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What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

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Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#71

Post by nathan_compton »

Dalewyn wrote: post #49
scarmig wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

"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.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#72

Post by nathan_compton »

mydriasis wrote: post #28

I don't like anyone as much as I like my wife, straight up. It's incredible to have a partner that acts as my actual 'other half'. We are two sides of the same coin. It's an amazing thing. I can't, nor do I want to, get that close to other people.

I don't really get this. I'm a 'wife guy' too, but I have no fear of the idea of having other close relationships. Obviously there are elements of my relationship with my wife that are exclusive to that arrangement, but almost by definition, having strong social ties to more people cannot hurt you.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#73

Post by LatteLazy »

In my experience this is a matter of entropy: if you have a partner at home, you are guaranteed support, so you neglect your friends. Your friends then need to either pick up the slack, or the group fails. So they pick up the slack until they have other options (like a partner at home). Then everyone stops bothering. Then people act surprised. I've seen this happen multiple times now. No one makes an explicit decision to kill the friendship. They just stop maintaining it. Another way to look at this is the tragedy of the commons or "privatising the profit, socialising the losses".

It's the same as a lot of social things, from public transport to pensions, from relationships to workers unions. People often end up with suboptimal outcomes by optimising for themselves blindly. And no one person can stop it.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#74

Post by rgbgraph »

dangwhy wrote: post #30
dash2 wrote: post #23

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.

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.

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).

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#75

Post by [deleted] »

jvm___ wrote: post #54
mydriasis wrote: post #28

I don't like anyone as much as I like my wife, straight up. It's incredible to have a partner that acts as my actual 'other half'. We are two sides of the same coin. It's an amazing thing. I can't, nor do I want to, get that close to other people.

That doesn't always happen though. I feel the most lonely when I'm alone with my wife. We can only have a back and forth conversation on topics that interest her, or the day to day of the house/kids, anything outside those things is just never discussed or is a one-way conversation that just dies. I was friendless and grew up with the same 15 boys until the end of highschool, never fit in. Married the first girl who…

[deleted]

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#76

Post by ff317 »

stef25 wrote: post #50
sf4lifer wrote: post #7

Kids are the center of your life. They are a lot easier (especially during the younger ages) to raise with a committed partner.

Ha ... recently single with two young kids. I find it actually easier to raise them (admittedly only every other week). No more arguments about "who's turn is it to put them in bed", "why do I always have to do this" etc ... They may seem like simple questions that can easily be answered but it's really quite complex: "Had a tough day at work, could you do it?", which leads to score keeping and different views on wha…

As they age, you're going to find a whole different level of arguing about how to raise kids on an every-other-week rotation with conflicting influences/decisions. Trust me, I've seen it. It can work, but you're gonna need to put in some work on the relationship with the other parent to get through it and find decent compromises.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#77

Post by nemo44x »

avar wrote: post #60
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional Catholicism. “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it.” Doesn’t take more than a minute of reflection to figure out why we interpret it this way. Edit @avar to your question ("posting too fast"): https://gist.github.com/gjsman/d928b0db53cc2a4bacf37d4e45543...

I'm an atheist, but this is an honest question: does it? My understanding of catholic doctrine is that Jesus was part of the holy Trinity and knew it before he sacrificed himself. Therefore when he sacrificed himself for humanity he wasn't in the sort of personal danger or at risk of eternal damnation that a mere mortal in his shoes would be. I've always understood that as God making a grand gesture of some sort, not…

Catholics don't really take the bible as literal as many protestant religions do. Some fundamentalist Catholics do but the Catholic Church (capital 'C') does not and has not for a very long time. Pope Benedict XVI in 1993 when he was a Cardinal:

“Fundamentalist interpretation starts from the principle that the Bible, being the word of God, inspired and free from error, should be read and interpreted literally in all its details. But by "literal interpretation" it understands a naively literalist interpretation, one, that is to say, which excludes every effort at understanding the Bible that takes account of its historical origins and development… The fundamentalist approach is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life. It can deceive these people, offering them interpretations that are pious but illusory, instead of telling them that the Bible does not necessarily contain an immediate answer to each and every problem… Fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide. It injects into life a false certitude, for it unwittingly confuses the divine substance of the biblical message with what are in fact its human limitations.”

So because of that it isn't really necessary to logically evaluate it unless you want to poke holes in a Protestant and Fundamentalists cheery picked parts. I want to be careful to not run into a "No true Scottsman" thing here, but Catholics by and large have tried to adapt the Bible to modern problems, not dissimilar to Reform Judaism.

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#78

Post by seydor »

mydriasis wrote: post #28

I don't like anyone as much as I like my wife, straight up. It's incredible to have a partner that acts as my actual 'other half'. We are two sides of the same coin. It's an amazing thing. I can't, nor do I want to, get that close to other people.

Most people don't know otherwise. For much of history family was secondary to public life

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#79

Post by parpfish »

asah wrote: post #37
ragnot wrote: post #6

Honestly, if my wife said I wasn't the number one person in her life then I would find that pretty disrespectful. She is my number one after all. It seems like we've failed a whole generation of adults with good examples of what a relationship should be like.

The 1970s/GenX/latchkey have entered the chat.

as an 80s kid raised by a helicopter stay-at-home parent, i've always been deeply envious of the independence afforded to latchkey kids

Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

#80

Post by nathan_compton »

ragnot wrote: post #6

Honestly, if my wife said I wasn't the number one person in her life then I would find that pretty disrespectful. She is my number one after all. It seems like we've failed a whole generation of adults with good examples of what a relationship should be like.

I feel like this is demented, frankly. If you loved your wife, then you would only want her to flourish. It seems necessarily disordered to think about your expectations of your partner in terms of "I should be her top priority." You should expect that she treats you with respect, obviously, and that might mean different things for different people, but I think centering the idea of "she must see me as Numero Uno" is a bad way to think about a lifelong relationship.

A healthy relationship is one where each partner is dedicated selflessly to the flourishing of the other partner.

In any case, the idea of a "number one person" is also really two dimensional and limiting.

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