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What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

randalolson.com

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Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#51

Post by flavor8 »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #37

He didn't address couples counseling and therapy as factors in keeping marriages going. There's always been marriage counseling; today it's a professional therapist you hire, but in the old days it was your priest/rabbi/minister, or perhaps an elder in your household, who advised you on how to get along. Today in First World industrial societies, couples just try to wing it, moving out from the parents' house as soon…

> My amateur theory is that fundamentally speaking a couple is supposed to have kids. It's what we were designed to do.

That's certainly what evolution has favored (by definition) in terms of primal drives, but that doesn't mean that living life without them is in some sense "empty". Evolution isn't innately wise; e.g. we have very common diseases like cancers, dementia etc in the population because they tend to show up late in life, after the next generation has already been produced. So, just because some particular behavior or attribute is in our genes does not make it "good", it just means that we are programmed in that way due to some set of evolutionary-historical circumstances.

And on the flip side to your point, if you have kids as a way to fill a void in your life, you may find yourself having an existential crisis when they move out and go to college.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#52

Post by ArtDev »

john_b wrote: post #46
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #37

He didn't address couples counseling and therapy as factors in keeping marriages going. There's always been marriage counseling; today it's a professional therapist you hire, but in the old days it was your priest/rabbi/minister, or perhaps an elder in your household, who advised you on how to get along. Today in First World industrial societies, couples just try to wing it, moving out from the parents' house as soon…

> "Kids are inconvenient and expensive and people mistakenly feel they'll have a happier life without them, but in a certain sense it's an empty life." s/kids/startups/ to see how ridiculous this sounds. Any kind of presumption that other people should make certain major life decisions a certain way just because you feel that will make them happy sounds extremely presumptuous.

Selfish jerks can benefit the most from having kids :) Unless your legit nuts or completely broke, it is a good thing for all.

Having kids is like going to college. Its expensive, difficult and challenging.. but in the end, you are sad to think of what would have happened if you had not taken the plunge.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#53

Post by thyrsus »

I didn't see this addressed in the comments on Part 1: how is it possible that expensive marriages had more effect on women's divorce rate than it had on men's?

For multiple reasons it is not plausible that a strong correlation within lesbian weddings skewed the results. Was the data self-reported, and this reflects imperfect memory of the expense? Were they only looking at the expense from that partner's side of the family?

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#54

Post by tjradcliffe »

ArtDev wrote: post #48

For a more in depth analysis check out "The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work", a book based on decades of research at the Seattle "Love Lab". Dr Gottman has written other books, but this is the book on marriage research. http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Principles-Making-Marriage-Work/...

Gottman is selling just-so stories. His "predictors" aren't actually predictors, but classifiers.

In machine learning terms, he gets his amazing results ("can predict which couples will stay together in just five minutes!") only on the training set, which as anyone with machine learning experience knows, is trivially easy: you can get 91% accuracy on training data consisting of random numbers in many cases.

Reference: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/03/can_y...

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#55

Post by skywhopper »

These statistics are interesting, but they are useless for individuals looking for a stable marriage, or couples attempting to foster one. Put simply, the headline is wrong. It implies this is information you can use to make a stable marriage. But all it provides is a summary of traits of existing stable marriages. Knowing those facts is unlikely to contribute to a stable marriage.

In fact, if anyone took them seriously as a guide to how to deal with their own marriage situation, they would find these facts only add stress and redirect blame in useless directions:

* "We have to have a kid, otherwise the statistics say we'll get divorced!!"

* "I guess I should have known better than to marry someone without a Master's degree."

Do those attitudes seem like a recipe for success?

