The most common reasons given for the breakdown of marriages or live-in partnerships in Britain are communication problems and growing apart, according to analysis by UCL researchers of the latest National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3).
[...] Natsal is the largest scientific study of sexual health lifestyles in Britain. It is carried out by UCL, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and NatCen Social Research [sic]
Natsal is run every 10 years, and includes a representative sample of men and women resident in Britain aged between 16 and 74. Natsal-3 was carried out between 2010 and 2012.
The study focused on the responses of 706 men and 1254 women to questions about their reasons for breakdown of a marriage or cohabiting relationship in the past 5 years.
[UCL is, of course, University College London. It has as part of one of its faculties the above-mentioned school.]
I would have guessed footie.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @01:11PM (5 children)
Marriage is mainly caused by poor communication? :-)
(Score: 4, Funny) by Snospar on Tuesday March 28 2017, @01:16PM (1 child)
I do.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Wednesday March 29 2017, @05:46AM
Who are you and how did you get in my house?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @01:39PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday March 28 2017, @04:33PM (1 child)
Typical marriage-inducing tier communication problem:
- "Honey what are you doing, I thought we would be sleeping together?"
- "We will, darling. Didn't I tell you? this bed is for momma"
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday March 28 2017, @08:43PM
Peggy Bundy: "Al, whatcha thinking?"
Al:"If i wanted you to know, I'd be talking!"
;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Tuesday March 28 2017, @01:44PM (2 children)
So anyone know where I can get a specialized chatbot for this requirement?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:15PM
Marriage needs an app. "Help kids with homework" swipe left or swipe right.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:29PM
Every room comes with 4 of them. Just pretend you're getting the silent treatment.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @01:52PM (1 child)
Here I thought it was the gays.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Wednesday March 29 2017, @08:18AM
It's the gaze. Stop rubbernecking!
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Tuesday March 28 2017, @01:57PM (2 children)
> footie
I am asked to "Join MWU now" on this link.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=footie [urbandictionary.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:18PM (1 child)
Dictionary paywall. Classic.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @06:09PM
Works for me.
Your adblock-fu must be obsolete.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Justin Case on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:00PM
There are some key topics that are critical to discuss early in a relationship:
Are you a cop?
How much?
(Score: 4, Touché) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:28PM (17 children)
Communication breakdown, really? I don't buy that. What about unreasonable expectations and demands, double standards, neurotic hangups and obsessive compulsions, raging insecurity, and irresponsible spending and waste?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:58PM (7 children)
WTF? How did you know about my ex-wife?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 28 2017, @07:05PM (6 children)
LOL. I speak from personal experience. Seems women share a lot of mental habits.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:48AM (5 children)
Any ideas on how to beat the system regarding those things?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:08PM (2 children)
The only way to avoid losses is not to play.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @05:52AM (1 child)
So your saying that marriage is like: "Global Thermonuclear War?"
Sounds about right to me.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday March 30 2017, @03:17PM
"Local Chapter 11 wherever it entangles" :p
Bad for relationships, economy, time etc. Missed anything? ;-)
Marriage and kids are obligations without enough ROI.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday March 30 2017, @05:07PM (1 child)
I've been trying to figure that out myself. It starts by understanding women in general, as best as men can. First, need a thick skin. Stay calm. Recognize the petty provocations as petty, and let them go. You can still suffer death by a thousand cuts, and it's a difficult judgment call to decide when enough is enough.
I've read, and it sounds plausible, that women are more devious than men because they have to be, as they can't compete with men on brute strength. So they're always trying to manipulate, always testing the waters, gathering information on how men react. Putting on an act is another thing they tend to do very well. Women's wiles. They've spent their whole lives honing those skills. Most are masters at it. But they do sometimes get too obvious. Perhaps sometimes they have so many acts going on that they start losing track, can't juggle all the roles convincingly. You might think that ought to make women better poker players than men, but it seems not. One pattern I've noticed is constant attempts to convince men that whatever they don't like is their own fault. Once I was dumped by a woman who tried to frame it as actually me dumping her, and I've seen that happen between other men and women. She dumps him and tries to make it look like he dumped her. Or she wants to dump him but instead tries to behave obnoxiously and crazily so that he'll decide to dump her first. It's much safer for her to get him to think he did the rejecting, rather than risk him becoming enraged at being rejected, and maybe beating her up.
