How relationship satisfaction changes across your lifetime
greatergood.berkeley.edu
greatergood.berkeley.edu
It's a living thing that needs to be fed, and when times get tough what do people often do. Stop being kind to each other, stop having sex, building resentment and accelerating the decline.
The goal is not to keep it together at all costs. The goal is to live an authentic life, and if that is going to be with a partner, don't lose sight of that fact it's the two of you that's important, not all the other stuff that comes along.
> It's been proven myriad ways that kids are better off with both parents for many developmental reasons.
Is that true? I know that it's been shown that kids in 2 parent households do better than single parent ones, but I don't know that research has separated out the "correlation vs. causation" aspect of that. I.e. would it be better for the kids 2 parents that hate each other to stick together rather than separate.
Such a study would not have any importance to me. One family that is stricken with physically abusive or alcoholic parents combined with another family that does not have those issues. How can you say the kids in the first family are better off without divorce compared to then second family?
If you leave your new born at home to join a swing sex party, you’re a bad parent. But if you can only have sex with your partner once a year in the first 10 years of your child, it should be considered just as bad, and society tends to ignore the latter case much more.
Turn out it’s the balancing act that would be difficult, and there is probably no one-liner to explain it all huh? Who could have known.
The relationship may even be harder than raising the children.
I might go even one step further though and say that your first priority has to be to yourself. Of course if you have children you have to take care of them at whatever cost, but if you aren’t taking care of yourself you’ll never be able to take care of them. And if you’re never true to yourself then you won’t be able to make an authentic relationship. Really the entire nuclear family requires such a high level of emotional intelligence that I’m surprised it works out as often as it does.
> As I get older, I feel that I have become much more self-aware of problems which appear in my life. While before, they may have been a black-box I push aside, now they are a curiosity I feel compelled to explore.
You somehow have to be aware of problems in your life and willing to explore them. Otherwise you stick to your defaults and deal with them with that severely limited tooling which your life path has handed down to you.
One small nit pick, I believe emotional intelligence was one of the subjects of the replication crisis. Or maybe it didn't even get that far. It seemed to become a thing by a journalist writing a best selling book off work by psychologists who ultimately decided it might actually not be a thing and moved on. I haven't checked the current state in years, but it looked like a dead end, last I checked.
You should prioritize your relationship regularly (e.g. every other week date night). You should prioritize talking to and educating your kids as much as possible. And as someone else mentioned, you're allowed to spend time with yourself, doing whatever productive or unproductive thing you want to do.
But balance is key. And more importantly, communication. All of this breaks down when two people don't talk to each other. Talking is the hardest part because it can feel useful, or useless, or downright infuriating, and etc. Yet, anecdotally, two people in a relationship that actively work to talk to each other are going to enjoy their relationship (more) and probably do a better job raising kids. They'll also more quickly conclude that they shouldn't be together if it comes to that - something that is easy to overlook.
> If you want an eye-opening account of how relationships go bad, take a stroll over to /r/deadbedrooms in Reddit. It doesn't matter if you're 20 or 50, you may see the same patterns in your own relationship.
They cover everything you need to know there, probably much better than anyone here will explain it.
This is the second time I've seen sex mentioned as one of the primary components of a relationship—and I think it can be, but the idea that that's the only way to have a loving relationship is wrong. Imagine raising children in a relationship without love? That's horrifying. Imagine raising children a relationship without sex? Well, sure, why not?
I can't imagine raising children, honestly, but I especially cannot imagine it while also being extremely unsatisfied in a relationship. Children deserve content parents, if possible.
This mentality is not only wrong, it's extremely unhealthy. Your personal life doesn't end when you become a parent. Parents shouldn't let their children's lives become the all-consuming center of your universe to the exclusion of all things self.
This mindset is actually extremely unhealthy for both the parents and the children. It's true that you need to provide attention and love and care to children, but you also need to grant them some space and autonomy as they grow older.
Take care of your kids, yes, but take care of yourself too. Everything in life is about balance and moderation. Go too far in any one direction to the neglect of other important things and you're only going to create problems for yourself, no matter how well-intentioned you thought you were.
Of course children need a happy and healthy parent to care for them, so your needs are still included in the mix, in case you were worried about that.
I have seen a handful of psychologists which claim that happiness of the parents is quite important to happiness of the children, and throwing yourself on the altar of self-sacrifice could be causing more harm than you think.
If taking care of yourself means not being in a relationship with someone, but you have children, what’s the priority? That’s always going to be a hard question.
Your first sentence is far too dismissive of that. These things are diametrically opposed if they parent of the comment you’re replying to is to be believed.
Sometimes one of partners remains authentic self and keeps all those self things. And it looks cool until you realize their partner is not getting any "me time" at all or help. And that setup is significantly less cool for partner.
To be charitable, I think the original post was more making an argument against complete individualism, and I broadly agree with that in principle: if you live in a community, you will have to deal with compromises between what you want and what other people want. But it's dangerous to push things too far the other way: if you are making all the compromises, and getting nothing that you want, then there is something unhealthy about that relationship. Obviously that plays out differently for relationships between adults, and relationships between parents and their children - you can't sit down with a baby and set clear boundaries! But making time for yourself, and organising things so your needs are met is still important.
Parents that give up their own lives to obsess over their children are often not the people a child will choose as role models, because they are boring. Kids need to see parents continually trying new things of their own choosing. They need to see them failing, and sometimes succeeding, at pursuing their own goals.
Most kids would be happier with a happy parent living their own authentic life and living in a trailer, than a parent trying too hard to provide for a "nice" home and a "good" school that a kid never asked for.
And also, imo, kids of parents who obsessed over kids pretty often end up obsessing over own kids. Parenting is one of those things qe tend to copy a lot.
People who obsessed over kids or particular hobby or work are not incomplete. They are whole humans, just that you disaproves their values and choices. Or don't understand their psychology. Even if they are unhappy in their own arrangement, they are still whole people.
It’s true that poverty is self fulfilling but economic success isn’t everything either.
You can be poor and happy (and good).
You can be wealthy and miserable (and immoral).
