Anyways, I usually bond with people because of the unique things that each partner brings to the table; I've loved each one for very different fun and amazing reasons. Sometimes the bond is tighter because of those unique things, sometimes it's not.
I don't remotely understand why people with no experience in a given subject matter like to speak so authoritatively on it.
https://www.quora.com/Does-having-lots-of-sexual-partners-af...
That can put a strain on relationships.
You shouldn't be made to feel you have to compete against their former flings in all the different aspects.
Should be working on your own couple ideally regardless of other people. 23 partners sends a bad signal.
Not very scientific... (snark semi-intended :P)
> Exactly, that's what leads to partner hopping until these multiple digits are reached most likely.
I oversaw the last two words, apologies. Without them the sentence would be logically wrong, the worst kind of wrong ;) They signal that it's up for debate, sorry. Logic pedant out.
Both "talking" and "emotions" developed in central nervous systems at times far removed from each other, and there's little reason to believe that those software systems are connected... or even compatible.
Internal dialogues aren't even thinking... it's when this particular faculty of your mind, the "rehearsal simulator" is overactive. Functioning correctly, you can bounce questions off of a fictionalized version of someone and get back replies that can be a useful prediction of what they might say when confronted in reality.
Those whose rehearsal simulators malfunction end up simulating themselves, who then goes on to start jabbering constantly, like some documentary narrator on crack, until they can no longer think at all.
We (those of us who can actually think) have a pretty good idea how this faculty even works. The principle seems rather similar to the LLMs we've all been talking about... it just predicts the most likely word that comes next, with some pseudo-random seed to start it all off. People with the "internal dialogue" only seem able to "think" of things, once everyone has talked about it enough that it amounts to training their LLM with it. When people without internal dialogues try to explain a new idea to them, they tend to respond in ways that indicate their thinking is much like how the LLMs function. Irrational, confused, denialism.
I don't particularly trust self-reporting, but maybe MRIs can empirically measure whether someone has an internal dialogue or not? I would be curious to see the IQ differences between the two groups. It's probably a massive gap. The rehearsal simulator starves the rest of your brain of resources while active. If you ever learned to turn yours off, you'd probably never want it turned back on again.
For instance, someone who does the internal dialogue thing may not even be able to correctly report their emotions. They may not recognize them at all. Instead, that little LLM in their skull is just "hallucinating" for them, coming up with plausible sentences for how someone might feel, based on training data they've accumulated over the years, but having absolutely nothing to do with their emotional state. Anyone who accepts their self-reported emotional state as correct can be very confused by it... visibly, they're in one emotional state, but verbally they're reporting something completely different. There's no reason to suspect dishonest reporting, but also no real way to reconcile the contradictions.
This should be interesting.
I have been working the past 3 years to turn off my internal dialog because I was only using it to stroke my own ego in a way - imaginary conversations with my boss where I can always respond/counter/defend whatever he MIGHT have to say to me about something. These conversations never occurred in real life, so I realized how senseless it was to devote my attention and energy to something so detached from reality.
I am no worse off for not "thinking things through" in my mind, because I tend to get sudden imprints of what I need to do or say next which are not a serial monologue of thoughts that guide me to understanding. On the other hand, I have been working on categorizing and actually processing my emotions as they are occurring, rather than ignoring them entirely, and many times I do need to have an external, verbal monologue for my subconscious to piece together all of the things it knows implicitly in bulk, but not explicitly as a single coherent concept.
One thing that does come and go is some sort of background music in my head, which also doesn't limit my ability to think. Finally, cannabis CAN give me that "serial monologue in my head" kind of thinking, which I have come to consider a mild "brain vacation" - especially if I am overwhelmed with stress or anxiety.
Out of curiosity, have you ever been kept up awake at night by your thoughts, either before an important event or after some problem? If yes, and you have no internal monologue, how does this manifest? Do you simply not feel tired? Or do you feel tired but unable to sleep? Or otherwise?
In my experience, the real answer is that The Pill means that women have more choice now and don't have to cleave themselves to the first man who colonizes them, and now that it's baked into society, women aren't going to put up with men who can't provide the social interaction reward that all people want. In my parents day, you just had to tough it out because you had kids (and you were probably terrible at it, lookin'at you mom and dad) but these days people can grow into finctional adults first, which might not happen until their late 30's.
In my experience, the real answer is that The Pill means that women have more choice now and don't have to cleave themselves to the first man who colonizes them, and now that it's baked into society, women aren't going to put up with men who can't provide the social interaction reward that all people want. In my parents day, you just had to tough it out because you had kids (and you were probably terrible at it, lookin'at you mom and dad) but these days people can grow into functional adults first, which might not happen until their late 30's.
Some (many?) won't. Adult means taking responsibility for your own actions to me.
In "archaic" societies, girls become women at the onset of their period. Boys have to undergo painful rituals to become a man. No puberty problems or teenage suicides in sight because these young humans have their place in the tribe and are treated like the young adults they are.
No artificial age barriers (18/21). The brain is actually done at myelinizing at 25.
Leaving the rest of the conversation aside, I find this perspective shocking. Becoming a "functional adult" cannot happen in late 30s, or we're all screwed.
Your experiences are valid, and a 50% divorce rate does mean a 50% success rate too. Hardly unlikely.
But overall, the data does not lie. There are clear correlations between the 2 variables mentioned by the previous commenter. It is what it is.
now i wonder how the distribution looks like
Data sure does lie if you interpret data selectively. If the alternative to a divorce is an unhappy marriage, then divorce can produce better outcomes than staying together. Just because people are divorced doesn't mean they're unhappy, and optimizing for marriage rather than happiness would be foolish.