The only explanations of women's behavior I find really accurate and convincing are scientific ones. Obvious, but worth spelling out again and again that a baby is a much greater burden for a woman than for a man. He can become a father with as little as 3 minutes of sex, while she can't become a mother without 9 months of enduring a pregnancy, and then perhaps a year of breastfeeding But what does that mean? That little fact of nature shapes the behavior of the 2 sexes profoundly. It means she is not going to be as interested in one night stands as he. Male prostitution is much rarer than female prostitution. She wants a man who will stay with her and who has means. She is also much more interested in a favorable environment, does not want children when times are looking bad. It also means it's a man's lot to ask and ask and ask, and suffer rejection after rejection. A pretty woman doesn't have to ask, has all she can do just to fend off the incessant proposals from all the men. When she does ask, she can be fairly confident the answer will be yes. Hence the expression "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday March 30 2017, @05:33PM
Firewall all guilting and personal emotional interference?
I suppose firm limits may be useful, ie commit to them.
And women has a larger physical burden but in the modern setting they can fulfill their biological drive by getting pregnant and the man pays for it all. But there's only a legal obligation for the man to pay, no obligation for the other party to reciprocate. So you end up with bills, no contact with children and not intimacy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:21PM (3 children)
A lot of the problems you describe can be mitigated at least somewhat by communication in a relationship, or made worse without communication. If people don't talk about problems, conflict builds internally, leading to increased apparent neuroticism, obsession of details (which often have a larger context that's not communicated), etc.
I'm definitely NOT saying that communication can fix all relationships or problems. But it is pretty well-known among therapists that a lot of relationships begin to break down more quickly when one or both parties stop voicing problems and "wall themselves off." It's often a symptom of the classic male "mid-life crisis" walkaway behavior, where a man seemingly suddenly gets up and leaves to break out of marriage in a conclusive way -- in many such instances, men have been unhappy for years, but they don't voice their concerns adequately.
In more recent years, it's also become a more stereotypical cause for women too, resulting in what some people call "walkaway wife" scenarios, i.e., women who seemingly wake up one morning and declare the marriage over without discussion. Again, despite appearances, this is generally not such a sudden thing, but rather a pattern frequently building for months or years where a woman stopped communicating her unhappiness, frustrations, etc. (I have a friend who went through precisely this scenario somewhat recently; I hadn't heard about this classification before, but apparently many counselors see it frequently.)
By the way -- that should serve as a major warning sign for people. If you live in a marriage or long-term relationship that seems to have escalating conflict, and your partner suddenly seems to STOP complaining, it's often a very bad signal that they could be starting to build a wall rather than resolving issues. Yelling at each other isn't good, but it's at least a sign that your partner still cares enough to fight. A novel shift toward silence can be a sign of resignation.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:38PM (1 child)
Talk helps, certainly. But when partners each say they're going to do things the other doesn't like, or not do things the other wants, and neither will budge no matter how much they discuss, that's not a communication breakdown so much as a negotiation breakdown.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @11:04PM
Had one of those, ultimatums are the worst!! Unless they shock someone into actually agreeing with the point, such as an alcoholic agreeing to get help or something. If you have to issue an ultimatum about something that wouldn't concern you much if it was a friend, then yeah, big problems ahead!
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:56AM
Perhaps people have been getting the wrong thought patterns and think they want things they don't really want. And don't comprehend their true nature. Thus getting lost in the maze of life?
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:07PM (4 children)
This was the main cause of the demise of my marriage, but because she hid it from me and lied about it for years I couldn't trust her after it all hit the fan. So the lack of straightforward communication on her part compounded the problem and made it impossible to reconcile.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @08:08PM (3 children)
It was the main cause for the demise for mine too. The problem there was that, fundamentally, we had very different approaches to managing finances and spending money. She didn't hide it from me, but basically hounded me on things and I gave in.
The lesson I've learned there is that you should never, ever marry someone who manages money in a different way than you do. It's the #1 most important factor in choosing a marriage partner.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Tuesday March 28 2017, @08:22PM (1 child)
The lesson I learned is just don't trust them w/ the checkbook. The Ronald Reagan approach (trust, but verify) would've worked but I was busy w/ my business and figured she'd do what was best for the family.