I’m not saying stress is good or that people should have to struggle, but you make it sound as if misery is a foregone conclusion for those raised in lower socio-economic conditions.
It's absolutely necessary to say "no" to that stuff pretty often. They can be "the priority" as long as that allows that a good deal of the time they actually won't be.
It's also not the case that one must only make that trade-off when there's some Greater Good in it for the kid(s). You don't give up your life because you have kids. The notion that you should is very modern and is still not typical in a ton of (non-US) cultures.
What do you think the "authentic life" is, and what do you think giving it up means, and why does that benefit the children?
Sure, you want to make sure that you feed your kids, don't ignore them, give them learning experiences and make sure they pay attention at school etc, but IME, weak people just end up being weak people and strong people just end up being strong people and their childhood experience seems to have little to do with it.
If anything, excessively "perfect childhoods" seem to lead to people who can't really deal with any level of adversity because everything is just theirs and always was theirs and always should be theirs. They literally don't know how to deal with it, in the same way that an Australian (generally) doesn't know how to speak German, they need to learn as adults.
Looking at statistics here is silly because you're basically just going to end up with the obvious conclusion that poor people stay poor.
It needs to be healthy, and it needs to stand up on its own two legs.
Kids know when their parents hate each other. And it adds a ton of pressure and guilt knowing that they're only likely together because it's "better for the kids"
Hard disagree. My SO comes first. Full stop. I can't be a proper role model if me and my SO are not in a good place.
> Once you have kids, your life is no longer your own...it's theirs.
Hard disagree. This just turns them in to Karens.
I think what you really mean is that you shouldn't repeatedly neglect the relationship in favor of other time investments, including kids. Or, perhaps you mean that most people under-invest their time in their relationship and over-invest their time in kids.
When my partner and I were younger we had more dependent children, were not yet established in our careers, and were living month to month, with little to show for it. Money was a frequent cause of arguments and resentment.
Now we are down to one dependent child, we are both earning good money, can afford to splash out on each other a little, take an occasional holiday, and don't feel bad about the odd selfish purchase. We don't argue about money anymore. Nothing much else has changed, our love life has remained consistent, time together, shared activities. The one major change is that we're not fretting at the end of the month, as we wait for payday.
Both my wife and I grew up children of poor immigrants. Neither of us had our own home, much less a room, and we moved around quite a bit, and we did not see a dentist until we both had gotten jobs in our 20s that afforded us dental benefits. I had been in 8 different schools in 7 states by the time I was in 9th grade, and I think we both agreed that financial insecurity was our biggest problem growing up. If we did not have that for our kids, then we were simply happy to go without kids.
Is that because of what it did to you and your life or because of the stress on your parents?
I also think I was lucky to have had the life trajectory I did, partly due to just being good at school. My parents never taught me English (and we still do not speak English to each other), but I somehow never had a problem being successful in US schools. I doubt that is the case for many other kids in similar positions.
I was also lucky that I had access to online forums and educated adults to advise me on what choices to make, since my parents were not able to help me. I do not think I would have had a fraction of the success were it not for the internet giving me the ability to communicate with educated people familiar with how things work in the US.
Well, that is really a metaphysical question. If there was a way of knowing whether consciousness exists before conception and if so, what is its "quality of life", it would shed a new light on our perspective of not just when, but also whether to have kids and how many.
A nebulous 'when we're comfortable' will never be comfortable. Whereas a set, concrete goal based on income and expenses is measurable and provides a clear path to an outcome.
And to be clear - that's cash money, not investments. That is simply a crash easy to access liquid asset in case of emergency. If we couldn't say, this cash is exclusively for this goal, we didn't count it.
It took 6 years to put together, with both of us working in education.
Reality though (imo) is this is extraordinarily rare and most people pick mates based on attractiveness at a young age and then have kids similarly randomly either then or a couple of years later at best.
Any kind of planning around this (or anything really) seems to be uncommon.
They will not get that until their 40s or later, if ever, by which point the wife will have reached the end of their viable child-bearing years, probably with some panic and grief if they waited.
Did your wife and you discuss before marriage whether you would skip having kids entirely if you didn't achieve your financial ambitions in time, or were you able to assume you would?
I am also cognizant that maybe those discussions were all just talk, and biological urges from one or both of us would have won out if push came to shove and we were mid 30s and had not reached our minimum viability stage yet.
Also, on population level and looking at history, a lot of marginalized subgroups would cease to exists entirely if they followed those rules. Including formerly marginalized subgroups that do better now.
And it's really not even that hard. We know what the issues are. It's entirely a political problem. (talking mostly about the Anglo world here).
I think they are talking about what kind of decision making about kids is rational for most people across the majority of the population, as well as what kind of decision making is useful for sustaining the cultures we have.
It would be a pretty big deal if most people decided to apply the "wait until we have a nice, stable home with decent healthcare and education" rule for having kids. In much of the developed world, it would be tantamount to deciding that only well-off people shall have kids, and the effect of that on human culture would be profound.
That reflects my experience in planning for vs actually creating a family.
Ppl worry too much about kids. They mostly ride along with whatever, and are probably more flexible than u are.
Is $1000+ a month per child for daycare in large cities considered affordable?
In other words, it's easy to imagine what you should've done when you also imagine the entire cost being in the past but all the benefits still being enjoyed in the present. You might, of course, be right - but you also might not be, and it's hard to tell when fantasising about all the benefits and not actively living through paying the cost.
Which is also the reason why we shouldn't put much stock in what people on their death beds say they wish they've done differently.
Certainly on the other hand, it makes some things easier if you don’t have to sweat the cost of a doctor visit, but it’s hardly prerequisite.
Maybe you don't have conscious memory of much of that time, but it absolutely shapes the person you will become. If you haven't, please check out the following books:
The Body Keeps Score
Behave
What Happened to You
Having said that, your psychological stability matters SO MUCH MORE than your financial stability. A parent who is kind, patient, caring, and struggling financially is going to have a much better outcome than a cold, distant parent that cannot control their anger, but can otherwise afford to provide their toddler's every whim.
