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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

The US (and developed world more generally) is full of people living alone, suffering from loneliness, and increasingly trending towards widescale mental and psychological illness. This has correlated quite strongly with the trend going from 'just stick with it' and having large families to 'mature and stable' people still being in a dating phase, childless, in what I assume is a relatively late stage in life.

At some point I think it helps to take a look at the macro, because it's so easy to get lost in the micro. And it often reveals the micro, in many domains, to be simply absurd.

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The people I know not in good and long term relationships now are the ones that stayed in bad ones too long in their 20s and 30s. Staying in bad relationships seems to be what has people in the "dating phase" later in life. Trying to make bad relationships work had people I know miserable for a decade and then dating again in their 40s when the relationship inevitably failed.

Especially when you consider that the set of people asking Reddit of all places for dating advice are probably young and in bad situations (it seems like people in abusive relationships often ask the internet for advice because part of abuse is separating them from their loved ones in real life), then "stick with it" seems like the riskier statrgy generally.

Nothing is inevitable. I think people are often looking for something that they're not going to find anywhere, which is a very poor state for living a contended life. This is certainly amplified by the nature of social media where people get mistaken realities of positive relationships. Great relationships on the outside often have endless issues on the inside, that they work through, that people on the outside aren't going to be aware of.

Because an important part of keeping a relationship healthy is not airing your dirty laundry. It's almost like these endless hokey folksy sayings were built up over millennia of wisdom that kept society moving along in a great and healthy direction. And now that we've decided to rethink everything, we have societies that are, at the minimum, no longer self sustaining.

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