find out how his own marriage went. At first, I thought the only reference to his wife was that his name were inscribed under his wife's tomb several years before his death. But, that was because I assumed his film listing would come after his personal life. Scrolling down shows that he was married five times.

Kids, families, shelter, food(!), retirement, health, social issues/relationships all feel like the things people can connect on. They’re more real, they’re innate. And you need the right level of challenge in all of them, too easy and it’s unfulfilling and too hard is soul crushing.

I don’t expect to “connect” with anyone with my own interests and hobbies - that seems incredibly naive to me. They’re far too abstract to be interesting to others.

Within healthy communities the need for meaningful human interaction is spread out among the community and not placed solely on your spouse. Therefore, I suggest a large driver of marital loneliness arises because marriage is not capable, on its own, of solving loneliness. Loneliness roughly means a lack of meaningful relationships. Communities offer the opportunities for various levels of connection from close friends to casual acquaintances while connecting all the individuals to each other (i.e. you have your close friends but everyone also knows each other). Furthermore, healthy communities create a dynamic environment where new relationships form spontaneously as the individuals grow and change (e.g. the former acquaintance marries your sister and now you become close friends, you have a kid and get to know the other parents in the community better, etc).

In this way, communities and marriage form a symbiotic relationship. Stable marriages become the bedrock of a community, as family provide the most stable structure for the community. However, strong communities also provide a dynamism and support that reduce the burden on marriage to provide a fulfilling life to those within it.

However, meaningful communities have been almost entirely eroded by the acids of modern life: increased mobility (communities, like all relationships, require time), car reliant infrastructure, declining religious participation, and economies built on individual consumption all make it harder to build, find, and belong to communities. And with the decline of communities, the sense of belonging and meaning that once was spread out over a largely stable group now falls to a single individual - your spouse.

In fact, one could argue that the increase in marital breakdown observed during the 20th century is itself a second-order effect of the breakdown of communities in that same time frame. Even the liberalization of the divorce laws could, arguably, be framed as a response to a trend already in motion rather than kickstarting it from out of nowhere.

Sorta related, I was reading today a translation of Charles Aznavour's "Je Bois" (I Drink)

    I drink to forget my unfortunate years                                          
    And this life together                                                          
    With you, but so lonely.                                                        
    I drink to give me the illusion I do exist,                                     
    Because I'm too selfish                                                         
    To smash my own face.

It continues ...https://lyricstranslate.com/en/je-bois-i-drink.html-3

"Yesterday, when I was young There were so many songs That waited to be sung So many wild pleasures That lay in store for me And so much pain My dazzled eyes refused to see I ran so fast that time And youth at last ran out And I never stopped to think What life was all about And every conversation That I can recall Concerned itself with me And nothing else at all"

-- https://youtu.be/7GtzB8cfkh0

Sometimes I feel every life has been lived more than once, and maybe if we were different we wouldn't have to, but sometimes I wonder if it's what's tough that makes us who we are. Guess we'll have to wait until we can transplant memories so we can all learn from our mistakes, without suffering them ourselves.

It's a nice article, but the realistic view is that pair-bonding in animals (and, yes, humans are animals) evolved to provide resources and stability to children. Couples are prone to a "seven year itch" which corresponds to the time at which children are able to move away from their mothers and the family unit psychologically. Pair-bonding is reinforced by a common purpose: the child or (as a proxy) some other shared goal. When these disappear, the bond weakens. It's a very natural occurrence. Romantically, we want these things to last for life, but the evolved machinery that we are born with does not provide as much reinforcement as we need to make that happen consistently without some of the problems listed by the article.

When I saw that HBO were doing a remake I wondered: who do they think they are that they can do better than Bergman?

In the problems of this article's perspective is a fixed mindset. That we have our defaults and starting places but cannot expand beyond them. Even (as one has in an [IMO] ideal life partner) given a customized guide into foreign passions and interests. Yet this is step one because the next and following stages are exploring and creating inside that connection and sharing, supporting both the contributed growth of the individuals but also of the shared endeavor and continuous creating.

I've been in a relationship not far from the early stages of what is described. Shifting towards what I describe above was contained by physical and emotional violence. So far as I can tell those were echoes of her past traumas, not to excuse. I can empathize though... The task of next levels growth is a challenge that rocks us at levels we are not normally thinking of and in facing we find nearly no guidance to assist us in our journeys.

What a pregnant and rich context into which a shift could unlock untold riches of two deeply sophisticated minds with much to offer and deeper challenging commitments to forge. There are other options, clearly, but are there, really?

[To be slightly less obtuse: the final sentence shifts from possiblity to desirability which is semantic slipperiness for which I apologize... but not enough to rephrase, apparently]

If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, marry your best friend. Don't read these self-help articles.