My point was that events absolutely do emotionally imprint from basically birth onward. There was a very unethical but interesting experiment that a pair of psychologists did on their toddler. They showed him a pet rabbit and made a loud noise to startle him. As an adult, the man was terrified of rabbits but had no idea why. Children exposed to violent parents as a child go on to have a host of issues even if they're removed from that environment. It's flat out wrong to suggest that parents get a pass from birth to 6 because 'children don't remember'.
Agree with he overall point that poorer material circumstances in the 0-5 age range likely has little effect, provided it's not to the point that basic things like good nutrition become a problem.
> Certainly on the other hand, it makes some things easier if you don’t have to sweat the cost of a doctor visit, but it’s hardly prerequisite.
Child care and healthcare costs in the US pretty much ensure that anyone with young kids who doesn't have a household income well over $100,000 is gonna feel like they're struggling. There's so-poor-you're-getting-quite-a-bit-of-assistance, which obviously feels like struggling (because it is), and then there's a big window of diminishing assistance in which those two things (especially) tend to eat all your extra income, before you finally hit a point at which it feels possible to keep your head above water without cutting expenses to the bone. It's easy to spend north of $30,000 on those two things per year, if you've got a couple kids and don't have absolute top-tier employer-provided health benefits (very few have that, and they tend to have huge salaries on top of it), and that's without splurging for, say, some super-fancy day care/school. And that's if no-one in your household has any health problems that year! And without costs for diapers, or clothes (very cheap, mostly, just buy used and in bulk), or food, or anything else. The only way to significantly diminish those costs is to have family that can take over most or all of what would otherwise be paid childcare, or to have one parent stay home, which usually only makes (financial) sense if you have lots of kids and the parent staying home had fairly low earning potential.
That really cemented in my memory a few key moments in my life from about age 2.5 onward (the birth of my younger sister, meeting some of my childhood best friends, etc)
Conscious memory of events has nothing to do with it.
Do you have any sources?
Certainly I don’t mean to suggest child abuse is fine when they are little. But you can’t be a perfect parent from day zero; there’s a lot of learning by doing, you can’t know how your life priorities will change, and kids don’t need material wealth when they are small outside healthcare, healthy food, etc.
In other words, you don’t need to have a successful career, perfect house, etc as a prerequisite to kids. They don’t even go to public school until they are five, yet many aspiring parents want to get into the right school district before having a kid.
(I'm guessing you are in the USA.)
If you do, then they are going to bring back sicknesses every other week for a couple years, which means lost work time / $150 to $250 for the ones that require doctor visits.
Pregnancy and birth alone will prob take most families to the out of pocket maximum, anywhere from $3k if your employer is generous to $17k per year (legal maximum) if it is the cheapest insurance.
I assume licensed, inspected daycare in even the cheapest COL areas is $10k per year. But this is where grandparents who are willing to serve as backup or guardians while you work can make a world of difference.
Anyway, one of the keys I think is explicitly acknowledging the transitions to different tiers of financial security as they happen. Otherwise a lot of that early stress/judgment/anxiety can hold over from the early years until long past the point where any of it really matters any more. A few $5 treats a week is a way bigger deal when the household income is $50k than when it's $150k.
I also see why the old guy divorces his longtime wife for the younger, fresher, gal...and by the time SHE'S hitting menopause, he's there too. I don't see that happening in my case, but if there were other issues in a marriage, I could see how it might be a stronger lever to getting out of that marriage.
It's unreasonable to believe that two people are going to be able to satisfy all of each other's needs for 30+ years.
Serial monogamy is accepted in our culture but it's an immoral solution that doesn't take commitment seriously and assumes you can just throw people away. I've seen people get that "new relationship energy", jump into a new "monogamous" relationship and then a year or two later they are breaking up with that person. Passionate love is really its own thing that is all the better when you don't confuse it with raising children, growing old with someone, etc.
It is very possible your spouse will be 100% cool with it and even experience "compersion" which is taking pleasure in you being happy. (Mine does) She might see this as better than getting nagged about it, dutifully trying to do something and leaving everybody disappointed, or just finding you hard to live with because you're not satisfied.
If you look at forums where people talk about poly life though you see there are big variations in the quality of consent. For instance sometimes one partner cheats and then tries to get their spouse to consent with it after the fact. Sometimes one partner asks permission and has a hard time getting it. Sometimes you can get permission in the abstract but when somebody specific comes into focus there is a jealousy problem.
I can pass for a "cheating monogamist" because my expectations for a metamour are somewhat like that for having an affair. That is, there is no expectation of a "threesome" and my wife doesn't have to approve anybody, although one of the best experiences I can offer somebody is coming out to my farm where they will probably meet my wife (who teaches people to ride horses) and ideally they get along. Other people have elaborate situations where there is a triad or a pair of couples, a rule you can only sleep over one night a week or other structures that help people feel secure.
(Then there are those "unicorn hunters" who are looking for a young hot bi babe and all I can say is I hope that you realize that is not what poly means to me or most poly people.)
There was a comic, it had two therapists talking to each other, one said “So I suggested they investigate poly”, the other therapist said “Did that work?” And the first therapist said “Ha! Oh GOD no!”
I’m paraphrasing, but I suspect in a lot of cases ‘looking outside the marriage’ sets things in motion I really don’t want to set in motion.
My partner and I don't think there is any problem (in terms of being able to do it, practical, moral, etc...) in loving more than one person at a time. There is a limit of how much time and energy that you have to pursue relationships, but if you have a 20 hour a week video game habit you have "time enough to love" a metamour.
I have read a lot about it and also done a lot of introspection and found that being attracted or attached to another person doesn't diminish the love I have for my wife at all. It's not like there is a certain amount to go around but you can experience more. Call me a throwback to another place and another time but I have little interest in casual sex but I love that feeling of falling in love, that feeling when you catch eyes with somebody and the next thing you know they sing and invade your personal space and when I am not working on a relationship I am developing my ability to share these feelings with people and give them a really great time as well as patching them into a supportive social network that includes my family.
There is no multiple times. Just a one off hook up. Just sex. Multiple times would be a betrayal of trust.
We only did it a few times but it was fun for sure.