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#56

Post by dasil003 »

john_b wrote: post #46
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #37

He didn't address couples counseling and therapy as factors in keeping marriages going. There's always been marriage counseling; today it's a professional therapist you hire, but in the old days it was your priest/rabbi/minister, or perhaps an elder in your household, who advised you on how to get along. Today in First World industrial societies, couples just try to wing it, moving out from the parents' house as soon…

> "Kids are inconvenient and expensive and people mistakenly feel they'll have a happier life without them, but in a certain sense it's an empty life." s/kids/startups/ to see how ridiculous this sounds. Any kind of presumption that other people should make certain major life decisions a certain way just because you feel that will make them happy sounds extremely presumptuous.

Sure it's presumptuous, but not as presumptuous as your substitution. Kids are a biological imperative, startups are not, so it's not quite that ridiculous-sounding.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#57

Post by dasil003 »

sergiosgc wrote: post #41
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #37

He didn't address couples counseling and therapy as factors in keeping marriages going. There's always been marriage counseling; today it's a professional therapist you hire, but in the old days it was your priest/rabbi/minister, or perhaps an elder in your household, who advised you on how to get along. Today in First World industrial societies, couples just try to wing it, moving out from the parents' house as soon…

> (...) in a certain sense it's an empty life. Inappropriately harsh position. A couple unable to conceive can easily have a meaningful life, even without going through the adoption path. It's just that having kids is the beaten path. You know from the onset the path all the way through. It is known what society expects from you and you feel happy fulfilling the expectation. A childless couple must create a journey t…

> You know from the onset the path all the way through.

Spoken like someone without kids.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#58

Post by lisper »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #37

He didn't address couples counseling and therapy as factors in keeping marriages going. There's always been marriage counseling; today it's a professional therapist you hire, but in the old days it was your priest/rabbi/minister, or perhaps an elder in your household, who advised you on how to get along. Today in First World industrial societies, couples just try to wing it, moving out from the parents' house as soon…

> a couple is supposed to have kids. It's what we were designed to do.

This misses to very important points.

First, we weren't designed.

Second, while it is true that there is evolutionary pressure to have a desire to reproduce one's genes, this is a gross oversimplification of our nature. We are not merely survival machines for our genes. We have these big brains, which give rise to all kinds of interesting secondary phenomena, like having ideas, making music, writing poetry, inventing computers, and arguing about things on hacker news. Because of this incredible richness and diversity of potential human experience, raising kids is just one of myriad ways to have a happy and fulfilled life.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#59

Post by [deleted] »

flavor8 wrote: post #51
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #37

He didn't address couples counseling and therapy as factors in keeping marriages going. There's always been marriage counseling; today it's a professional therapist you hire, but in the old days it was your priest/rabbi/minister, or perhaps an elder in your household, who advised you on how to get along. Today in First World industrial societies, couples just try to wing it, moving out from the parents' house as soon…

> My amateur theory is that fundamentally speaking a couple is supposed to have kids. It's what we were designed to do. That's certainly what evolution has favored (by definition) in terms of primal drives, but that doesn't mean that living life without them is in some sense "empty". Evolution isn't innately wise; e.g. we have very common diseases like cancers, dementia etc in the population because they tend to show…

[deleted]

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#60

Post by nevergetenglish »

ddebernardy wrote: post #50
barbudorojo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Long term couples invariably survive because the two involved never wanted to divorce at the same time" If I may be allowed a little joke, statistics here are really of little use in order to estimate a conditional probability (i.e, the probability that you (yourself) get divorced). But your sentence, while true, seems to be produced by a excessive rational mind an sounds like a pure truism, anyway, enhancing that t…

It goes a little deeper though. The quote about not wanting to divorse at the same time isn't mine and has been attributed to many. Because it's funny, and (reportedly) inherently true for anyone with a decade of wedlock to speak about. The remark on picking your battles, in contrast, is in no way as simplistic as you seem to suggest it is -- pardon if I misunderstood. In essence, psychological studies back that idea…

In my country, with loads of unemployment (23%) and people struggling to meet ends, some people don't divorce because they can't afford it. Harsh but true.

Just a litte question, why using divorse and not divorce, just spelling or any other reason?

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