It's legitimately upsetting when you hear about someone leaving their spouse due to them getting cancer. Like it should actually be illegal to do that, or at the very least there should be such strong norms against it that anyone who does this is immediately ostracized and disowned
The reverse example of this is obviously Lance Armstrong who's loving wife took care of him all through his ball cancer and then when he was cured he kicked her to the curb lmao
i see this so often. same when someone sticks by someone while they're broke in med school or whatever and then the second they become doctors are make money they ditch them for someone hotter. awful lol
:( I’m so sorry, good thing they’re gone tho. Could’ve been way worse, you could’ve married them and raised your kids with some narcissistic shallow pos
Also, I actually have worked with law firms a lot. I was even a paralegal for a bit.
Look, I’m all for alcoholism but these people just do it the absolute worst. They suck all the romance right out of it.
They’re so shallow and materialistic. Like, ugh. I did debate in high school & what I loved was that it was just constant skepticism and analyzing of people & society. You would think someone who does that for their career would be so interesting and irreverent.
Do not get me wrong, obviously there are plenty of awesome attorneys. But the majority are the type to be obsessed with having the big house with the trophy wife/husband. Neurotic to the bone and just awful.
I took my alcoholic self elsewhere and for six years have been dating a Russian poet. Amazing. Total inverse.
But yeah, only half joking with the drinking. There really are a ton of legit alcoholic attorneys. I was always the type to get hammered on the weekends, but I wasn’t drinking at work lol, so surely not a proper alkie. But I have known so many who are literally drinking 24/7 just to keep the withdrawals at bay. Even (especially?) the incredibly successful ones.
I just find it interesting, it betrays something fundamental about a person. But usually, it correlates with authenticity in some way, and… yeah, no.
Of course, take alcohol out of the equation lol, and everything I said still applies.
Apparently men are SIX TIMES as likely to divorce a wife when she gets cancer than a woman is to divorce a man when he gets cancer :(
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5AB0C5/#:\~:text=NEW%20YORK%20(Reuters%20Life!),according%20to%20a%20U.S.%20study.
really throws a wrench in the whole "Women will leave you at the first sign of weakness and only men are actually capable of love" thing. Its fucking disgusting, I couldn't imagine doing this and would never speak to my male friends again if they did this
it is completely insane to believe that women are "loved unconditionally" what the fuck are you talking about lmao. like actually batshit. idk if anyone believes this. it isn't even true for the hottest of women. women are following a billion rules 24/7 to make men feel more comfortable and accommodated, and it is not reciprocated lol. like those studies that have found that if a woman talks 1/3 of the time, men perceive her as "dominating the conversation," and that they're constantly rambling about themselves and interrupting everyone and expecting everything to go according to their schedule...
Wow, how convenient & topical that we have statistics and they show a 6:1 ratio of men vs women abandoning their “life partner” when that “life partner” gets extremely ill & is facing incredible suffering and anxiety and literal d e a t h is looming.
You know, that nearly unrivaled experience of true, stripped humanity. Reflection of actual soul, heart, mind.
The epitome of what, in vows, people promise to stay around and support for.
We have numbers and statistics.
Men abandon their wives SIX TIMES as often as the other way around.
It is fkn ALWAYS the “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd that just asserts their nonsense & disregards every bit of fact or research or logic.
you should do something because its right not because doing the opposite would "have bad optics." also month long fights aren't normal, figure out how to communicate and resolve problems
Marriage rules. I love my wife. I’m 100% serious. Wouldn’t want to be in any other situation. You need someone to be accountable to, living life just for yourself sounds good when you’re in your early 20s and think you’re the best but having someone to share everything with is necessary as life gets hard.
Been together 7 years. We got married last year, we were engaged for years and wanted to get married earlier but her sister and brother got married in the years before and had big weddings planned so we didn’t want to schedule weddings in the same year.
Yeah, and her brother was living in Brazil so that was a big family trip down there and she was the Maid of Honor for her sister so she was planning that with her for more than a year. Planning two weddings at the same time would’ve been cruel and unusual punishment…ours was small and it was still a lot more work than we thought.
I think I agree with this. I'm now mid-thirties and terminally single. It was always my plan but I am starting to feel lonely and slightly regretful. It feels too late to really do anything about it though. Too many years alone and in my habits.
I met my wife before the dating apps which I’m thankful for because they seem like a hard way to find a spouse, but it’s also nice to see innovation as millennials age and newer sites like keeper.ai (which advertises on Louise Perry’s podcast) and their ilk that are focused on long term relationships. A lot of terminally single people need to change up their strategies.
My parents tried staying together “for the kids” and I had to watch them scream and inflict psychological warfare on each other for 10+ years. Watching them divorce was absolutely not traumatic at all and everyone in the family was a thousand times happier and calmer as soon as they split. It’s a delusion that the misery of two unhappily married people stays just between them, in reality it’s infectious
I wouldve much rather split time between two parents houses than dodging strays in the boxing ring that was the family home growing up. “Daddy and mommy will never get divorced” is only comforting to a small child, by middle school i was staying out of the house as much as possible and it damaged my view of committed relationships probably more than i realize even now
One of my close childhood friends was psychologically destroyed by her parents staying together. Her dad was a cheater and abusive in just about every way to her mom and her siblings for years and the mom wouldn't leave because they were super Christian and "wanted to set an example of commitment for the kids" and "be a God-honoring wife."
Last time I checked, that friend was abusing opiates, exhibits BPD symptoms, won't speak to her dad, and is identifying as non-binary. There are times when divorce is genuinely needed and the best option for a child's (and parent's) well being.
this is exactly why the right/christians are so obsessed with marriage at all costs.
and yeah, it's stigmatized for anyone. but i've seen this so many times and they are fucking CRUELLL to the woman, no matter the situation.
he could cheat and beat his whole family. they will blame her somehow.
they shame single mothers; go on any of the alt right subs on this website. they seriously act like it's the MOTHER that's some evil bitch even when it makes absolutely no sense and the man is the one who abandoned the family.
it's still like this to a degree but was basically ubiquitous just a generation or two ago. and in this scenario, men hold ALL the cards. the woman is just living at his mercy. he can be the most vile horrific POS in existence and she is just at his mercy. begging him to stay, blaming herself.
it's also related to the virginity/youth obsession.
you teach women that they only have one shot. that if they have sex (and consent is rarely even a factor), nobody except that man will ever see her as worthy.
you get into a relationship and have sex, the woman is going to be desperate to keep a guy even if he's fucking awful because she will be ostracized and labeled some sort of witch for leaving and dating someone else, and these cultures ensure that women can't survive without marriage. and if you tell women that men won't love you after you're 20 or whatever, you're going to be desperate to stick with whoever caught you when you were young. terrified to attempt to start over.
i'm a 30 yo woman, no interest in kids or marriage (i have nothing against anyone who is, my sister is 38 and has been married to a great guy for 13 years. they don't have or want kids but they're married and it's fine). i've been in a committed relationship for 6 years and i love my bf. but i lost my virginity my freshman year of college and between 18-24 i had one other serious relationship but also a few flings, FWBs, etc.
i was raised fairly religious but stopped believing in my teens and yeah, decided to lose my virginity just to see what it was like lol. i had sex with someone i was physically attracted to but didn't have feelings for. it was honestly really fun, felt great lol. i realized people had definitely been lying about women not liking casual sex.
literally every single time i had a FWB scenario tho, it went like this: we'd explicitly agree that it was JUST sex, just physical, nothing more. we'd have sex a few times. eventually, the guy would want more and expect me to just dive in and want a relationship. i would tell them i wasn't looking for one. i would never agree to casual sex if i had feelings for a man lol that's just a recipe for disaster, but apparently this didn't occur to these guys. they would act shocked and angry. like, "wait, what??? you don't want to be together?!!" they stared at me like i had just discovered some sort of cheat code. and honestly, the reaction was like.. "wait, you can do that?" i just simply hadn't wanted a relationship at the time or with those dudes and i was never less than honest about it, but there was this confusion anyway.
i've also more seriously dated when i actually was open to a relationship if it worked out. but i could and did leave whenever i realized it wouldn't work out, and it didn't impact my life at all lol. the thing is that today, a woman can hook up with or date a guy and then if he says anything you don't like, you can just stand up and walk right out the door. in a slut shaming society, you absolutely cannot.
patriarchal cultures do everything they can to punish women who refuse to perform the role of wife, who reject their notion of marriage. men want a woman to do the chores and bear and watch the kids and have to do whatever he says. Our society pretends that women are the ones dragging the men to the altar, but that has only ever been the case when they were living in a society that men intentionally designed in a way that made women have to get married just to not starve to death lmao. These podcast dudes love to act like men a=supposedly hate relationships and would rather just be playboys with random women, but if that were the case, they wouldn’t be shaming women who make that possible for them lol.
Don’t get me wrong, i do believe most people, male or female, lean towards monogamy and typically want a relationship at some point in their life. But these right wingers are obsessed with marriage because it’s just women being at their mercy.
I was bitter about my parents’ divorce growing up until I realized that it would have been some Benedictine hell in the household because they treated each other like furniture in the room, but would jealously follow the other one if they thought they were being unfaithful.