The problem w/ your assessment is it's not something you notice about someone right away, especially when you get married in your 20's.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @09:47PM
Yep, you're right about not noticing it right away, esp. when you're young. At my age, and after going through a marriage ruined largely by finances, I'm very mindful of it, and am currently dating someone that seems to be very frugal like myself. Her favorite store is Costco... and she paid for her car with cash.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:49AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Touché) by Dunbal on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:31PM
Poor communication is also the reason why surveys are often completely wrong.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:32PM (33 children)
The fact that more marriages are ending like this may indicate that in our era, marriage may totally be a thing of the past.
People may scoff at Hobbes or Plato for offering radical new ways of life in their political books, but with sufficient technology, life might just evolve into societies without a need for arbitrary social contracts like marriage and whatnot and instead we can just enjoy each other without stupid and useless cultural relics from ancient times which cause MANY more problems than solve.
Imagine a world without spousal abuse or child abuse. We're getting there.
(Score: 2, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:40PM (17 children)
There's a reason basically every culture on the planet honors something very much resembling marriage. Natural selection long ago found that it was preferable for the species if children were brought up by both a man and a woman. Argue with Darwin at your own peril.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:01PM (1 child)
However it was an optimization for the living conditions of the stone age, which no longer apply to modern life. Also, it is not exactly true that the natural uprising of human children is by a man and a woman; rather the natural uprising is by a big family where lots of people have their part in it.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:41PM
A bold claim. What evidence do you have to back it up?
I don't disagree. The married couple were simply the core of the family unit not its entirety.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:05PM (6 children)
Wrong. Pre-industrial societies (and even most post-industrial societies, until the advent of today's idiotic "nuclear family") had children raised not by two parents, but by a sizeable group: either an entire extended family clan (consisting of grandparents, several of their kids and those kids' spouses, etc.), or a whole village. In pre-contact Hawai'i, they didn't have marriage at all, and didn't even know who kids' fathers were, nor did they care. The kids were raised collectively by their village. Now you could make a case that in all these instances, there were usually both men and women involved in raising the kids, and that's correct, just not necessarily their biological parents. Kids don't need a singular man and woman (and their bio-parents at that) to raise them, they need multiple different people, and really the more the better (up to a point). Honestly, I think many of today's problems come from society turning to nuclear families, and not having enough people involved in a child's upbringing.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:34PM
I think this is considered fake anthropology these days.
Everybody knows that the nuclear family has been how things are done for the past 4 million some odd years, right up until millennials invented gay. Also we've been at war with Eastasia far into the future, thousands of years ago according to my alternate fossil record.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:39PM (4 children)
Isolated exceptions do not disprove rules of a general nature. Logic fail. And I was not arguing for an only-existed-on-TV nuclear family consisting of only the biological parents and the children, so there goes that. Did you have any other arguments you wanted to make?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @06:44PM (3 children)
Are you stupid? I just disproved your central thesis. People did not live in nuclear families before ~1950s, period.
(Score: 2) by lgw on Wednesday March 29 2017, @12:39AM (1 child)
You do know that "nuclear families" are not radioactive, right?
The term refers to the committed parents and their kids as the nucleus of the family. It's a very common pattern through history for kids to be raised by the extended family, or small group of a few families ("village" is too big a thing, I think), but kids having specific people they know as Father and Mother is found throughout written history.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:37PM
No, that's not what the term means in practice at all; it means a family stripped down to its nucleus: the parents and kids only, no extended relatives at all (at least not actively involved in raising the kids on a day-to-day basis). It's an entirely modern phenomenon. Before that, at least in western societies, kids were raised by extended families or groups or villages.
And no, having specific people they know as "Father" and "Mother" is not found *universally* throughout history, though it definitely is the norm for places with written history I'll admit. Many more primitive cultures, such as pre-contact Hawai'i, did not have this.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 29 2017, @09:24AM
You disproved nothing. All you did was deliberately misunderstand in order to create a strawman.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:06PM (3 children)
Natural selection long ago found that it was preferable for the species if children were brought up by both a man and a woman. Argue with Darwin at your own peril.
While I have nothing necessarily against marriage, your invocation of Darwin seems a bit odd here. There are many possible patterns of raising young in various species, some of which are centered on two primary parents, many where the young are basically just raised by the mother, plenty where other social groups are important in raising young within a community (pack, herd, whatever).
