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We expect more from our partners than ever before—we want them to be our true love, our best friend, our coparenting partner, and the person we combine our fina
by varjag 5y ago
We expect more from our partners than ever before—we want them to be our true love, our best friend, our coparenting partner, and the person we combine our finances with.
Curious what is their idea of 'before'. Unless they mean pre-industrial societies.
- smackeyacky 5y agoTrue love is a very modern concept that used to be restricted to fairytales.
- varjag 5y agoFairytales are also pre-industrial. My point is exactly that it's not quite appstore-modern.
- eternalban 5y agoQuite a few of these are in fact cautionary tales or allegories. (Obsessive romantic) Love in many cultures was considered a sort of madness. Only the elite subset of society had time for romantic amusements in pre-industrial societies. A lot of these issues (and preoccupations with romance) go out of the window when people are struggling to survive, as most did in pre-industrial societies.
- arunprakash01 5y ago[flagged]
- smackeyacky 5y agoThe modern conception of true love is very modern. Nobles used to marry to accumulate property and fairy tales were little more than the glammed up version the hoi polloi consumed. Like the Kardashian thing, tabloids etc where the story is a fabrication. I think what gets lost is that long term relationships have been more utilitarian than anyone likes to admit. Who doesn't love a love story, or want to feel the rush of first attraction? The problem is that it isn't enough to build a life out of. You need a practical, working partnership to raise a family and app dating isn't geared to that goal. The apps give a monstrous illusion there might be something better on the next swipe, and it just isn't true.
- varjag 5y agoLook, just saying that "true love, nuclear family" concept is definitely not a new trend. It was a baseline expectation in the society of your grand-grandparents even if reality couldn't match that quite often. One probably have to go back to 17th century for this expectation to become entirely alien again. The times of arranged marriages and honor killings. However there hardly was a dating scene in modern sense to think of.
- smeej 5y agoThis sounds like what people in my culture have held forth as the ideal for "marriage" for centuries. Sure, there were times before that where it was much more utilitarian, but anywhere you see talk of "two becoming one flesh" is at least as intense as what's mentioned in this quotation!
- dotancohen 5y agoMore like pre-agriculture. There is evidence of legally-recognized union between man and woman going back over 5000 years, right at the beginnings of both history and of law. And there is strong case for socially-recognized exclusivity of partners dating much further back, right up until the first seasonally-permanent settlements which to our knowledge coincide with agriculture.