[lmg643]

This is a pretty provincial piece. Marriage has been transactional for thousands of years. To this day, the practice continues around the world. I have a colleague in the US who has an arranged marriage (he was born overseas). But of course, let's pretend that "romantic love" is the historical norm (versus recent movie invention) and we've somehow fallen from this expectation.

[PakG1]

My immigrant mother was talking with her immigrant friends about how kids these days have it all backwards. They say you fall in love with the one you marry, not marry the one you love. I was lucky to get it both ways with my wife though, and still finding out have to work on it every day to keep it alive. That's not a bad thing, and it keeps her falling back in love with me, especially when I screw up.

[zasz]

Actually, if you look at the hunter gatherer societies that best resemble the environment humanity evolved in, romantic love plays a big role. Such societies are often lenient about divorce as well. The !Kung San and Hadza are well studied examples of this.

[scarmig]

Suggestions on sources for this? Not that I doubt it, but I hadn't heard that angle before.

[swsieber]

The divorce rate is a new thing though, right? I'd bet that even if it was an arranged marriage, if you knew you weren't going to get divorced, you'd try to find ways to love your partner...

[closeparen]

Recognizing domestic violence and spousal rape as outside the bounds of acceptable behavior and/or grounds for redress is also a new development, in the grand scheme of things.

[victorhooi]

Do you have any evidence do suggest this is actually a leading cause of divorce, as opposed to other things like personality clashes, financial stress, etc.

Everything I've read seems to suggest that incompatible personalities and finances are the main reasons people in our society split up - which would seem to debunk your theory.

[riquito]

Do you seriously think that all the fights and demonstrations to get the right to divorce were mostly because of "incompatible personalities and finances"?

[horsecaptin]

Do you think those fights would have been possible without the possibility of financial independence?

[riquito]

Yes, there is no correlation between the ability to fight and one of the possible outcomes of the fight

[closeparen]

If it's happened so much as once (and I don't think that's controversial), then it's a good thing we let people get divorced instead of telling them they had better find ways to love their partners.

[xxXXxx-]

I don't see where the comment you are replying to claims that domestic violence and spousal rape are the leading cause of divorce or even a leading cause.

[Chiba-City]

Large populations expecting or knowing longevity are new. Never forget we count down from Depression hysteresis and post-WW2 50% share of global wealth. We have horrible diet and health statistics here. People are wise to not marry. By way of comparison Japan's population falls faster than their economic deflation.

[HarryHirsch]

Say what? Absent warfare and epidemics and with proper hygiene someone who had survived childhood could expect to live to 70.

Compare Psalm 90: "The days of our years are threescore years and ten"

[Chiba-City]

For most of Western history commoners lived to 28F/32M. Average age rose to around 40 by 1800 in France. I used to work for Futures Group in the early 90's (inherited Robert Tappan Morris's code) spending US taxpayer dollars on global demographic engineering. Human biomass is now way too high. Being fruitful multiplying is not such a great game plan anymore. Adjust lifespan expectations for pathologies we fuel with VAST profitable supply chains consumers only imagine are personal moral failings. We run full court presses against more making of us. I signed no security clearances. These are not really secrets. Maybe security via obscurity was more popular before the Net became popular.

[MandieD]

If female: survived to 40 - dying in childbirth was a very large risk until the 1930s in the US and other western countries.

Granted, most of the risk was due to midwives and doctors (especially doctors) not understanding or carrying out proper hygiene.

[radiorental]

As is often the case in such a complex issue, when someone has a penny to make the will go deep on a particular viewpoint

› In doing research for a book about workers’ experiences of being unemployed for long periods, I saw how people who once had good jobs became...

[xxXXxx-]

I completely agree with you. Civil marriage even today is very similar to a business partnership IMO. People give a lot of other significance to it (religion, love, faith, emotional etc.) but if you look at it strictly from just a civil/legal perspective it's essentially a specific type of legally recognized partnership.