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As advanced countries' systems for marriage and child-rearing continue to fail, there is a constant demand for cope. What if we learned to love being single? Wh

by dash2 3y ago

As advanced countries' systems for marriage and child-rearing continue to fail, there is a constant demand for cope. What if we learned to love being single? What if we substitute friendship for marriage? 64 ways to enjoy retirement on your own! This is the collective version of listening to an alcoholic explain why he doesn't have a problem.

XorNot 3y ago
How exactly is "marriage" failing? This notion that two people being in a long term relationship can somehow suffer systemic failure or attack is bizzare. No objection re: children though. We've done an absolute number there via cost of living.
- scarmig 3y ago
  How is it bizarre? It seems the same category as saying friendship is failing, which also is a reasonable claim; see the entire bowling alone thesis. I'd probably group them all under the umbrella of social connections failing, which I'd consider one of the biggest issues of US society today.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >social connections failing I have to wonder if people, and newer generations in particular, just fucking suck at socializing. Humanity has very literally never had it easier to communicate and socialize, and yet somehow the vast majority consider themselves isolated.
    - nightowl_games 3y ago
      Communicate? Yes. Socialize? No. It's easier to socialize when you are physically beside someone. There are less kids playing in the street. They are no arcades. As a parent you must bring your child to other children. You must encourage or mandate extracurricular activities. We are not a society where children are naturally surrounded by other children in their 0-4 years. We are not a society where adults are naturally surrounded by similiar adults outside of the in office work space. Its a matter of proximity and what is the default state.
      - artificialLimbs 3y ago
        >> We are not a society where children are naturally surrounded by other children in their 0-4 years. That's shocking to hear. We live out in the sticks, about 25 minutes from the nearest town (of ~10k people) and we make sure our kids get some social time a couple of times every week. From homeschool coop groups to random meet ups/activities planned by parents via Facebook to farmer's markets, library/museum trips, churches, parks, visiting neighbors... seems like my kids are always doing something which seems to help them socialize. I think it would be sad if they just stayed home all the time. I suppose being in a traditional marriage where I work and the wife raises the kids helps contribute to this being able to happen.
        vel0city 3y ago
        > From homeschool coop groups to random meet ups/activities planned by parents via Facebook to farmer's markets, library/museum trips, churches, parks, visiting neighbors All of these other than visiting neighbors are exactly the things nightowl means when saying they're not naturally surrounded. You're having to arrange the homeschool co-op, you're arranging playdates on Facebook, you're taking them to the famers markets and museum trips. You're facilitating them going to these places, probably by way of car. Comparatively, growing up most of my childhood days other than school and one weekly extracurricular most of my time was just naturally playing with the kids in the neighborhood. We'd all just play in each other's yards, we would just go to the playground ourselves, etc. These days you would have CPS called.
    - scarmig 3y ago
      The question then becomes why; it's not some random fluctuation where every single person happened to fall on the left side of the spectrum of socialization. Have to look at systemic issues for that.
    - nathan_compton 3y ago
      "people just suck at socializing" is no explanation at all. It is just an observation of a state of affairs. In fact, I don't think people are any worse at socializing than we have been in the past. What has changed is that our entire social lives are mediated by parasitic technologies meant to maximize engagement and our entire economic lives are mediated by a market ideology which only incentivizes maximum flexibility in order to meet our economic needs. Social phenomena do not materialize out of thin air, nor are the cause of evil wizards plotting somewhere. It is, as the saying goes, the economy, stupid.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    It's bizarre because it's distinctly not happening. The number of married couples in the US has been trending up since the 1960s [1] and only very recently has shown a plateau. Which is to say their doesn't seem to be any indication that "marriage is failing" i.e. there are less people in marriages. It's also notable that the rate of cohabitation has tripled over the last 20 years[2] (included because it's a worthwhile proxy for things which are long term relationships but might not be recognized as marriages). Where I can point to fertility rates across the Western world falling to below replacement and say "yeah we've got a problem", the notable thing is that it seems thoroughly uncorrelated with people being in long term relationships. People might not have time for friends, but there are more committed relationships around then at any time in history - by the numbers. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183663/number-of-married-couples-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183663/number-of-married... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/unmarried-partners-more-diverse-than-20-years-ago.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/unmarried-par...
