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Comment by starkd | Hacker News Reader

Does staying single make it any better? If you check the stats on that, I think you'll find married people tend to be happier, both financially and socially. The fact many marriages don't survive should not necessarily dissuade you from rolling the dice. Just be pickier about who you marry. Pre-marriage counselling can help weed out the improabable marriages.

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I think they mean something like Canada's "common law marriage" as an alternative.

You never actually marry. No institutional stuff. No expensive dress to fuss over and never wear again. No huge expensive party for a lot of people that you actually don't like but have to invite. No expensive "honeymoon" vacation that has to be super special and that everyone around you wants to fuss about. No other expensive big party for all those people at 25 years married etc.

Instead you just get the same tax benefits as a married couple for having lived together for a certain amount of time. You stay together as if you were married for however long it lasts. Which in lots of cases is the same 50+ years some people stay married. Or not. No need for a paper. If you guys work out long term you work out long term. If you don't, you don't.

I can see how that approach would be attractive, since it is more convenient. But there is a cultural significance to ritual that makes life events more meaningful, and hence, more durable. If you don't treat it as a life-ling treatment, there is less of a chance you will treat it as such for 50 years.

I can see how the corset of tradition, social pressure and law can make marriage "more durable" of course. If you're facing eternal damnation and being ousted from the only social circle you know unless you marry before ever having sex and everyone around you does the exact same thing then of course many if not most people will endure all but the very worst marriages.

I'm glad this is finally past us in at least some places in the world. Unfortunately not everywhere. Not even in Canada or the US and other such countries.

I think the 50+% divorce rate in itself isn't the bad thing. It's not the root cause. It's just a statistic that shows how unhappy a lot of marriages have always been. But until recently-ish (and still in some places) people couldn't get out of it and endured it all and you can't tell me that they were better off that way.

You can treat "it" as a life-long treatment without all the pressures and the paper and all the other stuff.

Its not just the "corset of tradition" or social pressure. I mean rituals themselves have a psychological value. Kind of like how membership in an organization is made more durable by initiation ceremonies. Without those ceremonies, members tend to float away because they percieve less value in belonging.

What's the fertility rate in these awesome modern societies?

At planet sustaining levels and way below the rabbit kind of fertility that we still see in places where women have no rights and are forced into marriages and prevented from access to higher education.

My ex would scream at me if I even hinted to anyone that I was unhappy because "I was trying to make them look bad". Emotional abuse and manipulation, power imbalances, etc, skews stats in any group.

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