My understanding (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that humans within the primate group we come from probably tended toward smaller bands consisting of an alpha male with one or more females. Children in prehistory were therefore likely raised by this group, a feature that continued to be part of most human societies (i.e., "it takes a village" kind of stuff) with women communally sharing child-care responsibilities, etc. It's only really in the past century or so that the "nuclear family" of just man-woman-children isolated from larger social groups has been seen as the norm in many societies. And it's this isolation of a nuclear family (with the added issues and tensions it often creates) that's abnormal for humans and perhaps leads to greater stress and frustration.
Anyhow, are there other primate species that operate under the single lifelong pair-bond scenario you describe? It seems singular marriage (as opposed to polygamy, and generally polygyny, which was common to many human societies in the past) is more of a creation of civilization, something to regulate and distribute the sexes in a way that minimized the conflict common in polygamous societies (which often tend to have a lot of warfare among males seeking to become alpha and take over a clan of women or whatever).
But I don't claim to be an anthropologist or expert in primate social groups, so maybe somebody else has better info...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:47PM (1 child)
I think you're reading what you wanted to argue against rather than what I said. I've made no claims that a nuclear family consisting only of both parents and the children are how humans function best. I did not exclude extended family members or friends in any way.
The point of my claim was more along the lines of if you do not have both a mother figure and a father figure, you are far more likely to end up with fucked up, antisocial kids. Which utterly fails all success criteria for species survival and prosperity.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday March 30 2017, @06:08PM
I've made no claims that a nuclear family consisting only of both parents and the children are how humans function best.
I didn't say you did. But our modern conception of marriage often focuses on it.
I did not exclude extended family members or friends in any way.
And yet monogamous marriage does precisely that, unless you were also admitting polygamous unions as options (more likely resembling prehistoric structures)? As others have noted, humans are likely inherently promiscuous from an evolutionary standpoint and/or likely to have a structure involving multiple mates. Defending the modern civilized conception of heterosexual marriage doesn't generally admit those sorts of social groupings.
The point of my claim was more along the lines of if you do not have both a mother figure and a father figure, you are far more likely to end up with fucked up, antisocial kids.
[Citation needed.] The concept of families with two moms or two dads or whatever is relatively recent in Western cultures (at least as considered acceptable), and most preliminary studies I've seen seem to show no such negative impacts. I'm willing to admit the data may still be limited. But even the impacts of divorce have frequently been overstated (though that at least has some clear negative impacts). If you're talking about the impact of single parents, I agree there's an issue there, but I'm not sure it's mostly caused by the lack of the opposing sex in a parent as the extra difficulties and stresses caused when people don't have the support of another full-time adult in a household to raise kids.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 28 2017, @07:36PM
Take a look at Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee.
We are best classified as one of the great apes, a subgroup of the primates. Chimps and apes have a wide variety of reproduction strategies. Mountain gorillas do indeed have the alpha male and harem set up. Chimps such as the bonobo are much more freewheeling and promiscuous, mating with each other all the time. Diamond points out that there is a correlation between male testicle size and sexual behavior. Relative to body weight, chimps have very large testes, the better to flood the females with lots of seed, and to shorten recovery time, increasing their odds of becoming fathers. The male gorilla doesn't need large testes because he doesn't mate that often, as he relies on physical force to keep other males away and doesn't have to guess when the female is in heat. Humans fit in at "mildly promiscuous". Monogamy was never entirely our way, though we're close enough to that lifestyle that we can do it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:54PM (3 children)
basically every culture on the planet
Note that contemporary non-marriage cultures are uniformly ... not doing well by any bean counting measure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @06:12PM (2 children)
Chicken and the egg.
Marriage does not cause create financial security.