    - pokepim 3y ago
      [dead]
    - shubb 3y ago
      Just want to point out that with population growth, your stats show that over the past 20 years married couples per thousand population has gone from 202/1000 in 2001 to 185/1000 in 2022 which is a 10% decline.
      - XorNot 3y ago
        Noticed that which is why I looked up the cohabitation data, since I'm not sure how "marriage" is being defined - over that same period cohabitation rates tripled. I suspect that accounts for a decent chunk of people not getting married, but still being in long-term relationships unless there's some evidence these are substantially different types of relationships (i.e. not intimate).
      - scarmig 3y ago
        > married couples per thousand population has gone from 202/1000 in 2001 to 185/1000 in 2022 which is a 10% decline. This probably understates things, if anything; as you get older, you're more likely to get married, and America's population has been aging.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- skipants 3y ago
  I agree with you. I suppose if peoples' goals don't include marriage and they are happy then what exactly is the problem? Saying these people fail because they don't get married feels like imposing a certain viewpoint on others. I'd say it's a problem if they want to get married and can't find a partner. Incels are a problem. People who are happy with their life aren't.
dangwhy 3y ago
maybe they are failing for good reason? I am in split worlds of being from traditional society and adopting a western outlook. I constantly feel the push and pull between both worlds.
- rgbgraph 3y ago
  Yes; and unfortunately there has yet to be a critical look at this phenomenon with the same skill as Quigley or Toynbee (at the very least, none that I can find).
thomastjeffery 3y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: There is more than one kind of relationship! It's exhausting to constantly hear about romantic commitment as if it's the barometer for all relationships. That's absurd! Did it truly never cross your mind that a person can have more than one meaningful relationship in their lives? No wonder people are so lonely! You don't need one or the other: you can participate in a close friendship and casual sex. You can have several of each. No relationship must last forever, either; or be started at the same time. Relationship isn't what we are, it's what we do.
- SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
  It’s a barometer not because it’s the only important kind of relationship but because it’s the easiest to measure. Close friendships are dropping too: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/11/friendships-less-is-now-more/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/11/friendships-less-is-n...
- willis936 3y ago
  That sounds pragmatic, and it is. A partner is also pragmatic. Why dismiss one while promoting the other? Someone can have good friends and also someone they spend everyday with for 50 years.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    I don't think it's either-or. If you're not a friend to your life partner, it's not going to be a very rewarding partnership in the long run.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    You can spend every day for 50 years with someone whom you relate with deeply and meaningfully. That doesn't have to be the same person every day. It can be 50 different people. It can even be your self.
    - willis936 3y ago
      I'm going to have to agree with GP on this one: this line of thinking is an excuse. 50 different people with is not a replacement for a partner who is wholly committed to you and you are wholly committed to them. You will never be able to give or receive the same level kind of love and security with a network of that size.
fknorangesite 3y ago
> As advanced countries' systems for marriage and child-rearing continue to fail US divorce rates are at a 50-year low.
- OJFord 3y ago
  That's not a complete argument though (not to say the conclusion's wrong, I have no idea) - what's happened to marriage, non-divorce separation, death, and birth rates?
- volkl48 3y ago
  Marriage rates are also there, so that statistic is not really that surprising. Most of the people who would have been getting divorced in the 1970s, today look like a relationship that fails after a few months or years, before reaching the point where they would have decided to get married.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  US marriage rates are at a 120 year low.
mschuster91 3y ago