I remember reading poly tends to appear in communities where there are men with very high status and wealth. In that context it makes sense men would push for harems (like a gorilla) and try to persuade others to do this too (obviously with more complex better sounding arguments than “I want a harem”), but I remain pretty skeptical.
Ultimately people can do what they want. I’m just skeptical it’d work out.
Of course it’s in my interest to argue that otherwise dating gets even worse for men so who knows?
I thought this rationally speaking podcast on the topic was great: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/216-being-a-transhumani...
This Sam Harris podcast about why people cheat was also really good: https://youtu.be/N4B9krAxIpY
The latter goes into interesting things like how men tend to ask “did you sleep with him” and women focus on “do you love her”. The former being an obvious risk of the baby not being yours and “wasting” resources on someone else’s baby, the latter showing risk of abandonment of investment. The selective pressures for this psychology seems reasonable. Also sex is a commodity for women, not for (most) men - how it’s valued is different.
They also talk about why each side cheats (more interesting in the women case imo) and things like how women tend to (unknowingly) curate backup mate options to protect against disaster.
My hypothesis is the nastiness directed towards women that sleep around is also tied up in this stuff too. It lowers investment required from men. Women have an incentive to shame others from doing this even if they don’t really know why they do so.
It is typical for passion to fade in relationships and superficially it often looks like the woman has lost passion first and people come to conclusions like "men like sex better than women like sex." I think actually women are quicker to get bored with boring monogamous sex whereas many men will tolerate mediocre sex (keeps your prostate gland for clogging up for one thing...)
The highest libido women have a higher sexual capacity than the highest libido men. It's a consequence, for one thing, of the refractory period of the male organ. Assuming a poly relationship involves some amount of emotional closeness and seriousness it's hard to believe a poly man can really serve more than 2 or 3 women at a time but a woman who is sexually voracious can have 5 or more lovers. Quite a few women who are not responsive with their husbands might experience a sexual awakening with somebody else, if only because of the power of new relationship energy.
So Poly in the modern world is not about a man having a harem (women have multiple partners too) but instead people developing networks for passion, mutual support, resource sharing, etc. Personally I have been there and done that with children but I still like the feelings of falling in love and I want to develop those feelings and share them with people as a high art.
Women have easy access to sex in a way that most men don’t. I think that’s probably the reason men are happy to have anything. I don’t know that I buy women care a lot about novel sex after the novelty wears off.
> “a woman who is sexually voracious can have 5 or more lovers”
I doubt the men are happy about this for the reasons I talk about. Yes, lots of women have lots of partners in their 20s when they’re high status and lots of men are competing for them. IME most burn out of this and find it unfulfilling about the time it also starts to become more competitive, there’s no investment.
> “So Poly in the modern world is not about a man having a harem (women have multiple partners too) but instead people developing networks for passion, mutual support, resource sharing, etc.”
This is the thing I’m skeptical of. Men are willing to sleep with pretty young women and will put up with competing with others if they must (don’t have a choice, fairly rare for young women not to have some sort of partner), but would rather not. Women eventually want investment, but will sleep around when they’re young to size up mates (and because it’s fun). High status men would be okay with poly if it meant they had lots of female partners only and pretend it’s all this other stuff.
I just don’t think you can turn off billions of years of selective pressures around these feelings. Maybe you can choose to ignore them, but I’m not so sure.
I spend my time thinking about the opposite kind of spell.
I am feeling limerent for someone right now. When it started I was just practicing charming people (which I take absolutely seriously, do it to develop metamours, but also find gratifying in itself) but then I got a response and it really got to me.
I don't compare this person to anyone else. I can't say she is a "7" or an "8" or "9". I don't idealize her absolutely but for all practical purposes she is perfect. I know she is receptive, I know she is vulnerable, I know she'll be disappointed if I don't take the next step. I could go into my past and remember being bullied in school and have many reasons to think I don't measure up but I don't go there because she is on the hook and I know I am good enough.
Also I know most people aren't that good about relationships, don't understand their own feelings, don't understand other people, don't see other people, don't listen, are too self-centered, etc. Based on my own ignorance and not wanting to feed my grandiosity (and conjugate feelings of worthlessness) I resist deciding what percentile my seduction skills are in, but I know my results aren't drawn from the same statistical distribution as the median person.
If you look at survey studies it's not so obvious that young people who are having casual sex are motivated by the desire for sex so much as what casual sex means for their relationship with the group. This is true for both women and men in somewhat different ways. (those "pickup artists" who I distance myself from are a homosocial community of men who like to boast about their conquests with other men and compare their experiences with abstract models who seem impervious to the many joys you can get from being a woman)
If you are looking at love as a process of comparison, sizing up, or sampling you are not going to feel it. If you jump in with both feet it's something different.
As for pretty young women I am still scratching my head because I see a lot of them and it's dawned on me that against all odds some of them like me as an animal but I agree with this guy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal
that love starts with admiration. It's easy for me to admire somebody my own age who's got a lot of history and accomplishments but I haven't figured out how to deeply admire somebody young. I'm getting good at "showing not telling" my appreciation for their looks but I if I want to get good quality love and lust out of them in I need to see something that other people don't see and learning to see that and communicate that I see that is important.
I don't have any time for defeatism, actually I get better advice from my imaginary friends than I get from rationalists and manospherists.
The paradoxical thing is that evolutionary psychology seems to have little relevance to human sexual behavior. Probably hunter-gatherers were poly. Female orgasm is a thing but is by no means necessary for reproduction. Different cultures have very different ideas about love, family structure, etc. (Stehdahl's book On Love claims that attitudes were widely different in different countries in Europe and even in times a few decades apart in France.)
This was anecdotally true for me, at least. My group of male friends put sex on a pedestal in such a way that having sex with women made me more popular and highest status my male friends, and boosted my self-esteem as well. It's not that sex wasn't enjoyable for its own sake (especially considering I had so much less of it back then), but there were strong, additional non-sex reasons to pursue sex. So it's hard to disentangle all the different motivations.
> I need to see something that other people don't see and learning to see that and communicate that I see that is important.
