Having worked on a dating app startup with a 2m seed (it's since pivoted to a brewery run by active gang members), I can say the problem of dating is looked at horribly wrong.
People assume dating is about finding the person "most compatible" with you. Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, they settle down.
This article https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/ is not about a guy who created some algorithm for finding love. The algorithm was simple. He went on enough dates to know what he didn't want, and then found the person that matched that criteria.
People who are in stable relationships are people who want to be in stable relationships. This is readily apparent when most find their spouse, significant other, love of their life or other half of the walnut in their small town, neighborhood, school, or place of work.
People like me, who have been dating forever, fool themselves when they think the issue is compatibility, not having found the right person, or other pedestrian rationalizations. The simplest and more likely explanation of the dating-forever syndrome (or pleasure, because I had a great time dating) is that consciously or sub-, we don't want to be in a stable relationship.
I've subconsciously burnt a number of opportunities to end up in a relationship with perfectly good women over the last few years. I work full time, I'm a single father and I'm studying. I get time to date between uni semesters but deep down I think I realise I don't have time for a stable relationship. At the same time I'm a human who has needs to develop connections with others, develop intimacy, etc. I don't see why dating-forever is seen as such a bad thing if you actually like dating.
Most of the norms of behavior and goals we find — at first – desirable are often nothing more than what novelist and people of imagination have repeatedly written or spoken about. But life is not a romance novel, there are rarely happy endings, and according to most people who got married, their spouse sounded more interesting a few years back. Why someone should be "the one"? How is it possible, if not by chance, that someone you find desirable in your 20s is still as desirable 30 years later? Then, when I hear that relationship need work to work, I want to run away as fast as Général du Pommeau. Next.
As it is often the case, it boils down to personality, character traits, and culture; if you are someone who is intrinsically and culturally driven to long-term, if not forever, relationships, fine. But if you are not, live your life and respectfully forget about what novelist and imaginative people have written about. I traveled the world on my own, dated everywhere, and fulfilled my childhood dreams of desire and be desired. I had a few multi-year relationships, but don't make me think about them or you'd ruin my day.
Had I listened to the spirit of the times or of the place, I would have ended up miserable, sad, and probably out of shape. Instead, when I am in bed and close to fall asleep, I often think about the exciting life I had, the amazing people I intimately knew, and the dreams I have for tomorrow. To each their own, always. And life has different phases and new desires will knock on my door, maybe a kid, maybe a long-term relationship, but always (I hope...) my choice.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
I think there's an unwarranted assumption in most dating theory that some kind of psycho-social compatibility, whether pro- or anti-, is a primary decider of anything.
What if it's yet another illusion that the conscious mind is in control and, in fact, it's not really related?
The attractiveness to women of differences in major histocompatibility complex genes is a documented thing, for example [1], More loosely we've all known people who were most attracted/committed to people who, intellectually by lists of criteria, etc., even they'd agree made no sense for them.
I think what makes relationships work/fail is the relationship people have with themselves above all else.
At times I was lonely and miserable and wanted somebody in my life badly and in those times nobody ever was even remotely interested in me. The moment I did well and / or was also in a relationship it seemed like potential partners were all over me (it seemed almost unfair). Point I'm trying to make is people usually "date" for the wrong reasons. The moment they're in to find somebody to "complete themselves" they create a an unconscious demand on their partner which is the pre-programmed disaster that it will turn out to be. The moment I notice my date is "actively looking" I run.
To me the whole concepts of "dating" is very sterile. It's not in my culture maybe to have a formal process where you sniff each other with prepared questions and then after 3 years you check "where this is going". What has worked well for me is not ever to look for partners actively and the trick was always "the less I look the more opportunities I find" (strange that).
I think why most relationships don't last is because we literally suffocate everything that is good out of it. Usually it happens slowly so we don't notice (or tell ourselves things will get better - they usually don't). For most people it's just a way to build many small co-dependencies into a neurotic prison which they can be unhappy in but tell themselves "at least I feel secure". Some even think it's their mission to fix their partner (and all they do is set themselves up for pain).
Seems like real-life more closely resembles Kepler’s “Marriage Problem” (later reformulated as the “Secratary Problem). https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h... Its a solvable problem from optimal stopping theory. How many people should you date before you know enough to stop and settle (for the next person who’s better than than all the people you’ve dated thus far)? The answer’s x/e, where x can either be a maximum partner quantity, or thr number of years you give yourself to be on the open dating market.
> Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, they settle down.
I don't see how this suggests compatibility is an illusion. You just described another way of finding someone who is compatible. Personally I already had a mental checklist of everything I wanted out of a relationship, no dating around was necessary to know those things. Just basic introspection. I ended up marrying my second girlfriend and I would say the relationship is 100% perfect.
People assume dating is about finding the person "most compatible" with you. Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, they settle down.
This article https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/ is not about a guy who created some algorithm for finding love. The algorithm was simple. He went on enough dates to know what he didn't want, and then found the person that matched that criteria.