> As advanced countries' systems for marriage and child-rearing continue to fail, there is a constant demand for cope. Make childcare not a choice between living in poverty and not, and people will have children again. Many of my generation including myself can't afford children despite us wanting to. The worst problem is obviously housing costs and cost of living in general, coupled with wage stagnation. We don't want women to be stay-at-home mothers for good reasons, but society as it is hasn't caught up with that - not to mention it's financially impossible. Our parents generally could afford that, as even simple factory jobs paid enough for a good home (that they owned and could build equity for themselves by mortgage, no less) and the mother to stay at home to actually raise the children. The US also has the problems of healthcare cost and a rise of anti-abortion laws that place the life of a fetus before the life of the mother, I can completely understand anyone not wishing to risk death from childbirth.
- ido 3y ago
  The thing is that even countries with excellent social safety nets and childcare benefits (like northern and western europe) have seen their birth rate fall in the last 50 years. In fact the most common correlation is that as countries get richer & more prosperous, birthrates drop.
  - rakah 3y ago
    50 years also roughly aligns with the development of chemical birth control.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > We don't want women to be stay-at-home mothers for good reasons, but society as it is hasn't caught up with that I don't think we should want women to be anything in particular. Saying they shouldn't be stay at home mums is wrong, just as saying that men shouldn't be stay-at-home dads is wrong, if they can afford to be. And society has caught up in the sense that house prices are driven up by bids from two-person incomes.
- adamrezich 3y ago
pixl97 3y ago
>. What if we learned to love being single? Now, you may not need to be married as per how it's defined by the state, but there are some number of benefits especially related to health when it comes to long term partnership. Trying to say being single is fine, then dying a few years younger may not be the best way to evangelize your idealism.
- cowuser666 3y ago
  Seems like you're making assumptions about the way the causation flows here.
- volkl48 3y ago
  There's 2-3+ groups of unpartnered people though. - Wanted to be partnered - unsuccessful at finding that long-term partnership. - People who didn't want to be partnered - and there's likely subgroups here: - People who aren't desiring of much social contact at all. - People who are highly social but not desiring that long-term romantic partnership, and have a lot of relationships of varying degrees of attachment throughout their lives and strong social ties to others - including close friendships. ------ Most literature I've seen on the "unmarried people die younger" doesn't really seem to look at anything beyond maybe splitting the never married | divorced | widowed groups. It can be a true statement for that as a whole but not necessarily true for the "unmarried by choice with an extensive network of close friendships + social connections" group being suggested by the article and by most "learn to love being single" people. They likely don't look a whole lot like the lives of the "unsuccessful at finding a partner" or "dislike social contact" groups. ------ To counter-argue myself though - the average number of close friends + social connections has been shrinking overall in the population. I don't know if it's great advice for the average person, since they're objectively doing worse at building those possible alternative connections than prior generations. And I'm not sure it's because they're too laser-focused on a partnership.
jollyllama 3y ago
What if fixing friendship fixed marriage as well in an indirect way that is difficult to predict or accept now?
archagon 3y ago
I think it’s deeply sad that people expect to be consumed by a marriage as a culmination of their social life, rather than having it be just one of multiple co-equal familial relationships. (Close friends, relatives.) Framing this as “cope” (why the Reddit language?) just spits in the face of friendship.
015a 3y ago
Is it the collective version of listening to an alcoholic explain why he doesn't have a problem, or the version of an air-breather explaining why breathing air isn't a problem? Humans are social creatures. Meaningful interaction is literally as important as eating, drinking water, and breathing. We don't say we're addicted to those things; those things are just necessary for life (well, I suppose with eating there's shades of gray). The concept of "exclusively pairing off with a romantic partner" is one of the most pervasive and universal patterns across all of humanity. Any culture. Any location. Any time. There are exceptions (polyamory shows up every once in a while), but they're vanishingly rare compared to the norm. Its not just cultural; its absolutely biological. Some would say its related to reproductive drive, but what's fascinating to me is: wouldn't one male / multiple female polyamory maximally optimize reproductive outcomes? I'm content in saying: I don't know why, but pairing is absolutely a biological need. Loving yourself is important and great. But that's different from "loving being single". There's a long list of human needs, and there's really strong arguments that trying to shed them will just force you to look to fill that void elsewhere, sometimes worse (the most compelling one I've heard is how religion fills an amorphous-need-for-spirituality in humans, and without it we've turned to spiritualizing things like tech companies / cars / capitalism in general).
