Why Marriages Fail

http://www.shrinktalk.net/archives/why_marriages_fail_1.phtml

by skwiggle • 17 years ago

107 57 17 years ago

ChrisXYZ• 17 years ago

I don't have any deep or insightful comments to make on this article.

I just want to say I read it a month or so ago and was really impressed with it at the time. It's a really intelligent, well written list of reasons why relationship don't work out, and what it takes to make them succeed. It also gives some good insights into couple's counseling.

I hope it does okay on this site, and doesn't get ignored because it's not the usual fare here.

sidsavara• 17 years ago

I actually think people on HN will enjoy it, because it takes a rather emotional topic and breaks it down into what are the primary reasons he has seen for marriages failing in what, I assume is, his professional opinion.

I think people like me enjoy hard problems, finding out the root cause, and determining a solution. From that perspective, I thoroughly enjoyed this article as it presented some salient causes for a fairly difficult problem (keeping a marriage/relationship going).

It wasn't full of platitude and suggestions to "date once a week" etc - it was a solid breakdown of causes. Coupled with the recent discussion of the bachelor paradox, I really enjoyed the diversion.

ALee• 17 years ago

Agree with you ChrysXYZ. In fact, I think you could replace spouse and relationship with co-founder(s) and startup very easily.

The article is fundamentally about human relationships and how they fall apart or stay together.

vaksel• 17 years ago

because its so easy to get a divorce and there is a huge monetary incentive for women to walk away at the first sign of trouble.

ajju4• 17 years ago

Disclaimer: This is personal opinion

If you are marrying someone who would actually weigh the option of dumping you for monetary gain, you're doing it wrong. This is probably incredibly hard to do without some luck, but you should marry someone who would never consider monetary gain in a decision about the relationship. In more concrete terms, someone who, even at the point where your relationship is ending (if it comes to that), is fair-minded enough, has enough self-respect and values your time together enough to give you a fair share.

Many people try to counter this by saying "People (and by this they mean, their core principles) change" (in other words people abandon their principles). I believe there are people who would never abandon their core principles. Marry one of them.

shard3• 17 years ago

Unfortunately it may take years to figure out what kind of person someone else is, and they may not want to wait until you figure it out. In the end, it's always a gamble based on partial information.

HeyLaughingBoy• 17 years ago

I have to agree with you completely.

It's not hard to marry someone you know very well. The problem is that like the article said, a lot of people are pressured and they end up getting married before they really know each other. I met my wife online and we got married three years later. The judge commented that most couples he married who met online did it after about a year.

A few months before our 5th anniversary we decided to get divorced. A few weeks before that same anniversary we changed our minds. Will we, won't we. Who knows.

People change; accept that and learn to enjoy it. But as you said, some people's deeply held core values will probably remain the same and that's really what you're marrying.

As an aside, when I saw the article on HN my first thought was that someone was making analogy between marriage and startup partnerships :-)

cousin_it2• 17 years ago

Even if financial and legal incencives don't matter for you, they do matter for many people. If you start rewarding women with money for dumping their husbands (as vaksel implied US law does), many families that were close to the brink will disintegrate and many okay families will move that much closer to the brink. We don't live in a world composed of ideal men and women - that's why we need laws and money in the first place.

I find your comment similar in spirit to a common pattern of defending the C++ language against criticism: the idea that, if C++ shortcomings worry you, then the root of your problem is bad design and muddled thinking. It's true, but the language could work to fix the problem instead of making it worse. So too with divorce laws.

vitaminj• 17 years ago

Economists (eg. Wolfers, Stevenson, Lundberg, Becker, etc) have been looking into the effects of no-fault divorce laws on the rate of divorces for quite a while now (refer to [1] for example).

Their general findings are that "the data broadly indicate that divorce law reform led to an immediate spike in the divorce rate that dissipates over time. After a decade, no effect can be discerned." [1]

They tend to attribute the steady rise in divorces to the changing nature of the family over the last century, things like increased participation of women in the labour force, advances in household technology, the contraceptive pill and the growing acceptance of non-standard family structures (eg. single mothers, defacto families).

