[lotharbot]

> "Divorce rates are over 50%"

"Divorce rate" is a misleading statistic. It compares marriages in year X to divorces in year X, but divorces in year X can come from marriages in many prior years -- so it's not exactly a direct comparison.

People often mistake it for "the chances of an average marriage ending in divorce", which is a bit lower (the data I've looked at puts it in the 30-40% range.)

But wait, there's more! There are ways to determine, beforehand, which marriages are more or less likely to end in divorce. There are mathematical models based on behavior (James Murray, John Gottman). There are statistics related to various life decisions and behaviors and shared interests. You can dig through all sorts of interesting statistics and figure out your own risk profile if you so desire (see, for example, the General Social Survey at http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss10 ). People like to act like divorce is just a thing that randomly happens through no fault of your own, and on occasion that's true, but there are a lot of choices you can make to reduce the chances it'll happen to you. (Making choices like my grandparents seems to work out -- one pair celebrated 65 years last month, the other celebrates 67 years this weekend. And yes, the statistics bear out that making similar choices to them results in lifelong marriage a very high percentage of the time.)

[KRuchan]

Could you explain what you mean by "making choices like your grandparents" ?

[lotharbot]

not in a single HN comment, no. I can't compress a lifetime of experience (second-hand) into the amount of text I'm willing to write right now with fidelity.

Reading through my HN comment history, and my wife's HN comment history, can give you some insight into what we learned from our grandparents (hers also had lifelong marriages.) Reading through the books published by the mathematicians I mentioned, and digging through the statistics I posted, are additional methods you can use to gain insight into what works. Talking to people you know who've had long and successful marriages (ie, not my grandparents, but yours) can help.

[arzugula]

The difference is that your grandmother didn't have a guaranteed payday and a "strong independent single-mother's movement" awaiting her if she decided she was tired of your grandfather.

The quickly disappearing stigma against single-motherhood combined with the demonization of men as deadbeats and child molesters, when paired with massive amounts of state handouts to single mothers (wic, welfare, child support, alimony, state medical insurance, housing subsidy, single-mother scholarships, affirmative action jobs, etc.) has made divorce as inconsequential as possible for women while dramatically raising the consequences for men.

Marriage is broken and men who go into it without understanding the disparity of legal, psychological, and economic outcomes between the genders are in for a rude awakening.

[lotharbot]

... yes, I'm sure you've identified the only relevant difference.

Which totally explains why my parents and my wife's parents, both married in the 1970s when those social movements were in full bloom, also have wonderful and happy marriages going on 40 and 38 years, respectively.

[arzugula]

Are you arguing that our social environment hasn't changed since the 1970's or that our obviously dramatically changed social environment has had no effect on male-female relationships?

Either way, your advice is more of the same feel-good nonsense that we feed our young men, hand-waving away the outcomes of divorce and custody law, and pushing them towards a statistically likely devastating outcome.

It may feel good to preach the traditional loving family of your grandparents, but the data shows that they are the outlier. A much more likely outcome is a split family and emotional and financial devastation for the husband.

[lotharbot]

I am arguing neither of those things.

I am also not giving "feel-good nonsense" advice, nor hand-waving. I'm suggesting avenues of research that require a level of effort commensurate with the task at hand, namely, creating a long-term stable relationship.

Statistically, relationships with the same attributes as my grandparents' relationships don't fall apart. Statistically, the most likely outcome in that case is "til death do us part". (You really should read some of JD Murray's books/papers. We can predict with a fairly high likelihood which relationships are going to lead to a split family and emotional/financial devastation for the husband, and which are not. But it takes a level of introspection and a level of honesty from friends and observers that most people don't have.)

[arzugula]

Again - is it your assertion that our drastically changed social environment has had no effect on the stability of relationships?

I whole-heartedly agree with you that there are many factors that can help predict the success of a marriage. This is somewhat besides the point.

It's shortsighted and a case of "ignoring the elephant in the room" to pretend that a dramatic shift in our social environment is having no effect on the stability marriage or that factors which contributed to past-generation's successful marriages have been unaffected by this shift.

[lotharbot]

> "is it your assertion that our drastically changed social environment has had no effect on the stability of relationships?"

I have already said explicitly that it is not. Please don't be obtuse.

> "there are many factors that can help predict the success of a marriage. This is somewhat besides the point."

No; it's exactly the point. Your initial comment used misleading statistics to argue that marriage is a "plague" that should be avoided, and you later hinted that my grandfather would have been a victim of this plague if my grandparents had lived in a different era.

I've countered that those statistics don't apply to every situation, and that in fact marriage remains quite a worthwhile pursuit especially for those whose circumstances and life choices put them in the "very high probability of success" category. My grandparents, my parents, and my wife and I are all in this category.

Repeating your assertion that current marriages lead "towards a statistically likely devastating outcome" is useless. The assertion, while true for many couples, ignores the reality that some couples are statistically likely to enjoy the benefits of marriage for their entire lives.

[was_hellbanned]

How much of your day would you say you spend thinking about how oppressed you feel?