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I’m having a hard time squaring these high (70+) satisfaction rates with what I’ve seen in the long-term relationships of people I’ve known well enough to know
by qgin 5y ago
I’m having a hard time squaring these high (70+) satisfaction rates with what I’ve seen in the long-term relationships of people I’ve known well enough to know if they were happy or not. It’s always seemed to me that the happy ones were a fortunate minority.
Maybe I’m wrong and I’ve just lived in a bubble of unhappy people? Maybe a study measuring “satisfaction” is actually capturing something other than happiness?
- gameswithgo 5y agoI see a mix of elderly people who are very happy and people who are bitter and actively do not want to hear any good news about the world because they would rather be mad. And America right now really has a lot of sophisticated people working hard to take advantage of the latter, amplifying it and making it worse. It makes me really sad and angry, and I think about strategies to avoid it happening to me as I get older. Anyone got good ideas?
- draw_down 5y ago
- francisofascii 5y agoI think those couples who are always in a satisfied state are a minority. As the article mentions, most relationships have ups and downs between satisfied and unsatisfied. So many with the people you know, you only are hearing about the unsatisfied times. So when I see those rates, I think is is those couples are in a "satisfied" zone 70% of the time.
- qgin 5y agoThat could be it. Also I think maybe "satisfied" is way of saying "I think this is worth it". People continue on in bad situations all the time because they think -- all things considered -- it's worth it compared to the alternatives they imagine.
- toyg 5y agoSome people might appear unhappy when actually they are just comfortably set in an adversarial dynamic. Two of my grandparents would often seem to be arguing with raised voices when in public, being serious all the time, with all the classic corollary of old-school wife/husband remarks, but behind the scenes they were an absolute unit - they never had any affairs (unlike their own parents...), and after he passed away she immediately fell into a long depression, barely a year later she was gone too. They would rarely admit to others that they were happy, but in an anonymized "only God can see you" survey, they would have probably been honest enough to tick the very-happy boxes.
- watwut 5y ago> they never had any affairs (unlike their own parents...), and after he passed away she immediately fell into a long depression, barely a year later she was gone too To be honest, that is rather low bar for happy relationship. It think that maybe you should believe more what they said about their own happiness then project happiness onto them when no one is looking.
- toyg 5y agoI think maybe you should refrain from passing judgement on people you've never even met. The fucking internet, man, sometimes...