[1] Wolfers, J. "Did unilateral divorce laws raise divorce rates? A new reconciliation and new results", http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/10014.html

plinkplonk5• 17 years ago

Ok I might be downmodded to hell for this, but hey I can afford the karma and this needs to be said so here goes,

I believe this article shouldn't be on Hacker News. At what point does "interesting to hackers" become "interesting to some subset of people and has nothing to do with hacking per se"? Yes yes hackers get married/have relationships too so this is possibly of interest to them, but then everything in the world that concerns life is possibly interesting and should be posted on HN.At which point there is no difference between HN and say reddit. At least reddit has subreddits.

My heartfelt wish is that these junk articles don't make the front page of HN. So what's next on HN? raising children (hackers have kids too) , home decor (hackers have homes too), politics(hey, hackers vote), sex positions (hackers have sex too ( ;-)) and are possibly interested in "hacking"/evaluating positions) ...

ajju4• 17 years ago

I upvoted the article as a gut reaction after reading it but what you say is true. In trying to make HN a great filter for all kinds of articles we risk losing a great filter for tech/entrepreneurial articles.

wheels• 17 years ago

And as I've been ranty about such in the last day, that's actually a pretty big deal. It's not just that it means that there are more articles to ignore, it also means that:

- We're missing other news about startups and hacking in the precious space that is the front page.

- People that come here for startups and hacker news begin to question the worth in coming here.

So, I'll repeat the two-pronged battle cry: flag inappropriate stuff, head to the "new" section at least once a day and vote up stuff on hacking and startups.

boris• 17 years ago

Wouldn't the same argument hold true if you substitute "marriage" with "web apps"?

ajju4• 17 years ago

Yes it would. Along similar lines, I don't know Haskell and have no time to learn it now and so dislike all Haskell stories. But that's a lesser problem than marriage stories (which, incidentally, I actually liked). Let me explain why with an example: The kind of people who like Haskell are much more likely to like Python or Hadoop - things that I am very interested in. So there is a very likely payoff to tolerating Haskell stories. I doubt there is a similarly strong correlation between people interested in stories on marriage and python or hadoop.

If 3 of the top 5 stories on HN were about marriage, childrearing and politics (all topics relevant to many hackers) for a significant amount of time, a Joe random with no interest in hacking and lots of interest in 1 or more of the above who just happened to drop by would be very likely to stay and contribute more stories of the same nature and none about hacking. Soon HN will be very little about Hacking.

All of this ignores active killing by moderators but we really don't want to get to a stage where moderators have to kill stories with any regularity. Self regulation is the best kind.

T_S_• 17 years ago

Think of it as a specification for a marriage debugger. Feel better now?

BTW I read the whole article with interest even came to the site hoping for an article telling me about someone trying to develop iphone apps in Haskell.

gommm2• 17 years ago

Well for the other subjects I don't know but for home decor, I hope to ask people here to review my startup in this field (home decor and interior design) when we launch :-)

That said, I just finished reading this article and found it quite good and interesting... So it's not really hacker news material but on this kind of subject, it's definitely one of the better articles out there

quizbiz• 17 years ago

I'm glad you proved yourself wrong. This seems to be a community that accepts its niche and is open to questioning content quality.

pg• 17 years ago

The rules about what's on topic explicitly say that articles don't have to be about hacking. They just have to be interesting to the intellectually curious. An article on any topic could be if it was sufficiently insightful. This one seems pretty insightful. Not overwhelmingly so, but it's certainly not a junk article.

plinkplonk5• 17 years ago

pg said

" This one seems pretty insightful. Not overwhelmingly so, but it's certainly not a junk article."

fair enough. differing perceptions and all that. I think (note: I think) it was a trashy article, not worth my time I spent in reading it (which is my working definition of "junk") and I don't want to see such articles on the front page so I did my part by (a) flagging it (b) explaining my thought process.

