[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.