[YetAnotherMatt]

Do you have any data to back that up that you can share? I don't mean to call you out, it could very well be the case, people date in rather not-understandable ways to me.

What you're saying does not match my experience though. Quite a few friends of mine have dated only very few people before getting married.

Anecdotally, the marriages that seem to do the best are the marriages in which both partners did not have a dating history with a lot of partners "to find out what they don't want". That said, I'm aware of the negative selection bias there.

[mcv]

I think the primary requirement for making a relationship work is that both parties are committed to making it work. The problem is: we're not, because we've been fed fairy tales about True Love and we keep looking for a Mr/Mrs Perfect that doesn't exist.

Finding out what you don't want is definitely important too. Some people figure that out quickly, some go through a lot of drama before they finally figure it out. And I can certainly see how people who have trouble figuring out what they don't want, may enter a marriage that doesn't work out. But I also think that people who marry with relatively little dating, are more committed to making it work.

[ksdale]

My wife and I talk about this occasionally. There's also a sort of prisoner's dilemma that disappears when you have both credibly committed to making it work. Suddenly each disagreement is... lower stakes(?) because you know that the other person is acting in good faith to solve it as well. Committing to make it work makes it easier to make it work.

[ryanmarsh]

This right here. Married for 16 years and took me a while to figure out the iterated prisoner's dilemma is a game with no winners in a marriage. We also call this game "why did you do it that way" and again there are no winners. The only way to win the game is ... (struggle not to make the War Games reference) for both parties to cooperate all the time. Therein lies the problem. Some people do not have the integrity to not take advantage of a spouse who is always cooperating. We call those people "not marriage material".

[CarbyAu]

The One Trick Relationship Experts Hate! :-P

My take on your comment.

Accepting the premise of: "you have both credibly committed"(a nice phrase) -> removes reason to be suspicious.

Removing suspicion -> removes fear. Removing fear -> removes anxiety/anger. Less suspicion, fear, anxiety and anger -> Less effort

Hence: "Committing to make it work makes it easier to make it work." (another nice phrase)

On the one hand you are committing to work. Who wants to sign up for more of that!? On the other hand, it really does reduce the overall workload. Long term relationships may be less scary than people realise.

When my wife does something that irritates me, my first question is "What error in communication led to our team play resulting in this?", because I have already accepted she is not doing it from spite.

[vlasev]

It really is like that. The less effort you put in with every choice in a relationship, the more work you'll end up having to do to save it later on. Every choice is a potential investment into your future together. A relationship is very much about doing fewer things wrong, because your default state is to be happy together.

[shoes_for_thee]

That's been my experience since getting married also. Disagreements are now low-stakes, time away from each other is low-stakes.. things are just way more chill because we've suddenly got all the time in the world and a belief that the other person is in it for the long haul.

[Cerium]

Absolutely, the requirement is commitment to success. I used to believe in true love and finding the right person. About 10 years ago I went on a trip across China, and at one point joined a tour group for a few days. On that tour I got to know a couple who got married through an arraigned marriage. I grew up thinking that arraigned marriage was terrible, but what I saw in this couple was a more beautiful facet of love than I had ever witnessed. Each person was committed to making it work, learning to live with and love the other.

[kibwen]

The parent poster is being a bit overly specific, but the gist is correct: compatibility is mostly about finding someone who clears a list of minimum criteria (in contrast to the classically romantic notion of dating alluded to in the OP, which is more akin to finding a global maximum). Plenty of people may have relatively few criteria (are we roughly the same age? do we live in the same place? can we have children?), and so need less (or no) time in the dating pool to determine what their minimum criteria are. Other people are pickier and will spend more time figuring out what their deal-breakers are.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Lol, Saturday Night Live did a skit on exactly this for a dating app called Settl:

https://youtu.be/zDn3zmumb8o?t=10

[watwut]

Because long term marriage is a lot about your tendency to create long term emotional ties to people. It is also about your willingness to think about relationship itself and put work on it.

It is also about selection, but much more about ability to weed out abusive people and selfish people and so on. Of course also compatibility, clean freak will never be happy with messy person.

And those abilities form a lot in childhood, in family and with friends. They are also about your deep seeted values.

A lot of short relationships suggest either lack of interest in long term relationship or inability to form it.

The way hn talks about these issue always strikes me like a bunch of people who think people are machines and kind of don't undestand how people form relationships. Like qualifying a partner that don't fit some checkbox on original list someone was forced to make as "settling down". There is chemistry alias emotional and hormonal side to the whole thing, people.

[toby]

I agree with this generally. For most people I know in happy marriages it's not because they figured out exactly what they wanted and found "the one" -- as much as they love their partners there are probably a lot of people they would have been happy with.

[pc86]

Yes, if you're not religious it's actually pretty ridiculous to believe that there is a "perfect person" for you. To paraphrase The Office, if that were true they're probably in China or India anyway so most of the readers here are out of luck.

[vlasev]

I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but I still think it's not the right point of view. A lot of the compatibility in a long term relationship stems from shared values, experiences, interests and culture. So I think your pool of potential "perfect people" is a lot closer to home than that.

[Retric]

Looking at divorce statistics you find that pattern doesn’t really hold up. There are spikes around various life transitions like retirement which still occur even with long term emotional bonds. Long term relationships are a continuous negotiation as people’s want’s and needs change.

Edit: Collage education and getting first married at an older age significantly lower the odds of divorce. Which suggests having multiple prior relationships increase the odds of marriage success. However, we don’t have good statistics for this stuff.