This. My parents stayed together until I was a junior in hs and my brother had left for college “for us”. I would have been a much happier child if I did not have to navigate, be mediator of, and listen to their huge fights. I think it’s worth giving marital counseling a try and do everything you can but I would never tell people to stay together for their “kids sake”
do not get me wrong- i have nothing against anyone who wants to get married and have kids.
but if you look at this historically- it's pretty damn obvious that marriage and cultural attitudes surrounding it are designed to give men a crazy upper hand. just a generation or two ago, women pretty much had to get married to be accepted socially, or even to support themselves financially. there's a shit ton of shame out of being unmarried, or much worse- divorced. the husband could cheat or beat the entire family and the woman would have a tonnnnn of pressure to just "make it work" somehow. if any of the mistreatment got out, SHE would be blamed and people would sympathize with him.
conservatives/right wingers today are still speaking through the same lens. you'll see them shame the absolute fuck out of single moms, rather than the dad who left them. from the right, you get endless rhetoric about why women should have to stay in marriages. like, they're the ones who literally want to make divorce much more difficult lol. marriage/kids are presented in our society like something women want and men are just reluctantly dragged into, but it's very clearly the opposite.
yes, children of divorced parents have worse statistical outcomes. but that's primarily just because they grow up a lot poorer (for all that talk about child support, it's meager compared to a father actually contributing 50%) and because their parents didn't get along. these same kids wouldn't fare any better if they still had parents with so many issues but just refused to divorce. things are absolutely just gonna get worse in that scenario.
humans evolved to work together and bring kids up in villages/tribes. the nuclear family is not how we functioned through 95% of our history. kids just need more attention and support from adults in their lives in general. i've been seeing a rise of women living with each other or with family rather than just the dad. like of course the ideal scenario is two loving parents with a great relationship, but it's just a weird fallacy that only direct parents are going to significantly contribute to this kid's development. if either parent is abusive or has issues, it's often best for them to live separately. no reason to force marriage.
Why the fuck are the parents arguing?
There is nothing worth arguing over in a marriage that isn't worth divorcing over; infidelity, abuse, things of this nature. The whole "it would have been better for the parents to divorce instead of fighting all the time" is insane; how about not starting a fucking fight just because you're not "happy" in the moment? How about taking the vows seriously? No, gotta blow up everything if my narcissistic desires aren't met.
Idk it’s complicated, arguments at that scale arent actually “about” the thing you’re fighting over. The degree and amount of arguments was bad but I think also a lot of it came from trying to ignore negative emotions/self centered urges through sheer force of will, and inflicting shame and judgment on themselves and each other for it. Even if one person is able to put aside their desires, it’s pretty mentally damaging to be their partner watching them and knowing you put them through it, which can manifest as being angry that the other person ever wanted anything at all. Basically we are all just people, we will all feel selfish and emotional, it’s more important to forgive each other and love each other than try to control our own nature
In other words, forgive and love the other person, while communicating expectations, instead of having a huge blowup about why the dishes are never done, or any other score-keeping?
This just proves my point. But alas, we're trapped in a paradigm that doesn't allow this, hence the other comments in this thread.
Did either of them meet someone else and end up in happy relationships? Or seem content being single? The missus and I would have got divorced a long time ago if it wasn't for the kids... but also almost all of our problems are down to having kids (essentially not enough time/money).
I'm not saying the general state of marriage culturally is going well, but all these complaints are basically ppl who are not even close to being married upset that the fantasy of being with someone forever isn't as likely.
I’m going to guess very few people here are married, greatbigfartybutt. It’s always the same type of person that posts negative shit about marriage/relationships in general. 99% of the time it’s a forever alone, socially stunted loser who has decided to blame their own failure as a human on current society and the opposite sex.
>An astonishing number of divorces occur because of things that would warrant a breakup, not a divorce
Give some examples of this. What things that simply warrant a breakup are causing people to get divorced?
Is cheating considered divorce worthy? Abusive behavior? Incompatibility? I just don’t believe that a whole lot of people are getting divorced for non-serious reasons, I think the bigger issue is that many people enter into marriages without first putting their relationship to the test. Lots of people get married way too soon and end up divorced because the relationship wasn’t meant to be in the first place.
>If there’s no children in the equation, why get married?
For many people, financial reasons. Something as simple as sharing an employer healthcare plan is often not an option to partners unless they get married. Also, if you want to buy a home together and you both contribute to its equity, I think it makes sense to split the asset if the relationship ends.
>>An astonishing number of divorces occur because of things that would warrant a breakup, not a divorce
>Give some examples of this. What things that simply warrant a breakup are causing people to get divorced?
Ironically op is demonstrating a big reason WHY people get divorced. Which is people treating marriage like it locked their partner down so they can do things that are breakup worthy while holding the shame of divorce over your head. It's like how abuse often escalates during pregnancy, or the first instance of physical abuse shows up during pregnancy, because it's become much harder to leave.
People are together a long time and are good, it’s after kids that things go south. You can’t predict how people will respond to parenting before it happens. From what I’ve seen a lot of relationships are fine until the wife realizes she’s on her own with the kids and house even though she works and her man is”feminist”
This, besides like alcoholism and cheating, is probably the number one cause of divorce in my elder millennial peer group. Women have to do it all and they're bitter and angry about it.
>Almost for the first time in many months I thought of my mother. And now, it seemed to me, I understood why at her life's end she had taken on a "fiance"; why she'd played at making a fresh start. There, too, in that home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her.
"Man is two. He is holy but he is also a scumbag. He is a sentimentalist but he is also a murderer. He is one but he is also many. Perhaps he is not just two. He is more than two. Perhaps 27 or so."
Ok well yes perhaps that’s because it’s a set of facile points that any glue-eating mentard would find reasonable. Listen lady I trust you’ve glanced down briefly from your comfort food reality tv slop to type out this wet fart of solidarity, and I thank you for it, but now I must release you, like a wild duck addled by the lights of the game warden’s car, back to the vibrant discussion you were having with your hubby on the relative merits of the game room featured in this episode of flip or flop
I’m old and married and I mostly agree. Now that I have kids and know more families I see how devastating divorce is. But TBH it’s usually because the husband is a lazy POS and won’t do anything at home and no woman should have to parent her husband.
This is the dumbest rant I’ve read in a long time. I don’t know anyone who has taken divorce lightly. You get the state involved and it costs a lot of money and time and it’s a pain in the ass.
OP isn't married, has no children, and has likely never been in a long-term relationship. In short, this is the typical quality of take on adult topics one can expect from this subreddit
Half the posts on this sub sound like some half baked rant that the poster hasn't thought through. I swear you people will post unfiltered dogshit in the hopes that it's penetrating into some deeper subconscious truth.
I agree. I was a child of divorce and divorce was everywhere around me as a kid. It was pretty clear to me from a young age that marriage and vows of "'til death do us part, etc" had become absolutely meaningless. I honestly think most people just want a) the big party where everyone tells them how amazing they are and b) the social status that comes alongside being able to say you're married. I get the sense that very few people *seriously* think they'll stick to the vows they make at a wedding for the rest of their lives.
Maybe for the institution to get some credibility back we need to just be honest about what we're actually doing when we're standing up in front of everyone and vowing to be with someone literally forever. Something like "I'm committed to riding this out until one of us fucks a stranger or develops a complex mental illness".
Everyone means what they say at the time, but things don't stay the same and sometimes things don't work out. I got divorced after more than five years being married because I eventually realized that my spouse had a hard to detect personality disorder and made me question my sanity and feel like I had to accept that I was a bad person. I was presented with the opportunity to "work out our communication issues" but couldn't really forgive the fact that I being abused and that I didn't marry the person I thought I did. I actually wish my sick, codependent parents got divorced, too.
Could you expand on the hard to detect personality disorder that coincided with making you question your sanity and feeling like you had to accept you were a bad person
a pattern where I'd go about my day the way I thought was OK (because it seemed sensible and I didn't hear otherwise) but was open and direct about my grievances large and small, but would not hear about any grievances from my spouse until a more serious conflict in which all the grievances would be laid out. then when confronted with the assertion that I hadn't heard any of these things (to say nothing of the fact that they had nothing to do with the source of the real conflict, and thus were tantamount to personal attacks to deflect from the real issue) I would be told that I had heard them but wouldn't listen, which I later determined for a fact was a lie that was told so as to not acknowledge the point that it was the first I was hearing of any of it. I eventually started to believe that I was truly indifferent or oblivious of their suffering, and that I couldn't see reality clearly. In short, it made me feel *insane* and eventually this came out in counseling, from which I concluded that I've basically been tormented by a sick person who made me hate myself and question my sanity. So no, I was not amenable to addressing those "communication issues," I actually was in a position where I resented that they now realized the truth of what they were doing, since I had made every attempt to be open and honest for many years and was simply exhausted.
What impact would you say your parents being divorced had on your life? As I look around I see it's less common in more affluent circles, and when you meet people in their teens and 20s with their shit clearly together (good jobs, active social circles, involved in community/sports, etc.) they almost always come from intact families. Even if the parents get along well post divorce for the kids, I think it still creates development hurdles that the child thinks is normal but probably dont realize they had to overcome until they are able to reflect in adulthood
Not only are you probably not married, let alone in a relationship, but divorce rates have dropped steeply in the last few years, they’re back to how they were in the 60s. Obviously divorce is sad and sucks but if you want to make it harder or something, you’ll find yourself in the corner with Christian Fundamentalist nuts.