Marriage is a symptom of financial security.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:20AM (1 child)
Marriage is pretty much nothing. It isn't some magical fix for relationships. The only practical effects it has is that the government foolishly grants some legal privileges to people who get married. Aside from that, it's much like rain dancing: Magical thinking nonsense.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:03AM
Don't worry. Some people think more babies are magical fixes for bad relationships..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:48PM (11 children)
Well, I see how abolishing marriage would remove spousal abuse, by the simple fact that there would be no more spouses (not that it would reduce the total amount of abuse, it would just be labelled differently). However I don't see how it would remove child abuse.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:00PM (10 children)
Child abuse can be mostly eliminated pretty easily: prevent people from having children. Private rearing of children is what leads to child abuse. Instead, let the state take over that function, so that professional child-rearers can be employed for this. There was a pretty good book a while ago about a society like this, called "Brave New World".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:06PM (6 children)
You seem to have missed all the cases where children were abused by teachers, priests or others professionally tasked to care of them.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:31PM (4 children)
You have a good point there. Eliminating child abuse by priests is easy: get rid of religion. But the others aren't so easy, and that really comes down to society wanting to invest strongly in childrearing, which means finding the most qualified people to do jobs involving children (like teaching, nannying, etc.), which is different from today where we massively underpay teachers and then wonder why they're frequently so lousy. Also, in addition to making these jobs prestigious and well-compensated, they need to have a good amount of oversight and cross-checking to keep standards of care high and eliminate anyone who's lacking. In a society which really wants to raise children in the best way possible, these investments will be made. In a society like ours which doesn't care about raising kids well, we get what you see today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:39PM (3 children)
You have a good point there. Eliminating child abuse by priests is easy: get rid of religion.
You are joking, right? It isn't the religion that causes the abuse, religionists are no more prone to child abuse than any other group. The reason pedo-priests were such a big problem is because the church covered for them to protect its own reputation rather than protect the children. Just like UPenn covered for Sandusky.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:44PM (2 children)
Right, it was the organization. Get rid of organized religion and there's no more organization and no more potential to cover up abuse that way.
Getting rid of big-money collegiate sports would be a good thing too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:55PM (1 child)
Where you do stop?
Boy scouts?
4H?
Schools?
Pee-Wee football?
What organizations are you going to allow to exist?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:23PM
NAMBLA. All organizations are now NAMBLA.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:33PM
I certainly don't want to downplay your valid point about child abuse occurring among non-family caregivers. However, it's worthwhile to note that most stats suggest it's a lot more common for abuse to occur in the home (from parents, siblings, other extended family members, family friends, etc.). Stats I've seen are that parents are generally implicated in ~75-80% of substantiated cases of child maltreatment, and ~90% of child abuse is caused by relatives of the child.
Perhaps those stats are so high mostly because of "opportunity," i.e., most kids spend a lot of their free time with family, and perhaps rates among non-family would be higher if more children were in the care of other people. (This is suggested by the high rates of foster care abuse, for example.) But the fact remains that right now a lot more abuse occurs at the hands of family.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:46PM (1 child)
I must be really weird. The only thing I found really disturbing about Brave New World was how certain people were intentionally retarded with ethanol in the maturation chamber or whatever it was called. It's easy to criticize a 1931 novel in 2017, but it seems that robots and AIs would do a better job of replacing the lower castes. Everything else I thought were interesting ideas that could improve the human condition, including some kind of outlet for people who can't fit into the system. I would need that outlet personally, but so many people are so desperate to be told by somebody else what their lives mean and what they must do with them.
Granted, I haven't read it since I was a teenager.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:59PM
Yeah, I always wondered why it was deemed a bad society when it really seemed ideal in many ways. But you're right, it was written ages ago (I thought it came out in 1947 or 49 actually, very close to when "1984" was published, in 1948), so some things seem a little silly. They didn't have real robots back then, and given technology now, we're already looking at replacing our crappy jobs with automation and robots, so in such a future society I think that's a given, so we wouldn't need to artificially breed dumb people for them. Also, in the book they had women carrying around "birth control" and having to remember to take it regularly. We still have a lot of that today, but only because many people don't want to take the permanent step of a vasectomy or tubal ligation. In a future society where natural births are eliminated, there'd be no reason to even bother with medical birth control; we'd do permanent sterilization on everyone automatically. I'm guessing they hadn't yet invented these procedures in the late 40s.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:11AM
Child caring from people without a vested interest in those children in combination with low probability of discovery or deterrent is a fertile ground for abuse.
And the state have many perverted interests. They are not suitable to raise children. Private homes have risks but they are lesser than the state has and doesn't carry nasty systematic feedback.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:32PM (2 children)
The fact that more marriages are ending like this may indicate that in our era, marriage may totally be a thing of the past.
And yet, only 13% of never married people say they do not want to get married. [pewsocialtrends.org]
Imagine a world without spousal abuse or child abuse. We're getting there.