This simultaneously strikes me as both a fascinating line of thought and overly simplistic. People aren't endlessly, perfectly competitive and rational the way many economic models assume we are. Sometimes being a reliable, quality, present, and attentive companion is enough to win a person's love and affection, even if there's someone "better" out there who might see things in them you don't see. And while seeing something unique in a person occurs in a moment, lasting companionship is lasting by definition. As you said, admiration is only the start.
Still, the skill of truly seeing another person in a unique way is a good one. It's good for the people you know, and it's good for your own self, your ability to learn from others, appreciate them, and grow from meeting them.
I've been involved in non-monogamous (and sometimes polyamorous) relationships for the past 7 years or so. What I've found is there are other options besides turning off or ignoring difficult feelings. The best option, for me at least, has been simply learning how to deal with them.
For example, jealousy frequently manifests as an obsessive rumination about the new paramour and your partner's feelings for them. There are a thousand leaves on that tree, and no solace to be found even if you pluck each and every one of them. What matters are the hidden roots of jealousy, which usually consist of insecurity, fueled by uncertainty.
Does my partner still want me? Are they still attracted to me? Do they still love me? Do I still turn them on? What will happen? Is this the beginning of the end? Will our connection suffer? If so, how far will it slide? Will we still spend time together, share love together?
These are some of the hidden questions that underly jealous ruminations and thoughts. And sometimes the best antidote is to simply ask these questions to your partner. Ask for reassurance and clarity, so you aren't suffering and wondering. I had one partner in particular who was great at anticipating these feelings during predictably tough moments, and providing loving reassurance in advance. It was magical how quickly it dissolved jealousy.
Beyond that, exposure therapy work wonders. Fearing that something will harm you, then experiencing it, and surviving it with minimal harm, repeatedly. It has a dulling effect on fear. You see it in people all over the world, who can walk tight ropes, jump out of planes, perform on stage in front of millions, approach strangers on the street, etc., all without the fear and worry they had when they first started. Dealing with jealousy with a particular partner isn't a much different mountain to climb.
Still, I’ve so far found it to hold up a lot of the time even with apps and modernity. What people say and how they behave are different. People often add after the fact narratives and say one thing while doing something else.
I have three people in my life that I share myself with: one person I absolutely adore and intend to marry, one I like but with whom the connection is purely physical, and one I dearly love and who is asexual and never have physical contact with.
I have no problem sharing those people either as long as the expectations are correctly set. My SOs having sex with someone else is a non issue as long as they feel comfortable telling me about it (there is no lying or breach of trust).
The classic question: is it cheating if you just kiss? If you just cuddle? If you just hug? What if it’s a hug with “more” intent behind it?
The reality is, it’s cheating when there is breach of trust.
Seems unlikely to win many people over.
(Alternately "unrealistic" might be another adjective to use: people really do get bored, they really do desire excitement. There is nothing wrong with pursuing passion because you are bored but almost all the time when you do this it is going to burn out... So trading a boring stable relationship for excitement is going to almost always hurt people, have a harmful effect, and thus be "wrong" or "immoral" in my eyes.)
Of course, my experience took a great deal of emotional maturity, which was developed through a series of monogamous relationships. Serial monogamy gets a bad rap IMO. Luckily I have enough emotional maturity to know that I don't have enough emotional maturity to pull of poly. In my reasonably broad experience with poly folks, the vast majority don't either.
Too many things are maintained well past the point of a positive possible ending.
Other times things don't go naturally and then is why we need "toolboxes" for relationships, no matter what kind.
For me I have been exploring my emotions and my ability to transmit emotions to other people. I plant feelings like seeds, kindle them into a roaring fire, can compress them into a ball and they hit someone like a lightning bolt. It's a power that brings responsibility because you can just easily if not more easily hurt somebody that way as opposed to draw them in.
There is a structure to falling in love and it's better to develop it than to be pushed around by randomness. Not a lot of people talk about it for a few reasons:
(1) The gap between desperation and being overcommitted is small
(2) Love is a dangerous game. Pickup isn't because people in casual situations wall off their feelings but no matter how much you expel hostility, sadistic tendencies and are sensitive to avoid accidental slights and interruptions of mirroring it's inevitable that you're going to hurt anyone who becomes attached to you because you're either going to break up or "death will do you part"Non-monogamy does not just come in one form, either. Kinsey showed that people are not so monogamous as everyone assumes, 50+ years ago. Social norms are still catching up.
The complexity grows exponentially with the number of people and the ways in which they are connected.
It's not unlike software. To torture an analogy, much of the "toolbox" and the conventions exist to provide standardized interfaces and help to reduce coupling between people/areas that don't need to be coupled.
Just to nitpick, based on a graph model, it should grow quadratically, no?
As an example, I have met a number of people who genuinely are not attracted in any significant way to people that are not their current partner. Forcing those people into an open relationship would only create misery. They simply aren’t interested in anyone else.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33956295/
that is it is not a dangerous lifestyle. Poly people have a similar level of satisfaction in most ways as mono people.
I think that's highly dependent on the rules/steps one follows to stay healthy. And many people who rely on testing don't have a clue of how to properly use it (timing).
That realization led me to focus more on quality of life now over aspirations of a "future" quality of life.
[1] At 36 I had "experienced" my Dad's life for the last 26 years or so and saw it to be relatively unchanged over that period. As a result, I felt I could expect little change in terms of social position or relative wealth etc, in the next 25 years of my life. I needed to spend time enjoying my life not planning on enjoying it at some future date.
As an engineer I know so many people who were the first in their family to have "lots" of money and they chose to spend it as if it would always be there, until it wasn't. Their challenges in adapting or supporting a burn rate that was unsustainable, could be directly traced back to their choice to live "beyond their means" as we say, which is to say spending all the money they were making and saving none in case of an issue later.
I was lucky (and there is tremendous randomness to life) to marry someone while I was young who was much more fiscally conservative than I was. As a result of that, I was able to experience times when she had insisted on saving and it turned a "bad situation" into a "manageable" one. People I knew and worked with had less pleasant outcomes.
Today, it feels like (although I don't know if it actually is true) that the whole "getting married" thing is out of favor. And yet being married and having two people who could work so at least one of us was providing employee provided medical benefits etc, kept "calamitous downturns" (which happen regularly in Silicon Valley) from feeling like the end of the world.