- cowuser666 3y ago
  Biological necessities for life != institutions that a majority of people participate in within most historical/cultural contexts. There have always been adults who never paired off into romantic partnerships. Not so with breathing.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Most of our problems are too-many-people problems. So I think your metaphor is upside down. It's the sober guy trying to convince the alcoholics that partying sober is actually fine.
xracy 3y ago
I'm in a relationship now, but I spent a vast majority of my life single. And the thing I learned from being single, was how to be okay with myself and love myself in spite of the world thinking I was "broken" for being alone. I feel strongly that this independence has fostered a confidence and understanding in all of my relationships that makes me a better person. And I feel this way because I see people all the time who are the opposite of this. They have to be in a relationship. The moment someone is out of a relationship, they have no coping mechanism for it, until they get into their next relationship. They take no time to process it. They are dependent on the relationship, and can't function without it. I have seen this from men and women. These people disappear when they're in a relationship. Like, I have friends who are only my friend when they're single. That's not healthy. That's people conflating sex with being loved/important, (and I can absolutely confirm I've seen people do that as part of this). If you don't know what loving/being loved is, it's real easy to assume that whatever you experience that's closest to it is what it is. There's a Daniel Sloss quote that "If you only love yourself 20% someone can come along and love you 40%, and you'll think 'WOW that's so much that you love me', but it's literally less than half of you that you love. Your self esteem is just so low that you're letting people love you less than you should." (Paraphrased). That's what we risk in people not learning to be okay with themselves as a single people.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  I feel like I'm living in the other side of that coin. I have a great relationship with my self. I'm not enough to fulfill all of my needs. I'm great at platonic intimacy. I'm super empathetic, and can (and do) get into deeply meaningful friendships very quickly. Sex isn't in this picture. If I honestly wanted to, I have no doubt that I could find a serious committed romantic relationship. I don't want to. I know that because I know myself. What I'm good at has solved many, but unfortunately not all, of my problems.
  - xracy 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm not saying it's impossible. But I think it's a lot harder to learn to love yourself if you're always depending on external validation. I have long questioned the "deeply meaningful friendships very quickly" thing. A while back I set up a model of relationships that's something like a probability cloud. When you first meet someone they have whatever your standard probability cloud is of actions they might take. The only way someone can really hurt you is by acting outside of that probability cloud. As you get to know someone the list of actions that you expect in their probability cloud changes pretty dramatically. I have a 'friend' who isn't a close friend, but I was friends with both him and his partner. He cheated on his partner (probably, I don't know for sure, but it's sorta moot, and I believe that he did). And I remained friends with both of them, in spite of feeling like this was a really shitty thing for him to do, because at the end of the day it wasn't really outside of what I expected for him. He didn't wrong me, because he consistently acted in the way I expected him to. That said, I also don't have a deep friendship with him, because at a certain point I realized that it wasn't the kind of friendship I would want with him.
paulddraper 3y ago
Someday, maybe we'll figure out that maybe age-old institutions -- marriages, families, churches, communities, nations -- have irreplaceable roles for the well-being of humanity.
- umeshunni 3y ago
  agree with most of those, but nations are a relatively new concept. Till 100-200 years ago in most regions, people had little loyalty to the concept of a nation. They were more loyal to their tribe, religion etc
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    More like 300-400 years, but sure. You can see it as the modern extension of the tribe (lingual dialect, culture, religion), but over a greater area due to homogenization. (Though perhaps we have gone too far in that respect...the USA in particular is a very large diverse country.)
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  We'll probably collapse first.
rayiner 3y ago
The question is--will the market self-correct, or will it stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent?