When I was young the pundits kept saying that love only lasts 2 years. I think this is because they had a shallow definition of love.

If you marry your best friend you will always be your true self and they will always be their true self.

I was also preached the two years thing. I wonder where that stupid meme came from?

I suspect that marriage as we know it was built for an agricultural society. We are (mostly) not that any more, and the “until death we part” doesn’t make as much sense as it did. Marriage will change into something else, we just don’t know what that will be yet.

Some people can only learn from first hand experience and this is why incompatible people marry and and raise children.

I dodged the bullet 2 times from partners, that I had feelings at the time (I was lonely and out of a relationship for very long periods before), who didn't want children with me (they would consider abortion in case I left them pregnant, instead of having a family with me, when I discussed the possibility).

Love is real and instinctual. No matter how many possible couples you have observed (I appreciate gossip sometimes) to know the possibilities of what to expect, you still have to fight your own urges and dreams.

"Marriage" is a pretty stupid concept to be honest. It's not a good signal of a committed healthy relationship at any point really. Some people get married so they can fuck without shame and guilt. Some people get married because they need tax benefits. My partner and I don't care at all about marriage despite a decade of being together and mutually understood plans of being together for the rest of our lives. We probably will get married. But is that an inflection point on things? Definitely not.

It’s easy to dismiss centuries of cultural evolution across thousands of extant and extinct societies. Taking a look at the absurdities of spending a small fortune on a wedding ceremony, the magical incantation of the vows out loud in front of people who love you and want the best for you can seem pretty unnecessary, this can all look ridiculous from the limited vantage point of a single life’s partial experience.

But sometimes once you put down the metaphorical tweezers and take off the lab coat, you find out that there are reasons that this stuff exists. You might be surprised.

Sure. There was religion, small community pressure, political family joinings, gross dowry incentives, a large manipulative industry, a desire to show off wealth. Lots of dumb reasons from outdated cultural norms. Everything you wrote seems to be about weddings though. And while I think weddings are much stupider than marriage, they're not the same.

Marriage is many things to many people. The concept of marriage is both cultural and legal. Whatever you feel about marriage, don't forget that it is also a legal concept with its own definition which may or may not coincide with your specific cultural expectations.

First, what a refreshing discussion for HN.

Separately, is it me, or do I just see less and less people choosing to get married these days, and even less of them having kids? Wondering if anyone has seen stats to the same and if this is just an n=1 problem or more of a generational trend.

The quality and thoughtfulness of some of the comments in this thread is outstanding.

I wonder if this is a modern marriage thing with the ride of individualism. Not saying this is right but back in the day the roles were very defined.

There is an explanation using some old stereotypes, to connect with others:

Men share their knowledge and ideas.

Women share their emotions and feelings.

If you follow this, you won't be able to relate to neither men nor woman. Womens knowledge and ideas will be ignored and so will be males feelings.

Men tend to get dumped, mocked, or injured if they share their feelings, while women tend to get dumped or mocked if they share their knowledge and ideas. Isn't it handy that stereotypes align with the mechanisms that enforce them? It's nothing innate. None of these stereotypes have any guidance for nonbinary people, so we tend to just get shoved into whatever box is most convenient for the person on the other side.

>>>None of these stereotypes have any guidance for nonbinary people

Isn't that tautological though? Why would a simplified characterization applicable to the mass of normies contain guidance equally suitable for the small percentage of divergent edge cases?

You responded to a sentence. There's a whole post there where I state how the advice is bad for people inside and outside the binary. /u/graycat's advice is bad for everyone.

None of these stereotypes have any guidance for nonbinary people

Looks like quite the stereotype you've identified "nonbinary people". You'd do well to start comparing yourself to actual people instead of the stereotypes you have of them.

The logic that OP was arguing against is that stereotypes are edifying in terms of gender.

They are right that if you do not match either of the stereotyped genders then you can’t learn from gender stereotypes.

Sure, it’s better to learn from people in a holistic non stereotyped sense but that is not what was being suggested.

I can't make sense of your comment. The only read I can come up with is that you're saying I'm not a person, and I doubt that's what you mean. What are you trying to say?

There's is a simple physiological component behind that, in testosterone and estrogen. Later in life now, hormone levels declining, I'm seeing some convergence.

https://outline.com/DmWXyr

I am saddened by this article turning into an advertisement for a HBO show.

It literally explains why this show is not as good as the original.

It has no place being there.

Granted, if an Aquafresh commercial was like, "Yeah, we're not such hot shit, Colgate is pretty great too", I'd probably be much more inclined to try Aquafresh.

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