So I look back and see the choice I made to get married early as a choice that provided a mitigation of the negative impacts of events that happened after I got married. In terms of bad choices, when the dot com boom was in full swing I had stocks that I could have sold and paid off my house mortgage. I chose not to, yes explicitly thought about it and said to myself, "nope." I only saw the down side of that choice of incurring a bunch of taxes, and hey I was making the payments easily on my current salary and so I deferred.
Then when the crash came and the company where I was working was evaporating around me as its customers were filing chapter 7 bankruptcies, I was looking at finding a new job and still having a mortgage that my now GREATLY devalued tech stocks would pay down but certainly wouldn't retire that debt. Ageism is definitely real in the valley and I was concerned I wouldn't be able to find a new job, would have this mortgage and a family to support, and would end up taking any job I could find just to survive, or selling the house and relocating to somewhere where the cost of living was once again within my means.
The hardest thing for me is being honest with myself and really looking at how and why I chose the way I do. I find I can convince myself that the decision I want to make is the right one, even when there is clear evidence that it is not the better choice in terms of mitigating future risk. Being burned a few times has helped train me to listen to those warning signs.
But of course this need not be the case. At 30 you have even more life direction choices available to you than when you were 18, indeed given this forum it's difficult to even fathom how many there truly are, though I'd wager you felt like the future was a lot more open when you were 18. But that's just inertia you're feeling, not destiny, and it can be changed at your whim.
Of course the WEIRD caveats apply here, as well as a host of other generalizations and psychological needs I'm glossing over. Nonetheless hopefully the shape of the point I'm trying to make finds some purchase.
Of course again the trend is that many people don't exert said self-care and fall subject to ailments much earlier (or just have bad luck w/ a host of varying types of environmental/genetic circumstances), and just generally use getting older as an excuse to withhold themselves from a great many things. This again is not destiny, merely a trendline that can be changed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18248
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/03/03/more-on-re...
I'm not an expert in psychology but something about that research just feels off. Seems like a real hard thing to quantify and detailed year over year results like they're presenting should be hard to get.
Anecdotally, very young kids in and of themselves are in fact pretty great! It’s the logistics around child-rearing that are soul-crushing. Or, glibly: having kids good, early parenting bad.
The strong individualism is not really compatible with that.
On HN when these structures are talked about, it is always only in terms of essentially free labor from extended family.
We nibble around the logistic edges with buying our time back: a front-door laundry service, a lot of delivery meals when we had a newborn during peak Covid, Amazon Prime for virtually everything. “Acquiring consumer stuff” is fairly solved.
We had a nanny for a while, and that had a lot of upsides, but having a family-like relationship that’s actually transactional is extra overhead to manage. Nice while it was working well, though.
My local pizza joint’s app has a “repeat last delivery order” that comes in handy.
Ultimately, though, the hard parts remain hard. When a kid is sick or doesn’t sleep through the night, who’s skipping work tomorrow? How do we tag-team our way to survive till bedtime? Do I not bill out a client today so my wife can get enough of a break from the kids to stay sane—and vice-versa?
It’s very isolating. This feels like a fabric-of-society issue to which the product-and-services-to-solve-it mentality, however well-intentioned in the moment, is kinda how we ended up here in the first place.
There isn’t an app or a service that’ll make living in the states (or, I gather, much of the west, albeit to a lesser degree) less individualized and more communal.
We haven’t tried it, but this looks like it could be great if you find a group you’re compatible with.
My wife and I just recently had our first no-kids date night since last Father’s Day (just short of a year ago). It was pretty great! The connection is still there. But it was also _surreal_, and I can totally see how couples just lose themselves in the chaos. It worries me sometimes.
What I'd tell my former self is: start doing everything in my life to optimize for my own perceived agency in this new life. I started doing the things that I'd previously delayed for "retirement" now, albeit with much smaller time investments. (Working toward decoupling time from pay.) If there are relationship issues, then start working on those, too. And, for heaven's sake, once the kid can be watched by family/friends, start doing so.
Good luck. HTH!
It's highly likely that they can imagine it, but realize that it might also be worse and decide that it's not worth the risk for them, since there is no going back.
I heard this a lot before I had kids. Then we had kids and it was not only fine, but actually enjoyable.
Yes, there was a short-term increase in stress and reduction in personal time, but the key factor missing from online discussions on the topic is that the stressful low-sleep, diaper-changing period isn't all that long. A couple percent of your lifetime, really.
The other thing the internet kids think pieces never really mentioned was that, as a parent, you actually like your kids and spending time with them. There's so much media that portrays children as some sort of endless chore and drain on your time, but it turns out that it's actually a ton of fun to play with your kids and help them grow.
The under one years were at a time in my career when I was working at 2am most nights anyway. A few minutes to hang out and take care of someone no love was a nice break. Mom slept pretty much through the night after the first couple of weeks.
Decade and 1/2 in and I can't see things getting worse, but we'll see.
Well, that's the core of the issue, isn't it? I know people who were really looking forward to having children, wanted them, and anticipated that they would enjoy it - so expected personal sacrifice was not that big of an issue. It's just what you had to do to enjoy having kids.
Media that portrays children as a chore, on the other hand, matches the thought process of someone who looks at having children (potentially including their own childhood) and thinks "why would someone want that?". It was a welcome balance, speaking as someone who barely came across portrayal of children as anything other than the source of joy and something that everyone - surely - wants. It was a different media landscape 10-15 years ago, and I like the current one better even if not maximally nuanced.
Not everybody enjoys time with their kids, either. I'm truly glad you do, but that isn't universal.
There's such a huge spectrum of experiences for parents. Listening to the experience of others in our post natal groups was really interesting for that reason. Some people just get it so easy, and some people seem to be living nightmares. There's no real rhyme or reason to it.
Look at the y-axis on the graphs. The average value for "relationship satisfaction" looks to be around 79%, but the variation over time only appears to go from a low of around 77% to a high of 83% (eyeballing it).
Basically +/- 3%.
There's barely any signal there. A variation of a couple percent up or down might indicate something small on a large enough sample size, but it's basically nothing in the big picture.