by dash2 3y ago

XorNot 3y ago

How exactly is "marriage" failing? This notion that two people being in a long term relationship can somehow suffer systemic failure or attack is bizzare. No objection re: children though. We've done an absolute number there via cost of living.

scarmig 3y ago
How is it bizarre? It seems the same category as saying friendship is failing, which also is a reasonable claim; see the entire bowling alone thesis. I'd probably group them all under the umbrella of social connections failing, which I'd consider one of the biggest issues of US society today.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >social connections failing I have to wonder if people, and newer generations in particular, just fucking suck at socializing. Humanity has very literally never had it easier to communicate and socialize, and yet somehow the vast majority consider themselves isolated.
  - nightowl_games 3y ago
    Communicate? Yes. Socialize? No. It's easier to socialize when you are physically beside someone. There are less kids playing in the street. They are no arcades. As a parent you must bring your child to other children. You must encourage or mandate extracurricular activities. We are not a society where children are naturally surrounded by other children in their 0-4 years. We are not a society where adults are naturally surrounded by similiar adults outside of the in office work space. Its a matter of proximity and what is the default state.
    - artificialLimbs 3y ago
      >> We are not a society where children are naturally surrounded by other children in their 0-4 years. That's shocking to hear. We live out in the sticks, about 25 minutes from the nearest town (of ~10k people) and we make sure our kids get some social time a couple of times every week. From homeschool coop groups to random meet ups/activities planned by parents via Facebook to farmer's markets, library/museum trips, churches, parks, visiting neighbors... seems like my kids are always doing something which seems to help them socialize. I think it would be sad if they just stayed home all the time. I suppose being in a traditional marriage where I work and the wife raises the kids helps contribute to this being able to happen.
      - vel0city 3y ago
        > From homeschool coop groups to random meet ups/activities planned by parents via Facebook to farmer's markets, library/museum trips, churches, parks, visiting neighbors All of these other than visiting neighbors are exactly the things nightowl means when saying they're not naturally surrounded. You're having to arrange the homeschool co-op, you're arranging playdates on Facebook, you're taking them to the famers markets and museum trips. You're facilitating them going to these places, probably by way of car. Comparatively, growing up most of my childhood days other than school and one weekly extracurricular most of my time was just naturally playing with the kids in the neighborhood. We'd all just play in each other's yards, we would just go to the playground ourselves, etc. These days you would have CPS called.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    The question then becomes why; it's not some random fluctuation where every single person happened to fall on the left side of the spectrum of socialization. Have to look at systemic issues for that.
  - nathan_compton 3y ago
    "people just suck at socializing" is no explanation at all. It is just an observation of a state of affairs. In fact, I don't think people are any worse at socializing than we have been in the past. What has changed is that our entire social lives are mediated by parasitic technologies meant to maximize engagement and our entire economic lives are mediated by a market ideology which only incentivizes maximum flexibility in order to meet our economic needs. Social phenomena do not materialize out of thin air, nor are the cause of evil wizards plotting somewhere. It is, as the saying goes, the economy, stupid.
- XorNot 3y ago
  It's bizarre because it's distinctly not happening. The number of married couples in the US has been trending up since the 1960s [1] and only very recently has shown a plateau. Which is to say their doesn't seem to be any indication that "marriage is failing" i.e. there are less people in marriages. It's also notable that the rate of cohabitation has tripled over the last 20 years[2] (included because it's a worthwhile proxy for things which are long term relationships but might not be recognized as marriages). Where I can point to fertility rates across the Western world falling to below replacement and say "yeah we've got a problem", the notable thing is that it seems thoroughly uncorrelated with people being in long term relationships. People might not have time for friends, but there are more committed relationships around then at any time in history - by the numbers. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183663/number-of-married-couples-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183663/number-of-married... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/unmarried-partners-more-diverse-than-20-years-ago.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/unmarried-par...
  - pokepim 3y ago
    [dead]
  - shubb 3y ago
    Just want to point out that with population growth, your stats show that over the past 20 years married couples per thousand population has gone from 202/1000 in 2001 to 185/1000 in 2022 which is a 10% decline.
    - XorNot 3y ago
      Noticed that which is why I looked up the cohabitation data, since I'm not sure how "marriage" is being defined - over that same period cohabitation rates tripled. I suspect that accounts for a decent chunk of people not getting married, but still being in long-term relationships unless there's some evidence these are substantially different types of relationships (i.e. not intimate).
    - scarmig 3y ago
      > married couples per thousand population has gone from 202/1000 in 2001 to 185/1000 in 2022 which is a 10% decline. This probably understates things, if anything; as you get older, you're more likely to get married, and America's population has been aging.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
skipants 3y ago
I agree with you. I suppose if peoples' goals don't include marriage and they are happy then what exactly is the problem? Saying these people fail because they don't get married feels like imposing a certain viewpoint on others. I'd say it's a problem if they want to get married and can't find a partner. Incels are a problem. People who are happy with their life aren't.

