[winchling]

These traditions developed around families with children.

The situation now is that divorce and childlessness are common and people are adapting accordingly.

Personally, I think it's sad. Long-distance relationships don't work. Yet, as I see it, short-distance relationships do work, though a period of adjustment may be required.

Medium-distance relationships are stuck in the middle!

And, to put a cynical hat on for a moment, the powers-that-be may be just fine with this. They want people isolated in separate dwellings for purposes of taxation, property pricing, general conformity to their agendas, etc.

[groby_b]

"Long-distance relationships don't work"

I don't think that holds as a blanket statement. (I have multiple counterexamples in my immediate circle, at least. Some of them on the decades scale)

Is there specific evidence, or is this simply an assumption you're making?

[kemayo]

Although I disagree with the grandparent post, I'd be fine with saying that long term long distance relationships are harder to make work. Mostly this is because there's a lack of cultural guidelines for how to handle it; if you're living with or near someone there's a cultural script to follow which mostly-works, but in a LDR you can't count on that and you need to put the work in to build your own system.

Of course, relying on the default cultural script for local relationships often falls down as well when it turns out that you disagree about the details. But we accept that relationships fail all the time, and don't tend to say "local relationships don't work" just because many of them fail. :D

[groby_b]

That (harder to make work) matches my anecdata :)

To be clear, I'm not saying "GP is wrong" - I was genuinely curious if maybe they had some data/studies on the subject, since all I have are personal observations, and I'm curious about the issue. I.e. How much harder are LDRs?