It reminds me of a famous racial bias study taught in "Leadership" courses in which the authors found that people had slower reaction times to pictures of black people and came to the conclusion that this meant we must have some innate bias against black people. Zero attempt to control for the image brightness, contrast, or any other potential explanatory factors.
Look, the IAT (implicit association test), which you are presumably talking about, has a lot of problems, but that ain't one of them. Pretty much all of the things you have talked about have been examined in multiple, independent studies.
It doesn't seem to replicate massively well in terms of behavioural impacts, but to suggest that social scientists don't control for obvious things is just false.
That being said, the US approach for getting social science participants is insane, and should be destroyed.
Something that caused me a lot of suffering was a feeling that I was running out of time. I see that now, but back then I couldn't even describe this anxiety. I couldn't even realize the anxiety in me. It's like there was no life after 30. This made me make a lot of mistakes and waste a lot of time because I was obsessed with achieving results instead of focusing on the process.
I've been thinking a lot about 20 year old me lately. To the point that I'm even considering writing a book, a newsletter, or something.
The blocks are purely in your head. Bad interview? It'll be forgotten by everyone but you in a week or two, if even that long, unless we're talking something outlandishly catastrophic ("... and then his tie caught on fire!"). Awkward when talking to a stranger? They'll forget you existed by the morning.
One helpful exercise can be to think through the actual harm—not how you'll feel about it, but all external-to-you harm—from a worst-likely-case scenario. Interview when you already have a job? The harm approaches zero. Talking to a stranger? Ditto. The harm of those is almost entirely something you do to yourself.
One simple way to practice social skills is to play little games when things are extremely low-stakes. Like, "today I'm going to compliment a stranger on something", or (a tad more advanced) "today I'm going to find out what a stranger's favorite sports team is", or whatever. Really little efforts are all it (usually) takes to reduce social anxiety quite a bit, it's just that lots of people never even try that much.
As for interviews specifically, the usual advice is "do practice interviews until no longer anxious".
- Slow breathing. Count to four for each step: inhale, pause, exhale, pause.
- Cardio exercise
- Talking with my partner about anything.
- Physical intimacy
- Five full cycles of sleep every night. You have to measure this with a device.
- Being in nature
- Spending time with friends
- Acetylcysteine (NAC) 14mg/kg per day. I started taking this a week ago. It feels like somebody turned down my emotions from 11 to 3. I still feel the same emotions, but their intensity is reduced.
- Vipassana meditation. I took the free 10-day "Goenka" course and learned the skill. Then I worked through some things, which was a lot of work. The payoff is in reducing the time and energy I spend ruminating. The meditation skill is also useful for dealing with stress.
- Therapy
- Having money in the bank
Things that increase my anxiety:
- Caffeine. Caffeine's effect is cumulative for me, building up to a maximum over about a week. If you suffer from anxiety and you use caffeine, stop immediately and completely forever. Quitting caffeine and feeling better takes about a month.
- Alcohol
- Noise. Vehicles with fake mufflers.
- Sudden loud noises. Vehicle horns and revving engines with fake mufflers. Sudden loud ring tones when using headphones. Sudden alarms. Set your phone's alarm to start quietly and slowly increase in volume.
- Dark-themed tv
- Staying up late
- Ruminating
- Sugar
Good luck to you!
Reddit caters to people who are bored, angry, and have a lot of free time. People don't spend hours complaining on Reddit when everything else is going great in their lives. The people commenting in that thread (before it hit the front page) had to actively seek out that topic and choose to subscribe to it. It's the opposite of random sampling.
Reddit's front page is only an indicator of what active Redditors are thinking and saying, nothing more.
Sometimes, you just know. Having my family figured out is such a gigantic load off my mind, knowing someone's got my back for literally the rest of my life is so much better than flitting around trying to meet new romantic partners, honestly I wonder if they interviewed people who were comfortable talking about their dating life, which means people like you and I get massively under-represented.
Wife and I have been together for almost 10 years. The last 2-3 have been the hardest. The last 1, the hardest of the last 3.
Why?
I’ve asked myself that many times.
Love fades, that’s definitely part of it. Hormones drop, and that “natural” urge to be with your partner wanes. At the same time, careers are shifting into overdrive. Promotions and responsibilities pile up. Work becomes the MAIN focus in life (if you don’t have kids).
At some point the stress of life can change people, slowly but over years someone can end up bitter, jaded, and difficult to be with. I think that’s part of what we are dealing with. After a decade of hard work, we haven’t done enough to ensure we are happy living with each other.
In other words, we’ve taken each other for granted for too long.
That seems like it's probably your own choice, or you've followed societal norms. You don't have to.
My personal belief is that freeing up some time for your future self may help with that.
For me that means I want a career where you can reduce to a 24 hour or less work per week. Now I work more to save and invest money to give my future self more options in how to balance children, work, friendships, sleep and hobbies without having to worry much about finances.
While there are some things you can do in your 20s to help you be healthy in your 40s; genetics can be a factor and cause serious issues.
Assuming you’re over 65, you have up to 120 days of Medicare and however long it takes to liquidate your assets. From there you’re a Medicaid ward, and without advocates, particularly as a male, you’re not a profit center and won’t last too long.
If you have an acute event and end up not progressing through rehab... then yeah you're on a clock. The gross part is that the facility knows it and treats you like an animal.
My only regret as a parent is how badly I wasted my time before becoming a parent. So much free time wasted.
Another question I'd like to know the answer to: is having more than one child better for the whole family?
The extra effort after one is pretty much a wash, but I see so many parents that spend so much time entertaining, and hanging with their kid. There's nothing wrong with that but it's not at all how we were raised.
I think there's something really beneficial to just going out into the world with someone who knows about as much as you and exploring. No one standing there telling you the answer or why right away.
You can play with your kid, but you'll never be let's get sticks and play pretend Zelda for 2 hours focused like two kids might.
Mine craft buddies? For sure.
Rainy day monopoly? Definitely.
Homework help? They do that too though sometimes need an adult. Nthe little one is really good at math and the older is a better reader/speller.
When we go to dinner, my wife and I can sit across from each other and enjoy a conversation and our kids usually talk/play games/do art together.