Neither of which are functions of marriage. Unmarried partners are abused all the time too, as are children of single parents. [nih.gov]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:50PM (1 child)
And yet, only 13% of never married people say they do not want to get married.
They're asking the wrong people; they should be asking both married (and unhappy), and divorced people about their views on marriage. People who have never married haven't had to learn from harsh experience what it's really like. It'd also be interesting to see how the never-married people respond based on age range. The over-40 crowd probably has a different take than the under-25 crowd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @04:26PM
That's goal-post moving of the first degree.
The OP's thesis was that marriage as an institution is going away due to reasons. If that were the case then unmarried people would be happy with their unmarried status because of those reasons, not because of a lack of personal experience.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Corelli's A on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:02PM (8 children)
TFA seems useless. If this topic is of interest to you, I offer two more useful links.
https://www.gottman.com/ [gottman.com] provides some better analysis of marriage issues and methods of improvement.
http://www.wwme.org/ [wwme.org] offers weekend workshops for married couples. Although these weekends are presented from a Catholic perspective, couples of any (or no) religious background are welcome.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:26PM (7 children)
I have better advice, which doesn't require reading any silly links:
Don't get married.
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:37PM (6 children)
Without saying much more, you should consider that monogamy is not a human invention - it also exists in the animal world, including birds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @06:14PM
Monogomy is not the same thing as mating for life.
Lots of 'monogamous' bird species just pair up for one breeding season.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @06:46PM (4 children)
Prove it. There's very, very few species that mate for life. Usually, they pair up for one season (see Emperor penguins) only, and find someone new the next season. Or, they pair up briefly and one of them kills the other one (see praying mantises).
Monogamy is just a silly romantic concept that humans invented because of the rise of agriculture and land ownership.
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Tuesday March 28 2017, @07:31PM (2 children)
Believe what you want - I coudn't care less.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @08:04PM (1 child)
I can ignore it because it's irrelevant. Something that's a statistical aberration is not evidence of anything. The fact is, monogamy is extremely rare in the animal world, and more importantly doesn't exist among the other Great Apes.
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:11AM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 28 2017, @08:16PM
Prove it. There's very, very few species that mate for life.
We have the usual adversarial approach. You admit that there are species that mate for life, thus your statement is sufficient proof for your demand.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:27PM (19 children)
Communication issues and growing apart? Pretty much exactly what happened to my marriage.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:47PM (18 children)
Honestly, I'd like to know how "growing apart" isn't something that's completely normal with time. Maybe some people "grow together" as they age, but I think that's likely a minority of people. People change as they get older, it's inevitable. They develop different interests, different political views, different philosophies. And that's likely to lead to people "growing apart". So why pressure people to stay in relationships long after they've lost interest in each other? Marriage is an archaic and useless institution in the modern age.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @04:29PM (5 children)
> Honestly, I'd like to know how "growing apart" isn't something that's completely normal with time.
It is normal, if you neglect your relationship. "People change" is an anodyne observation. Relationships, like everything else in life, requires maintenance to keep in good shape. If you don't put in the effort to maintain it, of course it will fall apart.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday March 28 2017, @06:32PM (4 children)
It is normal, if you neglect your relationship. "People change" is an anodyne observation. Relationships, like everything else in life, requires maintenance to keep in good shape. If you don't put in the effort to maintain it, of course it will fall apart.
Again, pretty much how it came apart. Typical female emotional BS coupled with a clueless husband over a long period of time. Amicable divorce, we still are united in raising our son even if we live in different houses.
I'm a damn fool too, looking for a new one. :)
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 28 2017, @07:09PM (3 children)
Re-marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday March 28 2017, @07:51PM (2 children)
My goal is to never get another divorce, even if that means I never marry again. Even an easy one like mine still sucked and cost a bunch of money. I shudder to think what a knock-down drag-out one costs.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:15AM (1 child)
Why marry when you still can live together and make kids regardless?
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:43PM
Make kids? HELL NO. My refusal to make more kids was the main reason I got divorced in the first place.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 28 2017, @06:01PM (9 children)
So why pressure people to stay in relationships long after they've lost interest in each other?
Who is pressuring people to stay together? Most states in the U.S. at least have had no-fault divorce for decades. If you don't want to stay together, you don't have to. If you don't want to even have the commitment to someone in the first place, don't take a marriage vow.
