As someone who departed a miserable marriage and now find myself very alone with very few friends the only advice I can give is take very, very good care of your marriage and take very, very good care of your friendships. Comparing wife / husband to friends is like apples and pears. It's like asking which of your children you like the most. If friends complain about the time spent with your partner, ditch them and if…
What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
321–330 of 418 posts
Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
That reads like an opinion piece and the etymology of the website is decidedly so: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Answers Catholics, in fact, are not a monoculture just because they follow the pope. If you travel the coasts, through the South and Midwest you'll see very stark delineations of Catholicism and their beliefs.
The only relevant part of the article is the quote from the Council of Chalcedon: > Following the holy Fathers, we unanimously teach and confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, composed of rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity; "like us…
The holy trinity wasn't known to Jesus at the time of his life or death. It became apparent that he, the holy spirit, and god were the same post resurrection. That's what separates Jesus from other canonical characters like saints and disciples - he was destined to become one because it was God's manifestation of himself. The others are just humans with extraordinary presence whom God chooses to act on the world through. It was pretty clear Jesus perceived himself as the latter.
Anyway, I could be wrong. I learned all this nearly 20 years ago and only remember it because it was beat into me.
Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need to maintain your friends relationships from younger days. You need to check-in, maintain a social circle, etc. It takes work. The magic is if you keep your core group close (and it's easier today with the Internet to keep in touch) then when you are able to get together (may be once a year!) you'l just pick it up like you hung out yesterday.
I want to maintain these friendships and relationships but after a point, I’m tired of being the first one to reach out all the time, the one word replies, and all the anxiety surrounding their very late replies. There is no such thing as busy, the average American checks their phone 96 times a day. If they want you, they’ll make time for you. It’s heartbreaking when it goes to this from a point where we’d talk for h…
Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How much of that is social expectation? Yes, we can change social expectations and boundaries. We did change social expectations and boundaries. It was called the "Sexual Revolution" and it happened over half a century ago. It's old news. This is where we've ended up since then.
Yep. We changed social expectations and allowed women to choose partners fully based on whatever they deemed attractive rather than coerce them into marriages they didn’t want. (Either initially or ever) Straight women’s sexuality is drastically different from gay men, lesbian women, and straight men. It’s not much of anything like the rest. There’s a desire for the attention and approval of straight men (probably du…
My theory is that this dynamic is mostly narrative-based, but partly physical:
Our social narrative says that a man's sexuality is dangerous, and that a woman's sexuality is fragile. It also says that safety comes from commitment.
The physical difference (that applies to sexual intercourse) between cis men and cis women is genitalia. The penis is homologous to the clitoris, and the vagina is homologous to the prostate. When a cis man has sex, he probably uses his penis, but when a cis woman has sex, she probably uses her vagina.
Most people who have mastered prostate stimulation can tell you it requires a completely different mental approach (headspace) than penis stimulation. This rules out most cis men, to whom the prostate is usually on a spectrum from unfamiliar to taboo: that gives queer/gay/trans people kind of opportunity advantage.
The headspace I'm talking about here is more of a yearning for connection (to connect with the prostate/vagina), as opposed to feeling impressed with and excited by someone's figure (to connect with the penis/clitoris).
The feeling of safety and commitment that can be found in a monogamous relationship is a really effective way to get into that headspace. This means that the utility of a committed romance can be directly applied to a cis woman's sexual experience, in the same way porn can be applied to a cis man's experience. This is where goals can be misaligned categorically along the boundary of sex.
Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
This used to be much more common, for men too. You don't have to go too far back in history to find a time when intense male friendships were not at all unusual, complete with holding hands and writing love letters to each other. Of course, some of these were gay relationships, hiding in plain sight pretending to be socially acceptable non-sexual intense male friendships. But gays wouldn't have been able to hide that…
Is it really positive in today's context though? When OP said only one spouse out of this whole group accepted these special friendships, I'm guessing that the time spent maintaining these kinds of friendships is getting in the way of marriages. If hardly any women will stay married to a guy with friendships like this, that's kind of a problem if he wants to be married.
* side note: I don't think most of the veteran suicide that we see is how we tend to mentally internalize it as a troubled veteran returning from a fresh deployment. The average age is close to 60, meaning these are veterans who have been out for awhile. I suspect the lack of social community, particularly as they age and no longer have the typical social aspects like work to define a social circle, may be part of the issue.
Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
#326Kids 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…
Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
What the parent is describing is not a "close" relationship, it's probably more binding. To pull out weird analogies, a mother and a fetus share the same system, they're different people but work as a single unit and need to survive together. I think some marriages are in that level of symbiotic relationship, and when it works it's incredible, when it fails it's really really messy. But it's pretty hard to explain to…
The mother does not depend on the fetus for survival.
Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
My point is that I'm not worried about winning or losing the lottery. I'm not playing. I'm not missing out, either. The expectation is that I'm filling a void with casual relationships; and that that void is a single committed romance. I never had that void to begin with. I sincerely am fulfilled by uncommitted relationships. They aren't casual to me: they are as serious and meaningful to me as monogamous partnership…
The way the previous comment came across to me was as from a cynical incel type rather than a more reasoned MGTOW-adjacent approach, sorry for the misunderstanding.
Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Trying to equate them all as relationships is a misdirection. Relationships with your friends, parents, children, and spouse are not going to be comparable ever. Certainly not with that attitude! I don't require commitment, therefore I am not interested in a spouse. Remember: I am not you.
You are human. And humans are social creatures. Every human requires five social elements: Communication, Mentorship, Teamwork, Dependence, and Servitude. Commitment is just a framework holding some or all of the five elements.
Re: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 worthwhi…
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.
This probably understates things, if anything; as you get older, you're more likely to get married, and America's population has been aging.