The amount of time they spend together takes a burden off of being a parent that I see my friends and other parents carry.
They are more like roommates to us than massive chores because we have time to do other things in life without feeling guilty because there is a board child that need socialization and attention.
They are kids, they need adult help and input but they don't need to be entertained every minute of the day.
I also am willing to factor that being able to afford 2 children in the city may hint at other problems we don't have. I recognize that's generally quite the privledged place to be and don't take it for granted.
A lot of people are saying this trend is about kids, and it might be. But at least in my experience there's maybe something else too, something about the internal relationship dynamics of trust and expectation. Early on I think there's a lot in a relationship based on expectations, and a certain distrust or something, even if you aren't aware of it. As the relationship continues, your expectations are not met in some ways, which interacts with distrust to cause issues. But then at some point those trust issues resolve, and you learn your positive expectations weren't too far off the mark either.
Every relationship is different. I'm not sure how you could prepare except to be patient, open, and empathetic.
I think the bigger correlate is -- make sure you are with the right person, persons, or no-one, who are capable and willing to be open, trusting, honest, communicative, and constructive, and who have a healthy balance of selflessness and selfishness. People change, and relationships must change to weather those changes (or not) -- and that can only happen if you and your partner(s) can recognize and communicate those changes far ahead of time -- and work to adapt or move on from the relationship as appropriate.
When my wife and I met, my roommates were eating by shoplifting slimjims from across the street.
We’re more prosperous these days, but the guys I’m around complaining about their wives mostly consciously or unconsciously avoid them. You may not be having circus sex as a couple in your 50s, but some folks slow down on talking too, and that’s how marriages fail.
You cant feel it allnthe time, but you can work to care for your partner regardless. they wont feel it all the time, but you can be patient and keep showing them love.
Being good to someone when they don't deserve it shows a lot more love then being all over them when you are feeling it.
carve out time for selfcare. bith for yourself and your partner. When someone snaps, don't respond with, 'why are you such a bitch?' (spoken or thought) instead try, 'You sound stressed, go take a bath and get your nails done' or 'why don't you take the afternoon off and I'll handle things around here's
If you do that when they don't deserve it, it's gonna go a long way.
Invest in yourself as well, really strive to understand who you are, what you like, and why you do what you do. That can help with those times when your partner triggers a strong negative feeling but you don't quite know what or why. Of course you'd love it if they never did that again but if you don't understand the why, a different but similar action could have the same effect and resentment starts to build.
To be honest though I wonder how much is luck? My wife and I have pretty open communication and have gotten to where we aren't easily offended by each other which makes undesirable behavior bearable and then the good times are a delight. Not all relationships have that.
Blink. Blink.
Yes, being rich is, famously, a great way to free up time and mental energy for other things, sure.
There are a few contradictory data points to keep in mind.
* at age 40 a "dip in satisfaction" won't be your most pressing concern
* marriage can be justified only by raising children
* after 40 your life is literally meaningless if you have no children
* a woman will want a child; those in their twenties who are lukewarm about it will be desperate by mid-30s
* once a woman gets a child you will be a very distant priority for her
* taking care of a child is a nearly full time job; earning enough to let your woman do it is a luxury only a few occupations such as programming can afford
* a child is not guaranteed to share your interests/aspirations or even have a similar psychological profile; it could be a girl
* a married man has no legal protection whatsoever and all the incentives are in place for women to take advantage of you. How decent you are or productive as a member of the society makes no difference. From what I have seen the correlation is negative - good men are hit the hardest.
Maybe I’m wrong and I’ve just lived in a bubble of unhappy people? Maybe a study measuring “satisfaction” is actually capturing something other than happiness?
To be honest, that is rather low bar for happy relationship. It think that maybe you should believe more what they said about their own happiness then project happiness onto them when no one is looking.
The fucking internet, man, sometimes...
Fulltext here: https://doi.apa.org/fulltext/2022-16081-001.pdf
edit: Actually "menopause" is being a bit glib. Things change in relationships, and often it's very difficult to understand why.
One thing that worked for us is establishing clear communication and guidelines. For example when I'm in my home-office and door is closed - it's do not disturb mode. Once I'm done with work, I take over and watch the kids while my wife rests for a bit and then it's bedtime for the kids - each of us takes a kid and put them to sleep. By 8:00 PM, both kids are asleep and its time for ourselves. We either spend it together (watching TV, etc) or apart (I play CoD, she relaxes by reading or watching her shows). We also have a mandatory at least one date a month away from the kids. This lets us to continue dating each other and enjoy each other's company.
For me, marriage is really about serving one-another every day. It's not about my happiness, desires, wants, it's about making sure my wife is satisfied and happy. My wife does the same for me. The moment you start being selfish and only try to get what you want and not work with your spouse/partner to help them achieve their dreams/wants, that's when things start to crumble.
I suspect the valley in the graph has to do with lack of sleep from getting children to school.
It is somewhat unusual for me to see meaningful analysis of underlying causes of such things. I'm mostly not a big believer in "well, x amount of time passed" as an explanation for much of anything. (Like with anything, there are exceptions.)
I also dislike the use of your in the title, which contradicts the statement in the article that these are averages and your experience may be different.
If you want an eye-opening account of how relationships go bad, take a stroll over to /r/deadbedrooms in Reddit. It doesn't matter if you're 20 or 50, you may see the same patterns in your own relationship.
As I get older, I feel that I have become much more self-aware of problems which appear in my life. While before, they may have been a black-box I push aside, now they are a curiosity I feel compelled to explore.
My first marriage took place when I was 25 and lasted a bit more than 10 years. I met my second wife when I was 38, and have been in a relationship with her for more than 20 years now.
As a result, my 40s were a high point for me, not a low point. Even though we had children and all the challenges that brings, 40-48 was probably 8 of the best years of my life (and I think my wife feels broadly the same).
Had my first marriage survived, maybe the pattern would have been similar to what is outlined in article (although maybe it wouldn't). Either way, an article that fails to note that many Americans actually start new relationships in their 40s seems to be missing something rather important.
Here's a 1hr talk the authors ( a couple ) gave at Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9i3LFEZRns