That said, there are a lot of studies that show that companionship is important in old age to health, longevity, etc. There are mixed studies on (always) single people vs. married, but it is clear that divorced people generally don't live as long, have more poor health, etc. Yes, it's possible to form close relationships when you're older that aren't through marriage, but it's often a lot harder (particularly for men, who have the worst impacts by being single when older).
And I think part of what you bring up has to do with changing expectations about relationships... and frankly, irrational ones. Yes, people change over time, but if you make a commitment to caring for them, you likely have a different perspective than if view a relationship as simply a matter of convenience for as long as it's "easy." Other relationships aren't easy either -- relationships with parents, siblings, children, etc. can last a lifetime too, and people often find ways of navigating and maintaining those even if they "grow apart."
Lastly, while people may "grow apart" in terms of personalities and various choices, living together with someone ensures that long-term marriage almost always "grow together" in other ways. I look at my own parents, who never seemed to have a nice calm, rational relationship (heated arguments were commonplace while I was growing up), but in their old age, they have become caregivers for each other, complementing each other in important ways. Could you develop such a caring relationship with someone else as you age? Sure -- but inevitably you'll be "starting over" in a lot of ways, whereas in a marriage you may have decades of time invested in "getting used to" one another.
None of this is necessarily an argument that long-term marriage is best, but pretending it has NO benefits for older people to try to stick it out and try to make it work long-term is overstating your case.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @06:43PM (8 children)
Who is pressuring people to stay together? Most states in the U.S. at least have had no-fault divorce for decades
First, Mississippi at least does not allow no-fault or uncontested divorce. (No, I don't live there.)
Anyway, it's society that pressures people to stay together. We track divorce statistics, we decry the high divorce rate, the very article we're discussing here is trying to analyze the "problems" with marriage and how to "fix" them. What if the whole institution is just a bad idea, and "fixing" it is only perpetuating the problem?
That said, there are a lot of studies that show that companionship is important in old age to health, longevity, etc. There are mixed studies on (always) single people vs. married,
That's because it's too ingrained into our society. Maybe men would be better off if we got away from this idea, and they learned to form better relationships outside of the obsolete marriage model.
relationships with parents, siblings, children, etc. can last a lifetime too, and people often find ways of navigating and maintaining those even if they "grow apart."
In most cases these days, people don't live together in the same house with their parents, siblings, or (adult) children. It's a lot easier to get along with people when you don't have to live with them, or even talk to them more than once a week. It's also a lot easier when you don't have to comingle your finances with them.
I look at my own parents, who never seemed to have a nice calm, rational relationship (heated arguments were commonplace while I was growing up)
Yeah, that sounds like a great way to live and for kids to grow up.... /s
whereas in a marriage you may have decades of time invested in "getting used to" one another.
Sunk cost fallacy.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 28 2017, @08:28PM (6 children)
Anyway, it's society that pressures people to stay together. We track divorce statistics, we decry the high divorce rate, the very article we're discussing here is trying to analyze the "problems" with marriage and how to "fix" them. What if the whole institution is just a bad idea, and "fixing" it is only perpetuating the problem?
Being unmarried is a significant correlation with poverty. For example [brookings.edu]:
The marriage simulation reduces the poverty rate among families with children by 3.5 percentage points, from 13 to 9.5 percent (figure 1). With a few exceptions, we find no shortage of unmarried men for these women to marry. The major exception is within the African-American population where there is a shortage of potential mates in some age and education categories. This shortage may be the result of the large number of young minority men who are incarcerated or dead or it may reflect the difficulty the Census Bureau has in finding and interviewing minority men in lower-income communities.
It's about as strong a correlation as education (13 to 11.1 percent). The top-down planners would be all over this, for example.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @09:45PM (1 child)
The marriage simulation reduces the poverty rate among families with children... With a few exceptions, we find no shortage of unmarried men for these women to marry.
So what's the problem? Why aren't they marrying if there's all these unmarried men around?
Maybe they should ask why an unmarried man would want to marry into a family with children. What's in it for him? It's great for the woman of course: an extra paycheck and someone to help raise her kids. But the guy isn't benefiting much: he now has a gigantic financial drain (have you seen the health insurance rates for a single man vs. a family with kids??), a wife demanding more money to spend on her kids, and huge demands on his free time. Raising kids is a lot of work. He'll get a small tax benefit from the kids, but if the wife works a similar-paying job now he has to pay a marriage penalty to the IRS. And of course he's assuming a huge amount of risk: divorce is very costly in most cases, and roughly half of marriages fail.