Furthermore, individuals getting divorced have a disproportionate effect on the marriage rate, because, obviously, they have strictly more marriages (and (one expects) more partners) than the people who haven't been divorced.
People who aren't good at (or aren't interested in) long term partnerships will tend to have more partners. Therefore such people may be more likely to divorce if they were to marry. People who tend to form long term partnerships won't tend to have many partners, because they have been busy being in long term partnerships instead.
Therefore having a high number of partners doesn't predict "relationship failure" but "relationship failure" predicts a high number of partners.
All this to say - if you're looking for a long term relationship, there may be reason to be cautious about folks who have not had stable long term relationships before, and as result had many partners as they may not be right for you. But it isn't because having lots of sex broke their pair-bonding mechanism.
I've had sex with more people (via swinging with my wife) since getting married than before, and I love my wife incredibly deeply, more and more each year that passes. Having more partners doesn't make me value her less, it has made me value her even more.
So if your idea of a happy long term marriage where we love each other incredibly deeply includes sex outside the marriage (i.e. swinging and similar) I'm going to struggle to see your point that the pair-bonding mechanism hasn't been broken. A totally non-negotiable element of the pair in my book is complete exclusivity.
A lot of people have a fury-inducing reaction to their partner speaking to a member of the opposite sex. Is a functioning "pair-bonding mechanism"?
Just pointing out that this thread is echoing a false dichotomy of "many partners, no long term partnership" or "long term partnership, one partner". There is a third option, for people who want it.
No, it doesn’t.
As an extreme counterexample, a marriage that avoids divorce because it ends in intramarital homicide is not a success.
This line seems really out of place because this is a topic nearly everyone has first-hand experience with.
I have definitely noticed that it caused a significant decrease in my ability to connect with people and my tolerance for other people. It develops that “why don’t I just move on” mindset, instead of the “until death” mindset that the previous generations cultivated.
I definitely did notice that the more people I was with the less interested I was becoming in actually settling down.
I am happily with someone way less experienced than me now, and I believe I can settle down with her now. I trust my ability to be done with the whole trying to one up on the last one now. If I had to only date people with similar pasts to mine, I most likely wouldn’t be able to trust them, however.
You’d be surprised how few people manage to come out on the positive end after you’ve known them for a few weeks.
> Women with 10 or more partners were the most likely to divorce, but this only became true in recent years;
> Women with 3-9 partners were less likely to divorce than women with 2 partners; and,
> Women with 0-1 partners were the least likely to divorce.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/counterintuitive-trends-in-the-li...
> In our sample, only 23 percent of the individuals who got married over the course of the study had had sex solely with the person they married. That minority of men and women reported higher marital quality than those who had had sex with other partners prior to marriage. We further found that the more sexual partners a woman had had before marriage, the less happy she reported her marriage to be. This association was not statistically significant for men.
> We investigated sex differences in shoulder to hip ratios (SHR) and waist to hip ratios (WHR), and their relationships to different features of sexual behavior. Males with high SHR and females with low WHR reported sexual intercourse at an earlier age, more sexual partners, more extra-pair copulations (EPC), and having engaged in more instances of intercourse with people who were involved in another relationship (i.e., having themselves been EPC partners). The predictive value of these morphological features was highly sex-specific.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(02)00149-6
> Past sexual promiscuity and sexual fantasies (Predictions 10 and 11). In both contexts, a partner’s concealed past sexual promiscuity (promiscuity) was rated as one of the more upsetting forms of deception (about 1 SD above the overall mean). Ratings did not differ by sex (ps > .05), failing to support Prediction 10. Prediction 11 was supported in the long term, with men’s ratings of a partner’s concealed sexual fantasies about others (sexual fantasy) relatively higher than women’s. There was no significant sex difference in the short term (p > .05). These results mirror those observed for sexual infidelity and flirtation and further suggest that the risk of cuckoldry constitutes a potent form of strategic interference for men in the long-term mating context.
2. That source seems of questionable quality - https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/my-rejecti...
3 & 4 - seem irrelevant.
2. Lots of sources say the same
¾. Arbitrary
Attractive people fuck, news at 11.
People get jealous/insecure when they feel like they're not living up to their partner's experiences/expectations. This is totally a HUGE problem, and also people should never eat any fancy or exotic food because then they'll be disappointed they can't afford to eat it all the time and affordable food has been ruined forever.
If I had a mediocre partner but I thought that was just how relationships were, I'd probably report being "satisfied" with them, even as I wished relationships weren't such frustrating things. If I thought marriage was an unbreakable bond I'd probably also avoid admitting I was dissatisfied with my partner to anyone (even myself!) as a coping mechanism as well.
You joined a conversation about promiscuity, sex, and marriage, and calling anyone with a perspective you disagree with an incel is extremely childish and against our guidelines.
Where did I call anyone with a perspective I disagree with an incel?
I literally said that this reads like something that one would find in an incel forum, and compared the idea that specific measurements of the human body being deterministic of their behavior with debunked science of Phrenology.
I think you're reading too much into my perspective and what I agree, or disagree, with.
I would argue that means the person who has had more sexual partners makes a better spouse. No one wants to be stuck in a relationship with someone who's unhappy but unwilling to let go. That's toxic af.
but since in real world it isnt, then I disagree
Nobody disputes, that if you give birth to a child -- your child -- then you will be overcome with love, with emotion, with levels of oxytocin you have never experienced before in your life. Nobody disputes either that this is real, or that negative hangover effects like postpartum depression are also possible and serious.
I'm not saying this to be a prude. In fact, I think there's something bizarrely sterile and sexless about many things in our society.
But still, I think it is a mistake to trivialize things that are not trivial.