It is upto the rest of the HN community to confirm or reject my perception. And I am completely fine with that. I can always start reading from teh second article from the top :-)

PS: I noticed that the article disappeared from the front page("Dead" ed) and then came back a few minutes later. How does that happen? Just curious.

Hexstream• 17 years ago

"The rules about what's on topic explicitly say that articles don't have to be about hacking. They just have to be interesting to the intellectually curious."

Frankly, I think that's a mistake. <opinion>We get screwed more often than not with this rule. There's regularly boring, offtopic articles that get to live because of it and it's seldom the case that an offtopic article will turn out interesting. And even in those rare cases, I can't help but this this is Hacker News, not Intellectual News.</opinion>

shard3• 17 years ago

Didn't we have an article about how children should be praised for working hard and not for being smart? I personally thought that was a great article too.

I appreciate having articles about hacking relationships and parenthood on HN.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/feat...

I think the article you refer to was another article on the same body of research, but I like this article as a best first introduction to that topic.

dhimes• 17 years ago

This is simply the worst "marriage advice" I've ever read that wasn't trying to be funny. Skip it.

rjurney• 17 years ago

As a hacker, I needed to read this. Marriage can be tough when you have your head in a macbook 16 hours a day.

bluishgreen• 17 years ago

PlinkPlonk says "My heartfelt wish is that these junk articles don't make the front page of HN. So what's next on HN? raising children? "

This is not a junk article. And yes, articles about raising kids were published here and I do not remember any one questioning if it was hacker news. ( http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html). This is intellectually interesting and useful. If hacker news wants to be a community where human beings take part rather than some large drone feeding me with 'programming' news this article stays.

For that matter this article has more insight than many articles about 'ruby' on this site, I cringe when articles get in just because it had the word 'programming' in it. There are many programming articles that were a pure waste of time, did not embody what hackers are about. Hacker is an attitude and not just programming. Hacker is the quality in programming and not just the programming. Just dealing with programming is not an automatic pass to be hacker news (some sites are actually banned!), and by the same account just that something does not contain the word programming does not mean its not hacker news.

Guess what, we are programmers and proud ones. But I personally value my relationships more than my programming abilities (And my girl friend will never say to me: if you love me stop programming!, she loves me too. Its a nice arrangement. :P).

The fear or the question "If we let this article where will this stop?" reminds me of people who ask: If we let gay people marry, then where will this stop ? If you felt pity for such people who did not have a good appreciation for dynamic nature of all things nature, then think a bit more. "Where will this stop?"is not reason enough and is not an automatic pass to raise the objection "this is not hacker news"

There is room here for more insight. Further I said this some 2 years back on this site: I will say it again. Dont have a very narrow view of what you are. Don't define yourself and put your self in such a tiny box "I am a hacker because I think ruby is not a gem". I feel kinship to the person who designs good buildings and the one who designs a good meal which is also cheap. In such a meal I see a succinct program which also is very efficient in terms of memory.

There are insights to be obtained from all of them for programming itself. Further only if you expand your world view and talk about problems people face on a daily basis can you obtain insights into peoples problems that need solutions. And guess what you will suddenly find a new business instead of hacking together your one millionth web based todolist with email and sms feature.

EDIT: adding link to the earlier comment that I refer to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31799 which was made looong back.

plinkplonk5• 17 years ago

" If hacker news wants to be a community where human beings take part rather than some large drone feeding me with 'programming' " news this article stays."

false dichotomy alert! A false dichotomy is a rhetorical device to position your favored option against a rhetorically maligned strawman opposite option.

Given that no one actually wanted "drones feeding me with "programming, , your statement is not very persuasive.

The actual options are about preferences for "insightful" articles about marriages, children etc vs "insightful" articles centered around programming, technology, startups etc. On this choice, people can (and do) differ, and that is perfectly fine.

"If you felt pity for such people who did not have a good appreciation for dynamic nature of all things nature, then think a bit more"

more putting words is my mouth. Where did I (or anyone else) say I felt "pity"? You are imagining the unexpressed motivations of others and reacting to your imagination. In other words, You seem to be setting up straw men and knocking them down.