[btilly]

You are not offering evidence against the hypothesis.

Divorce spikes around various life transitions occur because predictable events create predictable stresses that predictably are hard on marriages. Examples include the death of a child, children leaving the home, financial crisis, retirement and long-term illness.

Pairs who proved compatibility by settling down fast last longer because they are more likely to survive these stress points. However stress points are still stress points and "more likely to survive" still means that lots won't.

Personal disclaimer. I married at 20 to my second girlfriend. I was her first boyfriend. We did divorce..but only after 25 years. You can decide for yourself whether a 25 year marriage is evidence that we were more or less stable than an average couple.

[Retric]

Divorce after 25 years is statistically below average for a first marriage in the US. Waiting would have significantly reduced your odds of divorce. Overall, most relationships don’t involve marriage and many people never get married, so it’s really a question of what you consider below average.

I don’t think a relationship that ends is always worse than one that continues. Many stay together out of habit, fear, finances, having kids etc, continue long enough and someone is likely to die. Simply lasting a long time is thus a very poor measure of success. Arguably being happy, raising well adjusted kids, financial success, and or a host of other things could be considered a much better benchmark.

So I will turn it around, what’s the odds you would each have found a better partner or even become a better partner by looking longer?

[watwut]

> Waiting would have significantly reduced your odds of divorce.

You can not use statistic thay way. General stat for divorce does translate into individual one like this.

[btilly]

Well, I'm sure that I could have done better than to marry someone with manic depression.

I'm biased. But given her dating history since, I don't know that she would have done better than me.

[watwut]

How do you know those divorced people had strong emotional bonds?

People often avoid divorce and keep dead marriage because of inertia or fear of change. The massive life trasitions bring on stresses that test all of of that. And things are changing anyway at that point.

[jschwartzi]

Those abilities are trainable, especially with therapy.

[watwut]

Yes, but you won't train them by dating a lot of people. Dating a lot of people trains you that people leave, it will teach you that strong relationship hurts more when it breaks.

Also, if you dated a lot of people who were genuinly unsuitable for long term relationship, issue really is either your selection or what you signal to good prospective partners. Like, abusers pick up certain types and stable guys/gals avoid certain types.

[btilly]

I believe that therapists are better at convincing patients that therapy helped than they are at generating improved outcomes. Furthermore most therapists are not using treatments that there is much evidence for.

This is not to discount that there are treatments that really do work. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is an excellent example.

This is also not to deny that people who seek therapy on average do better than people who do not. That is clearly true, but it is unclear whether it is explained by "therapy worked" or the selection bias that "people who are demonstrate putting effort into their problems are likely to do better."

But it is a lot easier to make the claim that therapy helps than it is to demonstrate it. And given the combination of the replication crisis and widespread poor use of statistics, it is hard to trust most of the research into mental health treatments.

That said, most people who have been through therapy believe that it helped them. This is not actually evidence of effectiveness. Because that was true even for therapies such a Freudian psychology that are demonstrably ineffective. And even widespread belief in the effectiveness of treatments is not evidence either - as https://psmag.com/social-justice/75-years-alcoholics-anonymo... points out there is remarkably little evidence for 12 step programs for addiction. Despite testimonials and general belief to the contrary.

[eastbayjake]

> I'm aware of the negative selection bias there

I'm guessing those marriages are likely correlated with strong shared religious beliefs[1] and closeness to extended families that help share the burden of raising children.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2857783/#:~:tex....

[in_cahoots]

That’s definitely not true in my circle of friends. Of my 6 closest high school friends (all female), the ones who didn’t date in high school all married first, to either their first or second partners. The ones who dated a ton are still dating in their early 30s. None of us are very religious, and we all live in traditional (American) families with commensurate amounts of support.

[abrowne]

Fits what I see too, with "married" often replaced with unmarried partnership, so definitely not a purely religious thing.

[YetAnotherMatt]

None of them are religious.

Negative selection bias as in people who are less capable to maintain long term relationships are more likely to have a lot of dating history.

Conversely, people who are super easy going and great partners to be with may have very few people break up with them (and kind of succeed on the first try).

Or another way to put it: To have a long dating history with a lot of different partners, you need to have broken up (or been broken up with) quite a few times. This could be due to circumstances outside of your control, but that is probably not true for all people in that category.

[Enginerrrd]

As opposed to selection bias by being composed of people with a tendency toward stable monogamy? Because that would lead to fewer dating partners...

[greyswan]

Dating more isn't the only way to gather information about what you don't (or do) want.

People that have dated few people might be more likely to share a similar approach to relationships.

[ip26]

It doesn't have to take that many dates to find out what you don't want.

[paulryanrogers]

I'm not so sure. Dating often only reveals a person at their best, most agreeable. I've known couples that needed years to discover they were in a marriage with someone who had deal-breaker qualities. Sometimes things don't manifest until time and pressure force them out.

[_jal]

On the other hand if you date around a lot, you''ll discover you have hard limits you'd never even imagined previously.

[centimeter]

Experimentally, you are correct if the goal is to have a long-lasting marriage. People with small numbers of sexual partners before marriage are much less likely to get divorced than those with many sexual partners.

[polote]

> Quite a few friends of mine have dated only very few people before getting married.

This is not against what OP says, you could have some people who date less people and some who prefer to date a lot. At the end, both of them will probably settle down when they find one they like a lot