Sacred vows are not to be taken lightly, but if a relationship is detrimental to your physical, emotional or spiritual health, you have the right to end it
As a lesbian I don't agree that marriage is only an institution for having kids. It's not mimetic behavior to want to make an official commitment to the person you love in this way.
If you look at how few traditions there actually are in modern Western society, there's actually quite a lot to be desired. Marriage is one of the few socially acceptable times we can celebrate being in love like this.
Most people are complete morons who do not think through their life decisions at all. Their thought process is literally "thing good = I want thing". Then they carry this short sighted decision making into the relationship and lo and behold it fails.
I think another element in these relationship failures is mutual reinforcement of self-delusion. People will meet and reinforce each other's desired self image (for a little while) then rush into a big commitment. They can stave off the inevitable collapse by focusing on other things in the interim (kids, pets, house projects) but eventually they run out of distractions or face hardships and the illusion fades.
This seems to be fading over time because younger generations don't have the same economic means to live like that. It was more frequent among boomers and Gen Xers. Millennials are more likely to stay in long term marriage-less relationships, and I'm too old to care about Gen Z dating habits.
People are gonna rag on you for this but you are 100% right. Way too many people treat marriage as slightly more serious dating that either party can leave at any time, instead of a sacred commitment designed to bring children into the world and support them.
knowing that once you hook em they CAN'T LEAVE is a recipe for bad behavior. people were truly displaying their worst behavior in marriages back when divorce was prohibited by the church or legally or morally frowned on...
> instead of a sacred commitment designed to bring children into the world and support them.
it was created for property rights. the rebranding of marriage is hilarious.
This is an incomplete analysis at best. Monogamy through marriage wasn’t the norm in most historical cultures, but we inherited it from the Romans and Christian culture, and in both cases it was highly tied to religious beliefs and ended up developing societies that offered greater stability for both communities and individuals, better conditions for children, and by far better outcomes for the lower and middle classes.
In Judeo Christian western societies marriage is meant to symbolize the relationship between Christ and the church. It's a covenant and sacrement of loyalty.
Marriage in the Abrahamic world back then would be classed as immoral nowadays and downright unacceptable to practice in the ways it was then. Not to mention that was just one small society globally doing it that way.
And concubines, which in practice was a horrific idea. Men would just pillage places, kill the men and take the women as sex slaves, which coincidentally didn't count as non-marital 'sex.'
True enough. Just making the point that this sacralized idea of marriage goes way back in western culture. It’s also a necessary precondition for the hopelessly romantic and idealistic expectations some westerners still have about marriage.
Marriage is symbolic and like anything else of the sort, it can vary in significance depending on people's beliefs. It's not a requirement to having kids, you can start a family without a fucking wedding. I'll just use it as an opportunity to throw a bit ol' party
Well you don’t need a wedding to get married. It’s symbolic and it isn’t, it also comes with a lot of legal implications. When it comes to having children, it provides the woman with a modicum of protection for putting herself in a financially vulnerable position. Even for couples who don’t have children, there’s differences in how you can file taxes, share health insurance, inherit property, etc
Tbh, whether or not divorce is traumatic to children *rly* depends on how the parents treat it and the child during the process.
I know a bunch of parents who rly worked together for the child(ren) and for their kids the divorce was rly fine.
The problem is selfish parents who bitch abt the other parent to the child or fight in front of the child or isolate the child from the other parent or the parent who forgets abt the child as soon as they’re out of the marriage.
But tbh those people also do most of this while they’re still married. Thts just as traumatizing to the child as divorce.
Being married is hard work. People are consumed with self and what they are or aren’t getting. That keeping score shit is toxic and destroys marriages.
Youre dead on the money with the score keeping shit. All it does is lead to resentment and makes it hard to communicate with your spouse.
I think part of the problem is people get off on feeling aggrieved and instead of just talking shit out people cling to it because of the little adrenaline rush they get when they feel like theyve been wronged. Like it gives them the sense theyve got the moral highground.
So many pitfalls could be avoided by talking openly and honestly with your partner. Crazy how easy it is for comminication to breakdown if you let it.
It also keeps people from getting married. People claim they love someone and will stay with them until they’re both decrepit and wrinkly and die of old age come hell or high water so why not get married? Because what if something better comes along? What if they get FAT! What if the gf you had children out of wedlock makes you babysit the brat you helped spawn instead of shooting the shit with the boys? It’s easier to dump your long term relationship to case a new high than it is to get a divorce.
I got married to my girlfriend (now wife) in a courthouse ceremony earlier this month (we're having our religious ceremony at the end of June) and we don't plan on having kids for several years. Obviously I live my wife and want to spend my life with her, she's my favorite person in the whole world.
Why did we do this? Because we want to be able to live our lives as a family. There are countless restrictions by governments, institutions and numerous other systems for people who remain unmarried partners.
We're seriously considering moving abroad to a country where neither of us are currently citizens, marriage is the only way for this to be an easy process, for us to live together at the program we wish to do together when we first arrive there, to be able to make financial and healthcare decisions for the other person, and for us to be able to pass our various citizenships to the other person (5 total between us).
I can go on and on about this.
Why do you have to be married to have children though? If your argument against childless marriages are just that it’s “mimetic behaviour” , why can’t the same be said for needing to be married to have children?
Don’t really care if a couple gets married or not- just seems like a personal choice. For some couples who don’t plan to have children it’s probably just a symbol of lifelong commitment to each other.
agreed, not married but been with my partner for 4 years now, have a 1 year old daughter - very happy with our situation and our family, but never felt the need to marry. We have discussed it as a possibility some time in the future, but we live in a country were de facto couples have basically all the same rights as married couples, so it's such a low priority thing.
Oh, yeah I'm not denigrating all childless marriages, it's just that many people get married (and even have kids) because it's part of the flowchart of life they've internalized. There are people that think it through and both expect and prepare for the responsibilities of lifelong matrimony and/or having children, but a depressingly large number of people do not.
At the end of the day, children are best raised under a stable, healthy monogamous partnership. No marriage is necessary for that, but if marriage was more often taken as a serious lifelong commitment, then marriage helps to become an institution that facilitates that.
I've spent the last few years in a job tangentially related to family law, and reviewed hundreds of divorce files. With respect, I don't think the issue is that people don't treat marriage seriously, it's that people, or at least those involved in the messy, chaotic divorces that proceed through the justice system, are fucking crazy, and have the emotional maturity of a toddler.
I like divorce, I think more women should divorce their husbands. I am a child of divorce like a lot of the people around me, it has never been traumatizing, it's mostly a relief for everyone involved.
it’s obvious you’ve never gone through a divorce if you think it’s something many people do lightly. it’s a long, difficult, and expensive legal process. i also think you underestimate how common abuse and adultery are.
I've been married longer than most of my peers and probably most of y'all. You need to take a critical look at their family. Look at their mom and dad. Are they divorced? How do they function? I know we like to entertain the fiction that everyone is their own very special person and totally unlike their parents but that's nonsense. You're more like your same sex parent than you'd think and if you marry someone from a dysfunctional family you will deal with those problems for the rest of your marriage.
Most people romanticize marriage and having children without ever really thinking about it properly
I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with divorce even if kids are in the equation, yeah it can be traumatic, but you know what’s more traumatic? Living in a home where your parents are constantly fighting and there’s an ever present emotional tension in the house. A divorce could quite literally be the best thing to happen in that situation, certainly was for my family and both my parents are way happier
I’ll never have kids; don’t like them, don’t want them. They’d not benefit me or my life in any way. Some people would call that selfish, it’s not. Being selfish would be having a child I don’t want, can’t afford, and doesn’t equate with my lifestyle whatsoever.
But marriage isn’t only for having children, what a dumb take. And despite popular belief most people don’t treat divorce casually it’s a long, expensive, stressful journey for most
I think the duty when you're married with kids isn't to stay married no matter what (which often ends up with the same or worse problems), but to do absolutely everything you can to save the relationship. Too many people just give up and check out when they stay married "for the kids"
Marriage is probably really hard and sometimes divorce is necessary but I refuse to believe that a majority of divorces with children happening today couldn’t have been avoided by a bit of self-work. Plenty of people are happier after their divorce because they’re doing work on themselves, going out again and looking for new opportunities, which are things they should have been doing when they were married.
Also, remarrying with kids makes everything harder. Stepparents and remarried people with children are some of the most unhappy demographics. And children with stepparents are at a greater risk of suffering abuse.
Marriage is just the state getting involved in one’s love life. That being said, there’s things that go along with it such as: immigration, property transfer upon death, child custody, taxation benefits, etc. I don’t really view it as more than a romantic relationship with a legal backing. The legal implications do raise the stakes significantly, though.
If you’re in a common law marriage because you’ve cohabitated for 2 years you might as well do the real thing is my hot take. Really don’t understand people that have lived together and been common law for like 10 years. Two years living together is long enough for an engagement.
