Hacker News Reader

Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

They are pretty good friends of mine and I never sensed any tension. It really was a marriage-ending bolt out of the blue, like discovering an affair or severe financial infidelity.

View on HN

As an outsider you wouldn't know though.

I don't really want to say "thank you." That story, more to the point that I can't find a priori cause to doubt it, makes me glad I'm about to go enjoy a gorgeous spring afternoon full of birdsong and sunshine. But I appreciate your taking the time to follow up.

I mean the simplest way to look at this is that he's just wrong about the couple being happy.

I was married for a decade. Little of that was happy. (We both made the mistake of marrying each other, then compounded it by both being afraid to be first to admit to having noticed.)

Everyone noticed - and of course I've seen it from the other side, too, many times. You can't hide when people are together who don't want to be. That always shows.

This is like saying that of course people could tell Ted Bundy was a psychopath, it always shows.

One might insightfully argue the whole point of the psychopath is precisely that it doesn't show. I recommend Cleckley, whose definition is seminal in The Mask of Sanity, [1] originally 1941 but prefer his 1988 fifth edition especially for its rather disconsolate preface. But even a cursory review of either will trivially show the comparison does not hold.

[1] https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/personality/psychopathy/194... - despite the filename, this is the 1988 edition. I like my paper edition (I made my paper edition) but the PDF will serve well enough for your reference here.

One might equally insightfully consider that psychopaths get married.

Begin your reading on page 346, at the heading "Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love." After that, review Section Two for its many examples of psychopathic (mis)behavior in the marital context.

Bro. You cannot “always tell”. Get over yourself and whatever you are citing to support that ridiculous claim.

That was never my claim, but I can see how much it means to you.

Sorry, no. I was married 18 years and then divorced. Some people weren’t surprised, many were. Ditto for other couples I’ve seen divorce. You can never know what goes on behind closed doors in someone else’s marriage.

It gets easier with time.

Try not to develop AI psychosis before it does. I have had the regrettable privilege of seeing that close at hand quite recently, and it looks like something that can get to be extremely difficult to come back from. Like digging a hole so deep, you end up pulling it in after you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com