More strawmen

" Just dealing with programming is not an automatic pass to be hacker news " - Nobody claimed this.

" hacking together your one millionth web based todolist with email and sms feature." - nobody claimed this as a good idea either, especially against "you will suddenly find a new business" (false dichotomy again).

Nutshell : lots of rhetorical smoke, very little fire.

You make one good point ("Hacker is the quality in programming and not just the programming.") amongst all this false angst and strawman burning. And it is a very good one. It makes your post valuable.

I thought the article inappropriate, (still do), flagged it, explained why, and was overridden. That is all right. Getting into a mud throwing contest about motivations is not. So I'll stop. I am done with this thread.

visitor4rmindia3• 17 years ago

>3) There is far too much emphasis on 'weddings' as opposed to 'marriages.'

This is a nice article, but when reading this point I wanted to share a different perspective.

A colleague of mine got married recently. The marriage lasted 3 days with unnumerable rituals. It culminated with him and his bride having to sit beside a fire from 4 in the afternoon to about 3 at night while the pundit recited slokas.

It was, as you can imagine, an exhausting experience. I don't think he's in any hurry to get divorced and married again!

visitor4rmindia3• 17 years ago

>6) People settle for less than what they want.

Sorry - quick follow up. Many Indians get an "arranged marriage" where you don't really have great expectations. However, many of them go on to form happy, stable, marriages. People want to be happy and husbands and wives tend to grow into each other and find ways to be happy.

shader• 17 years ago

I think this is one of the major reasons that Americans have so many divorces. They marry for the "feelings", and as soon as those change they want out. The Indians marry for more than that - financial support, children, family name, cultural pressure, etc. The end result is that they are interested in making it happen, and are willing to work for that, whereas Americans think that the fact that it might require effort proves that they are "incompatible".

Imagine if someone tried to run a startup the way most Americans try to manage their marriages; they wouldn't last a week before they gave up - the "feeling" probably wouldn't be there, and there would be something else they'd rather do.

If both you and your spouse want the marriage to work, it can work, whether you "feel" for each other or not. The problem is really when they don't want it to work, and need an excuse.

kalid• 17 years ago

Unfortunately I think it works in the reverse. Cultures that have arranged marriages tend to have fewer women's rights (how easily can the wife initiate the divorce?), social stigmas against divorced women (who would want you?), lack of feasible opportunities (how will you support yourself?), and familial pressure (what would the community say about our family?). It's a bit like how North Korea has a 99% (or is it 101%) landslide win for their leader every election -- lack of visible disagreements don't mean the participants are happy with the outcome.

wallflower• 17 years ago

I'm not an Indian, and I felt this video series was illuminating.

"First comes marriage, then comes love"

"Liz Tuccillo, writer for Sex and the City and co-author of He's Just Not That Into You, asks why is the divorce rate so low in India? She finds out that Indians are taught that happiness is a state of mind. And if you've had an arranged marriage you wed first, and learn to love your husband over time, as you get to know him."

http://www.yourtango.com/20086547/first-comes-marriage-then-...

ams6110• 17 years ago

I don't fully buy into the arranged marriage concept, but won't deny that many of them are successful. I think one thing that probably helps a lot is that "older, wiser" people are looking at attributes of compatibility that younger people can't see in each other yet.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

My wedding took an hour and a half, with about 16 people there to witness, we went home and had like 60 people in the house for a party. Me and my wife went to bed at about 11 as we'd been up since like 5am, and the party went on without us. Like 5 lbs of bacon was cooked in the morning for everyone who staid over and then everyone was gone by 6pm the next day.

The wedding cost like $250 total, the food for the party cost $150. The wine for toasts and such cost us $40, other people through in up to $160 of wine. The cake was made by a family friend and paid for by another as our wedding present, so cost $0.