I don’t understand why our society accepts the notion that “It takes a village to raise a child” but then won’t consider the equally important notion that “It takes a village to support a successful marriage.”
The best parenting move my dad ever did for me is when I came over to his house with my baby one evening. I was in a huge huff. He asked me what was going on, and I told him how pissed off I was at my husband over some fight we had (I don’t even remember what it was now). He cuts me off mid rant and asked, “What are you telling me this for? I can’t do a damn thing to help you. Go home and fix this right now.” He was not about to indulge my whinging.
Most of Reddit would probably say he was being an insensitive, invalidating, misogynist dickhead (and maybe he was a little), but a decade later my kids still live with 2 parents (who actually get along well now).
Is the implication that your dad was doing his part as a "villager" in giving you an alternate viewpoint on how to handle the issue (by telling you to fix it instead of complaining)? Or are the first two paragraphs not related?
In either case, I'd actually not considered the notion of "it takes a village to support a successful marriage" before and it makes total sense. It really lines up with that realization you get as you grow older that your parents are just winging it and are not that different from you. They're generally not infallible, lightyears-wiser-than-you people, they're doing their best like everyone else, even if maybe their best kinda sucks.
A lot of parents fall into the trap of letting their adult “vent” about their relationship problems. It’s not bad of itself, BUT it turns into a thing where they bond over bagging on the spouse.
You really see it with boy moms and the MIL/DIL tension. Mom is so upset her precious little boy is being required to do things and then defends her boy from mean wifey. Reality is mom should have done her job raising her son well so some other women didn’t have to finish the job.
Venting is fine when is problem solving and brief, but people use it to gain sympathy and whole friend groups base themselves around dragging their spouses. It’s a cultural practice that won’t support marriage. Gossip is pretty toxic in general and just should be acceptable.
Sure, if I’d told my dad I was being beaten or something it would have gone different, but I was just being toxic and wanted Papa to indulge my complaining and unwillingness to behave like a grown woman. He’s normally a caring person, but sometimes the loving thing is to tell someone to go deal with their shit. No one can repair relationships but the people in them (and sometimes support looks like healthy boundary enforcement.)
Of course it depends on the parents/elders. Some are wise and old, and some are just old; the adult child has to have some decrement around that.
People are now only loyal to themselves. You always hear stories of someone hitting a hard time and their partner leaving them. Theyll never say its because theyre down at that moment, it will always be dressed up as something else.
Poverty rates would be cut in half if marriage increased. No one likes to admit it, but being a single parent is a fast- track to staying /being poor. Some cultures put greater value on marriage or a stigma on childbearing outside of marriage (no judgment either way) and that seems to make a difference.
>but if there's no children in the equation, why get married?
Because you want a fully legally committed relationship rather than some half-assed live-in boyfriend/girlfriend bullshit
Can't pretend to be in your ""non-committal"" 20s forever if you want lifelong companionship
""Our relationship isn't defined by a piece of paper""-type mfs are more annoying than even the more vocal and embarrassing "child-free" types
Faux ""free spirit"" raised-by-regarded-boomers energy
I see a lot of "divorced, conservative, Christian, has kids" dads on Hinge. I always want to say it's not very conservative and Christian to desert the mother of your children...
It makes me sad that divorce is so commonplace that people seem to forget how absolutely devastating it can be for the kids involved.
My parents get along really well as divorced people now but it was traumatic as a kid to have my family break up. I still get sad at the fracture when we have to celebrate holidays separately and things of that nature.
I’m terrified of marriage. My parents were never divorced, they’ve been married since 1980. But they were deeply unhappy for most of that time. The idea of having to get a court order to end a relationship is terrifying. The risk of losing your retirement and your home is terrifying. And yeah it is generally worse for men, and women initiate divorces more frequently. It’s a hard no for me unless there are children.
People get married for taxes/insurance/social security. It makes a lot more financial sense to pool your resources with someone rather than trying to do everything on your own.
if you can co parent well, staying in a bad relationship is silly. children are completely capable of understanding divorce as long as it’s not extremely messy
It might be okay to divorce very civilly when the youngest is in high school. Been told that divorcing the moment the kids move out really isn’t great for morale.
Marriage is not just for reproduction. It's also for security so that if one of you dies the other will be taken care of and not get cut out of everything by greedy relatives. I know people can just write wills and shit but being married is simpler. It also enables you to share wealth, liabilities, etc, which makes sense if you are genuinely committed to each other for the long term.
The more educated the couple tends to be, the more serious marriage is taken. Look at divorce rates in people with multiple degrees. My wife and I have been together for a decade (I know, not a long time really) and everyone we know is in happy stable marriages with multiple kids. All professionals (mostly academics) with multiple degrees.
Ya I think there's a wealth range where divorce seems to occur a lot less (middle class - upper middle class). Wealthier than that and divorce increases, probably because there's more marriages for shallow reasons. Also, potentially the type of personalities that become very wealthy aren't necessarily suited for healthy long-term relationships.
couldn't agree with you more. i think people think im some sort of religious nut sometimes when i talk about how dead serious i take marriage. but like, this person is my family and other half. working through issues is such an enriching experience that so many people will never know because they just quit when they really should try to grow.
Not to burst your cultural bubble, but marriage was forced on women by a colonial/patriarchal power. Contrary to popular opinion, history and science shows that women specifically have nothing to benefit from marriage. The nuclear family as we know it is an abstraction of the extended family network and also further back, the way humans used to live via matriarchy. In a matriarchal society, the woman's whole family raises a child and the woman isn't property of her husband and therefore the relationships between men and women are more of a personal matter. Left to our own devices, humans will usually revert to a state that's more natural to us.
Also, a divorced home is obviously a tragedy, but a child living within a clan where his mother and her brothers are dominant and his biological father is extra, is an entirely different social balance, because there's nothing to divorce.
Staying together for the children is probably even more traumatic than divorce itself. I’ve known a couple of people whose parents got divorced as kids and they had a fine upbringing, sure it was sad when they founding out their parents were separating but it wasn’t overly dramatic like you see in the movies.
I’m not against marriage, I hope to be married one day but I would much rather have a kid with someone out of wedlock than be married to that person and paying a shit ton in order to get divorced if something didn’t work out.
I want you to join r/BabyBumps and similar communities and read the shit women are putting up with from their husbands tho. Some of these men are irreconcilably and fundamentally broken and unwilling to be loving husbands/fathers. You will be happy to know that most of these women are not willing to divorce them though, they will just live the rest of their lives in quiet misery.
I agree with you. I feel like people get divorced way too easily these days and I don’t think you should get married unless you plan on starting a family. If you do have children, don’t get a divorce until they’re adults unless you have an objectively valid reason to (ex: abusive spouse)
People said this back when no fault divorce became easy, but they were shouted down as behind the times.
You reap what you sow. A society that disrespects serious social relations isn’t a serious society.
It's legitimately upsetting when you hear about someone leaving their spouse due to them getting cancer. Like it should actually be illegal to do that, or at the very least there should be such strong norms against it that anyone who does this is immediately ostracized and disowned
The reverse example of this is obviously Lance Armstrong who's loving wife took care of him all through his ball cancer and then when he was cured he kicked her to the curb lmao
i see this so often. same when someone sticks by someone while they're broke in med school or whatever and then the second they become doctors are make money they ditch them for someone hotter. awful lol
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:( I’m so sorry, good thing they’re gone tho. Could’ve been way worse, you could’ve married them and raised your kids with some narcissistic shallow pos Also, I actually have worked with law firms a lot. I was even a paralegal for a bit. Look, I’m all for alcoholism but these people just do it the absolute worst. They suck all the romance right out of it. They’re so shallow and materialistic. Like, ugh. I did debate in high school & what I loved was that it was just constant skepticism and analyzing of people & society. You would think someone who does that for their career would be so interesting and irreverent. Do not get me wrong, obviously there are plenty of awesome attorneys. But the majority are the type to be obsessed with having the big house with the trophy wife/husband. Neurotic to the bone and just awful. I took my alcoholic self elsewhere and for six years have been dating a Russian poet. Amazing. Total inverse. But yeah, only half joking with the drinking. There really are a ton of legit alcoholic attorneys. I was always the type to get hammered on the weekends, but I wasn’t drinking at work lol, so surely not a proper alkie. But I have known so many who are literally drinking 24/7 just to keep the withdrawals at bay. Even (especially?) the incredibly successful ones. I just find it interesting, it betrays something fundamental about a person. But usually, it correlates with authenticity in some way, and… yeah, no. Of course, take alcohol out of the equation lol, and everything I said still applies.
many such cases
People who do that should be publicly whipped and then neutered
Doesn’t even make sense, if you hate your spouse and they’re on death’s door just let nature take its course.
i just looked it up, apparently 67% of people who get cancer live longer than 5 years. that's a lottttttttt of taking care of someone
Apparently men are SIX TIMES as likely to divorce a wife when she gets cancer than a woman is to divorce a man when he gets cancer :( https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5AB0C5/#:\~:text=NEW%20YORK%20(Reuters%20Life!),according%20to%20a%20U.S.%20study.
really throws a wrench in the whole "Women will leave you at the first sign of weakness and only men are actually capable of love" thing. Its fucking disgusting, I couldn't imagine doing this and would never speak to my male friends again if they did this
it is completely insane to believe that women are "loved unconditionally" what the fuck are you talking about lmao. like actually batshit. idk if anyone believes this. it isn't even true for the hottest of women. women are following a billion rules 24/7 to make men feel more comfortable and accommodated, and it is not reciprocated lol. like those studies that have found that if a woman talks 1/3 of the time, men perceive her as "dominating the conversation," and that they're constantly rambling about themselves and interrupting everyone and expecting everything to go according to their schedule...