Sorry, I just don't buy it. These "researchers" are just cherry-picking data, looking at the cases where people got lucky and things worked out.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 28 2017, @10:43PM
These "researchers" are just cherry-picking data, looking at the cases where people got lucky and things worked out.
They're looking at aggregate data from the US Census (for the year 2001) over a limited set of possible characteristics. So there's a variety of failure modes possible here (particularly correlation != causation), but cherry picking isn't one of them.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:27AM (3 children)
Not owning a Ferrari is also correlated with poverty. :P
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 29 2017, @12:18PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:23PM (1 child)
Encouraging marriage can very likely lead to even more poverty. Just look at how many divorces coincide with bankruptcy, and combine that with the 50% divorce rate. Why do you want more people to go bankrupt?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday March 30 2017, @02:58PM
Precisely , Make love not mortgage ;-)
Marriage and seeding cell donations are bad business. Besides being attached all the time might not be so good after all either.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:25AM
Perhaps people need to realize that love can't be put into a contract. If economic stability is the issue, perhaps a joint-venture Child rearing Inc is a better idea :p
And people should perhaps live separately but near with shared spaces for the children and without entangling finances. Enforced daily socialization is perhaps taking a too large toll when people are lacking personal space and time. Man huts and dito female ones may have their reason for existing in the first place.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 28 2017, @07:19PM (1 child)
I'll add a tidbit of experience here: Marrying an "exotic" partner means that you have a lower common cultural pool to draw from.
When things work, you expand that pool together, learning from each other.
If things take a bad turn, someone can hide in their own culture and language, building nearly impenetrable walls to shut the other out.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @11:08PM
but muh asian waifu
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:49PM
Here's a strange hard sci fi book plot idea... in an over-internetted generation imagine a culture where most communication between spouses is on private(-ish?) imageboards like the chans instead of shitty SMS texts and messenger apps and legacy vocal speech. So instead of talking to your wife its all /hc/ or maybe /pol/ or /b/ or /soc/. I suppose single people stick to /r9k/ or repurpose /diy/.
Sometimes the most insane book plot ideas are the most interesting. Its not that it would work well, or work better, its that it would make an interesting story to read if it were tried at all.
A sci fi world where relationships rise and fall as greentexts. I'm kinda speechless at my own creativity there.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:39PM
See above
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday March 28 2017, @06:00PM (5 children)
The premise of the study makes sense to me. The core advantage of a marriage is the emotional intimacy it affords. If you're doing it right, you don't have to pretend to be anything or anyone other than you are. Everywhere else, you do.
At work, on the street, what-have-you, you have to maintain a projection to keep things going; and maintaining that projection always produces a level of anxiety. If you start doing the same thing in a marriage, maintaining a projection or hiding who you are and what you think, then there's no more emotional intimacy and no real reason to stay married.
We all need to have the chance to be vulnerable, and the chance to be strong for someone else, too. The medium for that is communication.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:36AM (4 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 29 2017, @12:23PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday March 30 2017, @09:26AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday March 29 2017, @12:27PM (1 child)
In many places what you have would be considered a common law marriage, essentially long-term cohabitation, comingled finances, etc. The exact definition is unimportant, though, because what you have is the essence of the emotional sanctuary I was getting at. You could be gay in a long-term monogamous partnership in a place that does not consider it marriage, but in its most important aspects it's the same.
The distinction between common law marriage and officially sanctioned marriage, I suspect, might count when it comes to divorce. I don't know for sure because I've never been divorced (thank god), nor do I know the law there. Maybe those more knowledgeable could say.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 29 2017, @01:02PM
When it comes to residency, here in Estonia she's still afforded the same protection (whilst I'm still an EU citizen - fuck you very much UKIP), despite there being no exactly equivalent official status. Quite how we get away with it, we don't know. But the cops have never raised the issue as we renew our id cards and residency permits every few years. Obviously no externally-imposed financial implications exist. (We both coughed up 50% of the wodge for where we live, custody on a split could be messy. No plans for that any time soon, fortunately.) Fuck knows what happens when article 50 kicks in - I probably go all bomb-belt on Boris Johnson's arse, that solves the problem quickly.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves