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Comment by anon291 | Hacker News Reader

> I’m on my second marriage now

I think you're unknowingly proving his point.

My mother and father are both twice divorced, and only now late in life have found enormously happy relationships, like, relationships they never thought were possible after the first marriage, and indeed, now that the stress of trying to collectively but not really raise three kids is gone, my mother and father are kind of friends, and my mother adores the lady my father is about to be married to.

The fact of the matter is, a previous relationship failing doesn't have to mean anything. You can grow as a person, fix previous faults, learn how to interact with people who you don't 100% mesh with. As most things in life, it matters the effort you put into it, and then you can always get very lucky.

Other than the legal and financial ramifications, it’s not significantly different than any other breakup of a relationship due to poor fit. Don’t read into it too much.

In quite a lot of cultural traditions, the point of marriage is supposed to be that it is significantly different and you won't break up due to poor fit. I don't mean this as a personal callout, I'm glad you've found happiness, but when people complain about serial monogamy creating "a loose bond" what they mean is that it makes your view of marriage seem obvious and their view of marriage seem impractical.

> In quite a lot of cultural traditions, the point of marriage is supposed to be that it is significantly different and you won't break up due to poor fit.

Which is not to say that you can't end up with a poor fit anyway. You're just compelled by social expectations (if not legal requirements) to stay together despite the poor fit, often to the detriment of everyone involved.

Sometimes people do give up too easily, and could make the marriage work if they just had a bit more incentive to try. That's where systems which grant marriage more permanence shine. But on other occasions the problems run deeper, and separation may well be the correct answer.

In any case, since people have learned that they can get most of what they want out of a relationship without actually getting married, stronger / less reversible marriages just tend to discourage people from getting married in the first place.

It is significantly different, and while I'm glad you're happy, a second marriage is pretty damning evidence that the loose bond suggested above exists.

No it isn't, because the tight bonds that can be formed in subsequent marriages can be very real. The strength of an interpersonal romantic bond might have some correlation with the age or order in which you met them, but that doesn't mean you can't have even stronger bonds later in life with later partners.

Certainly, but the first marriage failed? SO the bond was loose

Sure, but that's a tautological statement. If I hadn't chosen to divorce, the bond would also still be loose, but as an outside observer, you wouldn't see that.

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