dangwhy 3y ago

maybe they are failing for good reason? I am in split worlds of being from traditional society and adopting a western outlook. I constantly feel the push and pull between both worlds.

rgbgraph 3y ago
Yes; and unfortunately there has yet to be a critical look at this phenomenon with the same skill as Quigley or Toynbee (at the very least, none that I can find).

thomastjeffery 3y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again: There is more than one kind of relationship! It's exhausting to constantly hear about romantic commitment as if it's the barometer for all relationships. That's absurd! Did it truly never cross your mind that a person can have more than one meaningful relationship in their lives? No wonder people are so lonely! You don't need one or the other: you can participate in a close friendship and casual sex. You can have several of each. No relationship must last forever, either; or be started at the same time. Relationship isn't what we are, it's what we do.

SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
It’s a barometer not because it’s the only important kind of relationship but because it’s the easiest to measure. Close friendships are dropping too: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/11/friendships-less-is-now-more/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/11/friendships-less-is-n...
willis936 3y ago
That sounds pragmatic, and it is. A partner is also pragmatic. Why dismiss one while promoting the other? Someone can have good friends and also someone they spend everyday with for 50 years.
- uoaei 3y ago
  I don't think it's either-or. If you're not a friend to your life partner, it's not going to be a very rewarding partnership in the long run.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  You can spend every day for 50 years with someone whom you relate with deeply and meaningfully. That doesn't have to be the same person every day. It can be 50 different people. It can even be your self.
  - willis936 3y ago
    I'm going to have to agree with GP on this one: this line of thinking is an excuse. 50 different people with is not a replacement for a partner who is wholly committed to you and you are wholly committed to them. You will never be able to give or receive the same level kind of love and security with a network of that size.

fknorangesite 3y ago

> As advanced countries' systems for marriage and child-rearing continue to fail US divorce rates are at a 50-year low.

OJFord 3y ago
That's not a complete argument though (not to say the conclusion's wrong, I have no idea) - what's happened to marriage, non-divorce separation, death, and birth rates?
volkl48 3y ago
Marriage rates are also there, so that statistic is not really that surprising. Most of the people who would have been getting divorced in the 1970s, today look like a relationship that fails after a few months or years, before reaching the point where they would have decided to get married.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
US marriage rates are at a 120 year low.

