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You usually post very insightful comments. I'd be interested to hear what you think about the institution of marriage.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
The piece under discussion here -- his first big depressive episode was apparently triggered by a breakup in his mid-twenties where they had discussed marriage and it was a long-distance relationship where they were living about three hours apart. Historically, there were a lot of baked in assumptions about people marrying young, about the wife being primarily responsible for the women's work and the husband being primarily responsible for earning a living (and even that it would be a man and a woman -- we now let same-sex couples get married, at least in some parts of the world). And there is just this huge amount of unspoken assumptions there that you can no longer rely on and it creates friction in relationships. Men who think that the key to everything is career success find that women don't necessarily see it that way anymore and women who want careers often don't want to pick up after their man and do all the cooking, etc. That competes with their time and energy and the ability to learn other skill sets. So we have inherited a huge amount of assumptions about how life works and how relationships work and those things aren't necessarily true anymore. To the degree that we imagine they are, we are being set up for failure. This goes double when the two people in question are not seeing eye-to-eye on that. Our entire employment structure is also rooted in this idea that for "serious" jobs, we will be hiring a man with a wife and kids at home and his paycheck and benefits need to provide for a family and his ability to work and focus on the job will be helped by the fact that his wife is handling a lot of tasks like cooking and cleaning that he doesn't ever have to think about or put time and energy into. And we aren't thinking about the fact this doesn't work as an assumption for how to design our jobs anymore and we aren't thinking about how this impacts individual lives. Men who kind of implicitly assume that they need to be "good providers" and then all will be well and some woman will do the cooking and what not are getting the rug pulled out from under them when that same woman says "You are not worth putting up with." because she has career dreams of her own and no longer absolutely must marry to have much hope of some kind of reasonable comfort in life. Marriage used to be something people did as basic survival and we kind of gritted our teeth and put up with each other even when it was really hard. And we are much more free to walk away than we used to be and then we aren't really thinking through a great many things that this change impacts, from the societal level on down to the individual level.
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  Thanks! I agree that the roles in marriage or other long term relationships are less clear than they have been in the past. Overall that's probably a good thing in terms of creating the potential for each person to self-actualize, but as you point out, exactly what role each person expects to have in a marriage is not known without a very, very thorough discussion about each aspect. What do you think about Suzanne Venker?
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    What do you think about Suzanne Venker? I've never heard of her before. So I don't have any opinions about her.
- JetAlone 5y ago
  Indeed, the shifts in society took away the hope of marriage from most of us. It used to be that to not get married, something had to go unusually wrong with your life. Nowadays, to get married, something has to go unusually right with your life. Because the vain "proto-marriage" of my youth collapsed like the author's, I am cursed to sojourn the earth alone, at least for a time. The bitter taste dissipates when I know that a real wedding hall is set for me. Better still, it may not even be too late to find its typological implementation on the earth. So I'll keep dunetreading.

The piece under discussion here -- his first big depressive episode was apparently triggered by a breakup in his mid-twenties where they had discussed marriage and it was a long-distance relationship where they were living about three hours apart. Historically, there were a lot of baked in assumptions about people marrying young, about the wife being primarily responsible for the women's work and the husband being primarily responsible for earning a living (and even that it would be a man and a woman -- we now let same-sex couples get married, at least in some parts of the world). And there is just this huge amount of unspoken assumptions there that you can no longer rely on and it creates friction in relationships. Men who think that the key to everything is career success find that women don't necessarily see it that way anymore and women who want careers often don't want to pick up after their man and do all the cooking, etc. That competes with their time and energy and the ability to learn other skill sets. So we have inherited a huge amount of assumptions about how life works and how relationships work and those things aren't necessarily true anymore. To the degree that we imagine they are, we are being set up for failure. This goes double when the two people in question are not seeing eye-to-eye on that. Our entire employment structure is also rooted in this idea that for "serious" jobs, we will be hiring a man with a wife and kids at home and his paycheck and benefits need to provide for a family and his ability to work and focus on the job will be helped by the fact that his wife is handling a lot of tasks like cooking and cleaning that he doesn't ever have to think about or put time and energy into. And we aren't thinking about the fact this doesn't work as an assumption for how to design our jobs anymore and we aren't thinking about how this impacts individual lives. Men who kind of implicitly assume that they need to be "good providers" and then all will be well and some woman will do the cooking and what not are getting the rug pulled out from under them when that same woman says "You are not worth putting up with." because she has career dreams of her own and no longer absolutely must marry to have much hope of some kind of reasonable comfort in life. Marriage used to be something people did as basic survival and we kind of gritted our teeth and put up with each other even when it was really hard. And we are much more free to walk away than we used to be and then we aren't really thinking through a great many things that this change impacts, from the societal level on down to the individual level.

epicureanideal 5y ago
Thanks! I agree that the roles in marriage or other long term relationships are less clear than they have been in the past. Overall that's probably a good thing in terms of creating the potential for each person to self-actualize, but as you point out, exactly what role each person expects to have in a marriage is not known without a very, very thorough discussion about each aspect. What do you think about Suzanne Venker?
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  What do you think about Suzanne Venker? I've never heard of her before. So I don't have any opinions about her.
JetAlone 5y ago
Indeed, the shifts in society took away the hope of marriage from most of us. It used to be that to not get married, something had to go unusually wrong with your life. Nowadays, to get married, something has to go unusually right with your life. Because the vain "proto-marriage" of my youth collapsed like the author's, I am cursed to sojourn the earth alone, at least for a time. The bitter taste dissipates when I know that a real wedding hall is set for me. Better still, it may not even be too late to find its typological implementation on the earth. So I'll keep dunetreading.