My wife and I spent more when we got an Xbox 360 than on our entire wedding. We are having another celebration this summer as my parents couldn't visit at the time and a lot of my wifes family couldn't get out to Ontario either, so the total price of our 'weddings' would probably have gone up, but again everybody is offering to do and pay for stuff so the total right now is at like $10.

I think the worst thing anyone can do is spend like $50,000 on a wedding, it'll just ruin your first year of marriage. I think the next worst thing, is to actually think living together married should be different from living together unmarried. My wife and myself got married after being together for years, it was because we were already committed, not because we needed to commit.

catz• 17 years ago

This is extremely wise. There are too many people bankrupting themselves by having a too large wedding. What is worse is that some people delay marriage for a few years in order to save up for the reception. Another approach for this "fancy" weddings is to keep it small or not to allow children (which is stupid).

The best marriage I attended was in a farmers tractor shed (don't know the direct translation) - everyone was welcome and it was all around fun.

sethg• 17 years ago

I once attended what must have been the minimal possible Orthodox Jewish wedding; bride, groom, ten men including a rabbi, a ring, a cup of wine, and a prayer shawl that four men held aloft to make a chuppah. No dinner, no DJ, no videographer.

There was, however, a bottle of Scotch.

rglovejoy• 17 years ago

Any man who can get his bride to go along with spending only $250 on her wedding is a hero in my book. You are a very fortunate man, sir.

PonyGumbo• 17 years ago

He lost me when he linked to an article by Satoshi Kanazawa.

bianco• 17 years ago

"Fail" is the wrong term. The sincere love between a "male" and a "female" human being (if I name them "man" and "woman", maybe you won't understand, would you?) isn't considered a value anymore...

If it were some business, we would care much much more, and this says it all about current priorities in "modern" society.

Future generations will write about current society: "They destroyed themselves by starting to hate, inside of the most atomic value in human society: The Family..."

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

Because the author of the submitted article seems to fall for a common error in statistical reasoning about the divorce rate in the United States, I'll post a link to a detailed discussion of that fallacy here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html

Enlightenment• 17 years ago

Legalize... http://www.carmanfox.com/meet_vancouver_escorts.htm

benhoyt• 17 years ago

My maternal grandparents are in their 90s, have been married for 68 years, and are still going strong. (Okay, so I'm proud of them.) They relate a story of how they were called up once by a guy doing some research on why couples stay together.

My grandparents rightly noted that while people are constantly doing studies on "why marriages fail", hardly anyone ever looks at the long-lasting marriages and asks why they work.

They told the researcher that theirs worked mainly because they never considered divorce an option. That's a reflection of their culture and morals, but also their desire. They expected to stay together, and they did what it took to stay together. I've only been married for 4 years, but I certainly want that for my own marriage too. (And I blow raspberries to statistics -- I was married when I was 23 and my wife 19. :-)

The article had several good points. But I wonder at this: "If people are miserable together, the shrink's position is to help them separate and live happier lives apart." Why can't the shrink help them see ways to be un-miserable together?

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

Sometimes an example can go a long way. I grew up in another state than the one my maternal grandparents lived in, but I did travel to join their sixtieth wedding anniversary celebration with most of my thirty-four cousins. That's surely helped me and my wife (whose parents have also been married six decades now) stay together for more than twenty-five years. She and I grew up in different countries, speaking different native languages and eating different foods, and have changed radically from our former selves over the years, but we are still each other's best friends.

dkarl2• 17 years ago

Why do you assume your grandparents did something right in their marriage that divorced or unhappy couples didn't? Maybe they just happened to marry a person they were able to live happily with, for reasons they didn't understand at the time.

RDobrenski• 17 years ago

I wrote this article and, quite honestly, have no idea how it ended up here. I certainly can't vouche for its place in this particular forum but wanted to say thank you to anyone who read it and commented, whether that be positive or negative. If anyone has suggestions for topics that somehow cut across the hacker/psychology interface, please let me know and I will write about those.

Best, Rob Dobrenski, Ph.D. ShrinkTalk.Net

Why Marriages Fail

Related Stories