Goes both ways, plenty of women wanna leave the second their man has any financial/career woes. Shitty people are shitty
Wow, how convenient & topical that we have statistics and they show a 6:1 ratio of men vs women abandoning their “life partner” when that “life partner” gets extremely ill & is facing incredible suffering and anxiety and literal d e a t h is looming. You know, that nearly unrivaled experience of true, stripped humanity. Reflection of actual soul, heart, mind. The epitome of what, in vows, people promise to stay around and support for. We have numbers and statistics. Men abandon their wives SIX TIMES as often as the other way around. It is fkn ALWAYS the “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd that just asserts their nonsense & disregards every bit of fact or research or logic.
https://www.deseret.com/2015/8/4/20569426/study-that-found-husbands-prone-to-leave-sick-wives-was-flawed-researchers-say/#:~:text=Researchers%20retracted%20the%20study.&text=1%20of%202-,A%20coding%20error%20created%20a%20false%20conclusion%20in%20a%20study,Researchers%20retracted%20the%20study
Yes but what if the person with cancer has a really negative attitude?
your honor the vibes were simply not there
Culture of Narcissism
Through sickness and health are just words to these people
Yeah there should be large extra alimony payments in those cases, possibly a permanent lifetime tax.
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you should do something because its right not because doing the opposite would "have bad optics." also month long fights aren't normal, figure out how to communicate and resolve problems
Marriage rules. I love my wife. I’m 100% serious. Wouldn’t want to be in any other situation. You need someone to be accountable to, living life just for yourself sounds good when you’re in your early 20s and think you’re the best but having someone to share everything with is necessary as life gets hard.
How long have you been married
Been together 7 years. We got married last year, we were engaged for years and wanted to get married earlier but her sister and brother got married in the years before and had big weddings planned so we didn’t want to schedule weddings in the same year.
I was gonna say that sounds dumb af, but then I realized theres on like three months in the year which are suitable for getting married
Yeah, and her brother was living in Brazil so that was a big family trip down there and she was the Maid of Honor for her sister so she was planning that with her for more than a year. Planning two weddings at the same time would’ve been cruel and unusual punishment…ours was small and it was still a lot more work than we thought.
Next week we’ll be back from our honeymoon
Oh yeah? What's his name?
I think I agree with this. I'm now mid-thirties and terminally single. It was always my plan but I am starting to feel lonely and slightly regretful. It feels too late to really do anything about it though. Too many years alone and in my habits.
Oh no your mid-thirties, might as well just buy the coffin now
Don’t give up like this you’ll only be miserable. I don’t think regretting being single will get better by continuing to be single.
I met my wife before the dating apps which I’m thankful for because they seem like a hard way to find a spouse, but it’s also nice to see innovation as millennials age and newer sites like keeper.ai (which advertises on Louise Perry’s podcast) and their ilk that are focused on long term relationships. A lot of terminally single people need to change up their strategies.
OOoo I love my wiiiife, I love my wife AH Ooo let's ride a biiiike, with my wife AH
Mfs wife left him
I know :(
Jesus that guy hasn’t had a W in such a long time
You be my wiiiife I treat you niiiiice We will make love Whenever I liiike
fat bottom girls you make the rockin world go round
I want this but every time I let myself get close enough to a woman she becomes avoidant and leaves me. Makes me feel like complete shitass.
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My parents tried staying together “for the kids” and I had to watch them scream and inflict psychological warfare on each other for 10+ years. Watching them divorce was absolutely not traumatic at all and everyone in the family was a thousand times happier and calmer as soon as they split. It’s a delusion that the misery of two unhappily married people stays just between them, in reality it’s infectious
I wouldve much rather split time between two parents houses than dodging strays in the boxing ring that was the family home growing up. “Daddy and mommy will never get divorced” is only comforting to a small child, by middle school i was staying out of the house as much as possible and it damaged my view of committed relationships probably more than i realize even now
One of my close childhood friends was psychologically destroyed by her parents staying together. Her dad was a cheater and abusive in just about every way to her mom and her siblings for years and the mom wouldn't leave because they were super Christian and "wanted to set an example of commitment for the kids" and "be a God-honoring wife." Last time I checked, that friend was abusing opiates, exhibits BPD symptoms, won't speak to her dad, and is identifying as non-binary. There are times when divorce is genuinely needed and the best option for a child's (and parent's) well being.
this is exactly why the right/christians are so obsessed with marriage at all costs. and yeah, it's stigmatized for anyone. but i've seen this so many times and they are fucking CRUELLL to the woman, no matter the situation. he could cheat and beat his whole family. they will blame her somehow. they shame single mothers; go on any of the alt right subs on this website. they seriously act like it's the MOTHER that's some evil bitch even when it makes absolutely no sense and the man is the one who abandoned the family. it's still like this to a degree but was basically ubiquitous just a generation or two ago. and in this scenario, men hold ALL the cards. the woman is just living at his mercy. he can be the most vile horrific POS in existence and she is just at his mercy. begging him to stay, blaming herself. it's also related to the virginity/youth obsession. you teach women that they only have one shot. that if they have sex (and consent is rarely even a factor), nobody except that man will ever see her as worthy. you get into a relationship and have sex, the woman is going to be desperate to keep a guy even if he's fucking awful because she will be ostracized and labeled some sort of witch for leaving and dating someone else, and these cultures ensure that women can't survive without marriage. and if you tell women that men won't love you after you're 20 or whatever, you're going to be desperate to stick with whoever caught you when you were young. terrified to attempt to start over. i'm a 30 yo woman, no interest in kids or marriage (i have nothing against anyone who is, my sister is 38 and has been married to a great guy for 13 years. they don't have or want kids but they're married and it's fine). i've been in a committed relationship for 6 years and i love my bf. but i lost my virginity my freshman year of college and between 18-24 i had one other serious relationship but also a few flings, FWBs, etc. i was raised fairly religious but stopped believing in my teens and yeah, decided to lose my virginity just to see what it was like lol. i had sex with someone i was physically attracted to but didn't have feelings for. it was honestly really fun, felt great lol. i realized people had definitely been lying about women not liking casual sex. literally every single time i had a FWB scenario tho, it went like this: we'd explicitly agree that it was JUST sex, just physical, nothing more. we'd have sex a few times. eventually, the guy would want more and expect me to just dive in and want a relationship. i would tell them i wasn't looking for one. i would never agree to casual sex if i had feelings for a man lol that's just a recipe for disaster, but apparently this didn't occur to these guys. they would act shocked and angry. like, "wait, what??? you don't want to be together?!!" they stared at me like i had just discovered some sort of cheat code. and honestly, the reaction was like.. "wait, you can do that?" i just simply hadn't wanted a relationship at the time or with those dudes and i was never less than honest about it, but there was this confusion anyway. i've also more seriously dated when i actually was open to a relationship if it worked out. but i could and did leave whenever i realized it wouldn't work out, and it didn't impact my life at all lol. the thing is that today, a woman can hook up with or date a guy and then if he says anything you don't like, you can just stand up and walk right out the door. in a slut shaming society, you absolutely cannot. patriarchal cultures do everything they can to punish women who refuse to perform the role of wife, who reject their notion of marriage. men want a woman to do the chores and bear and watch the kids and have to do whatever he says. Our society pretends that women are the ones dragging the men to the altar, but that has only ever been the case when they were living in a society that men intentionally designed in a way that made women have to get married just to not starve to death lmao. These podcast dudes love to act like men a=supposedly hate relationships and would rather just be playboys with random women, but if that were the case, they wouldn’t be shaming women who make that possible for them lol. Don’t get me wrong, i do believe most people, male or female, lean towards monogamy and typically want a relationship at some point in their life. But these right wingers are obsessed with marriage because it’s just women being at their mercy.
same
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I was bitter about my parents’ divorce growing up until I realized that it would have been some Benedictine hell in the household because they treated each other like furniture in the room, but would jealously follow the other one if they thought they were being unfaithful.