mschuster91 3y ago

> As advanced countries' systems for marriage and child-rearing continue to fail, there is a constant demand for cope. Make childcare not a choice between living in poverty and not, and people will have children again. Many of my generation including myself can't afford children despite us wanting to. The worst problem is obviously housing costs and cost of living in general, coupled with wage stagnation. We don't want women to be stay-at-home mothers for good reasons, but society as it is hasn't caught up with that - not to mention it's financially impossible. Our parents generally could afford that, as even simple factory jobs paid enough for a good home (that they owned and could build equity for themselves by mortgage, no less) and the mother to stay at home to actually raise the children. The US also has the problems of healthcare cost and a rise of anti-abortion laws that place the life of a fetus before the life of the mother, I can completely understand anyone not wishing to risk death from childbirth.

ido 3y ago
The thing is that even countries with excellent social safety nets and childcare benefits (like northern and western europe) have seen their birth rate fall in the last 50 years. In fact the most common correlation is that as countries get richer & more prosperous, birthrates drop.
- rakah 3y ago
  50 years also roughly aligns with the development of chemical birth control.
robertlagrant 3y ago
> We don't want women to be stay-at-home mothers for good reasons, but society as it is hasn't caught up with that I don't think we should want women to be anything in particular. Saying they shouldn't be stay at home mums is wrong, just as saying that men shouldn't be stay-at-home dads is wrong, if they can afford to be. And society has caught up in the sense that house prices are driven up by bids from two-person incomes.
adamrezich 3y ago

pixl97 3y ago

>. What if we learned to love being single? Now, you may not need to be married as per how it's defined by the state, but there are some number of benefits especially related to health when it comes to long term partnership. Trying to say being single is fine, then dying a few years younger may not be the best way to evangelize your idealism.

cowuser666 3y ago
Seems like you're making assumptions about the way the causation flows here.
volkl48 3y ago
There's 2-3+ groups of unpartnered people though. - Wanted to be partnered - unsuccessful at finding that long-term partnership. - People who didn't want to be partnered - and there's likely subgroups here: - People who aren't desiring of much social contact at all. - People who are highly social but not desiring that long-term romantic partnership, and have a lot of relationships of varying degrees of attachment throughout their lives and strong social ties to others - including close friendships. ------ Most literature I've seen on the "unmarried people die younger" doesn't really seem to look at anything beyond maybe splitting the never married | divorced | widowed groups. It can be a true statement for that as a whole but not necessarily true for the "unmarried by choice with an extensive network of close friendships + social connections" group being suggested by the article and by most "learn to love being single" people. They likely don't look a whole lot like the lives of the "unsuccessful at finding a partner" or "dislike social contact" groups. ------ To counter-argue myself though - the average number of close friends + social connections has been shrinking overall in the population. I don't know if it's great advice for the average person, since they're objectively doing worse at building those possible alternative connections than prior generations. And I'm not sure it's because they're too laser-focused on a partnership.

jollyllama 3y ago

What if fixing friendship fixed marriage as well in an indirect way that is difficult to predict or accept now?

archagon 3y ago

I think it’s deeply sad that people expect to be consumed by a marriage as a culmination of their social life, rather than having it be just one of multiple co-equal familial relationships. (Close friends, relatives.) Framing this as “cope” (why the Reddit language?) just spits in the face of friendship.

015a 3y ago

Is it the collective version of listening to an alcoholic explain why he doesn't have a problem, or the version of an air-breather explaining why breathing air isn't a problem? Humans are social creatures. Meaningful interaction is literally as important as eating, drinking water, and breathing. We don't say we're addicted to those things; those things are just necessary for life (well, I suppose with eating there's shades of gray). The concept of "exclusively pairing off with a romantic partner" is one of the most pervasive and universal patterns across all of humanity. Any culture. Any location. Any time. There are exceptions (polyamory shows up every once in a while), but they're vanishingly rare compared to the norm. Its not just cultural; its absolutely biological. Some would say its related to reproductive drive, but what's fascinating to me is: wouldn't one male / multiple female polyamory maximally optimize reproductive outcomes? I'm content in saying: I don't know why, but pairing is absolutely a biological need. Loving yourself is important and great. But that's different from "loving being single". There's a long list of human needs, and there's really strong arguments that trying to shed them will just force you to look to fill that void elsewhere, sometimes worse (the most compelling one I've heard is how religion fills an amorphous-need-for-spirituality in humans, and without it we've turned to spiritualizing things like tech companies / cars / capitalism in general).

