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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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