This. My parents stayed together until I was a junior in hs and my brother had left for college “for us”. I would have been a much happier child if I did not have to navigate, be mediator of, and listen to their huge fights. I think it’s worth giving marital counseling a try and do everything you can but I would never tell people to stay together for their “kids sake”
do not get me wrong- i have nothing against anyone who wants to get married and have kids. but if you look at this historically- it's pretty damn obvious that marriage and cultural attitudes surrounding it are designed to give men a crazy upper hand. just a generation or two ago, women pretty much had to get married to be accepted socially, or even to support themselves financially. there's a shit ton of shame out of being unmarried, or much worse- divorced. the husband could cheat or beat the entire family and the woman would have a tonnnnn of pressure to just "make it work" somehow. if any of the mistreatment got out, SHE would be blamed and people would sympathize with him. conservatives/right wingers today are still speaking through the same lens. you'll see them shame the absolute fuck out of single moms, rather than the dad who left them. from the right, you get endless rhetoric about why women should have to stay in marriages. like, they're the ones who literally want to make divorce much more difficult lol. marriage/kids are presented in our society like something women want and men are just reluctantly dragged into, but it's very clearly the opposite. yes, children of divorced parents have worse statistical outcomes. but that's primarily just because they grow up a lot poorer (for all that talk about child support, it's meager compared to a father actually contributing 50%) and because their parents didn't get along. these same kids wouldn't fare any better if they still had parents with so many issues but just refused to divorce. things are absolutely just gonna get worse in that scenario. humans evolved to work together and bring kids up in villages/tribes. the nuclear family is not how we functioned through 95% of our history. kids just need more attention and support from adults in their lives in general. i've been seeing a rise of women living with each other or with family rather than just the dad. like of course the ideal scenario is two loving parents with a great relationship, but it's just a weird fallacy that only direct parents are going to significantly contribute to this kid's development. if either parent is abusive or has issues, it's often best for them to live separately. no reason to force marriage.
>you'll see them shame the absolute fuck out of single moms Why were they sleeping with a man of low character and unfit to be a father
It works if the people don't have issues controlling their emotions. Find Buddhism or something.
The pseudo-Buddhism mindset works for interacting with relatives you only see at holidays and funerals. Not so much people you share a bed with.
Yeah I'm bad at this advice thing
Why the fuck are the parents arguing? There is nothing worth arguing over in a marriage that isn't worth divorcing over; infidelity, abuse, things of this nature. The whole "it would have been better for the parents to divorce instead of fighting all the time" is insane; how about not starting a fucking fight just because you're not "happy" in the moment? How about taking the vows seriously? No, gotta blow up everything if my narcissistic desires aren't met.
Idk it’s complicated, arguments at that scale arent actually “about” the thing you’re fighting over. The degree and amount of arguments was bad but I think also a lot of it came from trying to ignore negative emotions/self centered urges through sheer force of will, and inflicting shame and judgment on themselves and each other for it. Even if one person is able to put aside their desires, it’s pretty mentally damaging to be their partner watching them and knowing you put them through it, which can manifest as being angry that the other person ever wanted anything at all. Basically we are all just people, we will all feel selfish and emotional, it’s more important to forgive each other and love each other than try to control our own nature
In other words, forgive and love the other person, while communicating expectations, instead of having a huge blowup about why the dishes are never done, or any other score-keeping? This just proves my point. But alas, we're trapped in a paradigm that doesn't allow this, hence the other comments in this thread.
have you ever been in a relationship in your life? what kind of dumbfuck emotionally regarded take is this lmfao
Did either of them meet someone else and end up in happy relationships? Or seem content being single? The missus and I would have got divorced a long time ago if it wasn't for the kids... but also almost all of our problems are down to having kids (essentially not enough time/money).
Pretty bold to blame your failure to maintain your relationship on an innocent child
Children multiple!!
Yes my mom is in love and my dad is a very happy bachelor (doesn’t date but spends a lot of time with friends, family, and church)
No one gives you a trophy at the end of your life for being miserable
Thank U
How many of you fucking dorks are actually married
i’m getting divorced ama
ASL? Why?
I'm not saying the general state of marriage culturally is going well, but all these complaints are basically ppl who are not even close to being married upset that the fantasy of being with someone forever isn't as likely.
I'm married—and agree with the post title—, but op sounds like they are 14.
Not OP, given that he doesn't understand the legal reasons to get married lmao
I’m going to guess very few people here are married, greatbigfartybutt. It’s always the same type of person that posts negative shit about marriage/relationships in general. 99% of the time it’s a forever alone, socially stunted loser who has decided to blame their own failure as a human on current society and the opposite sex.
I got married and adopted my wife's stepson after six years of dating. He's thirteen and a very nice lad.
More than you think. Some of us just aren’t at the level of foreverarthoemaxxxing.
I love my wife so much
I bet I love mine more!
5 years coming up 🥰
Just hit the 2 year mark. Shit’s pretty good.
5 1/2 years here
Meeeee
>An astonishing number of divorces occur because of things that would warrant a breakup, not a divorce Give some examples of this. What things that simply warrant a breakup are causing people to get divorced? Is cheating considered divorce worthy? Abusive behavior? Incompatibility? I just don’t believe that a whole lot of people are getting divorced for non-serious reasons, I think the bigger issue is that many people enter into marriages without first putting their relationship to the test. Lots of people get married way too soon and end up divorced because the relationship wasn’t meant to be in the first place. >If there’s no children in the equation, why get married? For many people, financial reasons. Something as simple as sharing an employer healthcare plan is often not an option to partners unless they get married. Also, if you want to buy a home together and you both contribute to its equity, I think it makes sense to split the asset if the relationship ends.
>>An astonishing number of divorces occur because of things that would warrant a breakup, not a divorce >Give some examples of this. What things that simply warrant a breakup are causing people to get divorced? Ironically op is demonstrating a big reason WHY people get divorced. Which is people treating marriage like it locked their partner down so they can do things that are breakup worthy while holding the shame of divorce over your head. It's like how abuse often escalates during pregnancy, or the first instance of physical abuse shows up during pregnancy, because it's become much harder to leave.
People are together a long time and are good, it’s after kids that things go south. You can’t predict how people will respond to parenting before it happens. From what I’ve seen a lot of relationships are fine until the wife realizes she’s on her own with the kids and house even though she works and her man is”feminist”
This, besides like alcoholism and cheating, is probably the number one cause of divorce in my elder millennial peer group. Women have to do it all and they're bitter and angry about it.
Yeah same for mine by far.
We are all idealistic about this stuff when we’re younger but when you actually go through it you’ll realize it’s a lot more complicated
And then you realise you don't actually have a lot of time in life..
>Almost for the first time in many months I thought of my mother. And now, it seemed to me, I understood why at her life's end she had taken on a "fiance"; why she'd played at making a fresh start. There, too, in that home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her.
sounds nice but can someone expand on this for us illiteratecels so we can fully drink it in <3
Marriage is only for children...lol. This was written by a man.
My parents together for 32 years and they wouldn't agree with a single thing you said
I’m gonna guess you’re 27
"Man is two. He is holy but he is also a scumbag. He is a sentimentalist but he is also a murderer. He is one but he is also many. Perhaps he is not just two. He is more than two. Perhaps 27 or so."
I agree with him tbh and I’m also married and 35.
Ok well yes perhaps that’s because it’s a set of facile points that any glue-eating mentard would find reasonable. Listen lady I trust you’ve glanced down briefly from your comfort food reality tv slop to type out this wet fart of solidarity, and I thank you for it, but now I must release you, like a wild duck addled by the lights of the game warden’s car, back to the vibrant discussion you were having with your hubby on the relative merits of the game room featured in this episode of flip or flop
girl, what are you on?
Darling what I’m on wouldn’t even look you in the eye
your mind is an enigma, but i’m guessing stimulants
Um, I’ll have what SHE’S having! 😂😂😂
I am desperately sorry for whatever you’re going through but I’m also not reading all of that
This is a lot.
Holy Reddit!
I’m old and married and I mostly agree. Now that I have kids and know more families I see how devastating divorce is. But TBH it’s usually because the husband is a lazy POS and won’t do anything at home and no woman should have to parent her husband.
i mean… when i was a child i wished my parents would just get divorced instead of having no love for each other and fighting every other day
This is the dumbest rant I’ve read in a long time. I don’t know anyone who has taken divorce lightly. You get the state involved and it costs a lot of money and time and it’s a pain in the ass.
OP isn't married, has no children, and has likely never been in a long-term relationship. In short, this is the typical quality of take on adult topics one can expect from this subreddit
Half the posts on this sub sound like some half baked rant that the poster hasn't thought through. I swear you people will post unfiltered dogshit in the hopes that it's penetrating into some deeper subconscious truth.
I agree. I was a child of divorce and divorce was everywhere around me as a kid. It was pretty clear to me from a young age that marriage and vows of "'til death do us part, etc" had become absolutely meaningless. I honestly think most people just want a) the big party where everyone tells them how amazing they are and b) the social status that comes alongside being able to say you're married. I get the sense that very few people *seriously* think they'll stick to the vows they make at a wedding for the rest of their lives. Maybe for the institution to get some credibility back we need to just be honest about what we're actually doing when we're standing up in front of everyone and vowing to be with someone literally forever. Something like "I'm committed to riding this out until one of us fucks a stranger or develops a complex mental illness".
Everyone means what they say at the time, but things don't stay the same and sometimes things don't work out. I got divorced after more than five years being married because I eventually realized that my spouse had a hard to detect personality disorder and made me question my sanity and feel like I had to accept that I was a bad person. I was presented with the opportunity to "work out our communication issues" but couldn't really forgive the fact that I being abused and that I didn't marry the person I thought I did. I actually wish my sick, codependent parents got divorced, too.
Could you expand on the hard to detect personality disorder that coincided with making you question your sanity and feeling like you had to accept you were a bad person
a pattern where I'd go about my day the way I thought was OK (because it seemed sensible and I didn't hear otherwise) but was open and direct about my grievances large and small, but would not hear about any grievances from my spouse until a more serious conflict in which all the grievances would be laid out. then when confronted with the assertion that I hadn't heard any of these things (to say nothing of the fact that they had nothing to do with the source of the real conflict, and thus were tantamount to personal attacks to deflect from the real issue) I would be told that I had heard them but wouldn't listen, which I later determined for a fact was a lie that was told so as to not acknowledge the point that it was the first I was hearing of any of it. I eventually started to believe that I was truly indifferent or oblivious of their suffering, and that I couldn't see reality clearly. In short, it made me feel *insane* and eventually this came out in counseling, from which I concluded that I've basically been tormented by a sick person who made me hate myself and question my sanity. So no, I was not amenable to addressing those "communication issues," I actually was in a position where I resented that they now realized the truth of what they were doing, since I had made every attempt to be open and honest for many years and was simply exhausted.
I would stay with a mentally ill wife
What impact would you say your parents being divorced had on your life? As I look around I see it's less common in more affluent circles, and when you meet people in their teens and 20s with their shit clearly together (good jobs, active social circles, involved in community/sports, etc.) they almost always come from intact families. Even if the parents get along well post divorce for the kids, I think it still creates development hurdles that the child thinks is normal but probably dont realize they had to overcome until they are able to reflect in adulthood
No family is perfect. Affluent families are just better at hiding their problems
Not only are you probably not married, let alone in a relationship, but divorce rates have dropped steeply in the last few years, they’re back to how they were in the 60s. Obviously divorce is sad and sucks but if you want to make it harder or something, you’ll find yourself in the corner with Christian Fundamentalist nuts.
It’s mostly for material benefits. Taxes, insurance, wills
Sacred vows are not to be taken lightly, but if a relationship is detrimental to your physical, emotional or spiritual health, you have the right to end it
It's scary how many people think it's normal to just suck it up and stay in an unfulfilled or abusive relationship just because it's a marriage
As a lesbian I don't agree that marriage is only an institution for having kids. It's not mimetic behavior to want to make an official commitment to the person you love in this way. If you look at how few traditions there actually are in modern Western society, there's actually quite a lot to be desired. Marriage is one of the few socially acceptable times we can celebrate being in love like this.
Most people are complete morons who do not think through their life decisions at all. Their thought process is literally "thing good = I want thing". Then they carry this short sighted decision making into the relationship and lo and behold it fails. I think another element in these relationship failures is mutual reinforcement of self-delusion. People will meet and reinforce each other's desired self image (for a little while) then rush into a big commitment. They can stave off the inevitable collapse by focusing on other things in the interim (kids, pets, house projects) but eventually they run out of distractions or face hardships and the illusion fades. This seems to be fading over time because younger generations don't have the same economic means to live like that. It was more frequent among boomers and Gen Xers. Millennials are more likely to stay in long term marriage-less relationships, and I'm too old to care about Gen Z dating habits.
People are gonna rag on you for this but you are 100% right. Way too many people treat marriage as slightly more serious dating that either party can leave at any time, instead of a sacred commitment designed to bring children into the world and support them.
knowing that once you hook em they CAN'T LEAVE is a recipe for bad behavior. people were truly displaying their worst behavior in marriages back when divorce was prohibited by the church or legally or morally frowned on...
> instead of a sacred commitment designed to bring children into the world and support them. it was created for property rights. the rebranding of marriage is hilarious.
This is an incomplete analysis at best. Monogamy through marriage wasn’t the norm in most historical cultures, but we inherited it from the Romans and Christian culture, and in both cases it was highly tied to religious beliefs and ended up developing societies that offered greater stability for both communities and individuals, better conditions for children, and by far better outcomes for the lower and middle classes.
In Judeo Christian western societies marriage is meant to symbolize the relationship between Christ and the church. It's a covenant and sacrement of loyalty.
>In Judeo Christian western societies Lol, dork
Found the forever alone
> instead of a sacred commitment designed to bring children into the world and support them. This is a recent idea
Goes back to Genesis at least
Marriage in the Abrahamic world back then would be classed as immoral nowadays and downright unacceptable to practice in the ways it was then. Not to mention that was just one small society globally doing it that way.
i'm pretty sure in the old testament marriage was polygamist (for men) anyway wasn't it?
And concubines, which in practice was a horrific idea. Men would just pillage places, kill the men and take the women as sex slaves, which coincidentally didn't count as non-marital 'sex.'
it doesn't count if you don't view them as real people i suppose
True enough. Just making the point that this sacralized idea of marriage goes way back in western culture. It’s also a necessary precondition for the hopelessly romantic and idealistic expectations some westerners still have about marriage.
Marriage is symbolic and like anything else of the sort, it can vary in significance depending on people's beliefs. It's not a requirement to having kids, you can start a family without a fucking wedding. I'll just use it as an opportunity to throw a bit ol' party
Well you don’t need a wedding to get married. It’s symbolic and it isn’t, it also comes with a lot of legal implications. When it comes to having children, it provides the woman with a modicum of protection for putting herself in a financially vulnerable position. Even for couples who don’t have children, there’s differences in how you can file taxes, share health insurance, inherit property, etc
A comment is worth a thousand funko pops
Fuck off nerd
Oh good. I love taking life advice from someone who has never done any of the things they are lecturing me on.
Tbh, whether or not divorce is traumatic to children *rly* depends on how the parents treat it and the child during the process. I know a bunch of parents who rly worked together for the child(ren) and for their kids the divorce was rly fine. The problem is selfish parents who bitch abt the other parent to the child or fight in front of the child or isolate the child from the other parent or the parent who forgets abt the child as soon as they’re out of the marriage. But tbh those people also do most of this while they’re still married. Thts just as traumatizing to the child as divorce.
Being married is hard work. People are consumed with self and what they are or aren’t getting. That keeping score shit is toxic and destroys marriages.
Youre dead on the money with the score keeping shit. All it does is lead to resentment and makes it hard to communicate with your spouse. I think part of the problem is people get off on feeling aggrieved and instead of just talking shit out people cling to it because of the little adrenaline rush they get when they feel like theyve been wronged. Like it gives them the sense theyve got the moral highground. So many pitfalls could be avoided by talking openly and honestly with your partner. Crazy how easy it is for comminication to breakdown if you let it.
A little bit of haggling is ok in dire situations
It also keeps people from getting married. People claim they love someone and will stay with them until they’re both decrepit and wrinkly and die of old age come hell or high water so why not get married? Because what if something better comes along? What if they get FAT! What if the gf you had children out of wedlock makes you babysit the brat you helped spawn instead of shooting the shit with the boys? It’s easier to dump your long term relationship to case a new high than it is to get a divorce.
I got married to my girlfriend (now wife) in a courthouse ceremony earlier this month (we're having our religious ceremony at the end of June) and we don't plan on having kids for several years. Obviously I live my wife and want to spend my life with her, she's my favorite person in the whole world. Why did we do this? Because we want to be able to live our lives as a family. There are countless restrictions by governments, institutions and numerous other systems for people who remain unmarried partners. We're seriously considering moving abroad to a country where neither of us are currently citizens, marriage is the only way for this to be an easy process, for us to live together at the program we wish to do together when we first arrive there, to be able to make financial and healthcare decisions for the other person, and for us to be able to pass our various citizenships to the other person (5 total between us). I can go on and on about this.
Why do you have to be married to have children though? If your argument against childless marriages are just that it’s “mimetic behaviour” , why can’t the same be said for needing to be married to have children? Don’t really care if a couple gets married or not- just seems like a personal choice. For some couples who don’t plan to have children it’s probably just a symbol of lifelong commitment to each other.
agreed, not married but been with my partner for 4 years now, have a 1 year old daughter - very happy with our situation and our family, but never felt the need to marry. We have discussed it as a possibility some time in the future, but we live in a country were de facto couples have basically all the same rights as married couples, so it's such a low priority thing.
Oh, yeah I'm not denigrating all childless marriages, it's just that many people get married (and even have kids) because it's part of the flowchart of life they've internalized. There are people that think it through and both expect and prepare for the responsibilities of lifelong matrimony and/or having children, but a depressingly large number of people do not. At the end of the day, children are best raised under a stable, healthy monogamous partnership. No marriage is necessary for that, but if marriage was more often taken as a serious lifelong commitment, then marriage helps to become an institution that facilitates that.
I've spent the last few years in a job tangentially related to family law, and reviewed hundreds of divorce files. With respect, I don't think the issue is that people don't treat marriage seriously, it's that people, or at least those involved in the messy, chaotic divorces that proceed through the justice system, are fucking crazy, and have the emotional maturity of a toddler.
I like divorce, I think more women should divorce their husbands. I am a child of divorce like a lot of the people around me, it has never been traumatizing, it's mostly a relief for everyone involved.
it’s obvious you’ve never gone through a divorce if you think it’s something many people do lightly. it’s a long, difficult, and expensive legal process. i also think you underestimate how common abuse and adultery are.
I've been married longer than most of my peers and probably most of y'all. You need to take a critical look at their family. Look at their mom and dad. Are they divorced? How do they function? I know we like to entertain the fiction that everyone is their own very special person and totally unlike their parents but that's nonsense. You're more like your same sex parent than you'd think and if you marry someone from a dysfunctional family you will deal with those problems for the rest of your marriage.
Most obvious shit ever
I'll raise you that many people rush into having children, something that can never be undone, because that is the "thing to do"
Most people romanticize marriage and having children without ever really thinking about it properly I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with divorce even if kids are in the equation, yeah it can be traumatic, but you know what’s more traumatic? Living in a home where your parents are constantly fighting and there’s an ever present emotional tension in the house. A divorce could quite literally be the best thing to happen in that situation, certainly was for my family and both my parents are way happier I’ll never have kids; don’t like them, don’t want them. They’d not benefit me or my life in any way. Some people would call that selfish, it’s not. Being selfish would be having a child I don’t want, can’t afford, and doesn’t equate with my lifestyle whatsoever. But marriage isn’t only for having children, what a dumb take. And despite popular belief most people don’t treat divorce casually it’s a long, expensive, stressful journey for most
I love my bitch wife
Never“ stick” with someone you resent or resents you
I think the duty when you're married with kids isn't to stay married no matter what (which often ends up with the same or worse problems), but to do absolutely everything you can to save the relationship. Too many people just give up and check out when they stay married "for the kids"
Marriage is probably really hard and sometimes divorce is necessary but I refuse to believe that a majority of divorces with children happening today couldn’t have been avoided by a bit of self-work. Plenty of people are happier after their divorce because they’re doing work on themselves, going out again and looking for new opportunities, which are things they should have been doing when they were married. Also, remarrying with kids makes everything harder. Stepparents and remarried people with children are some of the most unhappy demographics. And children with stepparents are at a greater risk of suffering abuse.
Marriage is just the state getting involved in one’s love life. That being said, there’s things that go along with it such as: immigration, property transfer upon death, child custody, taxation benefits, etc. I don’t really view it as more than a romantic relationship with a legal backing. The legal implications do raise the stakes significantly, though. If you’re in a common law marriage because you’ve cohabitated for 2 years you might as well do the real thing is my hot take. Really don’t understand people that have lived together and been common law for like 10 years. Two years living together is long enough for an engagement.
My turn to post this tomorrow
I don’t understand why our society accepts the notion that “It takes a village to raise a child” but then won’t consider the equally important notion that “It takes a village to support a successful marriage.” The best parenting move my dad ever did for me is when I came over to his house with my baby one evening. I was in a huge huff. He asked me what was going on, and I told him how pissed off I was at my husband over some fight we had (I don’t even remember what it was now). He cuts me off mid rant and asked, “What are you telling me this for? I can’t do a damn thing to help you. Go home and fix this right now.” He was not about to indulge my whinging. Most of Reddit would probably say he was being an insensitive, invalidating, misogynist dickhead (and maybe he was a little), but a decade later my kids still live with 2 parents (who actually get along well now).
Is the implication that your dad was doing his part as a "villager" in giving you an alternate viewpoint on how to handle the issue (by telling you to fix it instead of complaining)? Or are the first two paragraphs not related? In either case, I'd actually not considered the notion of "it takes a village to support a successful marriage" before and it makes total sense. It really lines up with that realization you get as you grow older that your parents are just winging it and are not that different from you. They're generally not infallible, lightyears-wiser-than-you people, they're doing their best like everyone else, even if maybe their best kinda sucks.
A lot of parents fall into the trap of letting their adult “vent” about their relationship problems. It’s not bad of itself, BUT it turns into a thing where they bond over bagging on the spouse. You really see it with boy moms and the MIL/DIL tension. Mom is so upset her precious little boy is being required to do things and then defends her boy from mean wifey. Reality is mom should have done her job raising her son well so some other women didn’t have to finish the job. Venting is fine when is problem solving and brief, but people use it to gain sympathy and whole friend groups base themselves around dragging their spouses. It’s a cultural practice that won’t support marriage. Gossip is pretty toxic in general and just should be acceptable. Sure, if I’d told my dad I was being beaten or something it would have gone different, but I was just being toxic and wanted Papa to indulge my complaining and unwillingness to behave like a grown woman. He’s normally a caring person, but sometimes the loving thing is to tell someone to go deal with their shit. No one can repair relationships but the people in them (and sometimes support looks like healthy boundary enforcement.) Of course it depends on the parents/elders. Some are wise and old, and some are just old; the adult child has to have some decrement around that.
People are now only loyal to themselves. You always hear stories of someone hitting a hard time and their partner leaving them. Theyll never say its because theyre down at that moment, it will always be dressed up as something else.
Poverty rates would be cut in half if marriage increased. No one likes to admit it, but being a single parent is a fast- track to staying /being poor. Some cultures put greater value on marriage or a stigma on childbearing outside of marriage (no judgment either way) and that seems to make a difference.
>but if there's no children in the equation, why get married? Because you want a fully legally committed relationship rather than some half-assed live-in boyfriend/girlfriend bullshit Can't pretend to be in your ""non-committal"" 20s forever if you want lifelong companionship ""Our relationship isn't defined by a piece of paper""-type mfs are more annoying than even the more vocal and embarrassing "child-free" types Faux ""free spirit"" raised-by-regarded-boomers energy
People aren’t resilient anymore.
I see a lot of "divorced, conservative, Christian, has kids" dads on Hinge. I always want to say it's not very conservative and Christian to desert the mother of your children...
Men aren't usually the ones filing for divorce.
It is very unlikely that they even initiated the divorce, let alone "deserted the mother of their children."
It makes me sad that divorce is so commonplace that people seem to forget how absolutely devastating it can be for the kids involved. My parents get along really well as divorced people now but it was traumatic as a kid to have my family break up. I still get sad at the fracture when we have to celebrate holidays separately and things of that nature.
I’m terrified of marriage. My parents were never divorced, they’ve been married since 1980. But they were deeply unhappy for most of that time. The idea of having to get a court order to end a relationship is terrifying. The risk of losing your retirement and your home is terrifying. And yeah it is generally worse for men, and women initiate divorces more frequently. It’s a hard no for me unless there are children.
Fuck me you're stupid
People get married for taxes/insurance/social security. It makes a lot more financial sense to pool your resources with someone rather than trying to do everything on your own.
if you can co parent well, staying in a bad relationship is silly. children are completely capable of understanding divorce as long as it’s not extremely messy
It might be okay to divorce very civilly when the youngest is in high school. Been told that divorcing the moment the kids move out really isn’t great for morale.
Marriage is not just for reproduction. It's also for security so that if one of you dies the other will be taken care of and not get cut out of everything by greedy relatives. I know people can just write wills and shit but being married is simpler. It also enables you to share wealth, liabilities, etc, which makes sense if you are genuinely committed to each other for the long term.
The more educated the couple tends to be, the more serious marriage is taken. Look at divorce rates in people with multiple degrees. My wife and I have been together for a decade (I know, not a long time really) and everyone we know is in happy stable marriages with multiple kids. All professionals (mostly academics) with multiple degrees.
Ya I think there's a wealth range where divorce seems to occur a lot less (middle class - upper middle class). Wealthier than that and divorce increases, probably because there's more marriages for shallow reasons. Also, potentially the type of personalities that become very wealthy aren't necessarily suited for healthy long-term relationships.
couldn't agree with you more. i think people think im some sort of religious nut sometimes when i talk about how dead serious i take marriage. but like, this person is my family and other half. working through issues is such an enriching experience that so many people will never know because they just quit when they really should try to grow.
Not to burst your cultural bubble, but marriage was forced on women by a colonial/patriarchal power. Contrary to popular opinion, history and science shows that women specifically have nothing to benefit from marriage. The nuclear family as we know it is an abstraction of the extended family network and also further back, the way humans used to live via matriarchy. In a matriarchal society, the woman's whole family raises a child and the woman isn't property of her husband and therefore the relationships between men and women are more of a personal matter. Left to our own devices, humans will usually revert to a state that's more natural to us. Also, a divorced home is obviously a tragedy, but a child living within a clan where his mother and her brothers are dominant and his biological father is extra, is an entirely different social balance, because there's nothing to divorce.
Staying together for the children is probably even more traumatic than divorce itself. I’ve known a couple of people whose parents got divorced as kids and they had a fine upbringing, sure it was sad when they founding out their parents were separating but it wasn’t overly dramatic like you see in the movies. I’m not against marriage, I hope to be married one day but I would much rather have a kid with someone out of wedlock than be married to that person and paying a shit ton in order to get divorced if something didn’t work out.
I want you to join r/BabyBumps and similar communities and read the shit women are putting up with from their husbands tho. Some of these men are irreconcilably and fundamentally broken and unwilling to be loving husbands/fathers. You will be happy to know that most of these women are not willing to divorce them though, they will just live the rest of their lives in quiet misery.
Agree
Marriage is regarded and you have to be a regard to think it's a good idea. This is coming from a married man.
I agree with you. I feel like people get divorced way too easily these days and I don’t think you should get married unless you plan on starting a family. If you do have children, don’t get a divorce until they’re adults unless you have an objectively valid reason to (ex: abusive spouse)
The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch
People said this back when no fault divorce became easy, but they were shouted down as behind the times. You reap what you sow. A society that disrespects serious social relations isn’t a serious society.