cowuser666 3y ago
Biological necessities for life != institutions that a majority of people participate in within most historical/cultural contexts. There have always been adults who never paired off into romantic partnerships. Not so with breathing.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

Most of our problems are too-many-people problems. So I think your metaphor is upside down. It's the sober guy trying to convince the alcoholics that partying sober is actually fine.

xracy 3y ago

I'm in a relationship now, but I spent a vast majority of my life single. And the thing I learned from being single, was how to be okay with myself and love myself in spite of the world thinking I was "broken" for being alone. I feel strongly that this independence has fostered a confidence and understanding in all of my relationships that makes me a better person. And I feel this way because I see people all the time who are the opposite of this. They have to be in a relationship. The moment someone is out of a relationship, they have no coping mechanism for it, until they get into their next relationship. They take no time to process it. They are dependent on the relationship, and can't function without it. I have seen this from men and women. These people disappear when they're in a relationship. Like, I have friends who are only my friend when they're single. That's not healthy. That's people conflating sex with being loved/important, (and I can absolutely confirm I've seen people do that as part of this). If you don't know what loving/being loved is, it's real easy to assume that whatever you experience that's closest to it is what it is. There's a Daniel Sloss quote that "If you only love yourself 20% someone can come along and love you 40%, and you'll think 'WOW that's so much that you love me', but it's literally less than half of you that you love. Your self esteem is just so low that you're letting people love you less than you should." (Paraphrased). That's what we risk in people not learning to be okay with themselves as a single people.

thomastjeffery 3y ago
I feel like I'm living in the other side of that coin. I have a great relationship with my self. I'm not enough to fulfill all of my needs. I'm great at platonic intimacy. I'm super empathetic, and can (and do) get into deeply meaningful friendships very quickly. Sex isn't in this picture. If I honestly wanted to, I have no doubt that I could find a serious committed romantic relationship. I don't want to. I know that because I know myself. What I'm good at has solved many, but unfortunately not all, of my problems.
- xracy 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm not saying it's impossible. But I think it's a lot harder to learn to love yourself if you're always depending on external validation. I have long questioned the "deeply meaningful friendships very quickly" thing. A while back I set up a model of relationships that's something like a probability cloud. When you first meet someone they have whatever your standard probability cloud is of actions they might take. The only way someone can really hurt you is by acting outside of that probability cloud. As you get to know someone the list of actions that you expect in their probability cloud changes pretty dramatically. I have a 'friend' who isn't a close friend, but I was friends with both him and his partner. He cheated on his partner (probably, I don't know for sure, but it's sorta moot, and I believe that he did). And I remained friends with both of them, in spite of feeling like this was a really shitty thing for him to do, because at the end of the day it wasn't really outside of what I expected for him. He didn't wrong me, because he consistently acted in the way I expected him to. That said, I also don't have a deep friendship with him, because at a certain point I realized that it wasn't the kind of friendship I would want with him.

paulddraper 3y ago

Someday, maybe we'll figure out that maybe age-old institutions -- marriages, families, churches, communities, nations -- have irreplaceable roles for the well-being of humanity.

umeshunni 3y ago
agree with most of those, but nations are a relatively new concept. Till 100-200 years ago in most regions, people had little loyalty to the concept of a nation. They were more loyal to their tribe, religion etc
- paulddraper 3y ago
  More like 300-400 years, but sure. You can see it as the modern extension of the tribe (lingual dialect, culture, religion), but over a greater area due to homogenization. (Though perhaps we have gone too far in that respect...the USA in particular is a very large diverse country.)
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
We'll probably collapse first.

rayiner 3y ago

The question is--will the market self-correct, or will it stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent?